Not exactly a conspiro-dismissal, but perhaps slightly worse: a landlord of mine thought I believed that wogs were more or less equal to white people because it's fashionable nowadays.
He's still alive, unfortunately. Too stupid to die.
Doesn't the dinosuar that gets shot in The Land That Time Forgot take several seconds to realise that it's dead because its brain functions are so slow?
After all, Advocates for economic system based on self-interest may tell lies if they believe it is in their interest to do so doesn't strike me as a ridiculous proposition, yet try telling people who work in finance that and they'll look at you like a stonking great pair of gonads just bulged out of your eye-sockets.
Funny how often this comes up. The usual claim is that if you were found to be lying it would irrevocably damage our personal reputation and that of your firm and therefore it's just not worth it, which is plausible enough until you realise they're saying "people just wouldn't nick stuff because you know, you might get caught and it's just not worth it".
My favourite contemporary conspiracy theory is "almost the entire Western Left is engaged in a conspiracy to conceal the anti-Semitism that actually motivates their hostility to Israel and this is why they don't use overtly anti-Semitic language even though given the apparent prevalance of this prejudice you'd have thought they'd be bound to".
I can almost believe that "Notable ones missing are Goldman Sachs as the third shooter [in John F. Kennedy's assassination] and faking the first lunar landing." is a double bluff.
There's a very nasty one doing the rounds on the Tory, libertarian and BNP-lite right wing blogs. It goes that rather than doing everything they can to harrass and immiserate refugees, Labour are deliberately importing as many as they can and giving them as much free money as possible because they want to replace the population with dependent voters.
Now, that's only wingnuts at the moment, but there's echoes of it everywhere in right wing media and political parties - the response to the BNP vote in the Euro election is a case in point. To me, that says "Hmm, looks like Enoch Powell's supporters and their kids have stopped voting Tory," but to respectable commentators it seems to mean "the government should adopt more racist policies to appease the Very Real Concerns of racist voters."
I actually had a long and tedious debate on this the other day with a bloke who regularly compares the Labour Party to the Nazis and ZanuPF*. He had a rare time denouncing people who egg Nick Griffin as being odious, totalitarian fascists, every bit as bad as the Nazis (1930s vintage) but thought that describing people who vote for actual fascists with well-publicised Nazi sympathies as "racist" was just ridiculous, hilariously silly. It wasn't a productive discussion, let's put it that way.
*Amusingly, not because of the wars and the propaganda, but because of the smoking bans and healthy living campaigns. It takes all sorts.
The usual claim is that if you were found to be lying it would irrevocably damage our personal reputation and that of your firm and therefore it's just not worth it...
At this point, I would like to point to the number of Wall Street banks that sold crap shares in worthless dotcom startups and were subsequently heavily punished by the free market for their errors/larceny - I believe the figure stands at "Zero", at the time of writing.
I've been dealing a lot of late with racists and the favourite madness they spew under the, "political correctness be damned" is that places like South Africa and South London prove that non-whites are inherently more likely to commit crime than whites, just because they are naturally crimnial.
Oh dear.
Oh and some nuts still bang on about AIDS being a gay plague, ignoring vast rafts of evidence and dead bodies that say otherwise.
And I should have said, the "financial whizzkids had no idea what was happening" story is very popular at the high-paid end of the accountancy profession. "We're not bloodhounds" is a line I've heard more than once.
"a bloke who regularly compares the Labour Party to the Nazis"
You know, it's only the fact that most of the people who ended up in concentration camps are either very old now or actually died there that's saving that cunt from a kicking.
Seriously, would you have got away with saying that kind of thing in, say, 1950?
"We're not bloodhounds" is a line I've heard more than once.
That's the way it goes - intellectual titans in times of plenty and poor, confused waifs in times of famine. The fact that they might actually be, you know, highly trained professionals doing their jobs exactly the way they're supposed to doesn't seem to enter into it.
That said, AIG rather undermine this thesis by having been one part scheming thieves to a hundred parts ideological idiots. RBS was allegedly just bad luck, although I'm reserving judgement until I've looked at it more closely.
"what's the most obviously true statement you've ever seen dismissed as conspiracy theory?"
Oh, easy - that would be the Herman / Chomsky Propaganda Model of the corporate media, as presented in Manufacturing Consent. Of course, it's only the tiny handful of media types who are prepared to admit to ever having heard of it who dismiss it as a conspiracy theory. Most seem prefer to pretend it doesn't even exist.
...and the rest spend a decade trying to smear the messenger first on usenet, then on blogs.
Gypsies, fine. But keep off the badgers, eh...cunt!
Moving right along, my statement that some of the cops hereabouts in southern Minnesota, on the North Coast of Iowa, ARE up to their nuts with the drug dealers has been called "paranoid" by the local Reader's Digest readers.
"Bopper" Wook...who DAT?
...what's the most obviously true statement you've ever seen dismissed as conspiracy theory?
That Adolf Hitler had a secret plan to exterminate the Jews of Europe. As usual one conspiracy theory gets rebutted by another - the Holocaust becomes a conspiracy, not of Hitler's but of his enemies', to defame his good character.
...the Holocaust becomes a conspiracy, not of Hitler's but of his enemies', to defame his good character.
I'd like to think that one falls into the category of "Insane things believed by a small number of deranged idiots" rather than "Fictions commonly maintained from political expediency".
Would a vast,shadowy,organization with tentacles stretching round the entire planet,from Beeston to Bali,with its goal of the total destruction of "western" "civilization" and the enslavement of all who do not adhere to the ideology of the vast,shadowy organization be a conspiracy theory?Not only that,but this organization is more of a "threat to our way of life " than the Soviet Union,with its 15000 hydrogen bombs ever was.
To me it sounds wacky enough,but obviously I know nothing,it is not a conspiracy theory at all,rather it is the truth about Al-Quaida.
This would be a good point to note the reaction to Adam Curtis' The Power of Nightmares. It's still never been screened in the US, as far as I'm aware, and has been attacked over there as an anti-American hatefest that implies that George Bush is more evil than Osama Bin Laden.
Curtis made lots of good points, but one of the main ones was that Al-Qaida isn't SPECTRE. It's a group of headbangers in a cave in Pakistan that has links to a lot of extremists in other countries. It's definitely not a planet-crushing secret cabal with multi-million pound mountain-bases filled with supercomputers, tank-killing lasers and Islamic ninjas.
Note - at no point during the film did Curtis say or imply that Al-Qaeda did not exist, or that they didn't pose any kind of threat.
But fuck me, what's this? Why, it's David Aaronovitch blasting Adam Curtis for saying and implying that Al-Qaeda is a non-existent, non-threatening illusion.
Curtis's is a one-stop conspiracy theory to stand alongside those fingering the Illuminati, the Bilderberg group and (vide the Da Vinci Code) Opus Dei.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/
...qaida.terrorism
A conspiracy, and one involving the fingering of the Illuminati at that.
Actually, I think this is so on-topic that I'll jam it under the post itself.
So the first question for Pfaff is this: would darjeeling junkie do it if he could? If it were possible to persuade Beyonce to fellate him while wearing a liontamers costume, would he be up for it, or would he say, "No, it'd damage the cause, we'd better not"?
So sayeth Aaronovitch...
"There's a very nasty one doing the rounds on the Tory, libertarian and BNP-lite right wing blogs. It goes that rather than doing everything they can to harrass and immiserate refugees, Labour are deliberately importing as many as they can and giving them as much free money as possible because they want to replace the population with dependent voters."
http://5cc.blogspot.com/2007/05/...-
mentalist.html
It's gone mainstream, but who starts these crazy theories. Its almost elders of zion-esque, the labour party of 1987 couldn't organise a piss-up in a brewery, yet are able to arrange travel documents/passports for a new support base of millions?
I do believe in one conspiracy: It concerns a shadowy cabal that meets every three months to discuss means and methods of keeping the population angry and ensuring that this anger is directed at foreigners, homos, liberals and lefties. That shadowy cabal is........................... the board of associated newspapers, who are doing quite nicely from all of this, don't yer know.
Anyway must go x-files are on.
I was gonna mention people who dismiss Adam Curtis's work as "conspiracy theories" too. As Charlie Brooker pointed out in the Guardian recently, Curtis is not interested in conspiracies but rather the unintended consequences of ideas in the world. In "The Power of Nightmares" he bent over backwards to portray the neo-cons as democratic idealists rather than a self serving clique of corporate shysters. Not that I have a problem with that - it showed that even taken at face value the neo-con conception of democracy is hollower than a ping pong ball.
Oh, I've got one:
Rupert Murdoch has no editorial control over his media outlets. None. Only a tinfoiler would say otherwise.
Just before that quote from that Aaro piece - "(The neo-conservatives) ...have created a "dark illusion" about Islamist terrorism, just as they earlier created one about that tin-pot, ramshackle, essentially harmless old flea-bitten bear, the Soviet Union."
I believe this crosses that fine line between "misrepresentation" and "lying" in a single bound. Bad form, Dave.
Climate change?
Or should I say that it is now very difficult to have a sensible discussion about climate change without being dragged into a morass of conspiracy theories. "You're only saying that 'cos you want to control how people live" or "The oil companies fund the climate change sceptics". There was a thread on CiF the other day that degenerated into accusations that the oil companies are funding climate change theories!
There's a very nasty one doing the rounds on the Tory, libertarian and BNP-lite right wing blogs. It goes that rather than doing everything they can to harrass and immiserate refugees, Labour are deliberately importing as many as they can and giving them as much free money as possible because they want to replace the population with dependent voters.
The odd thing about this one is that the people who seem to be taken in by it more than anyone are Labour themselves.
actually had a long and tedious debate on this the other day with a bloke who regularly compares the Labour Party to the Nazis and ZanuPF*. He had a rare time denouncing people who egg Nick Griffin as being odious, totalitarian fascists, every bit as bad as the Nazis (1930s vintage) but thought that describing people who vote for actual fascists with well-publicised Nazi sympathies as "racist" was just ridiculous, hilariously silly. It wasn't a productive discussion, let's put it that way.
I had a similar experience with one of the regular commentors at HP. He is one of those who will shout "anti-semitism" when the Guardian runs a piece critical of Israel but when I complained about the tabloids running hate-stories about immigrants on their front pages he accused me of wanting to censor the press.
AIG and RBS thought they were clever bigshots in a fundamentally honest and reasonable system, as did most of the people who were cleaned out in the crash. Goldmans probably knew perfectly well what they were doing, but it's strongly in their interests to pretend they were as stupid as everyone else but luckier.
Accountants are generally not too bright, but some are. Again, the ones who knew what was going to happen but realised that keeping schtum would be more profitable are sensible enough to position themselves in the 'stupid' group...
Neil: has anyone actually made the Murdoch assertion? If so, they can't have read Selling Hitler (and as it was published almost 25 years ago, that's a pretty poor show.)
Well, Rupert Murdoch - but only WRT his proper papers sothatsokaythen.
The only bits of NI that make money are the Sun, the NOTW and the Sunday Times, and all of them are in the shit because sales and print ad revenue are dropping (price rises are compensating to some extent), while the only on-line thing that makes any signficant money are the fixed-odds betting games their web-sites have...
The London Paper is being run pretty much to fuck off the DMGT, and the Times? Why I can't think why Murdoch would want to keep ownership of the Establishment paper of record...
The Soviet Union 'essentially harmless' aside from the 11,000 nuclear warheads pointed at the West with a 'ramshackle' government in charge.
I know it's not politically correct but good post, FR.
@neil The Sunday Times is surely one of his proper papers, and it was clear as early as 1985 that they ran the Hitler Diaries even after they'd been identified as probably fake because RM told them they had to...
Bit late, but here's a better link to the Taibbi article, hosted, bizarrely, on somethingawful.
http://forums.somethingawful.com...32&
pagenumber=1
Via lolfed, btw.
@johnb: Who to believe?
"Mr Murdoch [...] says that “the law” prevents him from instructing the editors of The Times and The Sunday Times. The independent board is there to make sure he cannot interfere and he never says “do this or that” although he often asks “what are you doing”."
"He distinguishes between The Times and The Sunday Times and The Sun and the News of the World (and makes the same distinction between the New York Post and the Wall Street Journal). For The Sun and News of the World he explained that he is a “traditional proprietor”. He exercises editorial control on major issues – like which Party to back in a general election or policy on Europe."
Of course, it could be that Mr M is talking out of his hat.
Oh, and apologies for the Bob B style post.
The Hitler Diaries? I had a request played on Radio 1 (Don't believe a word by Thin Lizzy) dedicated to Hugh Trevor-Roper, but still The Times published the tripe.
It's not really a conspiracy theory, more of a nasty smear, but those who claim that the BNP are 'really leftwing' or that the Nazis were 'really socialists' 'cos they called themselves National Socialists. Strange how these fucktards never accuse Erik Honniker of being a democrat despite being the leader of the 'German Democratic Republic'. You get a lot of such idiocy on the Guardian's CIF forum. It's strange that when actual BNP sympathisers post in support of the BNP it's never in support of its allegedly left-wing policies but in support of its extreme nationalism and racial policies. Also such posters usually self-identify themselves as right-wing. What gives? A party that libertarian fruit-cakes and Tory tossers accuse as being left wing but which paradoxically seems to draw its most vocal support from racist right-wingers. Shurely Shome Mishtake!!!!
I always get the feeling the 'nazis are socialists' lot have simply reached the end of their tether desperately trying to find something, *anything*, to dislike the nazis for.
And pretending not to know what a war economy looks like is bloody desperate.
Commenting by HaloScan
