I assume most people on here have heard of Alex Jones and the New World Order?

Miscellaneous Current Events
21

You hate praxeology? Interesting… [8-)]

“Far from being a paranoid or a determinist, the conspiracy analyst is a praxeologist; that is, he believes that people act purposively, that they make conscious choices to employ means in order to arrive at goals. Hence, if a steel tariff is passed, he assumes that the steel industry lobbied for it; if a public works project is created, he hypothesizes that it was promoted by an alliance of construction firms and unions who enjoyed public works contracts, and bureaucrats who expanded their jobs and incomes. It is the opponents of “conspiracy” analysis who profess to believe that all events — at least in government —are random and unplanned, and that therefore people do not engage in purposive choice and planning.” - Conspiracy Theory of History Revisited by Murray Rothbard

So do you believe there is a move towards world government?

Do yourself a favor and read this thread. Ask yourself what a Congressmen who has fought for 30 years, defending Liberty in the halls of power thinks about that question. Better yet, why don’t you find out. [8-)]

Then contemplate, well, if there really is a move towards world government…or for starters a World Central Bank…

"It is now all too clear that the world has become fed up with the unprecedented inflation, in the United States and throughout the world, that has been sparked by the fluctuating fiat currency era inaugurated in 1973. We are also weary of the extreme volatility and unpredictability of currency exchange rates. This volatility is the consequence of the national fiat money system, which fragmented the world’s money and added artificial political instability to the natural uncertainty in the free-market price system. The Friedmanite dream of fluctuating fiat money lies in ashes, and there is an understandable yearning to return to an international money with fixed exchange rates. Unfortunately, the classical gold standard lies forgotten, and the ultimate goal of most American and world leaders is the old Keynesian vision of a one-world fiat paper standard, a new currency unit issued by a World Reserve Bank (WRB). Whether the new currency be termed “the bancor” (offered by Keynes), the “unita” (proposed by World War II United States Treasury official Harry Dexter White), or the “phoenix” (suggested by The Economist) is unimportant.

The vital point is that such an international paper currency, while indeed free of balance of payments crises since the WRB could issue as much bancors as it wished and supply them to its country of choice, would provide for an open channel for unlimited world-wide inflation, unchecked by either balance-of-payments crises or by declines in exchange rates. The WRB would then be the all-powerful determinant of the world’s money supply and its national distribution. The WRB could and would subject the world to what it believes will be a wisely-controlled inflation. Unfortunately, there would then be nothing standing in the way of the unimaginably catastrophic economic holocaust of world-wide runaway inflation, nothing, that is, except the dubious capacity of the WRB to fine-tune the world economy." (pg 103-106) - What Has Government Done to Our Money? by Murray Rothbard

… If you then arrive at that conclusion, surely 9/11 isn’t beneath them? Just like it wasn’t for Pearl Harbor, the Gulf of Tonkin Incident and the deliberately constructed case for war against Iraq. Let’s not forget refusing to listen to the Japs who had been trying to surrender.

Shortly after WWII, military analyst Hanson Baldwin wrote: “The Japanese, in a military sense, were in a hopeless strategic situation by the time the Potsdam demand for unconditional surrender was made on July 26, 1945.” Admiral William Leahy, top military aide to President Truman, said in his war memoirs, I Was There: “It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons. My own feeling is that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages.” And General Dwight Eisenhower agreed.

- Whitewashing Hiroshima: The Uncritical Glorification of American Militarism by Gary G. Kohls, M.D

You really need to listen to this:

Pay No Attention to That Man Behind the Screen by Butler Shaffer (Radical Scholarship)

Ignorance is lame. Especially willful ignorance.

22

Praxeology doesn’t rest on there being a conspiracy theory to unite the world under a new world order.

23

It does, however, rest upon the willingness to look at evidence for or against such a theory, which seemed to be Rothbard’s point. (Thanks for that pointer, Physiocrat!)

Danno, who’s seen this syndrome before.

24

Conspiracy theorists assume too much. It is one thing to raise questions. But their elaborate constructs go far beyond that.

Conspiracy theories arise where the mainstream media is discredited jet where alternative media has not penetrated jet. (That is why conspiracy theories are very popular (and far more bizzare) in authoritharian places.) With the lack of real information, some people go out and construct explanations of their own, but based on very little real information. (Local drunkards tend to be particularly enthusiastic. “Gorbachev was an American spy!”)

Fact is if you are reasonably well informed you do not need any of these wackos. Since you do not need their wacky premises to explain things. As you do not need to belive in Zeus the God of Thunder to understand lightning if you know about electricity, you do not need to belive in Illuminati to understand what goes on in politics.

25

I agree. Only kooks don’t believe what the government says. I’m calling Homeland Security.

26

Rothbard went much further than writing this little essay. He actually devoted quite a lengthy and detailed article to an alleged connection between rich bankers and American policy. See Wall Street, Banks and American Foreign Policy.

It is also noteworthy that the controversial Ron Paul newsletters of the late 80s / early 90s (in which Rothbard was to some extent involved) contained a lot of conspiracy stuff as well. See The New Republic (I know, I know).

On a more general note, we should ask ourselves whether history is the result of human action or of some indeterminable force working beyond our understanding. That should help us judge the validity of theories that claim to have found groups of people working in their rational (or sometimes irrational) self-interest against the well-being of the masses.

27

Conspiracy theories become irrelevant in light of market anarchism. The goal of conspiracy theories is to discover truth, bring criminals to justice, and rid the government of corruption. But once your goal is to abolish government, it doesn’t matter whether government is corrupt or not. Also, a private law system is the best way to bring criminals to justice.

Conspiracy theories rest on the implicit premise that government can be good, but needs to be reformed. For instance, what would be accomplished if an investigation discovered that the U.S. government planned 9/11, and Bush/Cheney went to prison? Justice would be done, but the problem of statism would be untouched. Once you become an anarchist, you realize that the root problem is government itself, not just that the wrong people got elected.

It’s more important to teach people that tax-funded monopolies are immoral and inefficient, rather than that Building 7 wasn’t hit by a plane.

28

History is determined by the material forces of production, of course!

But seriously, I think Mises argued that philosophies of history were deterministic and unscientific. See Mises, Theory and History, Chapter 8 - Philosophy of History.

29

That is an improper conflation. It is entirely possible to be an anarchist and simultaneously to theorize that the anthrax letters were mailed by executive branch provocateurs in order to buffalo Congress into passing the PATRIOT Act.

And it may well be, but one does not preclude the other. It’s also important to teach people that you shouldn’t take antibiotics for viral infections.

30

Sure buddy. Fight the man. This is all about “what the government says”. Not the fact that the “evidence” is farcical at best. The government believes it, ergo it is a lie.

31

All conspiracy theories are true.

And now what?

32

You could do worse than by holding to that principle. For example, everything that the government told us about Iraq was a lie.

Here is why I dislike attitudes like yours: it means people who don’t toe the government/media line are no longer “alternative” or even “radical.” They’re flat out “kooks” who must be marginalized, even privately and publicly censored rather than allowed free speech in the marketplace of ideas. This propagandizing has become so successful that the government and its patrons are free to carry out conspiracies in plain sight: the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans, legislation exempting vaccine manufacturers from lawsuits and the denial of grants to anybody researching environmental or toxic causes of autism, a high-level SEC official marrying into the Madoff family, letters laced with anthrax from Ft. Detrick and cartoonish rhetoric that no educated Muslim Arab would ever use.

I’ll take the conspiracy theorists over the respectable any day.

33

True. I guess what I’m saying is that conspiracy theories don’t really matter once you’re an anarchist. If I’m going to abolish government, then government-sponsored terrorism is just another argument in my arsenal. But I think most conspiracy wackos believe that government is corrupt and needs to be reformed. (It would be interesting to see how many Constitutionalists/limited government people are conspiracy theorists. I came to Ron Paul from the 9/11 movement.)

Exactly. The conspiracy path is a dead end because the root problem is government itself. Conspiracy theories don’t address the root problem.

34

Now we can sneak up on the 2 12-year old boys who author 90% of the internet, and declaim them to their parents. (Ask an old Usenet geek to explain this.)

On a more serious note, we can more accurately evaluate the intent, methods, and likely next step of the forces with which we compete - valuable tactics in any market. In a market as large, chaotic, and important as the market of public opinion, any tidbit of accurate information will help some.

Teapot Dome was a conspiracy, effective until it suddenly wasn’t. How was it countered? What tactics were effective, and which ones had small effect? How can these strategies be applied to the current situation?

The current situation is, frankly, looking dismal. Accurate information about any given conspiracy theory may not be useful, but it may - and you won’t know until you actually look at it. Did you really have better things to do today?

Danno

35

Or you could say that the outlandish, weakly substantiated theories by professional conspiracy theorists through guilt by association discredit even the rational sceptic who raises questions and mistrust the government line, to the point where the government can get away with anything now.

The truth is however in between. Many of them are kooks. And yes the government media crucifies them (and actually gives them much more attention than they deserve because they are useful to them) in order to hint that everyone who questions the government line in a mayor way is actually a kook.

Which is all the more important that we ourselves differentiate between kook and non-kook. Take Raimondo, he wrote about this anthrax stuff, but the thing is unlike a conspiracy theorists he works on what evidence there is. He doesn`t create narratives to pass off as truth in parts where it can not be supported by the information we have.

36

No one here is arguing that the state isn’t stupid or that they don’t conspire. We all know that they conspire all the time - e.g. how unions push minimum wages to limite competition, or how big bankers pushed toward a national bank and succeeded three times, or how all financial institutions seeked a bailout with TARP. These are all examples of conspiracies.

There’s a difference between what I just mentioned and believing that the government rigged three buildings with hundreds of large bombs capable of destroying it without the thousands of employees of those buildings noticing, then the government hijacking four planes, sending a missile into the Pentagon when everyone clearly saw a plane, etc.

Except - you know - that an operation involving several hundred scientists and soldiers is no where near the operation scale of hijacking four planes, rigging three

Appeal to majority (large minority?).

No, there isn’t. Circumstantial evidence and a few grainy photos don’t prove anything.

37

Meaning that hijacking a couple of planes and blowing up three buildings is more complex than a top-secret project developing a key new weapon ?

Anyway, what do you think about so called operation northwoods ? Do you think it’s true that the gov’t planned such a thing, or is the wiki article just a subversive attempt at misleading patriotic americans ?

38

Nobody but the serious nutcases think that the hijackers were government employees. If you only pick the most obviously wrong examples of the people who don’t believe the official story, it’s easy to shoot them down. This is a textbook example of why the “conspiracy nut” pejorative works as well as it does.

No, it’s not - 9/11 could have been done as an inside job with a far smaller number of people knowing what was going on.

You’re not going to hear me claim that “everyone knows” is proof of anything. What I was trying to claim was that there are more people who disbelieve the official story than can be attributed to a lunatic fringe.

I never said that it did prove anything - only that it pointed in one possible direction, and merits a closer look that we’re unlikely to get.

The video off of your link is cute, but of it’s ‘top seven theories’, I’d never heard of three of them - it may have raised them as strawmen, or I may have not been hanging out with enough of the lunatic fringe. However, the single most damning data point in my eyes is rarely examined, and wasn’t touched upon by that video.

Ever since my youth, there’s been a protocol in place - if a flight over the USA varies from its filed flight pattern, and Air Traffic Control does not get a convincing reason for that flight deviation fairly quickly, fighter jets are scrambled to escort and secure the plane - it was originally an anti-hijacking measure. Ask any pilot or air traffic controller - it’s in place, and is taken very seriously, and is usually very quick in response. Not only did it not work that morning, it failed to work for at least 3 incidences, in that part of the country where one could expect the quickest response time. If this was anything but an amazing coincidence, it could not have been accomplished as anything but an inside job, on a very high level.

Does this prove anything? Of course not. I do believe, however, that this merits much more serious investigation. The only actual proof of conspiracy about that morning is proof that we were lied to by high government officials - and lies do not prove a conspiracy, either.

Yes, there is evidence that it’s possible it was, in part, an inside job. That may not frighten you - but it does frighten me.

Danno, recalling that once is happenstance, twice is merely coincidence, and third time is a nutcase conspiracy theory.

39

Yes, I have this crazy and irrational belief that a conspiracy which involves thousands of people to do their job perfectly in order to work, done on national television with millions of Americans watching, is harder than getting a few dozen scientists in the desert to create a new weapon.

Some crazy kooks within government thought it was a good idea and the government rejected it. That’s one example of the kind of circumstantial evidence I was talking about.

40

Hi, Juan! If “Operation Northwoods” is disinformation, it’s got an awful lot of people fooled, including most mainstream media. Despite widespread reporting, I’ve heard nothing of any official denial.

Would my very own government stoop to such measures? Um… sure. There’s nothing wrong with making plans - that’s what think tanks are for, and I expect that there is, somewhere, a feasability study in the files for far worse actions than proposed in the Operation Northwoods documents.

I’d like to say that no agency of my government would ever actually do such a thing - but they’ve been caught often enough that I can’t claim to believe that they just wouldn’t stoop so low.

FWIW, the wiki article is just that - a wiki article, not to be believed without a more authoritative source. There are enough other sources in the news business, however, that it’s probably safe to trust that article on Wikipedia.

Danno, needing to buy more “benefit of the doubt” - the supply is runnin’ low.