Three Rules for an Airtight Conspiracy Theory, or: How To Tell A Bullshit Conspiracy Theory

[icarus]

The boyfriend has a coworker who is absolutely certain that the Bush adminstration destroyed the Twin Towers on 9/11 as an excuse to go into Iraq. I keep explaining to wildernessguru why this is idiotic. The trouble with specific conspiracy theories is that people (who hate and distrust Bush, for example) want to believe them so badly, logic starts to fray in the face of their fervor.

I'm not against all conspiracy theories. I believe that JFK was assassinated by more than one shooter. But the JFK assassination theory passes my Three Rules.

Wait. You haven't heard of my Three Rules?

Three Rules for an Airtight Conspiracy Theory, or: How To Tell A Bullshit Conspiracy Theory From One That Makes Sense

Rule One: No cherry-picking the facts.

The conspiracy theory has to take into account all the facts available, even if the theory argues with them. If any inconvenient facts are dismissed out of hand ("oh, of course the government says that"), you have a crackpot theory – do not pass go, do not collect $200. The strength of a good conspiracy theory is in the additional information not covered by the mainstream media not in ignoring well-established facts.

Rule Two: No one is a super-genius (except in James Bond).

The conspiracy theory can't presume the culprit becomes suddenly brilliant and competent when they've proved to be a bumbling idiot in the past and since. The bad guy (or guys) has to be capable of pulling it off. A good conspiracy theory doesn't expect the culprit(s) to act out of character or be any smarter than they are on an average day.

An off-shoot of this is the cast of thousands all acting like super-geniuses rule. The more people that are involved in a conspiracy, the more likely the secret will get out, and the more likely the conspiracy will make mistakes. Ask any general. The bigger the operation, the more problems multiply.

Rule Three: No one has a crystal ball.

The conspiracy theory can't assume that the bad guys can read the future. If the bad guy's motive depends upon a complicated chain of events – "See, first they did X, then Y happened, and then Z, and then N, then after that there was W and then, voila! They got what they wanted" – the theory is a house of cards. Vast numbers of conspiracy theories fail because they project what we know in the present ("this is what happened") onto the past ("so they must have known this would happen"). A good conspiracy theory assumes a measurable and predictable result which could have been known at the time.

This is not to say that all conspiracy theories are wrong. Sometimes, they are out to get you. ;) But let's shoot down the stupid conspiracy theories, shall we?

Comments

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

There is no sign of competence or the Bush administration listening to any military professional, NORAD or otherwise. The 9/11 attack, I'm sorry to say, was brilliantly executed. "Bush as culprit" fails the super-genius test. Not even taking into account the cast thousands it would take to cover it up.

Bush didn't have to come up with stuff on his own, he just had to plagiarize all the people who were actually trying to defend this country from crazy people.

The person who would have been in charge of that operation would have been Rumsfeld. He's a cocky go-getter who insisted the US could hold Iraq with a minimal force and insisted on the retirement of the general who opposed him. He also insisted on using unarmored Humvees instead of US APCs stored in Kuwait (so that US would not appear to be an occupying force), resulting in the maiming of thousands of US troops. That dildo could never have pulled off the 9/11 attacks. It fails the super genius test again.

To what you said about our own weapons against us...the gas station and hotel videos would prove that a terrorist did it - you'd actually have the face of the 'mad Arab' or whatever firing the missile off at the Pentagon.

I lived in the DC area for ten years. If you go to DC, you'll see that there are many people of many different ethnicities, because of all the embassies up and down Massachusetts Avenue and elsewhere in the city. An arab (or someone else of another nationality who hates us) is not a remarkable sight. This isn't Nebraska. They would not stand out.

Why such an elaborate plane into the building hoax when you could just deny that it was our own country's armament doing the damage?

Oh, that's clear to any military professional: you do not want to announce your weaknesses. The US could not get around the fact that everyone knew we'd been hit by airliners. No way we'd want to admit we'd been successfully attacked by anything else.

As for the speed of creating the passenger list? Untrue. I remember. They were really slow in releasing the names of the passengers involved in any of those crashes, citing their need to contact the bereaved first.

*sigh* Look, I hate when RL bounces all over my fun time. In fifty years, someone will declassify something and we'll find out what happened one way or another. Or our kids/grandkids can tell us through a Ouija board fifty years after that, I don't know. I just wanna go back to the reason I friended the journal - fic and recs and fandom stuff. Can we chalk this out to You say tomato, I say tomahto while we're both making spaghetti sauce?

Personally, I'm not particularly upset because I enjoy research, so this has been fun for me. If hasn't been for you, I'm sorry. Do enjoy the fic and the recs. :)

[jya-bd-cp-ttgb.livejournal.com]

Normally, I enjoy debates about any subject imaginable, but lately everything to do with Bushie and his buddies, 911 and the wars has been driving me insane and I see my blood pressure going through the roof and then some. I thanked the Gods that it was him in office when the attacks first happened because I believed Reagan's people, his father's people, and somewhat Clinton's people, would help him find the bastards responsible and blow them off the face of the planet.

I was happy he was there, because I thought -- and remember please, I was a little kid during it -- that Reagan and Bush Sr. were decent Presidents. I didn't know about Reagan and AIDS or his Altheimer's, and again with the not being able to spell worth ducks today -- and I didn't know some of the stuff that Bush Sr. screwed up either. I thought "he's got two good men behind him, and the remains of Clinton's bunch. He's good to go."

But when he started talking about Iraq, I remembered some of the stuff I'd heard. His father's people and Clinton's people kept telling him to ignore Hussein the same way we ignore Castro now. That the danger to the States was in North Korea, stay out of the sandbox. Then all the stuff broke about no WMD were found, no this that or the other thing. ... Katrina hits and he and his people royally screwed it up and continue to screw it up. Gas goes up, this goes up, yadda yadda...and people start comparing Iraq to 'Nam. Rumors of the draft being started up again - which thank all the Gods again that they haven't tried that little stunt yet -- then gas rationing - thanks Mom. All the cheerful stuff, you know? My brother insisting that something wasn't right with the whole Pentagon story - I said in an earlier post, he was there and so was my cousin. When I got Loose Change, and watched it, I went straight to my brother and asked : Is this what you're talking about? "Yup. Can't fucking tell me it was a plane."

To me, that was the nail in the coffin. Bush and his friends pulling an Xfiles strength conspiracy and fucking over every man, woman, and child in America, Afghanistan and Iraq for money, power and oil. Then I started reading the books my customers told me about and here we are.

I know he's fired/retired a zillion people since this whole mess started. You need a scorecard to keep up. My brain insists that he's fired them because as long as the war is going on, he can keep funneling money to his buddies. If he wins in five minutes, they don't get the trillions, just a couple hundred billion you know?

It also insists that if I thought about the 911 conspiracy like a fanfic, I'd come up with an exact number of people needed to pull everything off, and it would be less than a hundred actually In the Know about the full extent of the plan. You can make less than a hundred people disappear easily if you've got the money.

My heart's just sick of the whole thing, and for once, I gotta listen to it.

I'm off to reread Tanlines now. My finals words in this section are to poke you for more from that 'verse -- like maybe T&D from John's POV? :)

[icarusancalion.livejournal.com]

Ah, Tanlines was written for Auburn under special circumstances. Also, I'm not going to be writing anything but Out Of Bounds until it's complete. Frankly I really can't see myself writing anything else in that universe.

As for the draft, I wrote a newspaper article and did research into that. There were two simultaneous bills drafted for the House and Senate arms committees in late 2003 to restart the draft. They've stalled in committee and no one will even consider it for a war this unpopular.

I double-checked this out by staying up all night reading the US budgets for the draft board (we are required by law to keep the draft board operational in case of an attack). The budgets stayed at bare minimum and did not increase any more than they had over previous years. There was some chatter online about draft board positions that were advertised, but those were mostly squawks by people who weren't aware that the draft board has been operational since the draft ended.

The draft is a dead issue. You can stop worrying about it with regards to this war.

Last food for thought: Bush doesn't have to have started 9/11 to profit from it. A politican's job isn't so much to create events as it is to use them to his own advantage.