Last edited Mon Nov 11, 2013, 04:21 PM - Edit history (1)
... that some people have a kneejerk conspiracist interpretation to many influential news events--that if some prominent dissident gets cancer or is killed in an automobile accident, or somebody shoots up a school or a movie theater or a congressional campaign rally, they will immediately claim the evidence bolsters their theory of a larger conspiracy involving many such events. For instance, those who believed in Icke's Alien Reptilioids from outer space instantly saw 9/11 as a confirmation of their theory--because who else but an all-powerful reptilioid could possibly have pulled it off? I prefer to call those people "conspiracists" because often times their "theories" don't deserve the dignity of the name, but I think we can all agree that those folks are conspiracy theorists.
I think we can also agree that some people are kneejerk skeptics of official versions of events, pointing out discrepancies, questionable evidence, unjustified assumptions, and facile conclusions in the official accounts of influential events. These people are often accused by the defenders of authority of being conspiracy theorists even when they don't advocate any theory. The self-styled "debunkers" try to dispose of the skeptics' questions by implying that they necessarily involve a silly conspiracy theory and thus are trivial, and by demanding a plausible alternative theory that they can reject as either 1) unproven or 2) less persuasive (to them) than the official theory. Demanding proof of an alternative theory before you will even admit the need for investigation is a particularly blatant bit of sophistry when you consider that the official version is rarely proven and that much of the documentation and physical evidence on events such as the assassinations of JFK, MLK, and RFK and such as 9/11 has been locked up in secret files for decades or even destroyed.
Michael Moore said "I'm not into conspiracy theories, except the ones that are true or involve dentists." I think we need to distinguish between conspiracists who think everything is a conspiracy, conspiracy theorists who advocate a particular theory, and skeptics who restrict themselves to questioning the official accounts and demanding more information. I think the serious skeptics' implicit assertion of official coverups deserves a pass on the "conspiracy theorist" label, which is slapped on by the Valiant Defenders of the Powers That Be in the unreasonable claim that any skepticism is inherently a silly theory.
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