What's wrong with conspiracy theories by SIGNYM

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

What's wrong with conspiracy theories

POSTED BY: SIGNYM
UPDATED: Wednesday, March 19, 2025 04:32
SHORT URL:
VIEWED: 2617
PAGE 1 of 1

Saturday, December 19, 2015 12:34 PM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Or ... "What's wrong with conspiracy theories?"

We have systems where power and wealth are concentrated in the hands of an exceptionally tiny minority: Did you know that 20 people in the USA have more wealth than the bottom 50%??? It's not just here, it's everywhere. And it's not by accident, it's by design. Not YOUR design, not MY design, but THEIR design.

Everywhere, people's ability to provide for their own basic needs for water, food, shelter, and safety is denied. Everywhere, even under democracies, people feel that their common goals are not listened to. Everywhere, many people live in utter impoverishment, while the wealth of a tiny minority grows and grows.

Despite our own democratic ideals, where everyone is supposed to have their say in what our government does and how it functions, we mostly feel that we have NO SAY in what the government does or what it decides. Choices which have overwhelming popular support (like single payer/ public option) go nowhere. On the other hand, we're often stampeded into supporting choices that we would not have made spontaneously. Who among us would have identified Iraq as the enemy of choice, if we had not been endlessly presented with the prospect of mushroom clouds and biowarfare and chemical agents? Who among us would have willingly weaponized jihadists, if we had known what sort of monsters they really were and not the "freedom fighters" (mujahideen) as portrayed?

Does anyone really think that the government is open and honest about what it does and why it does it? Does anyone really think that the decisions to bankrupt Greece, or to destabilize the entire Middle East, or to buoy up banks and stock prices instead of investing in the economy would have gone over with the public, if they had been presented as they really were:

"We" (the infinitesimally small minority) need to keep financialism safe because that's where "we" really make all of our money, and

"We" really don't care where you produce, as long as "we" take a cut on each sale, and

"We" have a devil's deal with Saudi Arabia because "we" depend on the petrodollar.

And does anyone think that this happens without discussion of any sort? That the head of the IMF doesn't talk with the head of the Fed, and with the State Department, and with the BIS? And that they keep these discussions very private?

Let's not call it "conspiracy" then, let's call it "collusion".

Of course, discussing these collusions is speculative because direct information - by design- is scarce. One can only speculate on goals and strategies based on observation of events (the Izzy Stone approach). But to pretend that the upper echelon thinks about your (our) needs and interests when they decide whatever they decide is just plain counterfactual ... if they really had your (our) interests at heart, do you really think the world would be in the shape that it is? If they really had our interests at heart, could they not explain that to us, openly? So, by necessity they keep their own counsels secret.

Shoving this concept into the back of the closet because it's uncomfortable ... because we prefer to think of our leaders as people who have OUR interests at heart (not theirs) ... is counterfactual. Collusions exist. We should be interested in figuring them out.

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Saturday, December 19, 2015 3:43 PM

WHOZIT

So it's OK to believe that Kennedy was killed by the CIA, the Dallas Police Department, the Military, Johnson, Castro, the Mob, the Secret Service and several New Orleans Homosexuals? If so then stop making fun of Pirate News when he posts here.

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Saturday, December 19, 2015 5:10 PM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Quote:
Originally posted by whozit:
So it's OK to believe that Kennedy was killed by the CIA, the Dallas Police Department, the Military, Johnson, Castro, the Mob, the Secret Service and several New Orleans Homosexuals? If so then stop making fun of Pirate News when he posts here.

No, silly. It's not good to "believe" anything! It's just as ridiculous to believe in every conspiracy theory that comes along as well as to believe that they never exist!

What we should be doing is looking at what's going on, bringing our evidence to the table, using logic try to connect pieces, and always keeping in mind that our explanations are provisional, until something better comes along.

--------------
You can't build a nation with bombs. You can't create a society with guns.

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Sunday, December 20, 2015 11:15 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.

Oh, BTW .... PN isn't as crazy as you might think. Much of what he posted were true facts, such as the existence of MK Ultra and other secret military experiments on troops, individuals, and even populations as a whole- such as when the military released aerosolized bacteria off the coast of San Francisco to see how it would disperse into the city. But that's another story from my youth. Of course, they wouldn't do such things today, would they?

Anyway, when PN would pop up with his unique Templar-Nazi-Jewish-Communist-Trilateral-British-whatever conspiracy theory, my eyes would kind of roll because that made no historical sense whatsoever. It just occurred to me a couple of days ago that PN was right-ish about some of that, but I need to tell you a shaggy-dog story how I got to that point.

About three or so years ago, here on this board, I converted to nationalism. I've known for many years that international banks and international corporations are simply world-scale money-concentrators and poverty-creators .... and they manage to practice that on a global scale, where people can not only be pitted against each other for jobs and money on the basis of sex, religion, education, and age but also on the basis of nationality.

Now, one of the things I've sensed for YEARS, and have expressed quite often (to the dismay of my liberal friends here) is that it's impossible to have a rational, effective national policy on .... well, anything .... the environment, population, employment, freedom, war, currency .... if your borders are open to people, goods, and money. No matter WHAT you try to do internally, it will be undone by more powerful forces, and you can bet that international businesses only SOMETIMES operate in your favor (if you have something especially valuable to trade) but ALWAYS operate in their own favor. That's why I'm universally hostile to so-called "free trade" agreements, and not too much in favor of immigration.

As a bit of a sideways point, the other thing I'm concerned with is robustness. Right now, we have a tightly interlinked "efficient" economic system which depends on single points of manufacture and "just in time" delivery. That kind of system is inherently sensitive to disruptions in supply and trade, because there are no "extra" supplies warehoused and no redundant manufacturers: All of that has been wrung out of the system to increase profits. It DOES increase profits money, but we've also managed to create a thousand points of failure. But I digress...

In the back of my mind is the prediction by Karl Marx (according to my Marxist friends)
that socialism will never come about until the world in completely under the thumb of capitalists and bankers. Once all distinctions have been wiped out ... we no longer see ourselves as Xtian or Muslim, male or female, gay or straight, American or Azeri, old or young, but simply as individual units... ONLY THEN will we be able to recognize the universality of our collective experience as workers, and revolt worldwide. So, if I'm pro-socialist .... shouldn't I be looking forward to that day? Am I not fighting an inevitable ... and even brighter! ... future history by my stubborn, regressive refusal to become an international piece of nothing? At some point during my discussion with Bytemite, I came to a "Fuck it" moment. I don't care if I'm fighting the inevitable or not. I just can't go along with a system that intends to grind the 99.999999% into a homogenous powerless paste. I want MY nation, and ALL nations, to have the capability to solve their own problems, on their own soil.

Now, where PN is right(ish) .... both Marx and international capital are on the same train-track. They both assume that at some point in the future, the world will be entirely dominated by international capital. So it's not TOO far off to claim a Marxist-banker conspiracy, because they're both headed in the same direction of One World Government.

--------------
You can't build a nation with bombs. You can't create a society with guns.

NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | TOP | HOME

Sunday, December 20, 2015 3:50 PM