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Fugu
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13 Jul 2015, 6:50 pm

AspieUtah wrote:
blauSamstag wrote:
Conspiracy is a real thing. It just means two or more people working together toward a goal.

Talk of grand conspiracy, particularly grand conspiracies that require a large number of people to keep the same secrets, or which would require some members to be super-competent, can generally be rejected out of hand.

Take for example, moon landing deniers. The sheer number of people involved in the lunar missions - tens of thousands of people - and not a single one of them spills the beans?

The Manhattan Project was a grand conspiracy where tens of thousands of individuals knew at least part of the facts. It wasn't disclose until after its conspirators decided to do so. Same thing with the Gulf of Tonkin incident, the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, the Guatemala syphilis experiment, ... um, should I go on?
why would the US military need to pretend to take over certain states when it could probably do that already(ignoring the fact that they're not supposed to fight on local soil.)



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13 Jul 2015, 6:52 pm

blauSamstag wrote:
in particular, with jade helm, i have a hard time swallowing the proposition that our own soldiers are going to invade our own territory

Then why are they training to do just that? What part of Miami (which will be included in the Jade Helm 15 exercise) resembles an Islamic community? For that matter, what part of San Diego (which will also be included)? Phoenix? Austin, Texas? Dallas? Albuquerque? No, the training is very much Americanized. So, why? And, remember, the largest single reason for the exercise is to determine how noticeable its activities will be to citizens. Why is the exercise using blank ammunition and explosives? At least 64.5 percent of Utah is "managed" (read "owned") by the U.S. government. Would that be enough land to train for just about anything imaginable? Apparently not, according to the government. Again, why?!?


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13 Jul 2015, 6:52 pm

AspieUtah wrote:
blauSamstag wrote:
Conspiracy is a real thing. It just means two or more people working together toward a goal.

Talk of grand conspiracy, particularly grand conspiracies that require a large number of people to keep the same secrets, or which would require some members to be super-competent, can generally be rejected out of hand.

Take for example, moon landing deniers. The sheer number of people involved in the lunar missions - tens of thousands of people - and not a single one of them spills the beans?

The Manhattan Project was a grand conspiracy where tens of thousands of individuals knew at least part of the facts. It wasn't disclose until after its conspirators decided to do so. Same thing with the Gulf of Tonkin incident, the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, the Guatemala syphilis experiment, ... um, should I go on?


From what Feynman wrote about the compartmentalization of the Manhattan Project -- and at the time he was a pretty junior scientist - so many people didn't really know what they were working on that it got very dangerous.

Also, as i understand it, a preponderance of physicists who weren't involved had a pretty good idea what was going on. The air of secrecy about it, is overblown.

The Gulf of Tonkin incident falls into the category of things adequately explained by incompetence.

Your later examples i don't think can be classed as grand conspiracies



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13 Jul 2015, 6:53 pm

Fugu wrote:
AspieUtah wrote:
blauSamstag wrote:
Conspiracy is a real thing. It just means two or more people working together toward a goal.

Talk of grand conspiracy, particularly grand conspiracies that require a large number of people to keep the same secrets, or which would require some members to be super-competent, can generally be rejected out of hand.

Take for example, moon landing deniers. The sheer number of people involved in the lunar missions - tens of thousands of people - and not a single one of them spills the beans?

The Manhattan Project was a grand conspiracy where tens of thousands of individuals knew at least part of the facts. It wasn't disclose until after its conspirators decided to do so. Same thing with the Gulf of Tonkin incident, the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, the Guatemala syphilis experiment, ... um, should I go on?
why would the US military need to pretend to take over certain states when it could probably do that already(ignoring the fact that they're not supposed to fight on local soil.)

Why, indeed! What are your wonderings?


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13 Jul 2015, 6:54 pm

blauSamstag wrote:
in particular, with jade helm, i have a hard time swallowing the proposition that our own soldiers are going to invade our own territory


It was on the radio here last week that more American troops are being cut - 40,000 US soldiers over the next 2 years. Military generals have already been cut with some being from the nuclear program. The Jade Helm is supposed to be including Chinese and Russian armies and having them work together with our armies. The only reason I can think of for that is a one world government (which has been talked about for a while now). I'm not crazy. I've been keeping up on all of this for about the past 6 yrs. All I ask is for people to do their own research and come to their own conclusions.


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13 Jul 2015, 6:56 pm

blauSamstag wrote:
...Your later examples i don't think can be classed as grand conspiracies

The syphilis experiments hardly operated in a vacuum. Both would require cabinet-level authorization. Intentionally infecting U.S. citizens and foreign citizens in their own nation is pretty damned grand, in my opinion. How many U.S. government staffers would "need to know" about such an operation to make it work? The bean counters alone could tell horror stories, I am certain.


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13 Jul 2015, 7:00 pm

AspieUtah wrote:
Fugu wrote:
why would the US military need to pretend to take over certain states when it could probably do that already(ignoring the fact that they're not supposed to fight on local soil.)

Why, indeed! What are your wonderings?
I just explained them up there in the section you're responding to ^^^^^



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13 Jul 2015, 7:10 pm

AspieUtah wrote:
blauSamstag wrote:
...Your later examples i don't think can be classed as grand conspiracies

The syphilis experiments hardly operated in a vacuum. Both would require cabinet-level authorization. Intentionally infecting U.S. citizens and foreign citizens in their own nation is pretty damned grand, in my opinion. How many U.S. government staffers would "need to know" about such an operation to make it work? The bean counters alone could tell horror stories, I am certain.


I actually expect that hardly anybody actually had to know that they were infecting people with syphilis.

As for the bean counters, the us military is notoriously bad at counting. the bean counters probably had no idea what the line items were about, if they even bothered to have more than one.



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13 Jul 2015, 7:37 pm

An example of how accurately our military beans are counted, in the modern era, with computers and spreadsheets:

http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/11/ ... LQ20131118

Anyway, for the syphilis thing, I expect that you'd need maybe 5 people to conceive of and get approval for the experiment.

You'd expect that whoever's big idea it was would be on the ground running it, but it might not be necessary, particularly if that person was not a scientist.

Acquiring pathogen samples for research doesn't raise any eyebrows and need not be secret.

Change some labels, maybe just put them in a new carton, and the field techs need not know what they are administering. In fact, it would be normal in a research scenario for the field techs to not be told, particularly if they expected to be just labor within a double-blind study.

Nursing staff wouldn't need to be told anything about syphilis, in fact you get better research results if the people doing the observation are merely given a strict set of criteria to observe and report.

So you need someone to have an idea, someone to plan the experiment, someone to order the specific materials, someone to arrange for research subjects and staff. A lot of these can be the same people. Sure someone has to approve it, perhaps at the cabinet level, so you get a few people involved.

But really it could be one s**thead general, one actual scientist who doesn't care about brown people (not hard to come by back in the day), and a compelling argument for someone in leadership who also doesn't care about brown people.

Hardly on the same scale as the apollo missions. Tens of thousands of people working on actual Stuff, and they might suspect something amiss if the stuff they are working on looks like busy work.



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13 Jul 2015, 8:16 pm

blauSamstag wrote:
...for the syphilis thing, I expect that you'd need maybe 5 people to conceive of and get approval for the experiment.

You'd expect that whoever's big idea it was would be on the ground running it, but it might not be necessary, particularly if that person was not a scientist.

Acquiring pathogen samples for research doesn't raise any eyebrows and need not be secret.

Change some labels, maybe just put them in a new carton, and the field techs need not know what they are administering. In fact, it would be normal in a research scenario for the field techs to not be told, particularly if they expected to be just labor within a double-blind study.

Nursing staff wouldn't need to be told anything about syphilis, in fact you get better research results if the people doing the observation are merely given a strict set of criteria to observe and report.

So you need someone to have an idea, someone to plan the experiment, someone to order the specific materials, someone to arrange for research subjects and staff. A lot of these can be the same people. Sure someone has to approve it, perhaps at the cabinet level, so you get a few people involved.

But really it could be one s**thead general, one actual scientist who doesn't care about brown people (not hard to come by back in the day), and a compelling argument for someone in leadership who also doesn't care about brown people....

All true. And, for the Guatamala experiment, that would work for the two or three years (1946-1948) without much fanfare. But, the Tuskegee experiment persisted for 40 or 41 years (1932-1972). Many more people would need to be involved as staffers moved into and out of the experiment's realm.


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13 Jul 2015, 8:25 pm

AspieUtah wrote:
blauSamstag wrote:
...for the syphilis thing, I expect that you'd need maybe 5 people to conceive of and get approval for the experiment.

You'd expect that whoever's big idea it was would be on the ground running it, but it might not be necessary, particularly if that person was not a scientist.

Acquiring pathogen samples for research doesn't raise any eyebrows and need not be secret.

Change some labels, maybe just put them in a new carton, and the field techs need not know what they are administering. In fact, it would be normal in a research scenario for the field techs to not be told, particularly if they expected to be just labor within a double-blind study.

Nursing staff wouldn't need to be told anything about syphilis, in fact you get better research results if the people doing the observation are merely given a strict set of criteria to observe and report.

So you need someone to have an idea, someone to plan the experiment, someone to order the specific materials, someone to arrange for research subjects and staff. A lot of these can be the same people. Sure someone has to approve it, perhaps at the cabinet level, so you get a few people involved.

But really it could be one s**thead general, one actual scientist who doesn't care about brown people (not hard to come by back in the day), and a compelling argument for someone in leadership who also doesn't care about brown people....

All true. And, for the Guatamala experiment, that would work for the two or three years (1946-1948) without much fanfare. But, the Tuskegee experiment persisted for 40 or 41 years (1932-1972). Many more people would need to be involved as staffers moved into and out of the experiment's realm.
if they're that well documented, what rationale are you using to declare it a conspiracy. aren't conspiracy theories generally categorized as having little concrete data?



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13 Jul 2015, 8:33 pm

Fugu wrote:
AspieUtah wrote:
blauSamstag wrote:
...for the syphilis thing, I expect that you'd need maybe 5 people to conceive of and get approval for the experiment.

You'd expect that whoever's big idea it was would be on the ground running it, but it might not be necessary, particularly if that person was not a scientist.

Acquiring pathogen samples for research doesn't raise any eyebrows and need not be secret.

Change some labels, maybe just put them in a new carton, and the field techs need not know what they are administering. In fact, it would be normal in a research scenario for the field techs to not be told, particularly if they expected to be just labor within a double-blind study.

Nursing staff wouldn't need to be told anything about syphilis, in fact you get better research results if the people doing the observation are merely given a strict set of criteria to observe and report.

So you need someone to have an idea, someone to plan the experiment, someone to order the specific materials, someone to arrange for research subjects and staff. A lot of these can be the same people. Sure someone has to approve it, perhaps at the cabinet level, so you get a few people involved.

But really it could be one s**thead general, one actual scientist who doesn't care about brown people (not hard to come by back in the day), and a compelling argument for someone in leadership who also doesn't care about brown people....

All true. And, for the Guatamala experiment, that would work for the two or three years (1946-1948) without much fanfare. But, the Tuskegee experiment persisted for 40 or 41 years (1932-1972). Many more people would need to be involved as staffers moved into and out of the experiment's realm.
if they're that well documented, what rationale are you using to declare it a conspiracy. aren't conspiracy theories generally categorized as having little concrete data?

Hehe. I believe that conspiracies exist whether or not they are noticed. In several instances, people do know all about them.


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13 Jul 2015, 8:56 pm

AspieUtah wrote:
And yet, all conspiracies were, at one time, conspiracy theories.


Wrong.

So what this all comes down to is this: A conspiracy theory is an irrational, instinctual thought process which puts to the fore the greatest fears in our minds. The conspiracy theorist is deluded into believing that the fear they feel is the fear everyone else feels, and they find avenues of opening up the dark recesses of our minds to the "truth". The rational skeptic is that person who intellectually approaches a problem, investigates the problem rationally, deduces a conclusion, and affirms or rejects the hypothesis. The skeptic and the conspiracy theorist are, for all intents and purposes, in each others company, but the fine line that separates them is ultimately logic. They both hear hoofbeats, but only one thinks horses.

Source: http://observationdeck.kinja.com/the-fi ... 1607326065


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Last edited by RoadRatt on 13 Jul 2015, 9:06 pm, edited 1 time in total.

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13 Jul 2015, 9:06 pm

RoadRatt wrote:
AspieUtah wrote:
And yet, all conspiracies were, at one time, conspiracy theories.


Wrong.

The Dividing Line between Rational Skepticism and Conspiracy theory:

So given what I have stated, it might be apparent that this dividing line, in some way, exists. That Chomsky and Zinn are able to intellectually approach a controversial topic and provide valid reasons for our introspection is testament to the idea that rational skepticism is a reasonable approach. Moreover, that conspiracy theorists reject this approach in favor of unreasoned, ill-informed propagation of batshit insane theories is testament to the fact that people still want to believe in the invisible enemy. However, there is a reason that people like Zinn and Chomsky have difficulty with mass appeal outside of academia and its small umbrella of overlap in mainstream culture.

Conspiracy theorists ruin the whole game for great academics like Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky. Radio hosts like Alex Jones who prop up wild theories of false flag attacks effectively make the public uneasy about trusting people who take the more nuanced approach toward investigating the ills of the world. Nuance and cogency are rendered obsolete when people like Alex Jones are allowed to openly state that the United States intentionally kills its own citizens so that it can begin to rile the dogs of war. Nuance and cogency are replaced by scaremongering and unsoundness.

So where we draw the line between rational skepticism and conspiracy theory has to be based on how blunt one's approach is. Where Zinn and Chomsky tear down the illusion of a beautiful America attempting to help the world using big words and fancy writing, Alex Jones has the openness and blunt prose which is more effective. Rhetoric beats prose every time. So after the first line of information (bought and paid for in our corporate democracy) passes to the public, the next step is to look to what the "real news" is. What aren't they telling us about X? And doesn't it just seem more obvious that 9/11 was an inside job perpetrated by the Bush administration in order to rile up the dogs of war and set us on a path to Iraq and Afghanistan? Well, no. That's not rational. But, what if the 9/11 terror attacks were retribution for decades long imperialist foreign policy by the United States and its allies? Well that seems to make more sense.

So what this all comes down to is this: A conspiracy theory is an irrational, instinctual thought process which puts to the fore the greatest fears in our minds. The conspiracy theorist is deluded into believing that the fear they feel is the fear everyone else feels, and they find avenues of opening up the dark recesses of our minds to the "truth". The rational skeptic is that person who intellectually approaches a problem, investigates the problem rationally, deduces a conclusion, and affirms or rejects the hypothesis. The skeptic and the conspiracy theorist are, for all intents and purposes, in each others company, but the fine line that separates them is ultimately logic. They both hear hoofbeats, but only one thinks horses.

Source: http://observationdeck.kinja.com/the-fi ... 1607326065



I was actually starting to read your post with an open mind until I read this:

"ill-informed propagation of batshit insane theories"

When that kind of talk starts, I shut down and the conversation goes no further. Learn how to debate respectfully.


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13 Jul 2015, 9:07 pm

I think there's a very real sentiment that so many people have gone slack, are plugged into their iphones/ipods, and completely dead to work events that a lot of people either less included or actively excluded gasp at the sense that instituting a global totalitarian state right under these people's noses would be like taking candy from a baby. These same people are also use to the math that if it can happen, and if it's a temptation to someone to try, eventually someone will do it.

A couple years back I had the opportunity to sort of get my gander at InfoWars, PropheticInfoWars, avant garde end-times stuff from Christian spiritual warfare people writing books about occult conspiracies (most chewing up and regurgitating their own variants of David Flynn's Cydonia), the alien-Vatican conspiracy, return of the Nephilim and giants, genetically modified super-soldiers, an Illuminati-run US that wants to fold our economy and is inviting China and Russia to clean up the 'chattle' in a bloodbath, government-made chimeras as portals in the flesh for demons to incarnate, as well as the ayahuasca of em all - Project Highjump. I got sucked into that because I'd freshly started reading a bunch of new-agey material, started feeling like something was deeply scammy (I'm sure you guys are stunned! :lol: ), a bunch of spiritual warfare videos turned out to be right that channeled beings never spoke of Jesus as Lord and savior and poof! Off I went because, really, I thought I might have actually stumbled in on the strong delusion of 2nd Thessalonians 2:11 and not to mention so-called Pleiadians (remember one man's Pleiadian is another man's Nordic Reptilian of the Black Star of Thule or from Draco) were offering DNA upgrades in the so-called new-age end times ascension from 3-D to 5-D!! I had a front-row seat for 12/21/2012 paranoia! Reading the bible a couple times cleaned that mess up in short order but suffice to say I learned a fair deal about what's out there as well as the kind of crap that tends to be behind it. I've usually never been that gullible but the timing couldn't have been more impeccable either.

I hate to say it but I might suggest a conspiracy of my own. I often wonder if some of the big names in conspiracy-study, particularly those really huge on the US being run by Illuminati witches and synarchs, aren't getting a healthy dose of funding from overseas. A particular guy I was listening to a fair deal really woke me up when he started drooling over Vladamir Putin the way Chris Matthews drooled over Obama and then even talking about how the whole NWO already owned all the fat, lazy, porned-addicted, permachild helpless dumb-undo-damnation wretches in the US, Europe, and in other places but that Putin was the last man fighting the Illuminati that it's the reason why the US and UN was after him. Him going on about gold and silver with his own brokerage was bad enough. Hearing him drone on about Putin pretty much clinched it and when I think of crazy, B-movie, Sky Captain type conspiracy plots I tend to think about how much pulp and reality-blending fiction Russia turns out these days.


Back at OT topic - I really don't knock people for being vigilant. I'd suppose part of having the internet, social media, and tons of information at our fingertips is probably far more powerful at helping us keep our freedoms than the 2nd amendment ever could be on its own. By the same token I'd advise people though, in doing their due-diligence as government watchdogs, to keep some emotional distance for it. There's a certain point where good vigilance starts lampooning itself and that's usually about the time that the Nephilim and DARPA chimeras start showing up.


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13 Jul 2015, 9:26 pm

nurseangela wrote:
I was actually starting to read your post with an open mind until I read this:

"ill-informed propagation of batshit insane theories"

When that kind of talk starts, I shut down and the conversation goes no further. Learn how to debate respectfully.


I edited my post down to the part I thought was the most relevant before I noticed your post.

By the way. I wasn't being disrespectful or anything else. The part you quoted were his words, not mine. :geek:


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