I just saw this thread and clearly it's been going on a long time. I haven't read through it. I'm just wondering what the "anti" conspiracy folks say about Julius Caesar and Abe Lincoln. Do they think that Caesar was killed by a lone knifeman? Are they aware the US federal government brought conspiracy charges against many people and hanged several of them?
Let me toss out a couple of other datapoints. In 1964 when Lyndon Johnson said that a US navy ship was attacked by North Vietnam in the Gulf of Tonkin, if an informed citizen said "Bullshit," would they have been called a conspiracy theorist? Yet we know now that the Gulf of Tonkin incident never happened. It was bullshit. A lie for the purpose of drawing the country in to a larger and totally disastrous war.
Likewise Saddam's WMD's. In fact the US government has lied the country into war many times. So if a person instinctively disbelieves anything the government says, are they a tinfoil hat loony? Or simply a well-informed skeptic with a sharp bullshit detector?
As I mentioned I'm sorry I couldn't have tossed out these questions much earlier in this thread. To me it's people who simply believe everything the government says, without running it through their own common sense, that are the ones who need to be questioned. The government lies to us constantly. Aren't we legitimately entitled to be skeptical, simply by the weight of history?
Let me toss out a couple of other datapoints. In 1964 when Lyndon Johnson said that a US navy ship was attacked by North Vietnam in the Gulf of Tonkin, if an informed citizen said "Bullshit," would they have been called a conspiracy theorist? Yet we know now that the Gulf of Tonkin incident never happened. It was bullshit. A lie for the purpose of drawing the country in to a larger and totally disastrous war.
Likewise Saddam's WMD's. In fact the US government has lied the country into war many times. So if a person instinctively disbelieves anything the government says, are they a tinfoil hat loony? Or simply a well-informed skeptic with a sharp bullshit detector?
As I mentioned I'm sorry I couldn't have tossed out these questions much earlier in this thread. To me it's people who simply believe everything the government says, without running it through their own common sense, that are the ones who need to be questioned. The government lies to us constantly. Aren't we legitimately entitled to be skeptical, simply by the weight of history?