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posted by on Tuesday December 06 2016, @12:19PM   Printer-friendly
from the don't-believe-everything-you-read dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @04:09PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @04:09PM (#437793)

    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.

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  • (Score: 3, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday December 06 2016, @05:00PM

    by Runaway1956 (2926) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday December 06 2016, @05:00PM (#437840) Journal

    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

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @05:17PM (#437851)

      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

      by LoRdTAW (3755) on Tuesday December 06 2016, @06:45PM (#437934) Journal

      I don't know you - you don't know me - you're just some anon fool on the internet - nothing you say counts.

      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

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @07:14PM (#437950)

        > 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

          by bob_super (1357) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @05:14PM (#438421)

          Bark! Bark!
          [wags tail]

  • (Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday December 06 2016, @07:18PM

    by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday December 06 2016, @07:18PM (#437953) Journal

    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) by cubancigar11 on Tuesday December 06 2016, @07:30PM

    by cubancigar11 (330) on Tuesday December 06 2016, @07:30PM (#437964) Homepage Journal

    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

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @07:44PM (#437979)

      > 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

      by Phoenix666 (552) on Tuesday December 06 2016, @10:33PM (#438092) Journal

      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

        by cubancigar11 (330) on Wednesday December 07 2016, @03:18AM (#438189) Homepage Journal

        I suppose it matters how your program of study was constituted.

        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

    by Phoenix666 (552) on Tuesday December 06 2016, @10:24PM (#438086) Journal

    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

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @10:46PM (#438098)

      > 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.