Conspiracies you think are plausible

[xman]

Also that shitty Oliver Stone movie.

Stone escapes absolute criticism in that he's telling Jim Garrison's quest. He's telling the conspiracy.

 

[Finger]

Also that shitty Oliver Stone movie.

Stone escapes absolute criticism in that he's telling Jim Garrison's quest. He's telling the conspiracy.

What he's telling is Jim Garrison's delusion with no regard for context or accuracy. Distorting facts to paint the guy as some sort of crack investigator going toe to toe with an evil government. That movie is probably the only reason JFK conspiracy theorists are still around.

 

[Marcus]

This:

'The crimes that people get away with seem to be the ones where they happen semi-randomly with no obvious plan or motive.'

Is also speculative. For instance, serial killers are often methodical, intelligent and they plan excellently. That is why they are so difficult to catch. They are highly motivated and are often extraordinarily well-planned, so this statement does not ring true.

Serial killers aren't comparable to conspiracies. The hardest ones to catch are the ones whose targets are connected only by sharing certain relatively common traits, meaning there is a large pool of potential victims. Although the motive might be clear (killing young gay men or whatever the victim type might be), the choice of the next victim can be essentially a random pick from that large population. The thing about most serial killers that makes them hard to catch is that they never tell anyone about what they are planning, so there is no risk of being caught because someone they told goes to the authorities or because one of the people they trusted with their secret is actually an undercover investigator or because some of their planning communications are intercepted.

Conspiracies, on the other hand, definitionally require the participants to communicate their plans. The communication and organisation of these conspiracies are exactly the elements which are used to detect them.

 

[ElegantUniverse]

Serial killers aren't comparable to conspiracies. The hardest ones to catch are the ones whose targets are connected only by sharing certain relatively common traits, meaning there is a large pool of potential victims. Although the motive might be clear (killing young gay men or whatever the victim type might be), the choice of the next victim can be essentially a random pick from that large population. The thing about most serial killers that makes them hard to catch is that they never tell anyone about what they are planning, so there is no risk of being caught because someone they told goes to the authorities or because one of the people they trusted with their secret is actually an undercover investigator or because some of their planning communications are intercepted.

Conspiracies, on the other hand, definitionally require the participants to communicate their plans. The communication and organisation of these conspiracies are exactly the elements which are used to detect them.

No, but they are comparable to the statement I was responding to.

 

[Jotto999]

In 2001 a group of religiously indoctrinated suicide soldiers infiltrated the United States under assumed identities, creating false lives, all funded by a shadowy billioniare Saudi, with connections to a massive fascistic theocratic underworld. These men trained diligently to hijack, and crash planes into stragetic targets. Each infiltrated Logan Airport seperately and boarded planes, coordinating their attacks perfectly to strike economic and military installations of their enemy, the United States. Their attacks destroyed the World Trade Center, a portion of the Pentagon and killed well over 3,000 people, a massive successful strike against the world's most militarily powerful country using nothing but fanaticism, planning and box cutters.

Then a host of White House insiders, longing for a more imperial foreign policy and wanting to crush dissent at home, looked upon this attack as a great opportunity.

They tried to pin the blame in some way on Saddam Hussein and his regime in Iraq, the war they really wanted to fight. They couldn't and were forced to strike first at Afghanistan. They put forward the minimum effort in that theater. They really had no interest in capturing Osama or destroying Al Qaida, probably because that would have removed the threat so critical to keeping Americans in line behind the new imperial policy. Bush let it slip on video that he "never thinks about him (Osama)" and "he's not important". Fortunately for them, this quote didn't receive much air-time outside of Michael Moore's movie. Reflecting this lack of a priority, they dropped a few bombs, topled the government and called it a day.

In an almost Orwellian move, they managed to shift American anger over 9/11 against Saddam and in support for the coming war that the Bush admin really wanted to fight. The mainstream media, controlled by conservative corporate interests and eager to boost ratings in a way that only a war could provide, played along. Plenty of talking head stooges that dominate right wing radio were instrumental in ensuring support from a non-thinking segment of the American population.

And so Bush successfully lied us into a war. First it was about supposed WMD. Then it was about supposed links to Al Qaida. Then it was about spreading democracy.

Meanwhile, Bush/Cheney used the war and fears of terrorism to club any dissent at home into silence. "Support the troops" became code for "shut up, salute the president and support his agenda unconditionally or you're a traitor."

Many insiders in the Bush admin and their cronies found the war quite lucrative with many sweet no-bid contracts for which they provided shoddy work.

The Bush admin also had a running conspiracy to cover their negligence and incompetence in preventing 9/11. They tried to deny that there were any warning signs (there were) and ran a smear campaign against general Clark, who had warned them prior to 9/11 about the dangers of Al Qaida. General Clark wasn't playing along and had to be shut up or discredited.

There's my 9/11 conspiracy theory. I think it's pretty well supported by the evidence.

It worked because a large portion of my fellow Americans are either rock stupid, apathetic, willfully ignorant or otherwise easily manipulated. This is evident by how 46% of voters still supported McCain and his fundy bimbo.

This.

I don't think this is much like most conspiracies. I think the immoral and illegal nature of the Bush Administration and what they have done is not some secretive, unsupported hush hush thing. I think it is jaw-droppingly blatant and obvious, staring any semi-competent person in the face yet somehow missed by so many people, and for so long. Anyone who has a clue of what is on the US Constitution, or a clue of what a peace treaty is, or on the UN Constitution knows that the Iraq war was completely illegal and I think all those responsible should be jailed for life, which would not change anything but hey, it's the principle.


I also believe in some kind of cannabis "conspiracy" (but again, I don't really see it that way). Even though society would hugely gain from legalization (finally hemp could be used industrially, like it used to be because nothing grew easier yet had such strong, versatile fibres), this type of plant remains illegal. Marijuana has thousands of potential functions and uses, but since one of those potential functions is getting you high, it's illegal. It has been the result of greed from a few people that it is still illegal today, the result of someone interfering on a large scale, which I despise. So many large companies would never allow cannabis to be legal, since it cannot be patented, many of them would go out of business.


I also think that America at the moment is not really "capitalist", they are actually more "corporatist", and that American politics are utterly messed up. Again, not really a conspiracy, more just a known fact in the mind of anyone who knows anything at all about the subject. When there are claims of a free market yet huge companies that are very well off start to have problems due to their own mistakes and failures, and get massive bailouts from the government that's not a free market, that's favouring the real rich and powerful. As if the tax paying middle class doesn't fork over to the rich enough already, the government has got to hand over some more.


There is a bunch of others that I think are plausible, but many of them people probably would not have heard of (for example, bicycle companies have made sure that recumbents cannot be used in many world-renowned bike races because they don't manufacture recumbents, even though recumbents hold all the records for top speed, endurance and also ergonomics and are in general far better. As Lance Armstrong himself said, "I would try a recumbent, if they were legal (in the races)". There are a lot of smaller examples of "conspiracies" like this one that I think are plausible.

 

[xman]

OH!

The CIA is responsible for the death of John Lennon. I don't think it was a sponsored hit. I think that bonehead acted on his own. I'm also sure that his thinking was heavily influenced by his exposure to the CIA. Imagine what you might get if you set the CIA agenda in the mind of a lunatic and that's what we got. Is that a conspiracy?

 

[nasher168]

Alexander the Great could well have been poisoned in some way, either by a pissed-off Persian, a disillusioned Macedonian soldier, or else by one of his generals. Perdiccas and Ptolemy both stood to gain much from Alexander's death-Perdiccas became the regent of the empire for a short while, and yet Ptolemy was the first to grab Alexander's body and take it to Memphis, out of reach of the other potential successors.

 

[Jotto999]

I'm in Canada so I can't view those.

How to access US only content with hotspot shield

I LOVE YOU!!!

 

[PresentedIn4D]

I haven't read the 2nd or 3rd pages, just jumping in.
As much as I hate conspiracy theories, I think the JFK assassination has most potential. I can't justify my answer, though.

 

[Finger]

I haven't read the 2nd or 3rd pages, just jumping in.
As much as I hate conspiracy theories, I think the JFK assassination has most potential. I can't justify my answer, though.

Read the 2nd and 3rd pages.

 

[lonelocust]

I actually find very many conspiracy theories "plausible". Many governments, certainly including my own (U.S.) have done terrible, despicable, and yes CONSPIRING things. To me the thing that makes a conspiracy theory is not being implausible but rather being *specific* without any specific evidence.

"The government is doing something bad and not telling people" is almost certainly true (if terribly nebulous), and is definitely true at given periods of time. Governments have done bad stuff before, and I find that to be reasonable evidence that they will do bad stuff again. It's the specifying of details that makes it cross the line.

If someone without details came up with "The government is sterilizing minorities and women who get abortions against their consent" decades ago, it might have been a "conspiracy theory", yet it was true. "Telephone companies are giving the government wiretaps without proper warrants" a few years ago without evidence for that would also be a conspiracy theory but true.

Now, I can say "Doctors are violating medical privacy laws and reporting specifics about individuals and their healthcare use to the government." I have no reason to think that. It's not really implausible or more beyond the pale than things that have really happened, but if I'm convinced of it with no evidence, I'm being a conspiracy theorist.

Now there are things that cross the line into implausibility like that all world leaders are reptilian aliens, or the U.S. government is preparing to oppress Christians, or Haiti was a setup to boost Barack Obama's approval ratings; and there are things that cross the line into impossibility because the science is wrong like many things said by the 9/11 truthers, but I think that plausibility isn't terribly relevant because you can come up with so many things that are plausible but unsupported.

 

[Lallapalalable]

They tried to pin the blame in some way on Saddam Hussein and his regime in Iraq, the war they really wanted to fight.

I will agree with you that Bush did WANT Iraq, and he used 9/11 to garner support. However, I dont believe that it was an unjust war. Yes, the methods used by both the government and the media were pretty shady, but there was enough reason for Iraq to have occurred (Saddam's genocide of the kurds in the 80's). Bush saw his father's campaign was a failure, and wanted to finish the job himself, but then 9/11 happened and the public would have no part in dealing with his agenda when war was declared upon us from someone else. Perhaps, if 9/11 didnt occur, we would have gotten in Iraq anyway, because it was pretty much unpopular because it was a second war, and then lost most of its support when the lying was realised.

Aside from that, I am in agreeance with you on the whole 'unsaid' story, and on how things like this can generate a lot of paranoia and elaborate apologistic rhetoric among stupid people.

 

[Niocan]

Here's an interesting conspiracy I don't think many have heard about, but from it stems everything else:
We're infinite spiritual beings having a human experience; As such we're capable of anything you can think of, including subjecting ourselves to total amnesia about our own nature.. Why would we do this? To learn how to Love our Self and our Other Selves, as we live in a singularity and are of One Mind. The conspiring part here is that there are two factions or types of energetic feedback in play: Service to Self, and Service to Others; The proverbial 'Them', are those who know all this and choose to use others for their own gains (Service to Self).

The sea we're apparently forced to swim through is their design of injecting fear or segregation into every intra and inter-personal experience possible; To distract us from Love/Connectivity.

 

[Finger]

I don't think this is the philosophy section.

 

[Grimstad]

And yet again,

Once someone has married themselves to a stupid belief, they will cling so hard to it that their brains quit working, and they refuse to even consider evidence. Evidence to them sometimes even turns into proof of the conspiracy.

This is NOT a computer recreation.
The actual shot takes place at about 1:43.

 

[Niocan]

I don't think this is the philosophy section.

Replace "The proverbial 'them'" with "Occult self-worshiping illuminati' and "the sea we swim through" with "Institutions propagated by various families" and I think you might see where I was heading with that

 

[michalchik]

There are plenty of conspiracies I believe in for instance:

In 1972, the President of the United States, paranoid to the extreme and willing to break the law to sabotage an ever growing list of enemies, assembled a team of like-minded zealots to break into the opposition party headquarters in the Watergate Hotel to steal documents. These same people were responsible for phone tapping journalists and breaking into the office of a psychiatrist of an opponent. Anything for the President. The break-in was botched leading to a massive cover-up that was eventually exposed by the discovery of taped conversations in the White House, which led to the downfall of the President and jail time for several members of his staff.

In 2001 a group of religiously indoctrinated suicide soldiers infiltrated the United States under assumed identities, creating false lives, all funded by a shadowy billioniare Saudi, with connections to a massive fascistic theocratic underworld. These men trained diligently to hijack, and crash planes into stragetic targets. Each infiltrated Logan Airport seperately and boarded planes, coordinating their attacks perfectly to strike economic and military installations of their enemy, the United States. Their attacks destroyed the World Trade Center, a portion of the Pentagon and killed well over 3,000 people, a massive successful strike against the world's most militarily powerful country using nothing but fanaticism, planning and box cutters.

The problem is, none of these Conspiracies are theories. There's overwhelming evidence for them. There's no naive speculation, no massive network of people paid hush money to cover up the truth. That's the difference between a real conspiracy and a conspiracy theory, a chain of well documented evidence.

You have to be careful not to assume that all or even most conspiracies have been discovered. I agree that those are examples of more typical conspiracies, but hear the Johnson tapes that came out recently. He says he knew Richard Nixon was negotiating with Vietnam to extend the war to ruin Johnsons peace proposal. The republicanm minority leader agreed with him. That is high treason by a presidential candidate.

It is only a fluke that the call was recorded and came out 40 years after the fact.

Then there is selling hundreds of million of dollars worth of weapons to Iran so they would free hostages and using that money to fund an illegal war. Wars are not small things, but that was Iran contra. That was when high intelligence operatives in the US admitted that plausible deniability was established SOP. They weren't hiding the truth from out enemies they had a standard procedure for hiding it from the congress and the US electorate.

 

[PsycoDad]

Totally unrelated i like to present my own plausible CT:
Of course i can give no evidence other than my imagination!

Setting: the mid 80s

Participants : the helm of Kinetics Asset Management, Inc. , The Vanguard Group or any suspicious financial gigant

Consequence: dominating stake in global currency trade, main initiator of the carry trade USD-JPY

A special software was written that enbabled intermediators controlling LSE& NYSE to gain acces to biders&buyers pricestargets hence creating incentive for the intermediator to scalp around making millions of bucks as "it is a risky market" to invest in.
In order to hide the exess profit and to evade taxes this special interest group utilized off shore money laundering centers (also favorited by Black market weapons traders and drug trafficers) like Gurnsey or the Kaiman Isles labeling them Financial Advisory and Investment centers. Confidentiality is of course guaranteed so that it becomes impossible for any outsider to follow the trail.
Ammassing enought money this group could virtually create a new market. One that trades currencies. Then the game really started.

At least not too far fetched considering bozo shapeshifting moondiggers, eh?

 

[PsycoDad]

Well actually i,´ve found a way more real world example of a successfull conspiracy... :idea:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120027155742887331.html?mod=hpp_u

Real world dudes, the real world.
Profit reaped : several billions

You now want me to think it,´s chance? Coincidence? Hmm.

Any bashing?

 

[bobhopeston]

Sounds like a lot of you would have supported the world being flat and opposed Galileo.