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Comment by ceilingcorner | Hacker News Reader

They would have you believe that the United States Government perpetrated a gigantic fraud on its citizenry.

Well, it certainly wouldn’t be the first time that happened, by any government. The “Weapons of Mass Destruction” lie could be described using the exact same sentence, and that wasn’t even twenty years ago.

Not defending the moon landing doubters, or conspiracy theorists in general, but: the proper response to these things isn’t to point and laugh. It’s to recognize their origins - a (often justified) loss of trust in institutions and governmental narratives - and work on addressing and fixing them.

Edit: commenters seem to be focusing on a single example, which I presented as an illustrative point for a much deeper and more important phenomenon. You’re missing the forest for the trees.

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The WMD claim had plenty of holes poked through it even at the time. There were constant stories making it clear the inspectors in Iraq were not finding anything, and whistle blowers like Valerie Plame who directly contradicted the White House claims. Today, less than twenty years later, it's no longer a question that there weren't any WMDs. The fraud Armstrong is pointing out isn't really comparable.

That's not the point though. If Aldrin's implicit argument is the US government would never try and defraud its citizen, then any example of such a fraud disproves him.

Do you mean Armstrong? Because I went back and read the argument in the letter, and that's not his argument at all.

His first argument was that it's incredibly unlikely that 400,000 people would have been complicit in such a fraud with none of him breaking ranks.

His second argument was all of the scientific experts from other countries who all agree it actually happened.

He didn't make any claims about how "the US government would never try and defraud its citizen".

Just imagine if Soviet Union could prove US faked the Apollo program, faked claims of landing on the moon.

But i bet Soviet Union was on the conspiracy too xD

puts on additional layer of tinfoil hat

Of course the Soviets were in on it. They didn't publicly humiliate the US because they feared Mad Man Nixon would start WW3 over it. IT ALL MAKES PERFECT SENSE.

The fact that it’s the US government isn’t the important bit; Armstrong isn’t asking you to trust the government, and his entire argument is explicit, no reading between the lines required.

What’s important is the “gigantic fraud involving 400,000 people” part -- clearly establishing that it would have had to be a pretty extreme effort. And rather than just saying “trust us”, he explicitly suggests asking people outside that group, such as scientists from other countries, who would be able to verify whether the moon landing was real.

How many people work in the homeopathy industry?

You can create that kind of group think were many do believe in what they are doing.

How many people are standing up and saying it's a scientific truth? How many actually-qualified scientists are backing it up?

No one outside of the people shilling those oils, and the fools buying them, think they're real.

The fact that you can point to it as an example implies that most people know it's hokum.

It all depends how much you dilute them in water i guess :p

And I completely agree with all of that. That doesn't change the fact that "the government wouldn't defraud you" is a horrific argument. And that is one of his points.

I think you need to point to the sentence where he says or even implies that. I can’t see it and neither can the other people responding here.

Three of us (when I last looked) pointed out, independently, that he has two main arguments, and “trust the government” isn’t one of them.

Armstrong's point isn't that the government would never try to defraud its citizens, and I think it's a stretch to mold his argument into that. His point is that it would be impossible to hold over 400,000 people to the same lie, without anyone breaking. Bush's WMD claims had plenty of people contradicting it at the time, and has been completely debunked now, unlike the moon landing that happened 50 years ago.

It was a weak man argument. Armstrong's paragraph was meant to be taken as a whole; but this argument just extracts one sentence and tries to establish a false equivalency with it.. And a scarecrow. Pretty impressive piece of drivel TBH.

No, that kind of is the point. The analogy doesn't work because the US put out all the evidence transparently - it was their conclusion that didn't make sense.

...so it's nothing at all like faking a moon landing.

It’s a single example. The list of governmental frauds is as long as recorded history.

Sure, but in a democracy it’s very difficult to defraud the public, because the government employees doing the defrauding are the public. At any given time, large swathes of those employees are politically opposed to whoever is in power. That’s why the WMD fiasco is so instructional. It failed immediately, for precisely the reasons we would expect any such fraud against the population to fail, and for precisely the reasons we would expect faked moon landings to be rapidly exposed.

> That’s why the WMD fiasco is so instructional. It failed immediately

Maybe we have a different understanding of "failed" or "immediately", but it worked well enough to get the media on board to build a case for war and carry it for long enough until the actual war started. It was solid enough that even all the doubt coming from NATO partners (and the flat out refusal to be part of it with Chirac's utterance that "France is not a pacifist country" and it's not about war itself but that war and those reasons in particular that they wouldn't be a part of it) did not stop the war. So, to me at least, it didn't fail at all, it succeeded.

It succeeded at getting us into a war, but did not succeed at silencing and neutralising criticism and counter evidence. The equivalent would be if the Apollo program was riven by controversy, doubt and criticism from the start, but nevertheless went ahead and rockets were launched but the fakery was ultimately conclusively exposed in the early 1970s, with all the astronauts coming clean and admitting to it.

There was a considerable body of evidence against the WMD story right from the start. Senior CIA personnel were crying foul at how their intelligence was being manipulated for political ends from an early stage, it's just that evidence wasn't enough to stop the war.

Nothing remotely like that ever happened with the Apollo program. There has never been any substantial evidence or testimony against it from within government or NASA, or as Neil pointed out from any foreign specialists or experts, even the Russians. Conversely the WMD story was being challenged internationally from it's conception, as you pointed out yourself.

In terms of challenges, counter evidence and controversy at the time the two cases could not possibly be more starkly utterly different, and that's why they are useful comparisons because the WMD thing shows clearly how government deceptions actually work out.

I would argue that government lies, especially ones that happen on a scale like that in the US, are not at all why we have conspiracy theorists. I think there's a more underlying human need to believe that there is something behind "it all", and when that is combined with a lack of education, political awareness, or just stubborness, you get people who will believe almost anything. That, and occasionally mental illness, is why you get people who will believe in lizard people who run the world, flat earths, and so on, not because of singular examples of wide scale government fraud.

> not because of singular examples of wide scale government fraud

I agree, but I do believe it's mostly because of many small scale lies. If there was only one example of government lies in history, but it was a big one, I don't think we'd see the same level of conspiracy theory acceptance.

The fact that there is a constant stream of lies of all shapes and sizes from the government, the media, companies etc is what contributes to it the most. Once you make people lose their trust in those institutions, they will pay more attention to anyone presenting "alternative" explanations ("this explains that thing as well, but it's not peddled by the liars, so maybe it's true"). If those explanations then also line up with their world view, it's hard to convince them otherwise.

I see that in a friend who still reads the news. He no longer trusts anything he reads, so it's a constant state of "they are probably lying, but why are they lying about this" and he's more susceptible to conspiratorial theories imho. He's not "there" yet, because he'll also research those theories and often come back to me and say "yeah that was bullshit" and share what he found, but the threshold for looking into and considering it an actual possibility is much lower.

Again, you are conflating frauds and have't actually refuted the point in question: did we land on the moon or not?

I was making a meta point about institutions and conspiracy theories, not commenting on one in particular. I specifically said this in my initial comment.

Wasn't the wmd not a fraud? It was just overselling a truth. IIRC the claim was that Saddam Hussein had ceased reporting the location of stockpiles of nuclear material that the UN used to keep track of. The sin of the bush administration was that they sold it to the public that this was a national security threat even though they knew it was very lightly enriched and counted on the public not knowing or caring (remember the Chapelle skit about yellowcake). The yellow cake was subsequently located in exactly the location where the un thought it was (Hussein hadn't bothered moving it) and it was likely that he was refusing to let UN inspectors in a misguided attempt to bluff the US into not invading due to deterrence?

You are mostly correct, but the bluff wasn't really directed at the US. The bluff was meant for Iran, mostly, and Israel, possibly.

They not only sold lie to the US they sold it to the world.

Colin Powell stood up at the UN to present the world his Power Point of lies:

https://theintercept.com/2018/02/06/lie-after-lie-what-colin...

I guess the question could hinge on if yellowcake is truly wmd or not, but regardless the administration openly claimed it was, and that's what they based their argument on, and iirc that yellowcake was found.

Don't let a few facts get in the way of that good story:

The yellowcake removed from Iraq in 2008 was material that had long since been identified, documented, and stored in sealed containers under the supervision of U.N. inspectors. It was not a “secret” cache that was recently “discovered” by the U.S, nor had the yellowcake been purchased by Iraq in the years immediately preceding the 2003 invasion. The uranium was the remnants of decades-old nuclear reactor projects that had put out of commission many years earlier: One reactor at Al Tuwaitha was bombed by Israel in 1981, and another was bombed and disabled during Operation Desert Storm in 1991. Moreover, the fact that the yellowcake had been in Iraq since before the 1991 Gulf War was plainly stated in the Associated Press article cited in the example above:

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/have-your-yellowcake/

No. Uranium recently shipped from Iraq to Canada was left over from Saddam Hussein’s defunct nuclear weapons program and had been in sealed containers, under guard, since the end of the first Gulf War in 1991. Claims that this material is "vindication" for President Bush’s WMD claims in 2003 are completely false.

https://www.factcheck.org/2008/08/uranium-in-iraq/#:~:text=%...

Did you not read what I wrote?

> IIRC the claim was that Saddam Hussein had ceased reporting the location of stockpiles of nuclear material that the UN used to keep track of.

And

> The sin of the bush administration was that they sold it to the public that this was a national security threat even though they knew it was very lightly enriched and counted on the public not knowing or caring (remember the Chapelle skit about yellowcake).

I'll refresh your memory on the yellowcake skit:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DLuALBnolM&t=1m36s

In any case, the WMD thing was not a coverup/fabrication. It was stretching the truth and stretching reasonable definitions of things, but I think that sort of lie is not in the same category.

Right - but the world looked at the evidence and said "sorry, that's not a strong case." ...and then the US invaded anyway.

So it's really nothing like a fake moon landing.

The US never convince the rest of the world their evidence was strong even though Powell tried his best.

That is why the United Nations Security Council never past a resolution authorizing the Iraq invasion and instead the US had to settle for the "coalition of the willing" as the their base of support.

right... which is why this entire line of the thread is worthless because it's nothing at all like a faked moon landing.

> The 'Weapons of Mass Destruction' lie could be described using the exact same sentence, and that wasn’t even twenty years ago.

Expect Hans Blix exposed that lie very shortly those words where uttered:

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/may/23/iraq1

If the moon landing is also a fraud where is the Hans Blix of the moon landing program?

Apollo looks nothing at all like the WMD lie. There is more evidence available today that the Apollo landings happened than there was at the time, such as photos of the landing sites taken by later Lunar probes. Lies generally degrade over time, not strengthen, and the WMD lie has collapsed.

Nobody believes the WMD lie any more. Even the Republicans are now admitting that. Many knew it was a lie back then.

I remember as it was happening getting the impression that nobody believed it, that it was universally understood to be a straw man placeholder for the real reason for the Iraq invasion.

Now as for what that was... that's the real mystery as far as I'm concerned. A large number of America's political class of both parties believed invading Iraq was important enough to burn massive amounts of money, trust, and reputation. Why?

The only even marginally plausible speculation I have is that some sizable contingent really believed the catastrophic collapse peak oil scenario that was popular back in the 2000s and that the invasion was rammed through damn-the-torpedoes to get exclusive access to that oil so America could weather the impending apocalypse.

> Now as for what that was... that's the real mystery as far as I'm concerned. A large number of America's political class of both parties believed invading Iraq was important enough to burn massive amounts of money, trust, and reputation. Why?

* 9/11 and the shock/bloodlust that stemmed from it * Powerful lobby groups, like the military-industrial complex and oil companies * the Saudis (local rivals, not fans of Saddam, and old friends of the Bush family) * the Israelis (also local rivals, not fans of Saddam, and capable exerting heavy influence on the W Bush administration) * Probably the Iranians (who bankrolled Ahmed Chalabi and his INC group, also not fans of Saddam)

None of this should be new or surprising -- the interests of most/all of these groups were known at the time.

> Nobody believes the WMD lie any more.

Not many believed it at the time:

https://www.theregister.com/2003/07/03/google_bombed_by_miss...

NOTE: Check the date off that page.

> The “Weapons of Mass Destruction” lie could be described using the exact same sentence, and that wasn’t even twenty years ago.

Yes, and not even twenty years since it happened we know a lot of details. Compare that to Moon landing, where conspiracy theorists can at best switch to another accusation after they've got the first one explained.

> It’s to recognize their origins - a (often justified) loss of trust in institutions and governmental narratives - and work on addressing and fixing them.

People should maintain healthy distrust of institutions and governments - after all, as you say, it's not the first time when such mistrust was justified. Too much distrust is however a problem. Similarly one can hardly expect to solve all origins of conspiracy theorists - some people are just bored and want to believe in unicorns, and even if you'd create a more interesting life to them - a big "if" - they could choose to believe what they want.

History teaches that our understanding of history is lacking, sometimes sorely.

> In the way that scepticism is sometimes applied to issues of public concern, there is a tendency to belittle, to condescend, to ignore the fact that, deluded or not, supporters of superstition and pseudoscience are human beings with real feelings, who, like the sceptics, are trying to figure out how the world works and what our role in it might be. Their motives are in many cases consonant with science. If their culture has not given them all the tools they need to pursue this great quest, let us temper our criticism with kindness. None of us comes fully equipped.

> And yet, the chief deficiency I see in the sceptical movement is in its polarization: Us v. Them - the sense that we have a monopoly on the truth; that those other people who believe in all these stupid doctrines are morons; that if you're sensible, you'll listen to us; and if not, you're beyond redemption. This is unconstructive. It does not get the message across. It condemns the sceptics to permanent minority status; whereas, a compassionate approach that from the beginning acknowledges the human roots of pseudoscience and superstition might be much more widely accepted.

Selected quotes from The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark by Carl Sagan

As other's have mentioned, the lies about WMD where rather quickly dispelled, and doesn't compare to moon landing conspiracy. As far as I understand the WMD fraud was successful insofar that the administration was able to use it as a pretext to go to war, but it was also quickly debunked.

I think you're missing the point that Armstrong tries to make. While he indeed starts with your selective quote, he then goes on to say that it is rather unlikely that the government would get away with a fraud of that scale. If nothing else, then simply because of the amount of people involved in the moon landing, and third parties that then and still to this day are able to confirm that the moon landing actually happened.

My experience is also that people who trust the tales of a conspiracy over a wide array of substantial counter arguments are simply not open to actual counterfacts from others. It's like fake news, the conspiracy supports their believe system, and rational arguments to the contrary simply isn't effective.

Still I agree that conspiracy nuts need to be confronted. Perhaps though, not so much in an attempt to convert the believer as to stop them from spreading the conspiracy to others.

This needs to be weighted though: while the US government had, is, and will be lying on some stuff to its citizenry, it's unlikely that it's constantly lying, and most of the time it's telling the truth.

A massive lie, with no holes nor whistleblowers for decades, is even less likely. This is exactly Armstrong's main point: go and actually do real research and cross-reference

Please keep in mind that Iraq did in fact have WMDs (chemical weapons are WMDs).

The lie was specifically about nuclear weapons and the stockpiles of uranium Iraq supposedly was hiding (they weren't.)

Saying they didn't have WMDs completely wipes out the history of Iraq using tons of chemical weapons against Iranians in the Iran Iraq war.

Oh and didn't the WMD fraud come out internally ? Tell me one NASA or JPL scientist officially on the mission who is claiming that it was fake ?

Stop being contrarian for the sake of it .

As I said, I’m not defending the moon landing doubters. But it seems obvious to me that the recent increase in conspiracy theories is a direct result of unethical institutional and government actions coming to light.

It's actually the result of a natural civilization cycle where falling living standards and increased intra-elite competition and conflict erodes the public trust in its institutions and leads to political unrest. America is now in the thick of it (starting around 1970 and culminating in the last decade), and so trust will remain low and conspiracy theories high for years to come yet (not to mention the riots).

https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/7ahqn/

I think conspiracy theories fill the same void as religion does. It’s for people who want to believe in a higher truth, that someone more powerful is constantly pulling the proverbial strings and the universe isn’t just a chaotic series of random events. And I believe, like religion, that those who love conspiracy theories are less interested in researching those facts themselves because they’ve come to rely on their assumptions for comfort and their peers for unity.

In short, it’s less about the actual conspiracy and more about the individual needing something more in life.

Like flat earth and anti-vax? To me, it seems more obvious that that's the effect of attention and manipulation in media, both "classic" and social.

A suspicious attitude institutions has always existed: from the government down to the grocer, who pushes the scales down while weighing. The more the attention is drawn towards it, the greater the suspicion gets, and I feel that especially divisive attention feeds suspicion. When behavior of an institution, such as the Trump administration, is not beyond reproach, it feeds the attention cycle.

The Flat Earth thing makes no sense to me, but regarding Anti-Vax: again, not defending them, but it’s trivially easy to find examples of governments (worldwide) deceptively giving people medicine which had a negative effect on their health, whether as experimentation, sterilization, or otherwise. The fact that vaccines are scientifically known to be safe is just lost in the noise.

I attribute the rise of conspiracy theories to an overabundance of information; doing the research on each individual topic is just overwhelming to the average person and subsequently a simplistic conspiracy theory has appeal.

My pet theory on the flat Earth is that it's been pushed in order to compile lists of extremely gullible people by scraping social media so that these lists can be used later. For what? Who knows. Targets of scams, marketing, propaganda...

Nah, some AI just figured out it was an easy way to get more clicks on YouTube.

I mention flat earth and anti-vax, because they are conspiracy theories that are not obviously driven by the government's behavior.

I am not too familiar with either, but in my view they are definitely associated with ‘authority’ whether then be mainstream media, government, institutions, etc.

Sure, but where I live, these are still held in high regard, yet anti-vax and flat earth spread here too. I don't think the institutions are the direct drivers of conspiracies.

Perhaps I should have made clearer that it was in particular the word "direct" that I was responding too, not the fact that unethical or shady behavior from a government can trigger long-lasting distrust.

Did it come internally? Didn't it just become obvious once they got there and nothing was there? Apologies, I'm not from the US so I didn't follow that closely

> Stop being contrarian for the sake of it .

That would eliminate the need for this website almost entirely.

Definitely applies to many threads.

No it doesn't.

Haha.

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