'Coincidence Theorist' vs 'Conspiracy Theorist'

[kham]

**Power levels at 400 Percent....


How about that?
ZORCH

Depends on perspective I s'pose.....

[MadMax359]

lincoln-internet-quote.jpg

he was ahead of his time, wasn't he?

[Fred588]

lincoln-internet-quote.jpg

he was ahead of his time, wasn't he?

There is, apparently, no evidence that Lincoln was the one who first said, "You can fool some or the people all of the time, and you can fool all of the people some of the time, but you can't fool all of the people all of the time."

But he tends to get credit for it because we recognize that he was a very wise man.

[Mynock]

"There's a sucker born every minute."
--David Hannum

[Duncan Edwards]

Well, I guess we settled that one.

Yea, I was going to try to (lamely) quote the dryly funny line from the Avengers movie - "Are we done here?"

Any time I use too big a hammer - Understatement

[nachtjaeger]

Can we go back to the days when Alex Jones could just be dismissed as a raving lunatic? I miss those days a lot!

I think I mentioned this before on another thread, but my Granddad's take on all this was "There's no Conspiracy, no grand plan- it's not that organized. The Government is just flat-out doing this stuff." I read another quote (can't find it right this sec) where the writer said that people love conspiracy theories because they're comforting. The truth- that there is no plan, that there is indeed no one at the wheel- is even more frightening.

I like to use a logical tool called Holmes' Razor (after Conan Doyle's fictional detective.) It states "When you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, is the answer." So, to make a very unlikely claim, first you have to eliminate all "reasonable" possibilities- which is tough to do with a conspiracy theory.

That being said, last year I was reading up on the movie "The China Syndrome", trying to find out if it was just a topical drama, or a deliberate piece of anti-nuclear propaganda. I answered my question- most definitely the latter- but in reading up on the accident at Three Mile Island (which took place just twelve days after the release of The China Syndrome) I finally found out the really disturbing details. Not vague rumors, but stuff like the handles of critical valves having been removed. Nobody was ever able to reproduce the initial Turbine Trip that led to the accident. The backup cooling system was redundant- it had two of everything, including two main inlet pipes. Operating procedure said that you could shut down one pipe for repairs or maintenance, but if you ever had to shut them both down, you shut the reactor down. Both pipes had been shut off. If that was an error, a bunch of people should have been fired over it.
Anyway, the happy coincidence of the accident at TMI made the producers of "The China Syndrome" very wealthy, Columbia Pictures only distributed the film- it was produced by Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden's IPC films, "IPC" standing for Indochina Peace Committee. Interesting that Jane, Tom, Michael Douglas, and Jack Lemmon all happened to be prominent anti-nuclear activists.

[Villein]

Oh, Dear God

Neptune is Blue
So is Uranus
And they have found at least one extrasolar planet which indicates blue in the spectral analysis

The bleaching is quite expensive I hear.

Training for a possible attack of this nature does not make it a 'conspiracy'.
The framing of a oil-wars/nation-state conflict (ISIS vs. Gulf States Vs. Israel Vs. Europe Vs. US Vs. Syria/Russia Vs. a hundred other competing interests) as a 'us versus the terrorists' isn't so much a conspiracy as a technique to justify changes in governmental behaviour and simplify complicated foreign policy conflicts in a cartoon narrative to ease the public consciousness.

If there is any 'conspiracy' is it one of private contractors seeking more work, the slow unravelling of the irrelevance of the nation-state (with power blocs becoming more important) and public sector bureaucrats looking to meet quotas and being seen to do 'the right thing'.

The sad truth is that we as a species really aren't capable of the level of insane planning required for such conspiracies to work.
And aliens of any stripe are purely the invention of human imagination; the boggarts, banshees and ghosts of the 20th - 21st century.

People are entitle to believe what they like however as the current dilemma with climate science has demonstrated human belief and evidence are often counter-intuitive.
So in the end public policy will be both evidence and bullshit-for-personal-reasons based.

[Villein]

Can we go back to the days when Alex Jones could just be dismissed as a raving lunatic? I miss those days a lot!

I think I mentioned this before on another thread, but my Granddad's take on all this was "There's no Conspiracy, no grand plan- it's not that organized. The Government is just flat-out doing this stuff." I read another quote (can't find it right this sec) where the writer said that people love conspiracy theories because they're comforting. The truth- that there is no plan, that there is indeed no one at the wheel- is even more frightening.

I like to use a logical tool called Holmes' Razor (after Conan Doyle's fictional detective.) It states "When you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, is the answer." So, to make a very unlikely claim, first you have to eliminate all "reasonable" possibilities- which is tough to do with a conspiracy theory.

That being said, last year I was reading up on the movie "The China Syndrome", trying to find out if it was just a topical drama, or a deliberate piece of anti-nuclear propaganda. I answered my question- most definitely the latter- but in reading up on the accident at Three Mile Island (which took place just twelve days after the release of The China Syndrome) I finally found out the really disturbing details. Not vague rumors, but stuff like the handles of critical valves having been removed. Nobody was ever able to reproduce the initial Turbine Trip that led to the accident. The backup cooling system was redundant- it had two of everything, including two main inlet pipes. Operating procedure said that you could shut down one pipe for repairs or maintenance, but if you ever had to shut them both down, you shut the reactor down. Both pipes had been shut off. If that was an error, a bunch of people should have been fired over it.
Anyway, the happy coincidence of the accident at TMI made the producers of "The China Syndrome" very wealthy, Columbia Pictures only distributed the film- it was produced by Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden's IPC films, "IPC" standing for Indochina Peace Committee. Interesting that Jane, Tom, Michael Douglas, and Jack Lemmon all happened to be prominent anti-nuclear activists.

Alex Jones does seem to cash in on the collective paranoia of a US public that is increasingly removed from understanding the complexities of public policy and decision making.
The rise of the private sector as the dominant player in international relations only further complicates matters.

I will say it always used to (and still does) crack me up when US crackpots would rave about a 'One World Gubmint' and the US being invaded by a foreign force led by the UN.
Last time I checked the UN was both a US-friendly organ, as well as separately challenged due to a complete lack of its own military.
This isn't a slight on the US-government, who despite its many, many flaws has been an overall force for positive and progressive change.
In the choice between coca-cola and jeans, or vodka and detention camps and a police state it was hardly a tough choice.

The 21st century is much more problematic in making such assertions, after all what is the US in the 21st century?
Is it the sum of its transnational corporations? Its military? Its culture and varied and complex society?

Humans love a 'solve for X' solution; especially male brains.
I've demonstrated some of that here!

But it's why anyone whose read a book or at least heard of critical thinking should know life isn't a sum of simple answers.

[PINK PONY]

It's true that correlation does not necessarily equal causation, and many people are too hasty in jumping to conclusions based on their own prejudicial preconceptions about 'what this means'.

Having said that, occasionally there are documented coincidences in public life that are so outrageously improbable, to have supposedly just happened by chance, that the existence of a coordinated conspiracy becomes a more plausible explanation, however unsettling the far-reaching implications may be.

Ever heard of a guy called Peter Power? He was the owner of a company called Visor Consultants. Visor Consultants were staging a mock-terrorism exercise in London on the morning of 7/7/2005, with the scenario specified by their client involving simultaneous explosions on London Underground.

Watch him openly admitting the above in a live TV interview conducted on July 7th 2005 - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JKvkhe3rqtc

"Power told the BBC that the exercise scenario included bombs going off at the exact same stations as they actually did in the actual attacks. Power said that this coinciding of his exercise and the real attacks was a coincidence."

John Anthony Hill esitmates the probablility of all this happening by random chance in a 10 year period at: 3,715,592,613,265,750,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000-1 against.

Now I don't know about you, but colour me a light shade of sceptical here, if we are seriously being asked to believe that this was mere happenstance.