The thing is I do think conspiracy theorists are idiotic, it is right to keep asking questions but what conspiracy theorists do is form their own conclusions without even looking at facts or circumstantial evidence and of course you have governments taking advantage of that and painting anyone who questions them with the same brush.
+1 for that. There's a world of difference between a healthy suspicion of government motives with a questioning scepticism and the mental contortionism of the conspiracy theorist. The give-away traits include the dismissal of anything that contradicts their belief by fantastical explanations. It's the absence of Occam and failure to change their opinions when presented with rational evidence.
Call me cynical, but I think Alex Jones is paid by someone to make conspiracy theorists look idiotic.
Sorry, I'd misread this the first time, thinking you were saying someone was paying Alex Jones to talk about conspiracy theories in order discredit everything else he says!
But that's not what you were saying at all. The point is, as Lethn suggests, it doesn't need anybody to make conspiracy theorists look idiotic. Just observe them in debate with rational people. They're all over the place. I recently watched a
series of videos (well the first few anyway) that illustrates this beautifully. It's not that there's anything wrong with hearing some plausible-sounding theories and concluding for the time being that things may not be what we thought they were. But it's another thing to then stick to such a belief, religiously dismissing evidence to the contrary.
One of the easiest ways to discredit someone is by saying they are crazy, or racist. The government does this to dissidents all the time. It teaches this practice to its citizens to self-weed out people from questioning what they do. This randomly is done to any dissident voices, like Ron Paul, all the time. Many politicians use this tactic to get ahead, it’s called
demagogues [url].
People don’t want to hear that things are bad, that the water is poisoned or that their food is giving them cancer. If someone is willing to tell them things are safe, they will readily believe it. But if someone else says otherwise, they don’t want to know? It doesn’t make sense to me.
In the 60s and 70s if someone were surrounded by people who believed in crop circles etc. and didn't have access to independent information and debates covering all aspects of such phenomena I suppose it would have been unfair to call them crazy without first taking the time to go through each of their arguments and patiently explaining everything that was problematic about their conclusions that they were made by aliens. Only then, if rather than reasoning things out properly, going away and thinking about it and being prepared to suspend the belief that all the politicians and the journalists and the scientists and the sheeple were out to con them long enough to come to some reasonable conclusions that they STILL believed that shit, would it be fair to call them crazy.
These days I come across very few conspiracy theorists in real life (a cousin being an exception). I come across them on the internet it is therefore safe to assume they have the same access to all the resources I do. Which means someone is either new to all this and rather naiive, is refusing to go see the great refutations, is declining the resources out there to understand the implications of argumentation of open scepticism and of Occam's Razor, or has become or is becoming a true conspiracy theorist who will hold onto their ridiculous notions at the cost of their rationality. The naiive, if they're prepared to take the hints and do some homework are not beyond redemption but the likes of Jones...
