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"For a literature version of a conspiracy theory, try The Illuminatus Trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson."
And, so far as movies go, why not rent Conspiracy Theory, watch the first half and stop; then rent The Parallax View? --KQ (self-editing) :-)
Do Elvis sightings really belong in conspiracy theory?? Although I guess if I have to ask, nobody will tell me the truth anyway. :-)
Removed from parent page, because people don't seriously believe that Bert and ObL are involved in a plot . . . do they?
Osama bin Laden and Bert (of Bert and Ernie) Conspiracy in relation to the terrorist attacks on the United States.
IMHO, we should try to separate "real" conspiracy theories from "conspiracy theory humor" (an interesting, related, but distinct topic). Or is there something I'm missing here? Does anyone really believe anything other than some Bangladeshi nutball protestor (who must have been much wealthier than the average Bangladeshi, admittedly) did a search for "Osama bin Laden" on images.google.com to make a collage for his poster, found the doctored Bert and Osama image, had no idea who Bert was, and just happily went on photoshopping his poster together? --Robert Merkel
Fortunately, there's already a place for the Osama-Bert connection: September 11, 2001 Terrorist Attack/Misinformation and rumors. --TheCunctator
I deleted quite a bit of text from the article (and included it below, complete). I deleted this:
I'm not sure what this means; I suspect it just needs to be reworded.
Well, that's true of anything, eh?
First, the point of the parenthetical comment seems to imply that conspiracy theories are not theories. Well, that depends, of course, on the claims being made by the conspiracy theorist, and the evidence behind them. I don't think that "conspiracy theory" is consistently used so that there are necessarily no conspiracy theories, but only conspiracy hypotheses. In other words, if one were to provide adequate evidence for you and I to establish that a nefarious conspiracy by the Council on Foreign Relations, McDonald's, and Michael Jackson were afoot, but not enough to "prove" it, and in that case we would have a conspiracy theory. Just because it would have moved past that vague stage of being merely a hypothesis, it would not therefore (??) not be a theory. More to the point, my understanding is that not everybody always uses "conspiracy theory" to mean something that necessarily has totally inadequate evidence in its favor. It's not always a pejorative term.
Second, I doubt very much that the majority of conspiracy theories are eventually disproven. I think that most of them are simply dismissed out of hand by experts as absurd and not worth considering. I could be wrong; perhaps the people who study conspiracy theories have studied who has responded to conspiracy theorists and wrote up this research, concluding, "Most conspiracy theories are eventually disproved (according to some standards or other)." --Larry Sanger
A lot of people, everywhere, refer to Freemasonry as a "secret society," but it obviously isn't. You can look up the address and possibly telephone number of your local Masonic Lodge in the phone book, and, especially in the US, most Masons are quite open about their affiliation. I'm not sure what to do about Freemasonry on the list, so for now I'm going to put it right above the heading "Secret Societies." --Alex Kennedy
Could we shift the Arab conspiracy theories somewhere else, and link to it? The point of conspiracy theories is that they're only taken seriously by a small minority. If, as is claimed, they're widely believed in the Arab world, they're a different animal. ---Robert Merkel
Further, their presence here, picking out Palestinians for conspiracy theories, is unfair. There are apparently all sorts of conspiracy theories floating around Africa as to the origin of AIDS. Many in Indonesia think Australia is conspiring to split it up. Eurosceptics have all sorts of conspiracy theories about the EU being some left-wing plot. The anti-globalization movement thinks the WTO is the seat of immense power (when it's really just a creature of governments and the multinational companies that influence their policy). And so on. --Robert Merkel
Does calling something a Conspiracy Theory fit with the principle of NPOV? In my opinion, in practice it has an implicit value judgement that the idea is absurd and only believed by the gullible. -- Khendon
-But the "obvious objective" ways do not seem to include verified conspiracies, so uncontroversal examples of the genre are excluded. It also seems to exclude quotidian conspiracies, so limiting the purview to the exotic. Finally, the article implies that conspiracies inevitably have little or no evidence. Ones that do have enough evidence to be accepted as "true" fall into a different category called "actual historical conspiracies". This biases the case by eliminating cases where such theories have proven correct and looking only at ones where they are still dubious. Judging from some comments on this thread; some people seem to think the discussion should be limited to the openly outrageous - all of this without a defined difference in kind other than the judgement of the one making the classification as "outrageous" etc.
Why isn't the idea that Al Qaeda was responsible for the Sept 11th attacks included in this page? That's a conspiracy theory, surely? -- Khendon
What's the difference between conspiracy theory and urban legends ? The Sex Gum story seems IMHO is more urban legends than a conspiracy theory. I heard the same in France (only difference it was not Israelians but a group of pedophiles). A urban legend reports imaginary facts. A conspiracy theory should have something more : the governement knows but he hides evidences because it's also involved in the conspiracy and some secret message (but strangelly not so secret for conspiracy theorist) has revealed the truth to the Pope John Paul I but unluckily the catholic church is also a part of the conspiracy (to be continued) ....... for instance.
Being French I have the strong feeling that the United States produce more conspiracy theories than most European Countries. Maybe it's related to JFK asssination ? Or maybe it's just that Holywood does good job turning them into blockbusters (MIB). Ericd 22:22 Sep 12, 2002 (UTC)
"Many African-Americans in the US believe that HIV,...." has nothing to do with american this is a worldwide belief (atr least for some).... than americans or russian invented the HIV virus in some biological warfare research and it escaped by mistake. This obviously impossible for those who are some culture in genetics.... I still wonder why there is no conspiracy theory about extra-terrestrial origins of the virus ?
Classyfying conspiracy therory by country is neither fair or neutral HIV conspiracy theory as nothing to do with arab moon landing hoax is not american it's believed by many peoples in Europa and Africa, Area 51 is worldwide famous. Ericd 00:12 Sep 14, 2002 (UTC)
-##No. But it is anti-conspiracy theory. That is not neutral.
Ericd 14:21 Sep 14, 2002 (UTC)
I'm going to remove the riff about Quebec. Since it refers only to future events, it is not a conspiracy theory, but a conjecture about possible consequences of modern political actions. A conspiracy theory would be something like "the sovereignists are trying to ensure that Quebec/the ROC is swallowed by the States" or "the federalists are trying to drag us along into being swallowed by the States" or some such, that imputes a past or present action. - Montréalais
Okay, Wilsonians and X-Philes ... This subject is sufficiently important, culturally speaking, that disconnected lists of conspiracy topics aren't really adequate to explain it. I've taken a stab at writing a clear introduction and starting to turn this page from a list into an article. Anyone interested in taking a few of the topics and other messiness from the bottom of the page and summing them up into actual paragraphs composed of actual sentences would be greatly appreciated. --FOo
Dennis -- adding Kennedy next to Trotsky there is misleading. The point of mentioning Trotsky in that sentence is that Trotsky is uncontroversially known to have been assassinated by a government and not by a conspiracy: i.e. that not all assassinations are subject to conspiracy theory. Kennedy's assassination is a popular subject of conspiracy theory, and so it should be mentioned in this page, but not in that context. I'm moving it.
M149, if you're watching this page -- IMHO, the chief "reorg" this page needs is to have the material below the "needs encyclopediafying" line rewritten into summary paragraphs, and incorporated in an organized fashion into the section on subjects of conspiracy theory. Those are the ones which I didn't incorporate into my rewrite of the upper half of the page.
As the number of topics in that section increases it will need some form of subsection organization. Sadly, to the best of my knowledge there is no academic study of conspiracy theory to parallel the study of (for instance) urban legends, and so the categorization of subjects is of necessity rather ad hoc. I don't think this is avoidable, and we should probably avoid artificial categorization. --FOo
"Another theory is that life on Earth or at least the human species was created by extraterrestials. This ancient astronaut theory has been promoted by Zecharia Sitchin and various religous cults."
Is it realy a conspiracy theory ? Not every stupid theory is a conspiracy theory.
By the way this is also believed by the Raelians
Are conspiracy theories about JFK assassination so incredible ? I don't mean large theories involving (for instance) the mafia, the CIA, the Roman Catholic Church, Exxon and the Walt Disney company. But is it stupid to believe that there's no evidence that Oswald was acting alone ? Ericd
I rewrite a phrase I have written before because I think it's worth to discuss :
"the idea that conspiracy theories can be instrumented by political groups. They often play a major role in tolitarian propanganda. IMHO it's obvious the nazi ideology is based upon a conspiracy theory." Ericd
Does this qualify as a conspiracy theory? According to Islam, the early Jewish leaders deliberately faked the contents of the Hebrew Bible, and the early Christian leaders deliberately faked the contents of the New Testament, in order to secure their own power and hide the true message of God. If this idea developed today, it would qualify as one. RK
I am more certain that this next idea does qualify as a conspiracy theory. Any comments? Within the Arab world there is the growing belief that the entire idea of a Biblical Jewish state is a hoax and a lie. According to a number of Arab writers, the entire history of the Jewish people in the Bible is an outright fiction, and that the progenitors of the Jewish people actually lived in Yemen or some other part of the Arabian peninsula. In this view, even the broad strokes of later Biblical book have had their historical correctness totally refuted. (This view, obviously, is rejected by the majority of the world's historians, archaeologists and Bible scholars.. While the details of the earlier books have been called into question, so serious historian disputes the fact that a Jewish nation of Israel did exist in the land of Israel.) RK
Examples:
This is not according to Islam, this is according to some Arabs. But read what I wrote above anti-semitism has something to do with conspiracy theories. What are "the protocols of the elders of Sion" if they're not a conspiarcy theory. Ericd 15:10 Apr 23, 2003 (UTC)~~
-## amused NPOV is an oxymoron. \ I can manage for most conspiracy theory, I just don't know if I can do for the antisemitic trash that has led to so much hatred, so much terror. Perhaps it's that the expression "conspiracy theory" is to some extent inherently trivializing (hence its abuse by propagandists against dissent) and that sort of lie should be taken trivially. Technically it belongs, but I ain't writing it. --FOo
I don't think this page meets the standard of presenting views as their advocates would present them. The notion that conspiracy theorists routinely cite the very absence of evidence of a claim as evidence is something you hear all the time on conspiracy-bashing sites, but many conspiracy theorists never say anything like this. See if any of the following conspiracy sites do this:
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/ http://www.emperors-clothes.com/ http://www.globalresearch.ca/ http://www.questionsquestions.net/
There are also problems with defining conspiracy theories as "absurd". What happens when one turns out to be true? For example, for years and years, conspiracy theorists claimed that US intelligence agencies had recruited Nazi war criminals. In the late 80s, some bigwigs finally fessed up, and the story was documented in Christopher Simpson's book Blowback (1987, I believe). However, if it was not absurd to say this in 1987, it was not absurd in 1977.
In general, words that encapsulate a judgement into the definition of a thing are the hallmark of prejudicial language. They make it impossible to concieve of the thing independent of the preformed judgement. This, after all, is the difference between the words "African American" and the word "nigger". Both denote the same people - the literal meanings do not differ - but the latter encapsulates a (hostile) judgement into the very definition of those people.
Also, if you're going to bring up Popper, you should note that theories that events are the result of accident or coincidence are also not falsifiable; this, in fact, was exactly the issue Popper was grappling with. Any pattern you perceive could be the result of simple chance. For example, a scientist observes on several occassions that hydrogen fuses to helium and concludes that it always does. How can he prove logically that it doesn't sometimes fuse to oxygen, but it just didn't happen that way on the occasions he observed it? He can't. That's induction, which has no rigorous foundation in logic. Science simply postulates that the universe is consistent.
In this situation, the scientist is indeed in the position of the conspiracy theorist. He sees a pattern and wants to draw broader conclusions from it. But he can never offer definite proof. A doubter could always suspect it is all coincidence or that there are exceptions the scientists has not found (like miracles). That's where falsifiability comes in. A scientist's theory can be used to generate predictions, and, so long as these predictions are fulfilled, the theory can be accepted as provisionally true; we will assume it is true until it is proven false. The doubter cannot match this because his position can generate no predictions.
The problem with trying to apply this standard to conspiracy theory is that, while conspiracy theory fails at reliably generating correct predictions, so does every other mode of political or historical analysis. The tools that science has - controlled experiments and isolation of variables - are not available to those who study history. -Hieronymous
The diagnosis of schizophrenia has been used as a means of silencing political dissent. Eg, Russia and sluggishly progressing schizophrenia. Fixing. Martin 12:42 17 May 2003 (UTC)