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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 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