Conspiracy Theories Are False, Frivolous, And Dangerous

There seems to be a lot of confusion and disinformation on FB, much of it the work of dishonest, irresponsible, unhinged people known as Conspiracy Theorists. These nut-jobs pop up in all sorts of discussions with their wild speculations and paranoid ravings. I'm tired of it, and I'm taking a stand.

There are no inside jobs. The inside job is a myth. There are no smoky back-room meetings where billionaires plot and scheme how to dominate the world. Powerful people do not have their enemies killed and then stage it to look like a suicide or an accident or natural causes or cancer. Corporations do not dump toxic industrial waste into municipal water supplies in order to save money on disposal costs; they do it because they love children and want them to have healthy teeth. And so on....

In fact, it's well known that cabals of wealthy and influential people do not routinely engage in blackmail, extortion, bribery, or espionage.... They don't intentionally destroy whole national economies for the sake of profit; that's just the fog of war.... They don't fund both sides of wars in order to extend the carnage indefinitely.... Nor do they rig elections.... Nor do they stage false-flag attacks that can be blamed on Muslims.... Nor do they carry out regime-change operations designed to look like populist "Color Revolutions".... Nor do they assassinate foreign leaders who won't bow to the needs of transnational corporations....

 
Pharmaceutical companies do not, as a matter of course, get away with falsifying drug trials.... Nor do banks own and operate government regulators.... Nor do intelligence agencies monitor and manipulate news reporting, censoring some stories and fabricating others.... Nor do they routinely inject propaganda into movies, TV shows, and other forms of popular entertainment.... Nor are there mainstream journalists who are actually CIA assets.... 

The DEA, CIA, and FBI do not import narcotics, nor do they make alliances with certain drug cartels.... The US military has never invaded and occupied a country for the specific purpose of facilitating the heroin trade.... Government officials would never intentionally flood the streets of US cities with crack cocaine.... These wild tales are nothing more than rumor, speculation, and demented fantasies, propagated by extremists and malcontents... anti-American agitators... subversives and schizophrenics....

 
The simple fact is that bankers, billionaires, corporations, non-profits, and government officials do not conspire at all.... On the off chance that they do, there's no need to be skeptical of the official narrative. There's no need to examine the evidence, or to apply critical thinking and logic to that evidence in order to determine what might have happened.... Because in the rare event of an actual conspiracy, the authorities generally hold the perpetrators accountable. At the very least, responsible news agencies like BBC, NPR, MSNBC, HuffPo, and Democracy Now keep us informed about what happened, who did it, and why. 

Theorizing about conspiracies is useless, frivolous, and even dangerous. At best, it's a distraction from important civic duties like voting, signing petitions, and going to church. At worst, it descends into alarmism, defeatism, nihilism, and anti-Semitism.

 
If these self-evident facts aren't enough, there are 3 more overwhelming reasons to dispense with this tin-foil-hat silliness once and for all:

1. Occam's Razor says that the simplest, most straightforward explanation is the most reliable explanation, so the more dastardly and complex a theory is, the less likely it is to be true.
   
   
2.  If a theory alleges government involvement in a particular plot, it HAS to be false, because everyone knows that governments and their various agencies are inherently incompetent, and thus incapable of large-scale deception.
   
   
3. The final nail in the coffin of Conspiracism is this irrefutable fact: People. Can. Not. Keep. Secrets. Period.... Any conspiracy involving more than a half dozen people would be doomed from the start by this basic flaw in human nature. If insiders were to ever try something stupid... like rigging voting machines... or rigging 3 skyscrapers with explosives so that their collapses could be blamed on fanatical Islamist hijackers... or staging a mass-casualty drill, making the world believe the casualties were real, and then using this fake massacre to beta-test the total shutdown and police takeover of a large US city... or announcing that Osama bin Laden was killed by Navy Seals even though he had already been dead for almost a decade... or whatever other cockamamie ideas are dreamt up by acne-faced losers sitting in their parents' basements blogging about their paranoid delusions... If a big conspiracy were actually attempted, some of the plotters would inevitably slip and tell their wives or boyfriends.... Some would not be able to resist the urge to boast about it at the gym.... At least one would have a crisis of conscience and take the story to the media.... Someone would get drunk and post about it on Facebook or Instagram.... Or they'd tell two friends... and they'd tell two friends... and so on... and so on.....

I know I'm mostly preaching to the choir here, so without belaboring the point, let me leave you with a few tips for dealing with this growing plague:

• Don't feed the trolls. Try to avoid a long discussion with dedicated Conspiracists. Either ignore them completely, or just repeat a few of the talking-points included here, and move on.
  
  
• Better still, just hammer them with insults and derision. Useful terms include: Conspiratard, Flat-Earther, Twoofer, and anything that includes tin foil or lizards. Accuse them of being anti-science, anti-American, anti-Jew, anti-Christ, and so on. You can even call them anti-Muslim for implying that Muslims are too stupid to pull off 9/11.
  
  
• Get psychoanalytical, and say they must be angry at God... or at their parents... or cuz they can't get laid... or whatever.... 
  
  
• Don't give in to the temptation to answer their trick questions, or to define your terms, or to in any way imply that their heretical views are acceptable or normal or worthy of actual dialogue. If they post an article or video to back up their bullshit theories, don't read it or watch it. Dismiss their sources as "conspiracy sites".
  
  

• Show them how foolish they are by exaggerating and distorting their position: "You believe everything is a conspiracy!... You think the Jews control everything!.... So you're saying that George Bush planned 9/11, Don Rumsfeld placed dynamite in the Twin Towers, and Dick Cheney flew the planes!...."
  
  
• Above all, guard against the temptation to question your fundamental commitment to Anti-Conspiracism. Don't be seduced by the call of cynicism. Repeat and reinforce affirmations like: I don't buy into conspiracy theories.... That can't be true; it sounds like a conspiracy theory.... and so on.... Remember: It's not about facts or evidence. Conspiracy theories must be opposed on principle.
  
  
• Trust the experts. Stick to reputable orthodox sources. Authorities are authorities for a reason: because they know more than you do, and certainly more than random scaremongering jerk-offs on the internet. If government agencies and/or prestigious scientific groups say that something is true, then goddamn it, it's true.... CDC, EPA, NASA, ADA, FDA, and so on.... If they have important-sounding initials, and if they tell you that something is SCIENCE, and if the majority of mainstream media agree, then go with it.
  
  
• Vaccinate your kids. I mean, every last vaccination, every time. Don't ask impertinent questions. Don't try to research it for yourself. Don't read or listen to those insane, anti-science, child-hating Anti-Vaxxers. Definitely don't read the package inserts. Those will scare the shit out of you. Don't wonder why the recommended number of injections per child has gone from 4 to 15 to 28 to 50-some and rising. Just follow the chart, and do what you're told. Why would doctors steer you wrong? Remember, if you question these vaccines, you're basically trying to kill your child, and every child your child will ever come in contact with.
  
  
• Remember that skepticism is a double-edged sword. If government officials and the mainstream media agree on something, then there's no need to be skeptical about it. It has to be true.... But be extremely skeptical of any fact, opinion, or perspective that contradicts the official consensus. In fact, don't even take a chance. Just reject it completely.

(Author Unknown) (Source Dated: 2016)