Partly prompted by a Penn and Teller episode, and partly by a post written by my friend Tristan, I have been thinking about conspiracy theories today. On what basis can we as individuals accept or refute them? Let’s take some examples that Penn and Teller raise: the reality of the moon landings, the nature of the JFK assassination, and the nature of the September 11th attacks. It should be noted that this is the worst episode of theirs I have ever seen. It relies largely upon arguments based on emotion, backed by the testimony of people to whom Penn and Teller accord expert status, rather than a logical or empirical demonstration of why these theories should be considered false.
Normally, our understanding of such phenomena is mediated through experts. When someone credible makes a statement about the nature of what took place, it provides some evidence for believing it. Penn and Teller amply demonstrate that there are lots of crazy and disreputable people who believe that the moon landing was faked, some strange conspiracy led to the death of JFK, and CIA controlled drones and explosives were used to carry out the September 11th attacks. That said, it hardly disproves those things. Plenty of certifiably insane people believe that the universe is expanding, that humans and viruses have a common biological ancestor, and that any whole number can be generated by adding powers of two (365 = 2^8 + 2^6 + 2^5 + 2^3 +2^2 + 2^0). That doesn’t make any of those things false.
We really have three mechanisms to work with:
- Empirical evidence
- Logical reasoning
- Heuristic methods
As individuals confronted with questions like those above, we almost always use the third. While those with a powerful telescope and the right coordinates could pick out all the junk we left on the moon, most people lack the means. Likewise, those with a rifle, a melon, and some time can learn the physics behind why Kennedy moved the way he did when he was shot, despite Oliver Stone‘s theories to the contrary. Finally, someone with some steel beams, jet fuel, and mathematical and engineering knowledge can model the collapse of the twin towers as induced by heat related weakening of steel to their heart’s content. Normally, however, we must rely upon experts to make these kinds of judgements for us, whether on the basis of sound technique or not.
Logical reasoning is great, but when applied strictly cannot get us very far. Most of what people call ‘logic’ is actually probabalistic reasoning. Strict logic can tell us about things that are necessary and things that are impossible. If every senior member of the American administration is controlled by an alien slug entity, and all alien slug entitites compel their hosts to sing “Irish Eyes are Smiling” once a day, we can logically conclude that all members of the American administration sing “Irish Eyes are Smiling” every day. Likewise, if all bats are bugs, all non-bugs must be non-bats. Entirely logically valid, but not too useful.
A heuristic reasoning device says something along the lines of: “In the more forty years or so since the moon landing, nobody has brought forward credible evidence that they were faked. As such, it is likely that they were not.” Occam’s razor works on the same kind of principle. This is often the best kind of analysis we can manage as individuals, and it is exactly this that makes conspiracy theories so difficult to dislodge. Once you adopt a different logic of probability, for instance one where certain people will stop at nothing to keep the truth hidden, your probabilistic reasoning gets thrown out of whack.
How, then, should we deal with competing testimony from ‘experts’ of various sorts, and with the fallout of our imperfect ability to access and understand the world as individuals? If there was a pat and easy answer to this question, it would be enormously valuable. Alas, there is not, and we are left to try and reach judgments on the basis of our own, imperfect, capabilities.
PS. For the record, I believe that the moon was almost certainly walked upon by humans, that Oswald quite probably shot John F. Kennedy on his own initiative, and that the airplanes listed in the 9/11 report as having crashed where they did actually did so. My reasons for believing these things are almost entirely heuristic.
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A whole collection of Penn and Teller episodes is online. Most are much better than the one linked in this post.
I was informed of this collection through comments left on this blog earlier.
You say tolerance is good. How can you be tolerant, but still be able to tell people when they are totally out to lunch on something? I remember you wrote ages ago about disproving how magnets can impove the taste of wine…
This P&T episode is especially full of easily disprovable stupid ideas: ie, fung shway.
Man, there’s no dealing with this stuff. When there’s no real proof, there is no real answer for people.
I started writing a comment and it turned into a mini-essay, so see my own blog for my thoughts..
This is a link to Lee’s post
9/11 conspiracism is dragging activists away from the real issues
By George Monbiot. Published in the Guardian 6th February 2007
The Paranoid Style in American Politics
By Richard Hofstadter
Harper’s Magazine, November 1964, pp. 77-86.
The Penn and Teller episode is on YouTube.
xkcd has a comic on conspiracy theories
Schneier just posted on this.
“To appreciate why this form of reasoning is seductive, consider the alternative: major events having minor or mundane causes — for example, the assassination of a president by a single, possibly mentally unstable, gunman, or the death of a princess because of a drunk driver. This presents us with a rather chaotic and unpredictable relationship between cause and effect. Instability makes most of us uncomfortable; we prefer to imagine we live in a predictable, safe world, so in a strange way, some conspiracy theories offer us accounts of events that allow us to retain a sense of safety and predictability.”
The Conspiracy Files 911
An interesting documentary dedicated to debunking the conspiracy theories surrounding the 9/11 attacks on New-York and Washington DC. … all » Exposes just how ludicrous these myths are, but unfortunately, true to the BBC’s tradition of Political correctness and leftist bias, fails to connect the dots between their views and their Political affiliation.
Ranging from the outright insane “inside job” theory of the so called “9/11 Truth movement” (talk about the height of irony), to the proposterous and racist anti-jewish conspiracies, this charade has all the characteristics of a mental disease.
I hope you enjoy this, and strongly advise you to also take a look at the desperate follow ups by this crazy bunch to get a better idea of what we’re dealing here with.
The World’s Weirdest/Stupidest Conspiracy Theories
Impossible conspiracies
By Mike Rudin (BBC News) on Mike Rudin
President Bush’s chief counter-terrorism adviser on 9/11, Richard Clarke, told The Conspiracy Files that there are two key reasons he thought the conspiracy theories about 9/11 are not possible – first competency, the alternative theories suggested are hugely complex and would have required a huge number of people; secondly, the difficulty of keeping secrets.
San Francisco Historians Condemn 1906 Earthquake Deniers
March 6, 2009 | Issue 45•10
“If an earthquake of that size really did strike downtown San Francisco, then where is all the rubble?” read one pamphlet, entitled “After$hock$: Truth, Lies, And The Business Of Earthquakes,” obtained by reporters. “Where are these alleged 3,000 dead? And why does the mayor refuse to answer questions about the fires that mysteriously started moments after the supposed ‘earthquake’ occurred? Ask yourself: Who is he protecting?”
Heated Controversy
Do firefighters believe 9/11 conspiracy theories?
By Christopher Beam
Posted Wednesday, April 8, 2009, at 5:18 PM ET
Do any firefighters believe in 9/11 conspiracy theories?
Yes. There’s no evidence that firefighters buy into 9/11 conspiracy theories at higher rates than the rest of the population. (A 2007 Zogby poll found that 26 percent of Americans believe the government “let it happen.” A 2006 Scripps-Howard poll found it was more than a third.) But some firemen do believe the government was behind 9/11 and use their status as first responders to draw attention to their statements.
Questions and Answers about the NIST WTC 7 Investigation (Updated 12/18/2008)
What was WTC 7?
The original World Trade Center Building 7 (WTC 7) was a 47-story office building located immediately to the north of the main World Trade Center (WTC) complex. Completed in 1987, it was built on top of an existing Con Edison substation and located on land owned by The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.
When did WTC 7 collapse?
On Sept. 11, 2001, WTC 7 endured fires for almost seven hours, from the time of the collapse of the north WTC tower (WTC 1) at 10:28:22 a.m. until 5:20:52 p.m., when WTC 7 collapsed.
What caused the fires in WTC 7?
Debris from the collapse of WTC 1, which was 370 feet to the south, ignited fires on at least 10 floors in the building at its south and west faces. However, only the fires on some of the lower floors—7 through 9 and 11 through 13—burned out of control. These lower-floor fires—which spread and grew because the water supply to the automatic sprinkler system for these floors had failed—were similar to building fires experienced in other tall buildings. The primary and backup water supply to the sprinkler systems for the lower floors relied on the city’s water supply, whose lines were damaged by the collapse of WTC 1 and WTC 2. These uncontrolled lower-floor fires eventually spread to the northeast part of WTC 7, where the building’s collapse began.
“conspiracy theories” is a bad idea. When you call a theory a conspiracy theory, you immediately remove all credibility from it. All conspiracy theories which are true are no longer called conspiracy theories. We should call the 9/11 truth movement not a conspiracy theory – this is an a priori dismissal of its possibility of being true (which is unscientific). We should just call it a theory, and evaluate it on its merits.
This is the same for Holocaust deniers. We shouldn’t call their theories “conspiracy” theories, we should just call them theories, and prove why they are wrong. Lots of theories that are true are theories which infer a conspiracy. For example, even something as mundane as price-fixing in gasoline pricing is a “conspiracy theory” in this technical sense.
If we want to be scientific about evaluating claims, and not presume them false because of perceived intentions in those who put them forward, we should never use the term “conspiracy theory” at all.
The real conspiracy in 9/11 is simple and not challenged by anyone seriously – that the Bush Administration and the “terrorists” always had the same interests – the reduction of civil liberties and freedom for US citizens. Making sure democracy does not function, making sure people hate the government and are isolated – these are preconditions both for the perpetuation of the existing American state and also for the possibility of a return to religious fundamentalism.
It makes no difference whether the towers were destroyed by dynamite or by a place, or whether the terrorists were hired by the U.S. or acted entirely independently, or whether they were intentionally not stopped, or even whether the Bush Admin’s incompetence in dealing with the threats in advance was purposeful or not. 9/11 was good for all states interested in committing state-terrorism in the name of a war-on-terror. That’s what is interesting, not how it was caused.
NASA UFOs explained
By Phil Plait on Skepticism
Some UFO stories are sillier than others. Among the very silliest are claims that NASA not only has evidence that the Space Shuttle is buzzed by flying saucers, but that they have video of it and this video is commonly released by NASA.
OK, can we first screw our heads on straight here? If you’re claiming that astronauts routinely take video of alien spacecraft, and that NASA is desperately trying to cover them up, why in the frak would they release the video?
Hello, McFly? I mean, seriously?
Anyway, the videos usually makes me laugh, because the “UFOs” in question are just ice particles on the Shuttle dislodged when they fire the maneuvering jets. And when they fire the jets again, the expanding plume of gas makes the particles change direction and accelerate away. It’s really that simple, yet there are elaborate conspiracy theories created to say these are alien spacecraft, and lots of people buy into it.
This thread has involved some discussion of the nature of conspiracy theories in general: Who Killed the Electric Car?.
Tristan,
Regarding this, does it not trouble you especially to think that most conspiracy theories are probably false? When all you have is conjecture based on plausibility, you will very often be wrong.
As Matt pointed out, conspiracy theories are very asymmetrical when it comes to effort – they are easy to create and hard to disprove. Indeed, they are so easy to create that those who have the information necessary to debunk them cannot justify the time required to do so – especially when their statement is likely to be dismissed out of hand by people already emotionally committed to the conspiracy theory. Just look at all the people who continue to reject the quality work done on the WTC collapse by engineers and metallurgists.
That a conspiracy is “probably” false isn’t a very scientific claim. The issue is the availability of evidence. When information is hidden we can only say that we can’t say of a theory whether it is true or not, and we can conjecture political reasons behind the absence of evidence. Theorizing as to why information is not available is not scientific, but it is not “unscientific” anymore than political analysis is “unscientific”. Perhaps conspiracy theories are characterized by the way they deal both with natural scientific issues (e.g. nano thermite), and human science issues (e.g. political motivation, power structures, etc…).
That isn’t a very satisfying response.
The fact remains that if you believe any plausible-sounding conspiracy theory, with little or no evidence, you will end up believing a lot of things that are untrue. This, in turn, is likely to make you think, speak, and act in inappropriate ways.
Dealing with conspiracy theories challenges us both to consider the means by which hypotheses should be evaluated, in an ideal circumstance, as well as what limitations in human psychology obstruct us from doing so well in reality.
Just scroll through Wikipedia’s list of conspiracy theories and think what an unhinged whacko you would be if you believed in all of them.
It would be more advantageous to think “is this likely” as opposed to think “is this plausible.”
Some of those are clearly absurd. A Guatemalan coup orchestrated by the CIA? What rubbish.
But the shape-shifting alien reptiles are the real deal, man!
Apparently, “tall, blood-drinking, shape-shifting reptilian humanoids from the star system Alpha Draconis are the force behind a worldwide conspiracy directed at humanity.” They “maintain their control through the generation of fear and negative emotion, which is food to these entities, by manufacturing conflicts, primarily wars.” Also, “most of the world’s leaders are in fact related to these reptilians.”
Stephen Harper certainly is.
Time Cube is the other 100% legit conspiracy theory:
“The 12 hour or 1/2 Day clock is an intended EVIL against humanity -
indicting every human on Earth as Dumb, Educated Stupid and Evil -
for imaginary Cubed Earth has 4
Days within simultaneous rotation.
One God would equal a God Dunce
as Humans evolve from Children.”
The problem with a typical conspiracy theory [CT from now on] is how they’re generally so sensational. You never, for example, hear a conspiracy theory about stolen Kleenex technology. Rather, the good ones all have really cool words in them, for example ‘spy,’ ‘assassination,’ ‘dynamite,’ ‘stealth,’ and ‘thermite.’ (As someone who’s actually made thermite I hate this one. Thermite, being only powdered rust and aluminum, is pretty boring. The aluminum simply reduces the rust in a very exothermic reaction giving you molten iron and aluminum oxide.)
I find most CTs focus on the sexy topics because it gives the teller a sense of importance, like they’re ‘in the know’. They can call dissenters “sheeple” and spout off with a half-baked understanding of science. No one would listen to them if they were telling stories about the above mentioned Kleenex.
I would normally classify a conspiracy theory as a theory that goes against a more likely, or in fact scientifically accepted answer. Unfortunately, with the internet, there is so much information readily available to anyone, that bad information makes it out as easily as the good stuff. If I want to log into a website that tells me the Earth is flat, and gives ‘scientifc’ reasons, I could! Just as I can log into a website that tells me god designed bananas to fit perfectly into the human hand on our young Earth.
The issue is between whether you should reject conspiracy theories outhand, or reserve judgement. Setting the question up this way:
“The fact remains that if you believe any plausible-sounding conspiracy theory, with little or no evidence, you will end up believing a lot of things that are untrue.”
ignores the possibility of reserving judgment. Thinking something is possible is different from thinking it is definitely true. There is a difference between people who do some youtube and wikipedia research on the Nazi Bell project and all of a sudden unilaterally believe that UFOs are a way of covering up futuristic technology, and those who find the possibility interesting enough to look for more serious research on the same topics. I don’t think one is a “conspiracy theorist” in the deplorable sense if one fails to deny the possibility that interesting technologies may exist which were never made public. The fact that oil companies were able to kill off the electric car, despite its obvious promise, makes it easy to believe that better energy alternatives might be kept in hiding to maintain the status quo of oil profitability.
In terms of behaviour, what does it mean ‘to reserve judgment?’
When you are having a conversation and someone brings up their ardent belief that the CIA blew up the World Trade Centre, vaccines cause autism, and the Large Hadron Collider will destroy the planet, how do you respond? Using what is ‘possible’ as your yardstick requires you to continually entertain the possibility that the sun orbits the Earth, we never landed on the moon, spinal fluxions cause tuberculosis, etc.
To me, it seems important to actively reject hypotheses that (a) don’t have a strong basis in evidence and (b) cause you to behave in inappropriate ways, if you take them to heart. There is a personal and societal cost that accompanies people being unwilling to reject very dubious hypotheses.
I often find myself in conversational situations where people are asserting claims I don’t think are well based in fact, claims which I would not affirm as my own beliefs. I find the right thing to do usually is to express doubt rather than assert the falseness of their claims. If I happen to be privy to the information which refutes their position, then sure, I’ll tell them they are wrong – but usually I don’t know enough about the issue to take a position.
Reserving judgement is a technical notion which means what it sounds like – choosing not to make a judgement rather than possibly making a false one. It’s certainly not appropriate in every case, but nothing ever is.
It certainly is possible that the new collider will destroy the planet. The technical debate is about whether the change is microscopic or infinitesimal, if I remember correctly.
The sun does “orbit” the earth by any reasonable notion of the word “orbit”. If you assume the earth is not moving, then the sun circles it. If you assume the sun is not moving, then the earth moves around the sun. Every model of orbits since the late Ptolemaic one is equally simple mathematically and provides equally good predictions to an amateur astronomer.
The CIA might have blown up lots of things. As for the 911 inside job theories, I think its just too unlikely – if you wanted to pull an inside job terrorist spoof, you’d do something simple, this scenario has too many contingencies. But, there is no principled reason to think the CIA would never attempt something like that, with adequate technology. The CIA is just a wing of the executive branch, they just do things told to them. What’s interesting, however, is not who blew up what, but who profited and how, and the disparity between claimed interests and interests acted on. The CIA is no stranger to committing acts of terror – certainly the CIA killed a lot of people on September 11th 1973.
Certainty
A good video animation about closed and open mindedness, evidence, and the difference between not accepting a claim and believing that a claim is false.
http://www.dailymotion.com/user/totocacapouet/video/x8uei4_openmindedness_tech
I am not saying we should be closed to new information. If Obama pulls his face off on national television, revealing his horrible Reptilian form, pretty much everyone would start taking that particular conspiracy theory more seriously.
What worries me about entertaining the possibility that conspiracy theories are true is that the simple fact of doing so can make us behave in ways we would consider inappropriate, if we knew for certain the theory was false. For instance, people who believe that vaccines are a western plot to sterilize people in the third world cause a lot of harm. Similarly, I think unfounded beliefs about the JFK assassination probably cause people to have a harmful attitude towards various elements of the American government.
When it comes to beliefs which have no practical impact on behaviour, there is no harm in reserving judgment. In situations where your belief does affect the choices you make, you need to choose a position to act on the basis of, even if you are open to changing it in the face of new evidence.
To take a practical example, I was once sitting on a Greyhound bus to Toronto beside a stranger who claimed that vaccines are harmful and unnecessary for children.
In this situation, I could have ignored her, or given a weak response along the lines of “I am willing to reserve judgment on that.” I think doing so would have been wrong. Even if I will not be able to convince this particular woman that there is no evidence of a link between vaccines and autism – and there is a strong link between vaccines and children not dying of tetanus, diphtheria, measles, etc – I have a chance of influencing the thinking of people sitting within hearing range, but not participating in the conversation.
In situations where people’s beliefs have important consequences (such as whether they vaccinate their children or encourage others to do so), I think we have an obligation to try to dispel weak arguments and provide strong counterarguments that make reference to good methodology and available evidence. That’s the only hope we have for rejecting damaging superstitions and encouraging behaviours that are well-informed.
I have been in similar situations with people arguing that climate change is not real or not a problem, people arguing that the World Trade Centre was obviously destroyed using planted explosives, people arguing that the pharmaceutical industry provides no benefits to people, and other things. In each of these cases, I think the position the other person held was not only wrong, but harmful. As such, responding in as fair and convincing a way as possible is at least morally laudable and quite possibly morally required.
…which is effectively just what the video says. Except it does it with an animation!
I watched the video, generally agree with it, and like the accent.
What the video doesn’t mention is third parties. One of the most important reasons for questioning those who assert the accuracy of conspiracy theories is for the benefit of others who are listening.
I liked the video.
Here’s an example of how much effort someone has put into dispelling a fairly frequently heard theory that a 757 did not strike the Pentagon. With pictures from the scene, it correlates debris characteristics with known characteristics of the Rolls Royce engine that powered the aircraft in question.
I think that’s a good illustration of just how much time can be wasted on addressing things like that.
It is good that someone took all the trouble to write that. It is sad that ‘a cruise missile hit the Pentagon’ theories endure, regardless.
Why is it sad that people keep questioning some explanation of some event? Irritating, bothersome, misleading, but I don’t see how sadness comes into it. Sadness is something with which to label another’s approach when you feel yourself to be qualitatively above them, i.e. “Those chemists who kept studying flogiston after the discovery of oxygen. It’s so sad for them”.
Patronize much?
I think it can be sad, because people can be driven by a psychological need served by the conspiracy theory, rather than a genuine desire to know the truth.
They are like parents who desperately want their child to not be gay, and who keep inventing outlandish explanations for why they are not, even though all the evidence is on the other side.
People who understand that climate change undermines libertarian ethics seem to fall into this group.
“people can be driven by a psychological need served by the conspiracy theory, rather than a genuine desire to know the truth.”
So, either people can be driven by an autonomous, rational desire for something good (truth), or a chemically, irrational, appetitive desire, which has no moral value?
Saying that it is ok to believe things just because they make you feel good is a far stretch from your original argument about keeping an open mind.
Certainly, people hold views for emotionally-motivated reasons. I don’t think it is preferable (or even acceptable) to hold views about things like the efficacy of vaccines or the reality of climate change for those reasons, however. The consequences of such beliefs are serious enough that truth must take precedence over feelings.
“The consequences of such beliefs are serious enough that truth must take precedence over feelings.”
Only “feelings” make you despise the “consequences” which make acting on “feelings” un-acceptable. “Truth” is just a special class of derivative feelings which take precedence over others by being a condition.
Unless you have some way of evaluating the goodness of consequences which doesn’t reduce to how people feel about some outcome compaerd to some other one, you are only talking about being more or less rational about feelings – not about “truth” on the one side and “feelings” on the other.
This feels like a philosophical evasion. Vaccines either work or they don’t. Feelings have nothing to do with it.
I think the ‘he can’t be gay‘ analogy is a useful one.
“Sure, he has had a succession of buff male roommates, and he subscribes to gay periodicals, and he moved to the Castro district of San Francisco, and he awkwardly tried coming out to me several times (he’s confused!), but he can’t be gay, because it would devastate me. No grandchildren!”
This is not a sound line of reasoning. It is a mode of thinking based on deep denial, and I think many conspiracy theorists are driven by something similar.
“Vaccines either work or they don’t. Feelings have nothing to do with it.”
Correct. Feelings have nothing to do with whether vaccines work or do not work. Similarly, feelings have nothing to do with whether some program to sterilize the poor or the people of colour works or does not work independently of how anyone feels about the program. However, the desirability of some factual event is a feeling – even if such desirability is based on “consequences” because the consequence must be “evaluated”, i.e. discerned to be more or less desirable.
In the “gay” analogy, all that’s being shown is that truth itself is something about which we have feelings. Truth in this case is something about which the speaker can not stand, because it would “devastate” them. Truth is being evaluated as non-desirable.
So, maybe the truth itself is not a feeling, but any situation in which we are to prefer truth over falsity, that decision is based on feeling in some sense.
What I am saying is: since we are beings with feelings that can interfere destructively with sound reasoning, it is broadly accurate to consider emotionally-sustained conspiracy theories as a kind of ‘bug’ in the human thought process – as alluded to in a cartoon linked previously.
It seems clear that we would be better off if such theories and distorted forms of reasoning could be effectively dispelled.
Greatest non-alien explanation for a phenomenon sometimes attributed to aliens: ‘Stoned wallabies make crop circles’
In this Richard Dawkins Foundation video, Skeptic Magazine’s Michael Shermer explains the ten criteria we can use when confronted with claims about how the world works that serve as a “baloney detection kit.”
I can see the fnords!
By empath on robertantonwilson
Before 9/11, the center of the conspiracy theorist’s universe was the Kennedy Assassination. And probably the definitive statement on the ridiculousness of the conspiracy theories of that era was the Illuminatus! Trilogy[warning, the entire several hundred page novel in PDF], published in 1975 and written by two Playboy editors at the height of the era of flower power. It drew on many sources, but most distinctively, it drew from a little public domain pamphlet called The Principia Discordia. Many people know the catch phrases (Fnord! Hail Eris!), but not many people know the authors’ very real connections to the Kennedy Assassination.
Malaclypse the Younger (Greg Hill) worked in Jim Garrison’s office in New Orleans and the very first copy of the Principia was run off of Garrison’s copy machine. There’s a copy of the first edition in the official House JFK assassination records. Kerry Thornley served in the Marines with Lee Harvey Oswald and wrote a novel based on Oswald before he assassinated Kennedy. He testified to the Warren Commission about his friendship with Oswald and later was accused of being part of the conspiracy by Jim Garrison, who ended up charging him with perjury. Garrison’s theory was so convincing that Thornley actually came to believe that he may have been unknowingly involved in the conspiracy.
Fox TV and the Apollo Moon Hoax
(February 13, 2001)
On Thursday, February 15th 2001 (and replayed on March 19), the Fox TV network aired a program called “Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon?”, hosted by X-Files actor Mitch Pileggi. The program was an hour long, and featured interviews with a series of people who believe that NASA faked the Apollo Moon landings in the 1960s and 1970s. The biggest voice in this is Bill Kaysing, who claims to have all sorts of hoax evidence, including pictures taken by the astronauts, engineering details, discussions of physics and even some testimony by astronauts themselves. The program’s conclusion was that the whole thing was faked in the Nevada desert (in Area 51, of course!). According to them, NASA did not have the technical capability of going to the Moon, but pressure due to the Cold War with the Soviet Union forced them to fake it.
So let’s take a look at the “evidence” brought out by the show. To make this easier, below is a table with links to the specific arguments.
Thermite video
The Grey Lady takes on the Moon hoax
By Phil Plait on Antiscience
Yesterday, the New York Times published a short piece on the Moon Hoax. It’s a decent write-up of the situation; I’ve read about a million others just like it at this point so nothing really leaps out at me… except they quoted me in it! That was cool. Now the Fox network has two reasons to hate me.
Actually, there were a couple of things that made me smile (besides also quoting My Close Personal Friend Adam Savage™). They talked to one conspiracy theorist from Argentina:
… he said that the political corruption during the years of dictatorship in his country shaped his thinking: “I started to realize how political corruption operates and how it is the interests of a few in power that really governs our world.”
Yes, paranoid conspiracy thinking is a good thing to extrapolate from one venue to everything else in the world. [Insert rolleyes icon here if you will.] Look: that sort of thing is not a worldview; it’s an excuse. If you use it as a way to live your life, then everything is a conspiracy. The light runs red when you get to it? Zionists! It rains when you want to take a walk? Illuminati! Your cat pukes up hairballs after cleaning herself? Big Pharma!
New images of Moon landing sites
A US spacecraft has captured images of Apollo landing sites on the Moon, revealing hardware and a trail of footprints left on the lunar surface.
The release of the images coincides with the 40th anniversary of the first manned mission to land on the Moon.
Neil, Buzz, Al & Other Conspiracies
July 20, 2009 by XUP
Are any of you old enough to remember that moon-landing back in 1969? It’s definitely one of those long-ago things that does NOT seem like it happened just yesterday. That one seems like a least two lifetimes ago.
If it really happened!
Ya, the big Moon Landing is one of the all-time favourites among conspiracy theorists. They’ve done elaborate research on the film footage and stills and reckoned the photographic technology just wasn’t there in 1969 to produce that calibre of film. Not to mention that the technology to land on the moon apparantly wasn’t quite within grasp yet either. But the Americans were afraid the Russians were going to beat them, so they faked the whole thing.
Other great conspiracies include the one that believes the US was behind 9/11. There was a documentary about it called Loose Change that proved why and how. America needed oil and needed a really good reason to invade some oil rich country.
Conspiracy Theorist Convinces Neil Armstrong Moon Landing Was Faked|
August 31, 2009 | Issue 45•36
LEBANON, OHIO—Apollo 11 mission commander and famed astronaut Neil Armstrong shocked reporters at a press conference Monday, announcing he had been convinced that his historic first step on the moon was part of an elaborate hoax orchestrated by the United States government.
According to Armstrong, he was forced to reconsider every single detail of the monumental journey after watching a few persuasive YouTube videos, and reading several blog posts on conspiracy theorist Ralph Coleman’s website, OmissionControl.org.
“It only took a few hastily written paragraphs published by this passionate denier of mankind’s so-called ‘greatest technological achievement’ for me to realize I had been living a lie, ” said a visibly emotional Armstrong, addressing reporters at his home. “It has become painfully clear to me that on July 20, 1969, the Lunar Module under the control of my crew did not in fact travel 250,000 miles over eight days, touch down on the moon, and perform various experiments, ushering in a new era for humanity. Instead, the entire thing was filmed on a soundstage, most likely in New Mexico.”
“This is the only logical interpretation of the numerous inconsistencies in the grainy, 40-year-old footage,” Armstrong added.
Lexington
Still crazy after all these years
Aug 20th 2009
From The Economist print edition
The perils of losing one’s grip on reality
“Some of Barack Obama’s detractors content themselves with arguing that he is a bad president. Others go further. “Birthers” insist that he was not born in the United States and is therefore constitutionally barred from being president. Yet Mr Obama’s birth certificate says he was born in Hawaii, and there is not a shred of evidence to the contrary. There is even an announcement of his birth in the archive of the Honolulu Advertiser, a local newspaper. Yet the internet crackles with theories as to how all this was faked so that, 48 years later, Mr Obama could impose a socialist state on America. And a YouGov poll for The Economist found that 26% of Republicans think Mr Obama is probably foreign-born.
…
But the left is hardly immune to such fantasies. Some people, including Mr Obama’s own former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, believe that AIDS was cooked up by the government to kill blacks. A staggering 18% of Americans think that the government of George Bush probably knew in advance about the attacks of September 11th 2001 but allowed them to proceed anyway. Some even contend that Mr Bush orchestrated the attacks himself, to create an excuse for invading Iraq. To believe this, you have to believe that the Bushies were both wicked enough to murder thousands of Americans and brilliant enough to execute such a mind-bogglingly sophisticated plot without a single leak—in a culture where Richard Nixon could not even hush up a burglary.”
9/11 Conspiracy Theories ‘Ridiculous,’ Al Qaeda Says
Deceptive Deceptions
Open your eyes, people: Dan Meth’s latest video was an inside job.
When sceptics fight back
By Arran Frood
Conspiracy theorists have used the internet to co-ordinate increasingly slick attacks on the accepted versions of events, but now a group of scientists and sceptics has decided it’s time to organise and fight back.
Conspiracy theories are pervasive and popular.
A poll for the Scripps Howard media organisation in 2006 suggested 36% of Americans suspected government involvement or deliberate inaction in the 9/11 attacks, and belief in a Kennedy conspiracy ran at 40% in the same poll.
A decade after Princess Diana’s death, one survey found a fifth of Britons believed she was murdered. And to millions across the world, 2009′s Apollo Moon landing 40th anniversary was a hollow sham because we have never been there.
Conspiracy theories predate the internet but the web has provided a fast, accessible platform for groups to unite, gather research and disseminate information without even meeting or leaving their houses.
While many people find them harmless fun, others believe there is a darker truth – that conspiracy theories are rewriting history, warping the present and altering the future. Enough is enough they say – it’s time to fight back.
Send Lawyers, Guns, and Money
Anti-Obama paranoia is good for at least one business.
By Daniel Gross
Posted Wednesday, Oct. 21, 2009, at 1:52 PM ET
In recent months, there has been a lot of talk about what historian Richard Hofstadter called the “the paranoid style in American politics.” To believe the Glenn Becks of the world, the Democrats and their Commie, tree-hugging comrades are going to take away Americans’ guns, confiscate private property, enslave free thinkers, and generally destroy the nation. Of course, most sophisticates don’t give much currency to such arguments. But that hasn’t stopped them from trying to monetize the phenomenon. Fox News Channel has boosted audiences by narrowcasting to birthers and tea partiers, and it has seen an increase in ads from gold companies (the metal is thought to be a good hedge against Obama destroying the dollar). HarperCollins, another New York-based component of the Murdoch empire, has ordered up a huge printing of Sarah Palin’s memoir Going Rogue. On Tuesday, Peter Lattman, the Wall Street Journal’s sharp private equity reporter, unearthed (subscription required) a more interesting example: the pending initial public offering of gun manufacturer Freedom Group.
Ironically, Freedom Group is a creation of Cerberus Capital Management, the private equity firm founded and controlled by Stephen Feinberg, a hard-core Republican. It’s been a rough few years for the firm, which bought controlling stakes in Chrysler and GMAC (General Motors’ former lending arm) at the top of the market. In the wake of the financial meltdown, Cerberus’ stake in Chrysler was wiped out as part of the car company’s recapitalization, and its holding in GMAC was trimmed after GMAC was forced to turn to the government for funds. Cerberus didn’t get any special dispensation from the Bush or Obama administrations. But now it seems that Obama’s election has provided Feinberg with an opportunity to recoup some of his recent losses.
The Lunar Reconnassance Orbiter, currently orbiting the Moon just 50 km off the surface, has taken more shots of the Apollo 17 landing site… and has seen the actual U.S. flag!
9/11 Truth and the Paranoid Style
By Arthur Goldwag on News
Forty-five years ago, Harpers magazine published Richard Hofstadter’s essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” The occasion for the piece was the revenant conservatism that had driven Barry Goldwater’s presidential campaign (the magazine hit the newsstands the month of the Johnson/Goldwater election), but it remains astonishingly apt. I cannot recommend it enough for anyone who wants to understand the mentalités of fringe political movements in the United States–from the Anti-Masons and Know Nothings in the first half of the 1800s, to McCarthyism, the Nation of Islam, and the Weathermen in the last century, to the Birthers and Truthers today.
I hesitate to bring up 9/11 Truth again after the firestorm of commentary I unleashed last week, but read Hofstadter on the pedantry of paranoid literature and tell me that he doesn’t nail some of the most contentious of the posters (most of whom were probably not even born when the piece was written) with a psychoanalyst’s precision and a novelist’s sympathy:
“One of the impressive things about paranoid literature is the contrast between its fantasied conclusions and the almost touching concern with factuality it invariably shows. It produces heroic strivings for evidence to prove that the unbelievable is the only thing that can be believed…..Respectable paranoid literature not only starts from certain moral commitments that can indeed be justified but also carefully and all but obsessively accumulates “evidence.” The difference between this “evidence” and that commonly employed by others is that it seems less a means of entering into normal political controversy than a means of warding off the profane intrusion of the secular political world. The paranoid seems to have little expectation of actually convincing a hostile world, but he can accumulate evidence in order to protect his cherished convictions from it….”
XKCD: Semicontrolled Demolition
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601039&sid=aaIuE.W8RAuU
“Commentary by David Reilly
Jan. 29 (Bloomberg) — The idea of secret banking cabals that control the country and global economy are a given among conspiracy theorists who stockpile ammo, bottled water and peanut butter. After this week’s congressional hearing into the bailout of American International Group Inc., you have to wonder if those folks are crazy after all.”
XKCD: The Flake Equation
“I think that it is much more likely that the reports of flying saucers are the results of the known irrational characteristics of terrestrial intelligence than of the unknown rational efforts of extra-terrestrial intelligence.”
Richard Feynman
“Seth Kalichman, a social psychologist at the University of Connecticut at Storrs, understands this better than most: he spent a year infiltrating HIV denialist groups. Many of the people he met were ordinary and sincere. “Denialism fills some need,” he says. “For people with HIV, it is a coping strategy,” albeit a maladaptive one.
Kalichman, however, feels that everyday reasoning alone is not enough to make someone a denialist. “There is some fragility in their thinking that draws them to believe people who are easily exposed as frauds,” he says. “Most of us don’t believe what they say, even if we want to. Understanding why some do may help us find solutions.”
He believes the instigators of denialist movements have more serious psychological problems than most of their followers. “They display all the features of paranoid personality disorder”, he says, including anger, intolerance of criticism, and what psychiatrists call a grandiose sense of their own importance. “Ultimately, their denialism is a mental health problem. That is why these movements all have the same features, especially the underlying conspiracy theory.”
Neither the ringleaders nor rank-and-file denialists are lying in the conventional sense, Kalichman says: they are trapped in what classic studies of neurosis call “suspicious thinking”. “The cognitive style of the denialist represents a warped sense of reality, which is why arguing with them gets you nowhere,” he says. “All people fit the world into their own sense of reality, but the suspicious person distorts reality with uncommon rigidity.”"
How A Wired Magazine Story Morphed Into “Brain Eating Vaccine” In 3 Easy Steps
Occasionally, though, Google Trends is an interesting window into what the paranoid crazies of the world are paranoidly crazy about, and today was one of those days, with “brain eating vaccine” shooting to the top of the chart. What is a brain eating vaccine and where did this trending topic come from? Let’s take a quick look at the making of a trending conspiracy out of a reasonably benign magazine profile in just three steps
Videos that prove the elites are really reptilian humanoids
I’m with my friend and senior editor of bOING bOING (the zine) Gareth Branwyn and he is showing me funny videos posted by people who think the world is ruled by reptilian humanoid shapeshifters (basically, the nonsense that David Icke perpetuates). The videos show politicians and other powerful people’s tongue flicks, hisses, strange head tilting, and membrane eyelids that move sideways.
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