how regular people think:
https://www.metabunk.org/threads/charlie-hebdo-conspiracy-theories-ignore-or-address.5476/
The horrific killing of 12 people at the Paris offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo seems disturbingly straightforward. The magazine has a long history of using satire to critique radical Islam (and many other targets). They have published many cartoons depicting Mohammed, something that has provoked violence before. They had previously been firebombed, and have been the target of threats for many years. Several of those killed were named as being "wanted, dead or alive" by al Qaeda's Inspire magazine (alongside Salman Rushdie). Witnesses to the shooting say the gunmen shouted they were "avenging the honor the prophet".
And yet there is a small but vocal subset of people who consider nearly every major story in the mainstream media to be fake in some way. Every time there is an attack of some kind, a shooting, a bombing, even the events of 9/11, they claim that the story has been manipulated, or that the shootings were not done by who the media says did it, or even that the event was entirely staged, with fake blood and "crisis actors" who play out the roles of shooters and victims in carefully choreographed pretend carnage. This has already started to happened with the Charlie Hebdo shootings, and with an event of such significance and potential for incitement, it is guaranteed to continue and escalate, and become part of the canon of purported "false flag" events...
This guy, the author,
Mick West, seems to be a good faith, although he is the founder of metabunk.org which is a "denialist" web site, in that, as you can infer from the quote above, it denies all major false flag events, and I suppose even suggests that JFK was killed by Lee Harvey Oswald. He wrote 20 thousand posts expressing lies, although he thinks that he wrote 20 thousand posts
exposing lies.
Such denialists do exist and they are not necessarily paid government agents.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denialism
In human behavior, denialism is exhibited by individuals choosing to deny reality as a way to avoid dealing with an uncomfortable truth.[1] Author Paul O'Shea remarks, "[It] is the refusal to accept an empirically verifiable reality. It is an essentially irrational action that withholds validation of a historical experience or event".
How funny. It reminds me of George Orwell's ideas. It's all reversed because the powers that be also control language, media, and education, and even literature (they revise history and revise literature). CIA-controlled Wikipedia's definition is correct in this case, but the term "denialist" won't be applied to those who believe the official government's version. Those 99% of citizens will be defined as the healthy ones accepting reality. Whereas instead they are the real "denialists". And we will be called "conspiracy theorists" or even "denialists" for being able to identify what is true, unaffected by cognitive dissonance.
More quotes from his post (cf. link above):
Over and over the theorists will come up with claims of things they think were suspicious about these events. In the Sandy Hook school schoolings, banal things like the lack of video, or the small stature of the shooter, or the facial expressions of the parents of the victims were offered as "proof" that the shootings never happened. After the Boston Marathon bombings armchair experts opined that there was too much blood, or not enough blood, or the blood was too red, or that people reacted in unexpected ways to having their legs blown off, thus proving that the events were just a charade.
These claims, of course, are specious. Just shoehorned cherry-picked confirmation bias by people who have already decided that everything is fake, and so everything they see is evidence of that fakery. Many of their claims have been examined at length, here and on many other sites, and have been shown to be either straightforward bunk (errors and lies), or meaningless subjective speculation and interpretations.
You see, he seems in good faith. He is not doing character assassination and denying the claims. He sees our evidence and discards it, and discards our interpretation of it. He accuses us of being prejudiced against the truth, just the same that we accuse him of the same mistake. I suspect that if you will show him a video of Obama laughing when he should be crying, he will think that Obama is laughing... in despair. This guy is definitely affected by cognitive dissonance and denial. My father instead, when I bring up important evidence, engages in character assassination. He doesn't look at the evidence but disqualifies the source. To him the only reliable source is television. If he weren't the politician he is, I would say he is an idiot. But I think he is just lying to me, because he doesn't want to admit that he knows about all this, or at least about part of this.
They hide under the excuse of "I'm just asking questions", and claim they are performing a legitimate role of fact-checking the mainstream media - something, they say, which you could not possibly object to. This excuse has the ring of truth about it, as fact-checking is indeed an honorable pursuit and errors in the media should be exposed and corrected. But that's not what they are doing.
They are finding ordinary and expected inconsistencies in the reporting of chaotic events. They are offering their own subjective interpretations of events as alternative evidence. They latch on to the most trivial of coincidences (with their mantra of "there are no coincidences") as evidence of a conspiracy. Two women with the same haircut is evidence that they are the same woman, and hence an actor, and hence everything is fake. It's self-reinforcing confirmation bias taken to an extreme. It does not seem worthy of response.
Ah ah... I think this guy is really in full-fledged denial. Or plain stupidity. I mean, I always thought there were two groups: 1) people who look at the evidence and realize these are false flag events, and then 2) there are the others, who won't look at the evidence, and will keep believing the official lie. But it's rare to find someone who investigates things this much and still believes the lie. I mean this guy investigated every single false flag event and discarded all the huge evidence every single time. He's either lying to all of us or he is blinded by patriotism.
An interesting study to do would be to poll 100 random people from this forum and 100 random "conspiracy theorists", and then test their IQs. I think we'd find out that the conspiracy theorists have above 130 and these guys have below 100.
Ah ah, check this out:
...And yet here on Metabunk we've taken them on, and debunked many of their claims. We have occasionally been criticized for doing this, as the claims are so outlandish, denying that people died, that they are deeply offensive to the relatives of the victims.
Yep, deeply offensive to the relatives of the victims, such as Robbie Parker, the day after his daughter was killed:
or James Foley's siblings, after their brother was beheaded:
Hilarious at minute 14!!! I don't know what Mick West or my father will say when shown this clip. They can't see it's not from TV, because it on TV. They will probably get angry and say that maybe those were actors but the guy was really decapitated. But most likely they will either refuse to sit down with me and watch the clip, or will fall asleep within a few minutes, just like my father did when I showed him Loose Change. After 15 minutes he was sleeping.
...And yet here on Metabunk we've taken them on, and debunked many of their claims. We have occasionally been criticized for doing this, as the claims are so outlandish, denying that people died, that they are deeply offensive to the relatives of the victims. This was particularly the case for Sandy Hook, where the conspiracy theorists have gone as far as harassing the parents of the children who were murdered. Should we even acknowledge these people? In debunking them are we actually giving them more attention than they would get if we just ignored them?
Right, let us not acknowledge these "conspiracy theorists" and especially let us not look at the evidence.
It's hard to draw the line. Some things are clearly way over it - suggestions than no planes hit the World Trade Center, or that what people saw were giant holograms, or that Sandy Hook School had actually been closed for years. Indeed you might think that the entire notion of events like Sandy Hook being fake, or the Boston Marathon Bombings being fake, is over the line - obviously ludicrous and offensive.
(helicopter camera shows explosion without plane, obviously removed from all mainstream media)
"Some things are clearly way over it - suggestions than no planes hit the World Trade Center"... yep, outlandish statements, such as claiming the earth is not flat.
It's hard to draw the line. Some things are clearly way over it - suggestions than no planes hit the World Trade Center, or that what people saw were giant holograms, or that Sandy Hook School had actually been closed for years. Indeed you might think that the entire notion of events like Sandy Hook being fake, or the Boston Marathon Bombings being fake, is over the line - obviously ludicrous and offensive.
And yet some people believe it.
Now we are obviously not going to change the minds of the David Ickes or James Tracys of the world. These are people who's very identity, their entire reason for the way they live their lives, is tied up in their beliefs of a fake media and all major events being fake.
Nor are we going to change the minds of the "true believer", the conspiracy theorist who has been thinking like this for decades, the type of person for whom evidence that should contradict his beliefs will bizarrely reinforce them. Where pointing out the errors in their evidence is simply more evidence that they are correct. They do come around, but very rarely.
Funny how he sounds to me, like he's describing the way I see
him.
But then there are vastly more people on the fringes of conspiracy theory than there are deeply buried inside it. In particular there are many young people - people who are very impressionable, with flexible minds that soak up new ideas quickly, but who are also able to drop those ideas when they are shown they are incorrect. It is this group that is the target audience for the majority of the debunking on Metabunk.
What on earth are they going to debunk regarding the videos I posted?
They have to help the young minds who are "flexible"... what a disaster. How widespread stupidity actually is.
Conspiracy thinking, conspiracy ideation, is a black hole, a dark rabbit hole that once you get deep enough into, it is very hard to escape from. When I debunk I hope I'm preventing people from falling into that hole, or if they are already in it I hope to keep them close enough to the light so they will eventually climb out themselves.
oh god, I almost feel sorry for him, he is so kind... he wants to cure us.
And that's why I address ludicrous and offensive theories like the Sandy Hook shootings being fake. It's not in the hope of changing the minds of the people who come up with the ridiculous claims of evidence - they are generally deep down the rabbit hole. It's to help people out who are not in too deep, and to help people not fall into in the first place - particularly the young.
And so yes, I think we should address the inevitable Charlie Hebdo conspiracy theories. But only if it seems like they have some traction, if they might actually be influencing people. We don't need to respond to every single labored YouTube video of "why was this person stood there" type thing - especially if nobody is watching those videos. But if people are being taken in by claims, if their young or overly-open minds are being darkened by bunk, then I think debunking has a place here.
Wow, this is like in 1984, it's just... maybe only 40 years late. Maybe Mick will have converted everyone by 2024.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministry_of_Truth
In George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, the Ministry of Truth is Oceania's propaganda ministry. It is one of the four ministries that govern the nation. As with the other Ministries in the novel, the Ministry of Truth is a misnomer and in reality serves the opposite of its purported namesake: it is responsible for any necessary falsification of historical events. In another sense, and in keeping with the concept of doublethink, the ministry is aptly named, in that it creates/manufactures "truth" in the Newspeak sense of the word. The book describes a willful fooling of posterity using doctored historical archives to show a government-approved version of events.
Remember Bush? "We must speak the truth about terror. Let us never tolerate outrageous conspiracy theories..."
