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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: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday December 06 2016, @03:42PM
"conspiracy theories sure seem to dominate despite being completely anti-scienitific."
Is anthropology a science? You know - the study of man.
Do you know people? I mean, real people, living near you, who have wants, desires, dreams, etc ad nauseum. Have you ever unearthed any conspiracies among them? Maybe two children conspired to trick you into believing they did their chores/homework/whatever, so that they could have their candy. Conspiracies, mostly minor petty ones, take place all around us, every day. Doctors, nurses, and family often conspire to hide the facts from terminally ill patients. Children conspire to cheat for better grades in school.
Are you going to pretend that rich bastards never conspire?
The thing about them is, they are more likely to "get away" with their conspiracies. They can afford high dollar security and muscle, whereas the kids cheating on exams cannot.
Anthropology. Empiric evidence, if nothing else, tells us that people DO conspire to get ahead in life. Some of the theories are based on better evidence, some of them are based on complete bullshit. But, they all remain theories, unless and until proven.
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @04:09PM
You fail vocab.
Conspiracy theories and people cooperating for their benefit are not even remotely the same thing.
Also, the word you are looking for sociology which is the study of human behaviour in groups. But I'm pretty sure you don't consider sociology a science since the field has produced so many conclusions you personally won't accept.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday December 06 2016, @05:00PM
I don't know you - you don't know me - you're just some anon fool on the internet - nothing you say counts.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @05:17PM
That's the best online interpretation of puting your fingers in your ears and going "na-na-na-na I can't hear you!" that I've ever read.
You are a fuckin riot!
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday December 06 2016, @06:45PM
As if some nobody named Runaway1956 is any more credible than AC. Or anyone for that matter. Take a note son: We're all nobodies.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @07:14PM
> Take a note son: We're all nobodies.
Speak for yourself son.
I'm Henry Kissinger.
I read soylent for the informative geopolitical commentary.
Runaway1956, VLM, Khallow, TheMighytBuzzard, Jmorris and Bradley13 are some of the most educated and insightful writers I have ever encountered. It is an honor to learn at their knee.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Wednesday December 07 2016, @05:14PM
Bark! Bark!
[wags tail]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday December 06 2016, @07:18PM
Conspiracy theories and people cooperating for their benefit are not even remotely the same thing.
The obvious rebuttal here is that all of the examples of cooperation given were conspiracies. Let's look at the actual definition:
1. A secret plan by a group to do something unlawful or harmful:
1.1 The action of plotting or conspiring:
Now let's look at the examples:
Maybe two children conspired to trick you into believing they did their chores/homework/whatever, so that they could have their candy.
Covert plotting? Check. Not doing chores/homework/whatever might not be a great harm. Subverting the rule of the parental unit might not be greatly illegal. But this still meets the definition of conspiracy as advertised.
Doctors, nurses, and family often conspire to hide the facts from terminally ill patients.
Again with the secret plans. And while the rest of us might find the intent noble, the terminally ill patient might strongly disagree that concealment of their true medical condition is harmless.
Children conspire to cheat for better grades in school.
Again, fits the definition.
So you say "You fail vocab", but he obviously does not since at least two of his three examples fits the definition and the last could.
I get the earlier post about the "anti-scientific" nature of conspiracy theories. But the grandparent has a point. There are conspiracies. The question isn't whether they exist, but how big do they get? And there's just not much point to discussing any sort of scientific basis for conspiracies without some actual conspiracies of the appropriate scale to study.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @07:33PM
> The obvious rebuttal
I think I'm gonna start the khallow drinking game.
Every time you say "the obvious rebuttal" everybody takes a shot.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday December 06 2016, @07:57PM
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @08:12PM
> The obvious rebuttal
Drink!
(Score: 2) by cubancigar11 on Tuesday December 06 2016, @07:30PM
I have a minor degree in sociology and sociology is not a science. People who do sociology are barely literate in maths. Most studies are created by what the (current) government wants to fund and consequently studies contradict each other all the time.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @07:44PM
> People who do sociology are barely literate in maths.
People who do science are barely literate in maths. Most know the bare minimum to get by in their field.
Math is not a requirement for science. It is a requirement for a certain range of sciences, but is not for all forms of science.
A falsifiable premise does not require math.
Repeatable results do not require math.
So, another vocab fail. Unsurprising. Its always the people who consider themselves superior that fall on their faces due to sloppy thinking.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday December 06 2016, @10:33PM
I suppose it matters how your program of study was constituted. The sociology program where I did my master's was all math, all the time. It was quite proud to be the home of NORC (if you studied sociology, you'll have heard of them). Then, they were right next to the economists who'd collectively won a dozen or more Nobel prizes. A lot of keeping up with the Joneses to do there with quantitative methods...
I consider both those disciplines to be social sciences. "Social" because human beings make poor test subjects and will never give you the predictability you need to be a "real" science. But it is certainly not for lack of trying, lack of mathematical understanding, or loosey-goosey modeling.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by cubancigar11 on Wednesday December 07 2016, @03:18AM
May be. One of my teacher was the head of some central government body, but he personally thought that boys schools promote homosexuality.
Sociology depends a lot on modelling and funnily it was sociology that taught me how measurement of variables via polling is flawed for giving wildly different results based questioner and how a question is framed. That itself is a razor that cuts through most of the publications. I am not dissing the whole discipline but a lot of "research" is borderline propaganda with bad sampling, small sample size and ridiculously in agreement with current government policies. In fact I will go out on a limb and say that every thing in sociology that is insightful is either 50 or more years old or is debunking 50 or more year old theory.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday December 06 2016, @10:24PM
Anthropology focuses on culture. Anthropologists abhor quantitative methods. Sociologists don't, and use the same approach and many of the tools that "real" scientists do, with the additional challenges that it's hard to get reproducibility when your subjects are self-aware, unpredictable beings, and when it's illegal and unethical to experiment on them in a way to satisfy true scientific rigor. Basically "real" scientists have it much easier.
But that's an aside.
Runaway's point still stands, I think, because people do conspire all the time, and because his examples were people who were working together to do something wrong. Believing that others do that makes it a "theory." But what I appreciate about how Runaway put it was how banal conspiracies can seem and how easy it can be to fall into one as a participant. You see one in real life, and you often can't bring yourself to believe it because that kind of thing only happens in movies, right? It doesn't help that the conspirators say it's "just business."
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @10:46PM
> But what I appreciate about how Runaway put it was how banal conspiracies can seem
That's because conspiracies and conspiracy theories are wholly different things.
What's the difference? Well, conspiracy theories are never banal, rarely simplistic and are so mutable as to be unfalsifiable. Ask a conspiracy theorist what it would take to convince them that their theory was false. If you even get an answer it will be something so unreasonable as to be impossible for all practical purposes.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday December 06 2016, @05:55PM
Are you going to pretend that rich bastards never conspire?
No, they certainly do. And frequently, particularly if it's a simple quiet lie that only a few people know about, they get away with it.
What strains credibility is when major PUBLIC figures are claimed to be involved in conspiracies that would require hundreds or even thousands of people "in the know." Nobody can keep that kind of stuff quiet... even the Mob can't maintain that sort of loyalty over years or decades that these "conspiracies" claim to be hidden. And in most of these conspiracy cases, we're not just talking about NSA operations where you claim to only have people involved who would have a high-level of clearance and be recruited for loyalty or whatever -- there would often have to be oodles of random everyday government workers or civilians who would have to be "paid off" and likely "intimidated" if not just shot and buried in a ditch somewhere.
Anthropology. Empiric evidence, if nothing else, tells us that people DO conspire to get ahead in life. Some of the theories are based on better evidence, some of them are based on complete bullshit. But, they all remain theories, unless and until proven.
Wow. I don't think I've ever seen such a concise and complete repudiation of the scientific method in one sentence. It's throwing Karl Popper and "falsifiability" completely on its head. Science generally says, "Claims are only ever theories, which may forever be incomplete (and thus never the complete "truth"), unless or until they are falsified." The burden of proof in science is on empiricism to prove that something is NOT false. For you, the burden is on the doubter, who can apparently never falsify a theory -- only prove it.
I'm not sure anymore if you're trolling or if you actually believe what you say, but this is a profoundly anti-science attitude.
(Score: 2) by curunir_wolf on Tuesday December 06 2016, @06:34PM
What strains credibility is when major PUBLIC figures are claimed to be involved in conspiracies that would require hundreds or even thousands of people "in the know." Nobody can keep that kind of stuff quiet... even the Mob can't maintain that sort of loyalty over years or decades that these "conspiracies" claim to be hidden.
And yet what Ed Snowden revealed seemed to indicate it does happen. And for some reason James Clapper has still not been indicted for perjuring himself in front of Congress...
I am a crackpot
(Score: 3, Informative) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday December 06 2016, @07:18PM
Convenient how you ignore the rest of the paragraph of that quotation from my post. If you don't see the difference between a bunch of loyal NSA operatives with secret clearances doing stuff behind closed doors vs. keeping secret a freakin' pizza parlor where the public comes in and out in broad daylight, all the apparent "clues" are readily visible for anyone to pick up on (and even appear on the menu!), and nobody apparently saw anything suspicious before now, I really don't know what to say.
And by the way, the thing that's conveniently forgotten about the Snowden thing is that there WERE leaks before then. You had Bill Binney [wikipedia.org], along with others in the early post-9/11 days which led to a 2005 New York Times expose [archive.org], which wasn't just a low-profile article -- it won a Pulitzer Prize! You had Thomas Tamm [wikipedia.org] who spoke out and was covered in 2008 in Newsweek. You had Thomas Drake [wikipedia.org], who gave details of more developments and even gave a televised interview on 60 Minutes in 2011.
And there were other more minor figures too. Snowden's revelations did NOT come from nowhere. He himself even said he was inspired by some of these previous people.
Anyone who pretends that the NSA's warrantless wiretapping hadn't been front-page news for years before Snowden obviously wasn't paying attention. Obviously Snowden produced further details, but you had at least a half-dozen high-profile leaks about the NSA's activities before Snowden came along -- and that was among supposedly loyal screened NSA operatives who were trained to keep secrets... not stuff visible on menus in a public pizza shop.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday December 06 2016, @11:00PM
I didn't read the original story (or "fake" story, or "conspiracy") about this pizza shop, so don't read this as a position either way. It is, however, easier to hide stuff in plain sight than you think. The apartment building across the street from me was running a brothel out of the street-level apartments. I've lived on the block almost 20 years, and it's chock full of yuppy families with toddlers. Nobody had any idea it was going on.
Even people you know really well can surprise you. I had a good friend that was the most cheerful person I knew. Until he stuck a shotgun in his mouth and ended it.
Many wrap themselves in bubbles and only see that which gets between them and what they want. Most of us only show others what we want them to see.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by curunir_wolf on Wednesday December 07 2016, @02:43AM
Well I wasn't commenting in the context of "pizzagate". Frankly I don't know what to think of it, but I'm not seeing a smoking gun, especially not as regards the pizza parlor. Then again, there have been rumors of child trafficking / prostitution in and around D.C. elites for many years, at least back to Bush Sr.'s administration. And nothing came of that.
But the entire idea that "the government is reading your email and listening to your phone calls" and tracking everyone was totally considered a wild conspiracy theory and the people claiming it was happening were ridiculed just as much as the people posting about "pizzagate" are today. That's the point. There have been people ridiculed that way throughout history that turned out to be right.
I am a crackpot