Or al-Qaeda, a creature of CIA (Mossad a silent partner?)… or the Taliban, also a creature of CIA and ISI (MI6 a silent partner?). The State is always spewing an endless stream of ridiculous paranoid conspiracy theories and then does the very thing that it claims that it’s trying to stop (drugs, prostitution, gun-running, street crime, terrorism, you name it…)
Clayton -
I remember hearing on John Stossel’s “Illegal Everything” that some time ago, a bunch of Feds broke into a family’s home, looking for cocaine. They shot their dog, and didn’t find anything. And they arrested the guy anyway.
America is a free country?
Ah, but if the robots are conspiring to use the holograms in an elaborate plot to overthrow humanity then it is certainly sufficient. #jesseventura
The term conspiracy theorist was invented by the state to stigmatise people who question the official version of events. When someone is labelled a conspiracy theorist then people have pre-conceived ideas about that person and it is stigmatisation through association that creates the preconceived idea about the person. By associating aliens and crazy crack pot theories with real investigations about a terrorist attack like 9/11. Just because someone think that man has never been to the moon or that there was controlled demolitions on 9/11 does not mean that they believe in aliens or go to stupid conferences or believe everything they read. Most people that think there was a controlled demolition on 9/11 hate the term conspiracy theorist and do not subscribe in any way what so ever to the cliché idea of a conspiracy theorist. These are just normal professionals, scientists, working people and similar that have looked in to the events and have come to a different conclusion than the state’s official story.
But what the term ends up doing is creating and all or nothing sort of language trick. That means if you question the governments offical story about X event then you believe that man never walked on the moon or that aliens exists. That is obviously not necessarily the case, most people who are intelligent enough to question the governments officlal narrative are intelligent enough to discrern for themselves. Each event or narrative that is being questioned has its own set of information and people make up their minds based on that information on a case by case basis. People that question the state narrative will most likely be better equip to not believe everything they read, even dissident related material, than the average football watching, state loving person.
Haha, I realize that; I’m just saying that there is a discernable difference between being skeptical and being a kook. I don’t think every 9/11 truther is a kook. But… quite a few of them are.
Not all conspiracy theories are created equal. The difference, to me, is more of an issue of semantics: the conspiracy theories that have substance cease to be conspiracy theories if they actually hold water. Then they become more mainstream and their labelling changes (scandals, etc.).
When people are given the opportunity to find truth, (thanks primarily to the greatest information disseminator ever: the Internet) truth will prevail over lies. This is why Ron Paul and the Austrian school have been gaining so much support. It is also why people who think the moon landing was faked are laughed at.
I put a conspiracy theory in your conspiracy theory so that you can conspiracy while you conspiracy.
The state may exploit the term, but it definitely did not “invent” it. Just because you’re skeptical of skeptics doesn’t mean you’re a statist.
EDIT: let me clarify before I’m attacked-- I am very skeptical of everything the state tells us; one of the state’s main tools is keeping the public in the dark as much as possible. However, I do not consider myself a conspiracy theorist. It’s true, I think it is a dirty word. I just don’t want the beliefs that I share with David Icke (central banks as shadowy, unaccountable, unethical organizations) to be tainted with fuckin’ lizard people. Not that any of you have done so.
Ok well I said that state invented the term i did not mean literally, Obviously not as an act of congress. I never said it was a conspiracy. I think it first appeared in government agency communications to the media or press releases. The idea or meme of the word though has been perpetuated by the media and often it is used in government related press releases or government news. They use the term as a way to marginalize dissent, through the very stigmatisation through association. Obviously aliens have nothing to do with jfk or 9/11 and 9/11 nothing to do with jfk. The only commonality is that the state via the media calls any different version of events a conspiracy theory.
In a way the cliche idea of a conspiracy theorist actually pisses many people off who subscribe to some of the ideas that get labelled a conspiracy theory. Obviously through marginalization. It even gets exploited by the pro state people by coming up with crazy crack pot theories about events. For example when someone starts making outrages claims about 9/11 like holograms or space beams. This is done by people as counter intelligence measure, this way any valid theories that come up have less credence, as people always cite the worst theories to refute and use as an example.
Truthers lost their credibility once some of them started claiming there were no planes… You just know the person saying that is just not in his right mind. I don’t beelieve government planned controlled demolition (there wouldn’t be a point, and if there was, one has to think one, so…back to square one). It is possible that there was 9/11 conspiracy going on, but not the kind truthers want us to believe. Because what they want us to believe is the same shit christian fundies want us to believe when they say evolution isn’t true because human eye is too complex. Learn damn science first, you nut, that would be my response to him.. 
To mention credibility, In some instances I think that the people who agree with the official version of events have no credbility.
Truthers is another non sense term. What if you are not a truther what are you, a liar?
Everyone (“truthers”) loses credibility of their beliefs because “some” of them believe something which the others do not? I’m confused by your use of language and I don’t know if you’re saying all the people who question the 9/11 events are discredited by the beliefs of a few (possible disinformation agents, possible crazy people, possible people who just believe anything they here). As for there being no point to government-planned controlled demolition, do you not think the government has used the events of 9/11 to greatly expand its power in a way it could not without a “Pearl Harbor” type event? (I hope my questioning does not sound hostile, I am genuinely curious.)
I’ll answer to your last point only:
Yes, it would be stupid unwise to ignore the fact, that this event have helped the government to expand its power and scare people, but it has nothing to do with the conspiracy, I think that even most liberals and republicans would agree with it. You can take any major tragic event, and all it does is making it easier for government to reach their own ends (ultimate control, ultimate power).
To the fella above you, truther is a legitimate term, that came few years after the 9/11, when they started making documentaries “searching for truth” or something like that. I don’t call all conspiracy theorists truthers, big majority of them are simply nuts, truthers is a group who question 9/11 official story and draw so many conclusions, that it often becomes no more credible than reptilian/illuminati conspiracy.
Is it not the nature of a state to agitate in foreign lands, and stage attacks to be blamed on phantoms?
I concur with Maiku, after these tragic events a discredited documentary came out called “Loose Change”. It seemed pretty sketchy and hyperbolic with the scientific facts, and there are websites devoted to proving LC wrong using simple chemistry and physics. It is hard to take these conspiracy people seriously, and bad things happen in the world. In Madrid for example there were horrible, immoral train bombings in the early 2000’s that killed hundreds of people. Sometimes bad things happen and people don’t want to accept that.
So, who ultimately benefitted from the disproved conspiracy theory?
I’m happy to accept that sometimes bad things just happen. However, I won’t accept that explanation from the primary beneficiary of those bad things. When a woman’s completely healthy ex-husband mysteriously keels over and she’s collecting his $10M life insurance and then tells me “Sometimes, bad things just happen”, I’m disinclined to believe her until every possible way she could be lying and covering up a crime has been ruled out to the best of my ability. Even then, I will simply say “I couldn’t prove she did it” rather than “She couldn’t possibly have done it.” Yet the government apologists demand that I throw my arms around the US government because it issued a massive tome called “The 9/11 Report” and declare it could not possibly have committed 9/11 in any sense. Ridiculous.
Loose Change was an amateurish work put together by a very young man and it contained some of the errors to which amateurs are prone. It focuses on issues that aren’t that important, doesn’t close the loop on other issues, and so on. It’s not even disinfo. It’s just not the best critique out there.
If you want to try to tackle serious criticism of the government’s official story, start with David Ray Griffin’s The New Pearl Harbor.
Clayton -
I’m reading Debunking Debunking 9/11 by the same author, but I notice it only focuses on a few key details. While I like that level of specific analysis, I would also like to read something broader in scope. What else, besides The New Pearl Harbor, would you recommend?
Everything, especially his latest three on WTC7, Cass Sunstein’s boneheaded anti-conspiracy paper and his 9/11 Ten Years Later.
Clayton -
The State is incompetent only in its stated aims. The mantra of general State incompetence arises from going along with the polite pretense that the governments’s stated aims are, in fact, it’s only aims. But this is simply not true. The government is not incompetent at all once its true aims are rightly understood. In fact, the State is astoundingly competent. Imagine trying to collect money from hundreds of millions of people and waging wars and covert actions around the world affecting the lives of billions in such a way as to keep expanding your turf and keep quelling dissent?
Agreed. Organized crime is…unsurprisingly…rather adept at crime.
Well the train bombings in Madrid were al-Qaeda’s response to Spain’s involvement in Iraq with the United States, so it’s not just a matter of bad things happening.
But, I suppose it’s true that if there’s one thing the state is good at, it is keeping itself in power.
The Madrid bombing investigation found no al-Qaeda involvement. It concluded that those involved were “homegrown radicals”.
