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Paper On Conspiratorial Thinking Invokes Conspiratorial Thinking
Layzej writes "Last summer a paper investigating the link between conspiratorial thinking and the rejection of climate science provoked a response on blogs skeptical of the scientific consensus that appeared to illustrate the very cognitive processes at the center of the research. This generated data for a new paper titled 'Recursive fury: Conspiracist ideation in the blogosphere in response to research on conspiracist ideation (PDF).' The researchers reviewed the reactions for evidence of conspiratorial thinking, including the presumption of nefarious intent, perception of persecution, the tendency to detect meaning in random events, and the ability to interpret contrary evidence as evidence that the conspiracy is even greater in scope that was originally believed. Some of the hypotheses promoted to dismiss the findings of the original paper ultimately grew in scope to include actors beyond the authors, such as university executives, a media organization, and the Australian government. It is not clear whether the response to this paper will itself provide data for further research, or how far down this recursion could progress. I fear the answer may be 'all the way.'"
recursion
all the way down.
The turtles are behind it all in the end.
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
I herd you like conspiration theories
Real life is overrated.
Let's all remember the study was objective and measured what people are thinking. Reality! Those conspiracy nuts better put on their tinfoil hats because the scientists know who they are!
Let's all forget that what we do about climate change is a political process and people's political views play a part on all sides.
A quick read of this paper's abstract indicates that the recursive can be applied to both sides of any argument. :-(
I state and you rant
Therefore I win?
I rant and you state
Therefore I win?
Blah, Blah f*****n Blah.
We centrists are starting to get really sick of this BS..
No one wins, nothing changes Rome burns, the extremists fiddle.
S***w you all!
Only turtles can do real science.
In 3... 2... 1...
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
It took them less than a month to put a paper out. I'm in the wrong field. I could have graduated in half a year.
Are we to presume, then, from the analytical model in TFA that the LIBOR affair, Watergate, and the 1919 Black Sox scandal are all just paranoid hysteria?
Scruting the inscrutable for over 50 years.
People believe in conspiracies because they don't have anyone in authority they can trust. It doesn't help when authority lies to them about virtually everything.
Isn't it obvious? The researchers paid dozens of bloggers to come up with these conspiracy theories. The blogs were used as evidence to support the hypotheses in the follow-up paper, which will earn the researchers enough cash to pay more bloggers. And so on.
It's kinda like the way McAfee and Symantec have secret programmers who strategically release new viruses when business is slow.
MEMBER OF THE ROYAL FAMILY, KING RICHARD III, FOUND MURDERED IN PARKING LOT, POLICE DECLINE TO INVESTIGATE!! CONSPIRACY??!! - Leave out one key piece of information and it takes on a life of it's own, but there is nothing untrue about the above. Conspiracies seem to live on the interpretation that those who believe them have a better understanding of the issue at hand than those in charge, or that they have all the relevant information, when they don't.
The paper was put forward in a slanted way. The report apparently concluded that: "those who subscribed to one or more conspiracy theories or who strongly supported a free market economy were more likely to reject the findings from climate science as well as other sciences."
What it the report SHOULD have concluded is: "those who subscribed to one or more conspiracy theories or who strongly supported a free market economy were more likely to reject the findings from science" which is exactly as valid, is a far more neutral observation, and does not single out a specific group.
By including the "climate science" as a specific category the researchers make themselves suspect and people may (perhaps not entirely without cause) assume that this report was not unbiased and perhaps targeting "climate sceptists" rather than being an honest report on the behaviour of conspiracists in general. And of course this fuels a discussion. The authors could have known this and probably did. Therefore the article's title should be renamed to: "Those who play at bowls, must look out for rubs".
It seems to me that, in this day, ideas that don't come from a place of established authority, are frequently, without consideration, assumed to be incorrect, or even delusional, symptoms of mental illness or of flawed logic. It makes me think, what reception would meet thinkers such as Rousseau, Voltaire or Montesquieu were they instead alive today, challenging the current prevailing view of the world? Surely, never would we be so prejudiced as to label them as 'CONSPIRACY THEORISTS' as soon as they had made a statement that did not let itself conform with our current collective view. We, because we are so enlightened, would recognize that theirs were great ideas, and we would maturely judge said ideas by their merit. We would think freely and independently, and not ignorantly adopt the views of some figure of authority.
Flamebait "study" provokes flames. News at eleven. I'm waiting for the next study showing the correlation climate alarmism and being a poo-poo head.
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean there isn't an invisible demon about to eat your face
this research is tantamount to calling a spade a spade, when most other people say it's a club. Doesn't change the fact that it's still a spade.
Microsoft (in order to drain talent into their sinking company) use a similar approach - an aptitude test with features that force you not just be right, but have the convictions to stand by being right.
The problem is that by calling out the first paper as BS science you're automatically labelled a conspiracy theorist. The second paper went on to do just that.
The horse crap in this one is so deep I can barely see the light. Does anybody else remember that paper on sociology that turned out to be a joke composed of mostly made-up words, but the sociology community accepted it and praised it in some journal? It was the Sokal Affair (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sokal_affair) and the article was "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity," an article that sounds about as interesting as this one.
If this were Usenet, I'd killfile the lot of you.
The very mention of thumb awareness makes you immediately more aware of your thumbs. That is unless you don't have any in which case you are increasingly aware of that fact.
In this day and age when citations and publications determine your funding and job prospects as a researcher, it is a gold mine to stumble on a process like this. It recursively generates new articles, and so research funding will flow her way almost automatically.
Wow someone writes a paper on conspiracy theory and targets it slap bang at climate sceptics and then complains when they cry fowl! It's like calling someone paranoid when people really are out to get them!
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
"I'm going to call you a conspiracy theorist, and if you deny it, that means you are a conspiracy theorist."
I think I have irony poisoning.
Being paranoid does not mean they're not after you
Really.
Though every single one of you retards makes the same bollocks assertion to cover up your own goal here, that isn't even remotely the case here.
I call you a conspiracy theorist. If you go "Wrong, I'm not", then that is you refuting it. I don't call you a conspiracy theorist for denying the claim. But that isn't what you dumb fucks are doing, is it. You're saying "Nuh, uh, you're with the EcoNazis trying to make a New World Order and using this claim to ensure we aren't heard, therefore allowing you to Take Over Everyone".
WHICH IS A CONSPIRACY THEORY.
To deny what is happening is beyond ridiculous. This planet now has less ice being formed at the caps and in glaciers and more water vapor, methane, etc in the atmosphere than it did even five years ago. The average temperatures for water at the caps alone is rising at an alarming rate.
I've actually gone to places where historically, there have been glaciers solidly covering the ground for well over 25,000+ years, and there was nothing but bare rock, with the glaciers having receded more than five+ miles up the valley towards the mountain tops.
Some of these particular glaciers, only receded that far within the last fifteen years.
The last time we've had these particular conditions occurring, there were tropical and sub-tropical forests and swamps in places where they are in no way currently found (aka when some dinosaurs still roamed).
What is happening, is our pollution is compounding on the natural cooling and warming cycles, and pushing us much farther into a warming cycle than we've ever dealt with in recorded history.
What is scary, is the CO2 we've pushed into the atmosphere in record tonnage, is melting permafrost layers in Canada, Alaska, Siberia and other places, releasing several hundred thousand metric tons of methane into the atmosphere every day, which is MANY times worse than CO2 (picture Venus), and just reinforces and pushes the global temperature rise even further.
@Mindless Drivel: 100% of Twitter posts ever Tweeted.
I've come to the suspicion that it's not so much lack of understanding of grammar or inability to spell that's at the root of the than/then problem, but rather the inablity to hear/speak the difference. The English sounds represented by "e" and "a" are not very far apart. Many of the people might be conflating the two sounds into one. If this is the case, you can correct them until you're blue in the face and they'll never understand because they can't hear the difference. Proof reading their own work won't help because they won't hear the mistake.
I started thinking this way for two reasons: too many people saying "I could care less" when they really mean "I couldn't care less" (understandable, that t can be difficult to hear) and having Japanese students think I said "pet" when I said "pat" (I've taught English in Japan).
However, for this particular case, I've got a slightly different theory, based on my own mistakes: the writer sub-vocalizes while touch-typing and something between tongue, brain and fingers short circuited and instead of N, T was hit. The tongue is in the same place for both sounds, and when touch typing, the index finger on opposite hands is used for both letters (and the movement is rotationally symmetrical). The vast majority of my typos follow a similar pattern (and swapping N and T is very common for me). Heck, I sometimes make the same mistakes with pen and paper!
Bill - aka taniwha
--
Leave others their otherness. -- Aratak
Could someone tell me what journal or journals these papers appeared in? They were peer-reviewed weren't they?
Just asking.
If you strip out the words that don't exist in the English language, the title of the work makes a weird sort of sense, if you excuse poor-grammar:
'Recursive fury: Conspiracist in the blogosphere in response to research on conspiracist"
...when you tell them the voices in their head aren't real, they think you're in league with the voices.
I think it's part of a plot.
rewriting history since 2109
Recursive fury: Conspiracist ideation in the blogosphere in response to research on conspiracist ideation in the blogosphere in response to research on conspiracist ideation
"The minority of people who still support the hypothesis of man-made global warming are at the point of grasping at straws to keep their little pet fraud going..."
You're joking, right? The minority? Pet fraud?
An unfortunate thing about the "it's not us" argument is that the trajectory is somewhat like that of "it's us, but no-one does anything about it", so that "minority don't even get the chance to point and say 'see? What did we say would happen. "
If you make a habit of reading polls on a a variety of political and social issues, you'll learn a lot about Americans and specifically you might come to the conclusion that about 25-35% of Americans are basically so disconnected from scientific and social reality they're functionally insane and their opinion should ALWAYS and AUTOMATICALLY be classified as "non-truth related".
For instance, and famously, about 46% of Americans don't believe in evolution
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/05/americans-believe-in-creationism_n_1571127.html
But also 10% think that prosecutors who send innocent people to jail should not be prosecuted:
http://www.latimes.com/news/nation/nationnow/la-na-nn-texas-exoneree-testifies-20130204,0,3950542.story?page=2
25% think Obama is not an American citizen:
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20056061-503544.html
30%^ think God decides the outcome of sporting events: http://rt.com/usa/news/super-bowl-result-god-337/
And on and on and on. Watching polls what you'll discover is about 10% of Americans are just outright fascists who wouldn't hesitate to do whatever any right wing authority told them to do, and think it should have been started yesterday. This is also the finding of Bob Altemeyer in his seminal work on authoritarianism :
http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/.
right.
About 25-30% believe that events on Earth are assiduously overseen by an all knowing God who "sees them when they're sleeping / and knows if they're awake / and knows if they've been bad of good..." and what happens in everything from their personal life to world events is really of no consequence except to the extent that it is a reflection of an eternal, ongoing battle between good and evil being fought on an unseen cosmic plane. This is something they have this is common with every Muslim extremist who ever strapped a suicide bomb onto himself.
Americans have a deficit of rationality, a deep and persistent belief that something other than outcome based, welfare of humans is the proper measure of human morality, are scientifically illiterate and constitutionally incapable of perceiving in their thinking just the kinds of bugs that the referenced article details.
There's not enough time to reform the American character before we have to take radical and decisive action on global warming. The fact is, democracy stops where science begins. This isn't going to lead to anything good.
The least divisive, least disrupting course of action is for the government to internally and secretly set up an Executive Action team within one the intelligence agencies whose purpose is to discredit, attack and dismantle and neutralize the leaders of the denier terrorist movement. We all know who they are. These *thought leaders* need to be attacked the same way we'd attack any group of terrorists building a bomb named which would have the same long term destructive power as global warming. Denialism is a bomb with the capacity to permanently destroy civilization and the people assembling that bomb are not working in secret. They need to be neutralized and their sources of funding and societal legitimacy attacked through and and all means necessary. They have forfeited their civil rights and constitutional protections. We simply need to deal with them like the world destroying terrorists they are.
You can come to this conclusion now when there's still time to do something about global warming or you can come to this conclusion later, when there's no possibility of doing anything about it and the starvation, the concomitant societal breakdown and mass, uncontrolled immigration, the tidal wave of anti-Western (Big Oil / Big Coal ) terrorism and collapsing centralized governments take not just the denier's civil liberties and Con
I bet you'd get a completely different response on /. from people if the subject of the conspiracy were 9/11 instead of climate change. Climate Change is something that most liberals and libertarians agree on. However, you swap the conspiracy for one closer to home?
I pretty much stopped reading /. for a couple of years except the post here or there that I was referred to because this site started to get hijacked by wackjobs. Maybe it was a corporate thing. Who knows. Either way, the signal to noise was highly in the wackjob category with 'truthers' trying to prove how it was all an inside job. Unfortunately, I headed to Reddit to get away from it and it turned out to be worse there!
You'll always find wack jobs and dumb fucks that want to believe, if only because it goes to their beliefs that the other side is corrupt and they are the only side of truth, as if everything is black and white. I know a lot of conservatives that believe in climate change, but they also believe it has happened for natural causes in the past exactly the same and we survived. Or that pragmatically, there is no way to go back except to put on the Birkenstocks and start eating granola and that if science is so advanced, eventually it will catch up and fix things.
Either way, the fact that neither side wants to back down is going to cause a division that naturally leads us all to conspiracy theories...
There are two dark forces that come into play. One is Fear and the other is Greed. People who are infested with Greed will tend to have beliefs that justify them to continue doing evil things. And we also have people infested with Fear. These people may have at some level a knowledge that they are not really worth their daily bread and will do anything to maintain their status quo. Between Greed and Fear those with weak spines tremble and promote false beliefs such as there being no pollution problem, no global warming problem, no social problems, as well as whatever nonsense they feel they need to promote. These weak minds or defective souls do seek each other out. They do try to install other defectives in places of power in government and business. They may not be aware at the conscious level of what they do. It may be called net working or hidden under other terms that disguise what they really are. The unconscious conspiracy can exist, does exist, and will tend to persist. The author of fear and greed is a rather ancient devil who designs things to bring humanity to lower and lower levels. Those that serve this monster usually do not know what they are doing. As an easy example consider this: An employer pays low wages in order to compete with another employer who offers low wages. That employer reasons that he must pay less than any competitor in order to survive in business. He really will not be aware that fear is running him. He will rarely confront the fact that he lives a bit too well and that greed is running him. So there is his evil. It owns him. But the real evil resides behind the scenes in the creator of an economic system that permits any employer from paying a non- living wage. And very, very few will ever question a system that allows such practices. There is conspiracy at the majority level.
One thing that many who believe that climate change is a "scam" or a "conspiracy" have in common is a political outlook that says that lefties, socialists, hippies, greenies etc. are just plain WRONG about everything, that their entire world view is basically incorrect.
So it really is hard for them to accept that the lefties and the greenies might be RIGHT about something - which seems to lead to ever more bizarre denials.
The corollary of this is that people with this kind of viewpoint tend to believe that climate change is a stalking horse of the left, to de-industrialise the economy, to promote their "business-hating" ideals, etc.
In Soviet Russia, all our base are belong to YOU!
"the presumption of nefarious intent"
There is more than enough evidence to demonstrate that our contemporary institutions of government, media, academia, finance, etc. and the unholy alliances thereof have nothing BUT nefarious intent. It's only logical to assume that these people and groups are going to lie, cheat and obfuscate to fulfill their agenda at the expense of the vast majority of the population.
The label "conspiracy theorist" is simply their dismissive label for anyone who dares question the official narrative and a convenient excuse to avoid countering evidence with facts.
The odd thing is that a "conspiracy" is generally some sort of secret plot. Many of the so-called "conspiracy theorists" are simply highlighting evidence which isn't even in dispute.
"You liberals are going to be the death of civilization as we know it"
Indeed. And it will be a crazy new world where people can expect medical treatment despite their financial circumstances; where having food to eat is actually considered a right; where quality education will be widely available, even to those on low incomes.
Civilisation is dead! Long live civilisation!
Conspiratorial Thinking is clear example of the Dunning Kruger effect at work.
They overestimate their own intelligence or skill, and ignore contrary feedback. They disavow the intelligence or skill of others. These people are simply too stupid to invalidate their own hypothesis and recognise the validity of the alternative.
The simpler explanation is that the buildings were shoddily built and the difference in costs pocketed.
A badly built skyscraper can fall internally and look like a controlled demolition of a properly built skyscraper.
I'm utterly confused by the premise here.
Conspiracies are very often extremely real and extremely provable. HSBC was just found guilty at the highest levels of management of laundering money for Mexican drug cartels. LIBOR manipulation involved dozens of banks and hundreds of people and was the largest financial market manipulation in history. During the mortgage crisis we had robosigning and MERS which intentionally broke the chain of ownership (and the law) in the interest of securitization. We also had dozens of investment banks bundling worthless mortgages and assigning positive valuations to them. Bernie Madoff and his partners conspired to rip off countless pension funds and communities. Etc. Etc. Etc. These are all conspiracies involving billions of dollars and hundreds if not thousands of people. That's just the last 4 years. And those are the provable conspiracies.
And then there are the conspiracies we know to be true, but cannot prove: Julian Assange for example, who announced he had an upcoming Wikileak regarding the banking system, and the next thing you know he's wanted on rape charges for consensual sex but supposedly with an aconsensual lack of a condom. A crime supposedly so serious that apparently world governments are willing to abandon 500 years of international law and invade sovereign embassies. Is disbelieving the premise "Conspiratorial thinking" or just "not being an idiot"?
Or let's take an easier one: Jon Corzine and his firm looted private accounts and absconded with over $1 billion dollars. The money was transferred somewhere. But no one knows where. It's a magical mystery of the disappearing $1 Billion. If you believe that are you resisting "conspiratorial thinking", or are you the biggest idiot on Earth? Let's see -- JP Morgan underwrote MF Global's trades. Everyone knows where the money went. But no one can talk about it. Because if you claim that the money went anywhere but to "money heaven", you're engaging in "conspiratorial thinking".
We are surrounded by corruption, plotting, scheming and insane rapes of the public coffers every day of every year.
These schemes are nothing other than "conspiracies".
But somehow this study begins with the entirely "fringe" premise that conspiracies aren't real. That in itself appears to be a conspiracy.
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
and when touch typing, the index finger on opposite hands is used for both letters (and the movement is rotationally symmetrical)
I touch type with Dvorak, you insensitive clod!
The continued dominance of the illogical QWERTY keyboard smells like a conspiracy to me!
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
If I assume there's more to a story than what appears in the mainstream media, I must be experiencing "conspiratorial thinking." Or I could be assuming that most journalists are morons who are paid to write *something* whether they know anything about it or not.
Please do not read this sig. Thank you.
So, in the course of reading the article on ElReg, I noticed that the folks denying climate change are being referred to as "Skeptical".
I get it - being "skeptical" of something means that you are not taking it at face value - that you dispute it.
However, there's also the self-identified "Skeptical Movement" nowadays which consists of a lot of great folks who are trying to introduce science-based thought and skepticism / critical thinking.
I'm talking about folks like Adam Savage (of Mythbusters fame), Phil Plait (of "Bad Astronomy"), Brian Duning's Skeptoid, The Skeptic's guide to the Universe, Skepchick.org, the James Randi Educational Foundation, QackCast, and many many more...
Real science-based medicine and thinking... and to see "Skeptical" with a capitol S, I think of these folks and having the word used to refer to conspiracy nuts and climate deniers... well, it just feels like the same kind of co-opting that happened to the "hacker" monicker.
I guess I just wanted to get the word out that while the climate deniers and conspiracy nuts may be "skeptical" of climate change and such, they're not representative of "the Skeptical Movement" which is all about critical thinking and science-based approach to life, the universe, and everything.
The Digital Sorceress
do you think that it just random that this story appears on slashdot today?
think about it
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
It's a HOAX! This paper does not exist. I fail to understand why people who would appear to be rational in other areas believe that there are people writing papers on conspiracies. It's just plain nuts!
The drone program is the best we can do in terms of precision right now; it leads to the least loss of innocent life that we can manage and still be effective against those who would destroy us.
Sure, if by "us" you mean the House of Saud.
Your idea for a new conspiracy made me LOL.
The least divisive, least disrupting course of action is for the government to internally and secretly set up an Executive Action team within one the intelligence agencies whose purpose is to discredit, attack and dismantle and neutralize the leaders of the denier terrorist movement. We all know who they are. These *thought leaders* need to be attacked the same way we'd attack any group of terrorists building a bomb named which would have the same long term destructive power as global warming. Denialism is a bomb with the capacity to permanently destroy civilization and the people assembling that bomb are not working in secret. They need to be neutralized and their sources of funding and societal legitimacy attacked through and and all means necessary. They have forfeited their civil rights and constitutional protections. We simply need to deal with them like the world destroying terrorists they are.
Holy flying gargoyles, Batman! Did you just advocate for assassinating climate change deniers? I think they're wrong too, but this little thing called the Constitution, and this other little thing called morality, stop me short of your position.
The problem here is that the conspiratorial thinking that was invoked was was on the part of Lewandowsky. Rather than taking the critiques of his abandoned first paper as legitimate, he immediately decided that anyone disagreeing with him must be part of a conspiracy against him.
My prediction - when this second paper is also taken apart as a fraud, he'll write a third one saying everyone who disagreed with his second one is part of a conspiracy of conspiritorial thinking :)
I think I know why we keep building larger and larger particle accelerators !!! Real smart people must be trying to get to the bottom of the Kennedy assassination whatever the cost!!!!! I've got pictures and footprints. How do I contact the CERN team??!!
E Proelio Veritas.
re: ..they think it is a load of crap..
I believe that use of the word think is misleading. Technically, think is synonymous with (be of the) opinion; however it implies that the opinion is one garnered by contemplation of connected ideas.
It does not suffice to contemplate what opinion could lead to my greatest personal benefit then present that as what I think. That is contemptible fakery.
Nobody ever makes up anything on the internet! Especially not when there's powerful personal convictions at stake.
Holy shit Stephen Colbert predicted this not more then a few days ago with pop. It's a conspiracy mobius strip of conspiratorial thinking!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ejgq0r0SEU
"(I) have this unfortunate condition that causes me not to believe a single thing any politician says when a mic's on.
There is no such thing as man made global warming, nor is there any 'global warming' occurring at the moment.
Oh, well that's all right then.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
...I think what they were trying to say was "evokes", even though as written it's probably more accurate :)
invokes 3rd person singular present of invoke (Verb)
Verb
Cite or appeal to (someone or something) as an authority for an action or in support of an argument.
Call on (a deity or spirit) in prayer, as a witness, or for inspiration.
evokes 3rd person singular present of evoke (Verb)
Verb
Bring or recall to the conscious mind.
Elicit (a response).
So, certainly, Lewandowsky's fraud papers both appealed to conspiratorial thinking to support their arguments :)
may I gently rib my co-employee and say "well duh Stephan, so the paranoid get paranoid being told that they are paranoid and blame the people that tell them they are paranoid? like we never saw that one coming"
Its turtles wearing tin foil hats all the way down.
Have gnu, will travel.
This human mind is long known to be superb at pattern detection. To the point where it often detects patterns that are not there. Shapes in clouds, patterns in random stock market behavior. Attributions of control of nature by gods.
Why should these false positives not also exist in analysis of behavior by individuals as well?
Conspiratorial thinking is just one of the many examples of human false positive pattern extraction.
It's not that we need to assassinate them, it's that we need to turn the power of the government against them and their credibility.
Is that democratic? Is it "fair"? Are we interfering with their Constitutional rights somehow, someway a lawyer could identify ? Probably.
But about anything we have to ask, what are the alternatives and their respective outcomes.? I compare this to the drone program. It's not perfect, but it's what we have now and our hand has been forced into action. We have to use the tools we have, not wait for advent of hypothetical tools which have no unwanted side effects and about which we can all feel good.
That's the justification for the drone program and it's the justification for the government unilaterally acting against the machinery of deniers. I am not saying drone the deniers. I am saying bring the power of the state against them in whatever way is necessary to stop them without reserve. for the purpose of undermining their influence. legitimacy and mind share.
"[a] strict observance of the written law is doubtless one of the high duties of a good citizen, but it is not the highest. The laws of necessity, of self-preservation, of saving our country when in danger, are of higher obligation. To lose our country by a scrupulous adherence to the written law, would be to lose the law itself, with life, liberty, property and all those who are enjoying them with us; thus absurdly sacrificing the ends to the means
-Thomas Jefferson
I would love you see you substantiate the first clause of your first sentence.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
all the way down.
The least divisive, least disrupting course of action is for the government to internally and secretly set up an Executive Action team within one the intelligence agencies whose purpose is to discredit, attack and dismantle and neutralize the leaders of the [conspiracy theorists].
A secret Executive Action team to discredit conspiracy theorists? Sounds like something a true conspiracy theorist would have anticipated and taken measures against :-)
Follow the Money.
Lookup: Pseudo skepticism
Unless you think this is progress.
Unfortunately the Skeptical Movement is doomed to failure due to lower life spans and birth rates. Like the Shakers and Amish, they will eventually die out or be so out numbered by the pseudo scientific to be irrelevant. Sadly, it is their own belief in the rigidity of science that has compounded the problems. Their dogmatic insistence on all things scientific means that they do not benefit from the Placebo Effect.
I just can't be bothered to do so at this time.
Conspiracy theories are believed by a majority of world population. It's all Satans' conspiracy...
I've never believed any conspiracies. There's no such thing. All of the "so-called" conspiracy ideas are just created by some secret government department trying to spread fear and doubt.
Everything you know is wrong, Just forget the words and sing along.
That's somebody who is "green on the outside, Red on the inside". Environmental action inevitably involves controlling land and it's use. That often takes the form of government control over land. That tends to be painted as a creature of the left, hence the accusations of them being closet Reds. Of course it can happen on the right too (e.g., the "sustainable timber harvest plan" by a corporation on land acquired by eminent domain).
One grand conspiracy? No. Lots of little personal, selfish conspiracies by people using environmental arguments to further their agenda? You bet yer boots!
Oh, no, they're not collapsing.
Australia, then, after their CO2 tax.
Nope, no implosion there either.
How about Germany!
Nope.
USA hasn't done anything about it, so they must be doing fine, right? Damn, no they're in the shitter too.
Unfortunately, most of the people who work for intelligence agencies are very conservative and also tend to think climate change is a bunch of bullshit. This will never happen.
And have Slashdot mod that down by 6. Seriously, that's all you can do with spelling/grammar nazis. They are the kind of people who can't actually argue a point, can't admit they are wrong, and can't just stay quiet. So instead they nit pick and go after minor issues with presentation as though that invalidates the actual point made.
Just put them on ignore, and move on. Ends up making Slashdot much more enjoyable.
. . .
Conspiracy Theory in America, by Lance DeHaven-Smith
There were not a lot of people shouting in the desert that "LIBOR are fixing interest rates for their own gain!", nor a lot of people saying "Nixon is using illegal means to keep track of his political opponents. Guaranteed!". Conspiracy theorists tend to miss the real conspiracies, it seems.
Conspiracy theorists were telling people it was happening long before the proof came out in public view. You can go read materials that people had, and see old videos where things were being hinted at by politicians, media people (generally independent), and scholars.
I think the first thing to be brought out into the open is that conspiracies do happen. There is, and has been, an ongoing campaign to associate "conspiracy" with insanity. The media does it all the time, labeling people and cutting clips to make people look crazy where they have valid concerns regarding a conspiracy. Long ago, the media actually had investigative journalists that worked with "conspiracy theorists" to dig out the truth. Like Watergate, LIBOR, REX84, Operation mocking bird, COINTELPRO, etc.. etc... (Yes, this could be an exhaustive list of "known" and "proven" conspiracies).
About 10 years ago, most major news agencies canned every investigative journalist on the payroll. Now all your news comes from the AP and it's well scripted to be entertainment and not news. Fox even won a supreme court ruling that stated their "News" is not news. It is entertainment. They don't have to tell you the truth, and can put anything they want on their "News" programs.
A reality is that our Government has become so large and entrenched with bribery (sorry folks, campaign donations and "gifts" to politicians is bribery) that we can't possibly investigate or know every possible conspiracy. Very few investigative journalists exist when we compare today to 40 years ago (think percentages, not raw numbers. 1 in 10,000 is a much lower percentage than 2 in 100,000). Since media has been monopolized in the US, I believe it's valid to investigate a conspiracy to hide the truth from people.
Conspiracy theorists are not a bad thing. They play an important role in exposing wrong doing. The most popular conspiracy theorists may not be yelling "LIBOR" any more, they are on to other conspiracies. "LIBOR" has been exposed, so they did what they set out to do. What you see portrayed in media is not often the full story, but a cut and edited version to sway emotion and hide truths. The media often ignores known conspiracies to further their own agenda(see note below). Most Americans don't know anything about Fast and Furious because the media ignored the stories. Most American's don't know that Obama's attorneys have appealed the courts ruling twice trying to support indefinite detention of Americans without trial which was buried in the NDAA. They may find it important if they knew, but instead they are inundated with Sports and Celebrities which works to divert attention from real "News".
Note on my use of "agenda" above. The agenda is not intentionally well defined. This could range from "revenue" to a "conspiracy". You can do the research and come to your own conclusions.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
But about anything we have to ask, what are the alternatives and their respective outcomes.? I compare this to the drone program. It's not perfect, but it's what we have now and our hand has been forced into action. We have to use the tools we have, not wait for advent of hypothetical tools which have no unwanted side effects and about which we can all feel good.
Some of us believe that if only certain abhorrent actions can save us from certain death, then we should choose death. After all, what the hell is the point of living if we can't be the people we wish to become? By that reasoning, is it not implied that the type of people who would choose the abhorrent action do not deserve to live?
Sometimes a no-win scenario means you don't win. There's no shame in that, but there is certainly shame in abandoning your principles every time a crisis is looming.
But look at all the countless people in previous generations who suffered things far far worse than the targeted neutralization of a apocalypse-inducing POV. People in the feudal China or under Stalin or in the Middle Ages, people who lived under despots, were tortured, saw their loved ones tortured then killed, people who reside in some 3rd world hell hole prison tonight because, say, one of their neighbors carried a grudge, or was jealous, and had the political savvy and pull to put them there.
None of the people who came before us chose death over those circumstances; they soldiered on, and we are the beneficiaries of that soldiering on. When things get so bad some part of your brain is telling you it's not worth going on, then you start to live not for yourself but for future generations who will get THIS / this pathological hatred of a rational interpretation of reality right the way we moderns got polio right. There's a reason these people are the way they are, but we don't know what it is. One day, we will know. One day soon, we'll decide that knowing is a top priority for humanity.
One thing is sure- conservatism and civilization are incompatible. In the battle between secular humanism which posits that human (and other) welfare and an egalitarian system of governance is the measure of what is Good and exactly what produces that Good is an ongoing journey of discovery and religious conservatism which posits that what is important is to serve an invisible Santa God and what defines Good was written down in texts once and for all by sheepherders who lived in the Bronze Age, there can be only one winner because of just this circumstance and all that will follow it.
From stem cell research to evolution to global warming , the religious conservative mind which seeks to conserve the old way and the old world views cannot by definition deal with the new world science has birthed and is birthing , faster and faster, deeper and deeper into everything we know about ourselves and understand as ourselves. There is no place of the Jesus / Allah people in the genetic revolution except to play the role of "the party of no " and terrorists who would sooner blow up the world and everything in it than see their cherished belief systems be rejected by the bulk of humanity, decay and finally perish from the face of the earth.
And on and on and on. Watching polls what you'll discover is about 10% of Americans are just outright fascists who wouldn't hesitate to do whatever any right wing authority told them to do, and think it should have been started yesterday. This is also the finding of Bob Altemeyer in his seminal work on authoritarianism
This I can believe, because I actually run into this sort of person on a regular basis. Though they don't always follow "right wing" authorities. More on this in a bit. I will say though that I remember your "send the deniers to the glue factory" tough talk from before. I never saw this sort of ruthless stormtrooper attitude in any of my other arguments on Slashdot. Something about AGW seems to bring out the inner Nazi in some people.
There's not enough time to reform the American character before we have to take radical and decisive action on global warming.
And one wouldn't need to, if there was demonstrated evidence that radical and decisive action on AGW was needed. Keep in mind that part of the fuel for conspiracy theory is a frequently repeated betrayal of trust. This is just as much a problem in climatology as any other field of endeavor with a huge political component to it.
The thing I find damning (though your rhetorical call for mass murder is pretty damning on its own) about "climate change" concerns is the ignorance of more pressing environmental issues such as habitat destruction, desertification (and bad farming practices), pollution, and global poverty. While it's probably true that there would be some aggravation of these problems from AGW, it remains that a large group of people are advocating unusually expensive remedies for a problem that isn't near the top of the list of the stuff we have to deal with.
So why should we think it is a character problem of people who happen to disagree with you when no one, including you, has yet to present a case for urgent action on global warming?
One of the things that has happened in history is the most powerful nation on earth is incapable of stopping a pending world wide ecological collapse.
That hasn't been true over the past few decades. The US had a genuine pollution problem and pretty much fixed it. They had genuine problems with habitat destruction, bad farming practices, poor fire prevention practices, and endangered species, and have made concrete improvements in all those genuine environmental needs. Sure, there is more we could do there, but real problems get fixed. All you need to do is show that you have a real problem.
The least divisive, least disrupting course of action is for the government to internally and secretly set up an Executive Action team within one the intelligence agencies whose purpose is to discredit, attack and dismantle and neutralize the leaders of the denier terrorist movement. We all know who they are. These *thought leaders* need to be attacked the same way we'd attack any group of terrorists building a bomb named which would have the same long term destructive power as global warming. Denialism is a bomb with the capacity to permanently destroy civilization and the people assembling that bomb are not working in secret. They need to be neutralized and their sources of funding and societal legitimacy attacked through and and all means necessary. They have forfeited their civil rights and constitutional protections. We simply need to deal with them like the world destroying terrorists they are.
The world splits between those that know the US government planned a 9/11 identical false-flag to justify a war against Cuba, and those that do not. The owners of Slashdot, pushing an anti-Muslim and anti-Iran agenda whenever possible, hope that even the saps that come here have not heard of Operation Northwoods, and do not know that the false-flag was authorised by every person required in the US administration EXCEPT the president (at which point the operation was cancelled).
Only today, it was announced that the ENTIRE body of mainstream news organisations in the USA had conspired with Obama's regime to keep the existence of a particular drone base secret. The owners of Slashdot tell you saps that media companies are independent, and never conspire together to sell a single viewpoint on an agenda demanded by the government.
When Obama wanted to butcher the families of government officials during his sickening holocaust of Libya, every news organisation simultaneously started calling the family homes 'COMPOUNDS' to imply they were valid military targets. Did Obama's people meet with the heads of every major news organisation (TV and newsprint) to INSTRUCT them to use this word? YES! Did the owners of these organisations instruct their editors to ensure their staff used the word 'compound' in appropriate stories about Libya? Absolutely.
Climate change 'science' follows exactly the same pattern as eugenic 'science' that was pushed by various pseudo-scientific organisations linked to major American universities at the beginning of the 20th century. If Slashdot was operating in 1913, the owners would be promoting regular stories attacking the opponents of eugenics and forced sterilization, using exactly the same tactics used to attack the sceptics of the political climate change propaganda. Every major US science magazine promoted eugenics at the time, and the movement had the support of very many senior US politicians and industrialists. The opponents were derided as "anti-scientific" cranks. If Man didn't kneel before the 'science' of eugenics, than Man was no better than his primitive ancestors, these monsters told you.
Only yesterday, the Irish government was giving a (very half-hearted) apology for the sickening abuse of tens of thousands of Irish women placed against their will in the slave facilities called 'Magdalene Laundries'. The victims were people the eugenicists had labelled 'sub-standard'.
The goons behind the paper discussed in this article use the common trick of saying that the very act of learning why something may be bad or wrong makes the person an extremist, a nut-case, irrational,anti-scientific, and/or a conspiracist. The good people, they say, are those that know nothing, but give unthinking support to their 'betters'.
Every major news organisation has agreed to have a co-ordinated position on 'climate science', and to lock out any voices that disagree with the position designated by the governments of the UK and USA. In other words, the same people that told you the LIE that Iraq had WMDs are the ones telling you what to think about 'climate science'. The tobacco business had no problem finding friendly scientists and doctors to tell you suckers that cigarettes had been PROVEN to be good for you (and this only changed when the cancer rates due to atomic fallout from atmospheric tests had the USA authorities desperate to blame smoking as a distraction). Likewise, the 'official 'climate science' business run by team Obama has no problem finding extremely well paid experts to tell you to shut your mouths and minds.
Anyone who decides based on preconceptions concerning climate skeptics to embrace this clown will be embarrassed as the story emerges.
http://thelukewarmersway.wordpress.com/2013/02/05/skeptic-baiting-and-academic-misconduct/
"Now, I know that some skeptics are in fact believers in conspiracy theories, as are some climate activists. Just as some skeptics, politically conservative, are possessed of the lunatic notion that Obama was born in Kenya or on the moon, some climate activists are equally gripped by the fatal peril posed by vaccines or GMOs. There are real kooks out there.
But as we wrote regarding Climategate, we found no evidence of a conspiracy to change the science–what we found was the more normal and grubby practice of working together to push ‘their’ theory to the top and push others’ theories down, using poor practice and judgment. It was a mundane example of what happens when people chase fame and glory. They justified their behavior because they felt their cause was just.
But what Lewandowsky et al have produced here is the equivalent of bear-baiting in London in the 18th Century. It is a sport designed from cruel motives, aimed at eroding sympathy and legitimizing further cruelty.
I get that Lewandowsky is a committed climate activist and regards skeptics as a mortal threat to his belief system. What I don’t get is why a publication would allow his personal therapy to appear on its pages."
What a perfect example of a conspiracy theory. To believe that so many climate scientists and politicians around the world can maintain a scientific fallacy in the face of the intense scrutiny it's received over the last 20+ years just boggles the mind. Accolades galore are awaiting the scientist that overturns the current theory yet all we get is nibbling around the edges.
riverat1 posting AC to preserve mods (and no, I didn't mod you).
and this paper is a joke.
Nothing more than a thinly-veiled Soviet-style attempt to label anyone who questions the science behind global warming claims as nuts.
The least divisive, least disrupting course of action is for the government to internally and secretly set up an Executive Action team...
Hands down the most committed /. joke I've ever read. Good show, sir!
Prove it. Follow the scientific method. Otherwise you are the one with the problem NOT the skeptics. Those involved in the CAGW scam (yes SCAM) are the ones to blame because they haven't and they didn't.
And there is no such thing as organised crime in government.
I am new to the ADA programming language, but If I had to devise a routine for the thought recursion it may look something like this.
.. 100;
with Ada.Text_IO;
with Movie.Reference_IO;
use Ada.Text_IO;
use Movie.Reference_IO;
type Available is new Float range 90
Freetime : Available;
loop
if Freetime >90 then
Form_Consipracy_Theory ("They want us all to drive electric cars!");
Post_Garbage_To_Blog ("Science is an intellectual dead end, you know? It's a lot of little guys in tweed suits cutting up frogs on foundation grants");
elseif Freetime >95 then
Form_Consipracy_Theory ("These potshots are meant to destroy the Amercian refining industry");
Post_Garbage_To_Blog ("They hate these cans! Stay away from the cans!");
elseif Freetime =100 then
Form_Consipracy_Theory ("Their proof is intentional misdirection");
Post_Garbage_To_Blog ("I switched glasses when your back was turned! Ha ha! You fool! You fell victim to one of the classic blunders");
else
Post_Garbage_To_Blog ("Science is a load of *$#@*%#@ and climate change is #@&%!* and they should just go *$#@*& themselves and the stacks of *%@#!*#$ data they use to tell lies with");
end if;
end loop;
Yes, it doesn't ever fall through, it just loops infinitely saying the same crap over and over. Secondary and Tertiary recursion is not necessary because the initial cause is the same, though from different sources.
You are right, but, at the same time, you are tremendously, fabulously wrong! Global warming or climate change is a red herring used to distract us from the real issue: the ever increasing real cost of burning fossil fuels as an energy source. By real cost, I do not mean externalities. Externalities are real, but beyond humanities' ability to process. What people can comprehend is the ratio between energy invested vs. energy harvested. Think about oil. Every year we have to go deeper and into more stubborn formations to get the oil out. However despite the ever rising cost resulting from this inexorable trend, oil is now, and still will always be the cheapest. The only way out of this is a huge government program to build thousands of breeder reactors. Breeder reactors are expensive to build, but, once built, are very cheap to operate. Once thousands of them are online, the price of electricity will go so low, that we can, 1. Stop burning natural gas. 2. Develop an alternative transportation infrastructure that runs on electricity instead of oil. Then we stop burning oil. So you see, by abandoning global warming, we can stop burning fossil fuels. That's what you wanted, no? Look at it this way: if you think humans will voluntarily impoverish themselves on the chance that global warming is real, you are living in a fantasy world. On the other hand, if we promise people free electricity, they will support the needed changes. Do you want to be righteous, or do you want to stop burning fossil fuels? Pick one!
Social Credit would solve everything...