Sandy hook "hoax"?

[Bang]

I see your point. Perhaps this man should have declined to appear on TV and be exploited for ratings and ad revenue. As an adult, it mustve crossed his mind and I'm sure it does now.. The children had no such consideration.

That said, being the whipping boy for right-wing gun nuts and white supremacists is a terrible outcome. i wouldn't wish it on anyone.

And I see your point, too. the media are jackals... but really, they just give us what we want.
if it bleeds, it leads. We're all rubberneckers. It's human nature.

~Bang

[SkinsWarrior81]

In non-conspiracy news.. it seems as though the NRA is attempting to self destruct by releasing a shooting video game immediately after blaming video games for the state of gun violence in society. Meh.

[China]

And I see your point, too. the media are jackals... but really, they just give us what we want.
if it bleeds, it leads. We're all rubberneckers. It's human nature.

~Bang

[Mad Mike]

Also, the immediate dismissal by folks without viewing the video seems a bit short sighted. I shut the video off a few minutes after I saw the "infowars.com" moniker. I don't think the government killed a bunch of kids here to enact gun control. Do I find the timing politically convenient? Yes.

Do I think calling anyone who questions the situation a ****ing moron / idiot / dumbass is warranted? No.

To each his own.

---------- Post added January-15th-2013 at 12:00 PM ----------



Jumbo, the FBI screwed up and killed some people in Waco who didn't deserve to die. That isn't some hugely disputed thing. Whether those people inside were great people or not is irrelevant. David Koresh was a pretty creepy / terrible guy. I was unaware that lighting a building on fire was the generally acceptable way to end a stand off.

Just to be clear. With that last paragraph you have gone on record as accepting a lunatic conspiracy theory as fact. I'm with Jumbo. I think you are putting more effort into "sounding" reasonable, than actually *being* reasonable.

[mboyd784]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h0xr31XbSOU

What time does the bubble-headed bleach-blonde go on?

[Jumbo]

Also, the immediate dismissal by folks without viewing the video seems a bit short sighted. I shut the video off a few minutes after I saw the "infowars.com" moniker. I don't think the government killed a bunch of kids here to enact gun control. Do I find the timing politically convenient? Yes.

Do I think calling anyone who questions the situation a ****ing moron / idiot / dumbass is warranted? No.

To each his own.

---------- Post added January-15th-2013 at 12:00 PM ----------



Jumbo, the FBI screwed up and killed some people in Waco who didn't deserve to die. That isn't some hugely disputed thing. Whether those people inside were great people or not is irrelevant. David Koresh was a pretty creepy / terrible guy. I was unaware that lighting a building on fire was the generally acceptable way to end a stand off.

Read what I wore about mixing reality with nonsense. Disagree, fine, but get what I stated. I "get" the regularly trotted-out Waco in these conversations (usually by conspiracy-friendly (or nuts), "states rights", or "militia" types, 2nd amendment extremists", or just the generally paranoid). I've even worked with good people who were there. The tragic reality of both incompetence and even twisted thinking among some authorities involved in that matter are disgustingly used to support plenty of truly stupid **** and that's not ok with me either.

Nor is your presentation of that matter, as far as that goes.

Now I did watch a little more than five minutes, just so I could say I did when I commented early in the thread. But I felt secure that an intelligent person could deduce its likely worth from the chosen title. Media flaws had already been covered in the media (gasp) so most of those angles aren't new to me, either. And while I'm an exception, I am hardly used to seeing people who are taking, or supporting those who take, moronic, idiotic, or dumbass positions (Yes, Virginia, there really are such things) advocate for being called those names when doing so.

No, I'm not mad , I just feel like speaking out on these things in no uncertain terms at the moment.

[Predicto]

Read this handy summary and see if it describes you.

10 characteristics of conspiracy theorists
A useful guide by Donna Ferentes

1. Arrogance. They are always fact-seekers, questioners, people who are trying to discover the truth: sceptics are always "sheep", patsies for Messrs Bush and Blair etc.

2. Relentlessness. They will always go on and on about a conspiracy no matter how little evidence they have to go on or how much of what they have is simply discredited. (Moreover, as per 1. above, even if you listen to them ninety-eight times, the ninety-ninth time, when you say "no thanks", you'll be called a "sheep" again.) Additionally, they have no capacity for precis whatsoever. They go on and on at enormous length.

3. Inability to answer questions. For people who loudly advertise their determination to the principle of questioning everything, they're pretty poor at answering direct questions from sceptics about the claims that they make.

4. Fondness for certain stock phrases. These include Cicero's "cui bono?" (of which it can be said that Cicero understood the importance of having evidence to back it up) and Conan Doyle's "once we have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however unlikely, must be the truth". What these phrases have in common is that they are attempts to absolve themselves from any responsibility to produce positive, hard evidence themselves: you simply "eliminate the impossible" (i.e. say the official account can't stand scrutiny) which means that the wild allegation of your choice, based on "cui bono?" (which is always the government) is therefore the truth.

5. Inability to employ or understand Occam's Razor. Aided by the principle in 4. above, conspiracy theorists never notice that the small inconsistencies in the accounts which they reject are dwarfed by the enormous, gaping holes in logic, likelihood and evidence in any alternative account.

6. Inability to tell good evidence from bad. Conspiracy theorists have no place for peer-review, for scientific knowledge, for the respectability of sources. The fact that a claim has been made by anybody, anywhere, is enough for them to reproduce it and demand that the questions it raises be answered, as if intellectual enquiry were a matter of responding to every rumour. While they do this, of course, they will claim to have "open minds" and abuse the sceptics for apparently lacking same.

7. Inability to withdraw. It's a rare day indeed when a conspiracy theorist admits that a claim they have made has turned out to be without foundation, whether it be the overall claim itself or any of the evidence produced to support it. Moreover they have a liking (see 3. above) for the technique of avoiding discussion of their claims by "swamping" - piling on a whole lot more material rather than respond to the objections sceptics make to the previous lot.

8. Leaping to conclusions. Conspiracy theorists are very keen indeed to declare the "official" account totally discredited without having remotely enough cause so to do. Of course this enables them to wheel on the Conan Doyle quote as in 4. above. Small inconsistencies in the account of an event, small unanswered questions, small problems in timing of differences in procedure from previous events of the same kind are all more than adequate to declare the "official" account clearly and definitively discredited. It goes without saying that it is not necessary to prove that these inconsistencies are either relevant, or that they even definitely exist.

9. Using previous conspiracies as evidence to support their claims. This argument invokes scandals like the Birmingham Six, the Bologna station bombings, the Zinoviev letter and so on in order to try and demonstrate that their conspiracy theory should be accorded some weight (because it's “happened before”.) They do not pause to reflect that the conspiracies they are touting are almost always far more unlikely and complicated than the real-life conspiracies with which they make comparison, or that the fact that something might potentially happen does not, in and of itself, make it anything other than extremely unlikely.

10. It's always a conspiracy. And it is, isn't it? No sooner has the body been discovered, the bomb gone off, than the same people are producing the same old stuff, demanding that there are questions which need to be answered, at the same unbearable length. Because the most important thing about these people is that they are people entirely lacking in discrimination. They cannot tell a good theory from a bad one, they cannot tell good evidence from bad evidence and they cannot tell a good source from a bad one. And for that reason, they always come up with the same answer when they ask the same question.

A person who always says the same thing, and says it over and over again is, of course, commonly considered to be, if not a monomaniac, then at very least, a bore.

http://www.urban75.org/info/conspiraloons.html

[mboyd784]

And I see your point, too. the media are jackals... but really, they just give us what we want.
if it bleeds, it leads. We're all rubberneckers. It's human nature.

~Bang

Could not agree more. Can be pretty difficult to see any real difference between FOX/CNN and InfoWars/Prison Planet, sometimes.

[SkinsWarrior81]

Just to be clear. With that last paragraph you have gone on record as accepting a lunatic conspiracy theory as fact. I'm with Jumbo. I think you are putting more effort into "sounding" reasonable, than actually *being* reasonable.

Actually, I have been of the mind that the tear canisters used by the FBI were resultant in the fire that lit the compound ablaze for most of my life and have done very little reading on the subject since I recall that being a major talking point on the news. (There was known to be fuel present as a deterrent to the feds and those canisters were supposedly of a pyrotechnic variety.) I actually just read up on it a bit more and found I am wrong, and that the surviving Davidians claimed that their own people lit the fire. It seems that the medical examiners say that most of the children killed were done so in a "mercy killing" fashion as they were unable to escape the burning compound and the others did not want them to suffer. Well **** me, heh. My apologies.

[AsburySkinsFan]

BTW, I'm done with this thread...said all I need to say but even more than that I've become increasingly concerned after reading these types of threads and reading facebook that stupid is contagious. Jumbo and Bang I believe are immune, maybe due to repeated exposure. So in an attempt at self preservation.

[Jumbo]

Actually, I have been of the mind that the tear canisters used by the FBI were resultant in the fire that lit the compound ablaze for most of my life and have done very little reading on the subject since I recall that being a major talking point on the news. (There was known to be fuel present as a deterrent to the feds and those canisters were supposedly of a pyrotechnic variety.) I actually just read up on it a bit more and found I am wrong, and that the surviving Davidians claimed that their own people lit the fire. It seems that the medical examiners say that most of the children killed were done so in a "mercy killing" fashion as they were unable to escape the burning compound and the others did not want them to suffer. Well **** me, heh. My apologies.

Kudos to you on this; that ability is a very important one.

[Bang]

Could not agree more. Can be pretty difficult to see any real difference between FOX/CNN and InfoWars/Prison Planet, sometimes.

They're EXACTLY alike now.
if you can, catch last night's Daily Show, the interview with the CNN bean counter that has eliminated their entire investigative journalism section.
CNN may not be a direct propaganda outlet, but they've gone off the deep end of the "Lazy river'.
the guy said that there was no news story anywhere in the world that required any travel, that it could be thoroughly discovered, researched and vetted on the internet... and so they did.. they cut their entire investigative dept.
it's ****ing pathetic.

~Bang

[Predicto]

Kudos to you on this; that ability is a very important one.

Equally important is the ability to do so BEFORE you fully embrace the conspiracy theory and start spouting it around. We shouldn't have to do it for him like we did here.

[Mad Mike]

Actually, I have been of the mind that the tear canisters used by the FBI were resultant in the fire that lit the compound ablaze for most of my life and have done very little reading on the subject since I recall that being a major talking point on the news. (There was known to be fuel present as a deterrent to the feds and those canisters were supposedly of a pyrotechnic variety.) I actually just read up on it a bit more and found I am wrong, and that the surviving Davidians claimed that their own people lit the fire. It seems that the medical examiners say that most of the children killed were done so in a "mercy killing" fashion as they were unable to escape the burning compound and the others did not want them to suffer. Well **** me, heh. My apologies.

Now *that* is a reasonable response.

[Bang]

Actually, I have been of the mind that the tear canisters used by the FBI were resultant in the fire that lit the compound ablaze for most of my life and have done very little reading on the subject since I recall that being a major talking point on the news. (There was known to be fuel present as a deterrent to the feds and those canisters were supposedly of a pyrotechnic variety.) I actually just read up on it a bit more and found I am wrong, and that the surviving Davidians claimed that their own people lit the fire. It seems that the medical examiners say that most of the children killed were done so in a "mercy killing" fashion as they were unable to escape the burning compound and the others did not want them to suffer. Well **** me, heh. My apologies.

Self reflection is a MAJOR asset.


~Bang