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The guardian reports on a sobering event in Washington DC.
US police have arrested a man wielding an assault rifle who entered a pizza restaurant that was the target of fake news reports it was operating a child abuse ring led by Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and her top campaign aide.
[...] The suspect entered the restaurant and pointed a gun at a restaurant employee, who fled and notified authorities, police said. The man then discharged the weapon inside the restaurant. There were no injuries.
[...] [Police] said the suspect during an interview with investigators revealed that he came to the establishment to "self-investigate" Pizzagate, the police statement said. Pizzagate is a baseless conspiracy, which falsely claims Clinton and her campaign chief John Podesta were running a child sex ring from the restaurant's backrooms.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday December 06 2016, @01:58PM
You didn't even try to verify one fact, did you? Just jumped right to assuming it was wrong because it sounded crazy, didn't you? You'd think you'd know better after Snowden.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @02:11PM
Citing snowden is the biggest cop-out ever.
For every snowden there are literally a million conspiracies that are not true.
I am especially reminded of the completely made-up satanic ritual abuse [wikipedia.org] hysteria that ruined a lot of lives.
Pizzagate is just more bitch-hunt logic. Hillary's a satan worshipping pedo so anything that 'proves' it is true, anything that does not is irrelevant.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday December 06 2016, @06:28PM
I see you've made up your mind on something you can neither prove nor disprove. In the words of Dean Yeager: Your theories are the worst kind of popular tripe, your methods are sloppy, and your conclusions are highly questionable. You are a poor scientist, Anonymous Coward.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @07:20PM
> I see you've made up your mind on something you can neither prove nor disprove.
Lolwut?
Are you talking about yourself?
Because damn, that's some hardcore denialism on your part.
It could be true. Anything could be true. Its pretty revealing to go through this thread and tally up all the people who are arguing in support of this conspiracy theory. What is the common thread here? Bitch-hunt.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday December 07 2016, @11:59AM
Undoubtedly, but in the end if she weighs the same as a duck...
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Tuesday December 06 2016, @03:15PM
Not a lot to verify, to be honest, there's just a bunch of circumstantial and often tenuous connections pulled in from all sorts of different directions. Even if we were to assume that all the individual pieces of information are true, there's not enough holding it all together to give it any credit. It's Dan Brown stuff, where if you pick the right sequence of words or letters out of the bible you can get it to quote the free software manifesto, Mein Kampf or the script to the Star Wars holiday special.
"As we can see, Trump is wearing a RED tie. Now RED is a colour often associated with communism, including such organisations as the USSR (Or, in Russian, the CCCP). Now, throughout his career Trump has had dealings with an organisation called the Casino Control Commission, or the CCC. In the 1980s, a prominent member of the Pennsylvania branch of this organisation, or the CCCP..."
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday December 06 2016, @06:20PM
S'what I'm saying. Don't assume. Check into it yourself.
Right at this moment, there's not a serious case by my digging but I was anything but thorough. I'm neither giving them the benefit of the doubt nor withholding it, which is where any intellectually honest person should be at this point.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:38AM
I find that there is just enough circumstantial evidence there to warrant suspicion. It's certainly not enough to justify the conclusion given, but it's not as contrived as your analogies make it out to be either. I'm not saying all the conclusions are necessarily solid, but the pizza emails are reasonable evidence that there could be something amiss there, even if it's just drugs and hookers.
Just because someone has an an elaborate conspiracy theory doesn't mean there isn't a conspiracy.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @03:42PM
You didn't even try to verify one fact, did you?
You mean the pictures and "pedophilia symbology" and satanic symbology? I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that they aren't photoshoped.
The use of fucking triangles in a logo for a pizza place or a heart in a logo for a nearby charity that campaigns against child slavery is almost too much of a coincidence to deny.
I'm incredibly disappointed that the level of evidence is on the level of "folded 20 dollar bills predicted 9/11". I admit that I may have missed the really damning evidence, since I only looked through 3/4 of the page (Oh noes! A child sitting on Obama's lap at the white house).
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday December 06 2016, @06:16PM
You're not interested in the truth? That's fine. Go ahead on with your rose-colored glasses. Don't look for verifiable facts in the story and try to prove or disprove it. Just write it off. It's what we expect of partisan fools.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday December 06 2016, @07:27PM
In discussions like this, I recall a quotation I first learned on Night Court from Judge Harry T. Stone: "I try to keep an open mind, but not so open that my brains fall out."
The quote didn't originate on TV (and apparently has a long history [skeptic.com]), but I think it's apt when confronted with conspiracy theories that make all sorts of claims, most of which are provably false (and conveniently discarded from the theory after they are demonstrated to be so), and the rest of which have no hard evidence to support them.
People want to see patterns in random data, casting off any inconvenient bits of information that don't fit the pattern. We even have terms like apophenia [wikipedia.org] to describe this fundamental cognitive bias.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday December 07 2016, @11:58AM
If a significant portion of the claims were actually provably false, I'd agree with you. Mostly though it's supposition and evidence that, while provably true, is highly circumstantial.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @08:34PM
I believe that you are an intelligent person and it seems like you are genuine in your belief in some of the conclusions from that dcpizzagate site. You mention that "there's not a serious case" but that you perceive some sort of pattern from what is presented that seems fishy.
From what I've read on the site, the data that they present is not convincing and the emotional way they interpret the data hurts their credibility in my eyes. I'm used to scientific data (so my standards may be too high) but pictures of a Biden-Obama friendship bracelet, pictures of satan, pictures of logos next to "pedophilia symbology", random social media shit, and coded emails with secret messages involving handkerchiefs does not rate very high on an objective scale.
If you have time, could you write a journal where you point to the specific data that is more convincing?
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday December 07 2016, @11:55AM
I could but I think it's a case of you evaluating the same data and finding it slightly less indicative of "something going on" than I do. Also, we're currently pushing hard on getting site code tuned up to where it doesn't take a dozen seconds or more to render heavily commented stories and that just ranks higher in my list of interesting/important things right now.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 07 2016, @03:04PM
I hope some more conclusive data arises one way or the other.
The problem is that, while there is obvious physical evidence and testimony that could help prove a child sex ring, I can't think of evidence that would help prove the negative. Negative witness testimony would be unreliable (due to possible coercion) and "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence".
Thanks for responding and I also appreciate what you do for this site.