New World Order

[White Boy]

Instead of being the typical conspiracy theorist who complains on the internet, why don't people just try to join the secret societies? I never got this

However I am of Jewish descent so maybe this is why I hold my point of view? Lol I don't know

I hope you guys understand what I'm asking.

I see a lot of people on the internet (and only online) mainly YouTube, who leave comments about Jewish folk, Illuminati and celebrities, and rich people, and talk about their plans to take over the world, usually telling others to "wake up." I've always wondered why these same conspiracy theorists spend their time warning others, instead of improving their own lives.

I don't know about you guys but I'm working real hard to become rich and famous so I can join the New World Order

illuminati sign me up !!!!! :crackup:

 

[( . )( . )]

http://i.qkme.me/3on832.jpg

 

[White Boy]

^didn't read lol

 

[Dust 2 Dust]

These secret societies are by invitation only. I was once offered the opportunity to join the Free Masons, but I declined.

 

[Deep Dish]

White Boy:
I see a lot of people on the internet (and only online) mainly YouTube, who leave comments about Jewish folk, Illuminati and celebrities, and rich people, and talk about their plans to take over the world, usually telling others to "wake up." I've always wondered why these same conspiracy theorists spend their time warning others, instead of improving their own lives.

My expert witness is Michael Shermer, author of the book Why People Believe Weird Things and editor-in-chief of Skeptic magazine.

First, as a primer, you need to understand why people believe.

Souls, spirits, ghosts, gods, demons, angels, aliens, intelligent designers, government conspirators, and all manner of invisible agents with power and intention are believed to haunt our world and control our lives. Why?

The answer has two parts, starting with the concept of “patternicity,” which I defined in my December 2008 column as the human tendency to find meaningful patterns in meaningless noise. Consider the face on Mars, the Virgin Mary on a grilled-cheese sandwich, satanic messages in rock music. Of course, some patterns are real. Finding predictive patterns in changing weather, fruiting trees, migrating prey animals and hungry predators was central to the survival of Paleolithic hominids.

The problem is that we did not evolve a baloney-detection device in our brains to discriminate between true and false patterns. So we make two types of errors: a type I error, or false positive, is believing a pattern is real when it is not; a type II error, or false negative, is not believing a pattern is real when it is. If you believe that the rustle in the grass is a dangerous predator when it is just the wind (a type I error), you are more likely to survive than if you believe that the rustle in the grass is just the wind when it is a dangerous predator (a type II error). Because the cost of making a type I error is less than the cost of making a type II error and because there is no time for careful deliberation between patternicities in the split-second world of predator-prey interactions, natural selection would have favored those animals most likely to assume that all patterns are real.

But we do something other animals do not do. As large-brained hominids with a developed cortex and a theory of mind — the capacity to be aware of such mental states as desires and intentions in both ourselves and others — we infer agency behind the patterns we observe in a practice I call “agenticity”: the tendency to believe that the world is controlled by invisible intentional agents. We believe that these intentional agents control the world, sometimes invisibly from the top down (as opposed to bottom-up causal randomness). Together patternicity and agenticity form the cognitive basis of shamanism, paganism, animism, polytheism, monotheism, and all modes of Old and New Age spiritualisms.

Agenticity carries us far beyond the spirit world. The Intelligent Designer is said to be an invisible agent who created life from the top down. Aliens are often portrayed as powerful beings coming down from on high to warn us of our impending self-destruction. Conspiracy theories predictably include hidden agents at work behind the scenes, puppet-masters pulling political and economic strings as we dance to the tune of the Bilderbergers, the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers or the Illuminati. Even the belief that the government can impose top-down measures to rescue the economy is a form of agenticity, with President Barack Obama being touted as “the one” with almost messianic powers who will save us.

http://www.michaelshermer.com/2009/06/agenticity/​

More to the point of your question:

ON WEDNESDAY, MAY 16, I spent several hours on a hot bus in a neon desert called Las Vegas with a merry band of British conspiracists during their journey around the Southwest in search of UFOs, aliens, Area 51 and government cover-ups, all for a BBC documentary. One woman regaled me with a tale about orange balls of energy hovering around her car on Interstate 405 in California, which were subsequently chased away by black ops helicopters. A man challenged me to explain the source of a green laser beam that followed him around the English countryside one evening.

Conspiracies are a perennial favorite for television producers because there is always a receptive audience. A recent Canadian Broadcasting Corporation documentary that I participated in called Conspiracy Rising, for example, featured theories behind the deaths of JFK and Princess Diana, UFOs, Area 51 and 9/11, as if there were a common thread running throughout. According to radio host and conspiracy monger Alex Jones, also appearing in the film, “The military-industrial complex killed John F. Kennedy” and “I can prove that there’s a private banking cartel setting up a world government because they admit they are” and “No matter how you look at 9/11 there was no Islamic terrorist connection—the hijackers were clearly U.S. government assets who were set up as patsies like Lee Harvey Oswald.”

Such examples, along with others in my years on the conspiracy beat, are emblematic of a trend I have detected that people who believe in one such theory tend to believe in many other equally improbable and often contradictory cabals. This observation has recently been confirmed empirically by University of Kent psychologists Michael J. Wood, Karen M. Douglas and Robbie M. Sutton in a paper entitled “Dead and Alive: Beliefs in Contradictory Conspiracy Theories,” published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science this past January. The authors begin by defining a conspiracy theory as “a proposed plot by powerful people or organizations working together in secret to accomplish some (usually sinister) goal” that is “notoriously resistant to falsification... with new layers of conspiracy being added to rationalize each new piece of disconfirming evidence.” Once you believe that “one massive, sinister conspiracy could be successfully executed in near-perfect secrecy, [it] suggests that many such plots are possible.” With this cabalistic paradigm in place, conspiracies can become “the default explanation for any given event—a unitary, closed-off worldview in which beliefs come together in a mutually supportive network known as a monological belief system.”

This monological belief system explains the significant correlations between different conspiracy theories in the study. For example, “a belief that a rogue cell of MI6 was responsible for [Princess] Diana’s death was correlated with belief in theories that HIV was created in a laboratory... that the moon landing was a hoax... and that governments are covering up the existence of aliens.” The effect continues even when the conspiracies contradict one another: the more participants believed that Diana faked her own death, the more they believed that she was murdered.

The authors suggest there is a higher-order process at work that they call global coherence that overrules local contradictions: “Someone who believes in a significant number of conspiracy theories would naturally begin to see authorities as fundamentally deceptive, and new conspiracy theories would seem more plausible in light of that belief.” Moreover, “conspiracy advocates’ distrust of official narratives may be so strong that many alternative theories are simultaneously endorsed in spite of any contradictions between them.” Thus, they assert, “the more that participants believe that a person at the centre of a death-related conspiracy theory, such as Princess Diana or Osama [bin] Laden, is still alive, the more they also tend to believe that the same person was killed, so long as the alleged manner of death involves deception by officialdom.”

http://www.michaelshermer.com/2012/09/conspiracy-contradictions/#more-3106​

Thus, conspiracy theorists tell people to “wake up” as part of their monological belief.

 

[Deep Dish]

Throwing out the baby with the bathwater. I'd rather look at each "conspiracy" independently and verify or refute it independently. For example, if someone is charged with "criminal conspiracy" the prosecutor is not laughed out of court for being a "kooky conspiracy theorist".

The term conspiracy theory is often used derisively to indicate that someone’s explanation for an event is highly improbable or even on the lunatic fringe, and that those who proffer such theories are most probably crackpots. Since conspiracies do happen, however, we cannot just automatically dismiss any and all conspiracy theories a priori. So what should we believe when we encounter a conspiracy theory? What are some of the characteristics of a conspiracy theory that indicate that it is likely untrue?

1. There is an obvious pattern of connected dots that may or may not be connected in a causal way. When the Watergate conspirators confessed to the burglary, or Osama bin Laden boasts about the triumph of 9/11, we can be confident that the pattern is real. But when there is no forthcoming evidence to support a causal connection between the dots in the pattern, or when the evidence is equally well explained through some other causal chain—or through randomness—the conspiracy theory is likely false.

2. The agents behind the pattern of the conspiracy are elevated to near superhuman power to pull it off. We must always remember how flawed human behavior is, and the natural tendency we all have to make mistakes. Most of the time in most circumstances most people are not nearly as powerful as we think they are.

3. The more complex the conspiracy, and the more elements involved for it to unfold successfully, the less likely it is to be true.

4. The more people involved in the conspiracy, the less likely they will all be able to keep silent about their secret goings-on.

5. The grander and more worldly the conspiracy is believed to be—the control of an entire nation, economy, or political system, especially if it suggests world domination—the less likely it is to be true.

6. The more the conspiracy theory ratchets up from small events that might be true into much larger events that have much lower probabilities of being true, the less likely it is to be grounded in reality.

7. The more the conspiracy theory assigns portentous and sinister meanings and interpretations to what are most likely innocuous or insignificant events, the less likely it is to be true.

8. The tendency to commingle facts and speculation without distinguishing between the two and without assigning degrees of probability of factuality, the less likely it is to be true.

9. Extreme hostility about and strong suspicions of any and all government agencies or private organizations in an indiscriminate matter indicates that the conspiracy theorist is unable to differentiate between true and false conspiracies.

10. If the conspiracy theorist defends the conspiracy theory tenaciously to the point of refusing to consider alternative explanations for the events in question, rejecting all disconfirming evidence for his theory and blatantly seeking only confirmatory evidence to support what he has already established is the truth, he is likely wrong and the conspiracy is probably a figment of his imagination.

—Excerpt from The Believing Brain, by Michael Shermer​

 

[goundra]

we know for a FACT that Rooseveldt was aware of the Japanese threat on pearl harbor. THAT stayed hidden for decades, and millions and millions died because of it. FDR basically FORCED the Japanese into attacking us, cause he WANTED us in the war against Germany. Hitler was an idiot to have allied himself with Japan, they could offer him very little. Just like he was an idiot to not have attacked Russia FIRST. The rest of the world would have HELPED him do that. then, with his eastern flank secured, he could have also, with little risk, have taken N Africa and the middle east, then the mediterranean, then England. then only the nukes could have ousted germany from Europe, given that he wasn't dying of syphilis, of course, which he was.

 

[White Boy]

@Goundra, what's your point?

 

[twentee]

I believe that thepoint is

that MASSIVE conspiracies CAN be hidden (well enough) for long periods of time, since Pearl Harbor proves that most adequately.

 

[Deep Dish]

we know for a FACT that Rooseveldt was aware of the Japanese threat on pearl harbor. THAT stayed hidden for decades, and millions and millions died because of it. FDR basically FORCED the Japanese into attacking us, cause he WANTED us in the war against Germany.

A far more mundane explanation:

FDR wanted war with Japan/Germany. He had been planning it all along
This point is actually a recycled criticism of FDR from the days he was actually in office. There was a strongly isolationist atmosphere in the US due to disillusionment with World War I and the Great Depression. Young adults of the Roaring Twenties were referred to as “The Lost Generation.” With the economic collapse in 1929, people were far more worried about the state of their own country than international affairs. The Old Right, “Taft Republicans,” and Republicans in general were hard-line isolationists (seriously). Conspiracy theorists often like to throw out quotes by FDR's opposition painting him as a warmonger.

However, FDR’s arms build-up enjoyed bi-partisan support. The Army was so poor it was training its soldiers with wooden guns during the Depression. FDR was a Wilsonian and supporter of free trade, and so clearly came down on the side of the Allies with policies such as the Lend-Lease Act and the Four Freedoms. However, his stated policy was “All aid short of war” and had issued memos to the military making it known that they should not attempt to engage in any offensive action. Furthermore, FDR was far more concerned with Germany than Japan. This is similar to truthers who cite Project for a New American Century documents. It’s merely circumstantial evidence, not definitive proof.

There were clear signs in radio transmissions intercepted by intelligence
This ignores the signal-to-noise ratio in the intelligence. Most messages were vague or not fully decoded and the ones that were more explicit were awash in a much larger sea of intelligence stating the opposite or having nothing to do with Pearl Harbor. There were also similar problems in intelligence collection to the ones that happened pre-9/11: Oftentimes, low-level intelligence officers would decode reports and then file them away in some dusty cabinet, never to be seen again. Communication between agencies wasn’t perfect, or even that good, so a full picture of what the intelligence suggested never emerged. If anything, these conspiracy theories are a good argument for streamlining intelligence rather than arguments for a real conspiracy.

There is also the fact that intelligence gathered the week of the attack suggested that Japanese forces were most likely moving toward Thailand or Malaysia in that time frame. The Navy’s phone taps in the Japanese consulate were found and removed about a week before the attack as well.

The McCollum memo, outlining a strategy in the Pacific, proves war was the goal
More circumstantial evidence. FDR, as well as his military advisors and naval officers in the Pacific, were wary of the growing Japanese empire and the possibility that it could strike the US. Every country draws up war plans for preparation for vast numbers of situations that may never occur. This sort of thing isn’t unique to the run-up to Pearl Harbor. The memo itself, however, was not a blueprint for all-out war, but aimed at containment of Japan (though it does make a brief mention of provocation). In addition, it never went all the way up the chain of command to Roosevelt himself.

...Vastness of the conspiracy
Most versions of the theory would implicate a good chunk of the Pacific fleet’s chain of command, up to and including, of course, the president himself. The higher-ups stationed at Pearl Harbor would not only have to put their men’s life on the line, but also their own. And all without any of them letting anything leak, speaking up about it later, or objecting that the idea would be completely bonkers. This would be truly impressive considering the biggest conspiracy committed by the executive in American history was foiled by some fools who failed to tape over a door lock the right way.

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Pearl_Harbor_conspiracy_theory​

Occam’s Razor, the principle of parsimony.

 

[goundra]

in the Navy, dudes, the man at the top gets all the credit, and all the BLAME. The admiral in charge of Pearl would have had his HEAD cut off, had he been so derelict as to "line up" those ships and planes like that. Instead, he got a MEDAL, cause he followed his ORDERS. I SAID FDR wanted in the war vs Germany, dude, can you read? He just USED Japan as an excuse, and Hitler was dumb enough to go along with it.

 

[Deep Dish]

goundra:
in the Navy, dudes, the man at the top gets all the credit, and all the BLAME. The admiral in charge of Pearl would have had his HEAD cut off, had he been so derelict as to "line up" those ships and planes like that. I SAID FDR wanted in the war vs Germany, dude, can you read?

Can you read?

...it turns out that if we examine each of these points not just with a narrow focus to see only the suspicious side, and look at the complete event in context, no good arguments for a conspiracy remain. Most of the points made by conspiracy theorists were raised by the 2000 book Day of Deceit by Robert Stinnett, who really boiled down the innuendo from the preceding 59 years and condensed it into a cohesive conspiracy. However, it should be noted that many more authors (almost all others) find him to be wrong. Chief among these is probably Pearl Harbor: Final Judgement from 1992, written by Henry Clausen. In 1944, the Secretary of War ordered Clausen, then a lawyer in the U.S. Judge Advocate's office, to conduct an independent investigation into what really happened in the days and months leading up to Pearl Harbor, and to find out who screwed up. His report remained top secret until its substance was finally published in this book.

Clausen found plenty of sloppiness, but nothing that could be characterized as a cool, smoothly-running conspiracy. Agencies operated independently, decoding Japanese transmissions and then filing them away rather than sharing them. There was plenty of knowledge that hostility was building, but no experience in how to deal with it and no specific knowledge that it was so imminent. Roosevelt knew as much as anyone, and issued warnings and ordered preparations that were poorly handled all the way down the line.

One thing that conspiracy theorists and historians agree upon is that Admiral Kimmel was unjustly made the scapegoat for Pearl Harbor. Ten days after the attack, he was reduced in rank and replaced by Admiral Nimitz. It's also agreed that he did the best he could given the limited amount of intelligence Washington shared with him, and this is one point where the conspiracy theory simultaneously kicks in and breaks down. Historians say he was held accountable for bad decisions; conspiracy theorists say he was made the scapegoat for the secret orders from Washington. But, nearly everything that happened at Pearl Harbor was on Kimmel's own orders. Let's look at some.

When Kimmel received the order to assume defensive positions ten days before the attack, viable threats at the time were from espionage and sabotage, not actual attacks. Thus the aircraft were moved out into the open and tightly packed, where they could be best guarded against saboteurs. The ships were similarly grouped in the harbor. It was the wrong interpretation of the order, but it was a reasonable one in the context of what Kimmel knew was happening.

How true is it that the three carriers were safely hidden out at sea? Not very. The carriers were not clustered safely together; they were widely scattered throughout the Pacific on separate duties. Being alone out at sea even with their carrier groups, each isolated far away and unable to support one another, was not at all considered safe. The Saratoga was just coming out of a lengthy overhaul in Seattle and was underway to Pearl Harbor via San Diego at the time of the attack, but the Enterprise and the Lexington had in fact been at Pearl and recently sent away. Why?

Kimmel had sent them, separately and on staggered schedules, to deliver Army aircraft to reinforce Midway and Wake islands. Because of the Japanese spy network on Hawaii, great caution was taken to disguise this movement of forces. The Enterprise was scheduled to return by December 5th, at which time the Lexington would leave; Kimmel wanted to make sure that Pearl had coverage from at least one carrier at all times. The Lexington left on schedule, but unfortunately, bad weather struck the Enterprise and kept its group at sea for two extra days, resulting in an unforeseeable 2-day span of no carriers in Pearl Harbor. There was never any mysterious directive from Washington to hide the carriers. Had the weather not intervened, there would have been at least one carrier in Pearl at all times, which was the maximum force available.

Even so, there's a powerful reason why the absence of carriers would not support a conspiracy theory. World War II was the first time that aircraft carriers proved themselves to be the most important assets in naval warfare. At the time of Pearl Harbor, we'd not yet learned that, and the battleship was considered the most crucial weapon. That's why the Pacific Fleet had nine battleships and only three carriers. Conspiracy theorist descriptions of the battleships as old, useless, and expendable are a misstatement of history. They were the best we had, and their perceived value was such that at the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, six new battleships of the Iowa class were under construction, and a further six of the Montana class were planned. It wasn't until the Battle of Midway in 1942 that we learned the value of carriers, and construction shifted to those.

http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4211​

Near the beginning of the article, it's noted: "If the American commanders wanted the attack to happen, they would probably still choose to protect their most valuable assets."

And so forth. You can read the rest. For the sake of brevity, I'm going to skip to the conclusion to deliver its final point:

Now of course, all this only pertains to what happened at Pearl Harbor on the day of the attack. It doesn't address the much larger question of what President Roosevelt might have known or wanted to happen, or other people in Washington. The reason I don't go into that is that it doesn't matter. Even if this presumed conspiracy to allow the attack did exist, it failed to have any effect where the rubber meets the road. No orders from Washington altered the state of readiness at Pearl Harbor. Obviously the attack ultimately did play into the hands of anyone who wanted war with Japan; every tragedy somehow benefits somebody. That doesn't make every tragedy a conspiracy.​

 

[Deep Dish]

PairPlusRoyalFlush:
Hmmmmm Oh and an ad populum.

I disagree.

Burden of proof
Who has to prove what to whom? The person making the extraordinary claim has the burden of proving to the experts and to the community at large that his or her belief has more validity than the one almost everyone else accepts. You have to lobby for your opinion to be heard. Then you have to marshal experts on your side so you can convince the majority to support your claim over the one that they have always supported. Finally, when you are in the majority, the burden of proof switches to the outsider who wants to challenge you with his or her unusual claim. Evolutionists had the burden of proof for half a century after Darwin, but now the burden of proof is on creationists. It is up to creationists to show why the theory of evolution is wrong and why creationism is right, and it is not up to evolutionists to defend evolution. The burden of proof is on the Holocaust deniers to prove the Holocaust did not happen, not the Holocaust historian to prove that it did. The rationale for this is the mountains of evidence prove that both evolution and the Holocaust are facts. In other words, it is not enough to have evidence. You must convince others of the validity of your evidence. And when you are the outsider this is the price you pay, regardless of whether you are right or wrong.

(excerpt from Why People Believe Weird Things)​