Ask a basic question on physics, biology, or engineering and only an actual scientist will pipe up. I blame science fiction novels.
Or, look at controversial topics in other domains of science: AIDS was created as a biological weapon, vaccines cause autism. Fluoridated water is a Communist plot to "deplete the brainpower and sap the strength of a generation of American children." The WTC could not have fallen because of planes crashing into it, and must have been leveled due to planned explosives.
This holds even outside of science. Ask a question on copyright laws and a bunch of people with no formal law training (including me) will chime in - leading to complete ripped movies on YouTube prefixed with the magic phrase "fair use."
Some believe them, others collect them.
The alternative to this is not believing whatever Alex Jones and NaturalNews.com say.
In fact, this false dichotomy is amazingly common among Internet conspiracy theory believers: Unless you fall in lockstep with them, you must believe everything Fox News tells you. No middle ground. (Or, of course, they accuse you of being a COINTELPRO Zionist shill, which is really a more extreme version of the same fallacy.)
> you should avoid putting ridiculous conspiracy theories next to more believable ones
Which theories, out of that list, do you think are believable?
There were obviously no WMDs in Iraq even though it was used by several governments as a reason to go to war, so there are many cases in History where we are blatantly lied to and we might as well recognize that and learn from it.
As for the rest, unless you are sufficiently knowledgeable about a particular subject, just saying "I do not know enough to have an opinion about it" would be more honest than putting every idea in the bag with stinky ones.
Doubts like what? Do you believe foreign government agents killed him? Do you believe domestic government agents killed him? Do you believe he's still alive?
Just saying you have questions doesn't cast doubt on any theories. Evidence casts doubt on theories.
> There were obviously no WMDs in Iraq
This doesn't qualify as a conspiracy theory because the cat was essentially out of the bag from the beginning.
> just saying "I do not know enough to have an opinion about it"
Except I can do research, which conspiracy theory believers seem incapable of.
The Zapruder film clearly shows Kennedy being hit from the front when approaching the grassy knoll. That's the evidence I am talking about. And when the official government story has a single magic bullet making 7 injuries by going in all crazy directions, then I wonder which one is really the conspiracy theory in the end? You are not the only one capable of doing research.
> This doesn't qualify as a conspiracy theory because the cat was essentially out of the bag from the beginning.
Well it was a conspiracy theory that become true, actually. It's just that there were too many people who did not believe the lie and did not want to walk into it, and foreign powers involved who did not want to be trapped in another war. But the US and UK governments did try to fool people with false evidence as long as they could.
> conspiracy theory believers
Classic fallacy. It's not because some believers are morons that all believers are. And the other fallacy is the put all the theories in the same bag no matter how much research is done on them : some are obviously ridiculous, some other deserve more attention. It's too easy to dismiss everything.
No, it doesn't.
http://karws.gso.uri.edu/jfk/issues_and_evidence/zapruder_fi...
> And when the official government story has a single magic bullet making 7 injuries by going in all crazy directions
Another lie:
http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/sbt.htm
> Well it was a conspiracy theory that become true, actually.
You're confusing the issue by bringing up an irrelevant matter. The phrase 'conspiracy theory' has a definite definition in English and it isn't just a theory that involves a conspiracy. It's a theory about a massive conspiracy involving many people over a long span of time. Words (and a noun phrase is a 'word') have meanings based on usage, not logic.
Yeah, the official version make total sense, for sure. Oswald himself said he was a patsy - why is that not considered a possibility ?
>Numerous witnesses saw gunfire coming from behind the fence and heard shots coming from different areas
Eye witnesses are beyond useless at everything. Gunshots echo. No one 'saw' gunfire. Everyone filled in their own blanks.
For example, big aircraft crash at an English airshow. Of the hundreds of people asked what they saw only one remembered correctly. There have also been more scientific studies into this. (eg something about a video of a speeding car, some participants were told there was a barn in the video, there was not. 3 days later when asked about the barn a significantly higher % of people who had been told there was a barn said they saw one.)
Anyway. I have no opinion on the assassination - but if I was trying to make an argument for anything the last thing I would take as true is the statements of witnesses.
The man was a Marine. He was a trained rifleman making a shot that, for him, was close range.
> he would have been firing perfect shots
No. He missed once.
You claim to do research, and to know things, but you get basic facts wrong. This is a common thing to find among conspiracy theorists: Their conspiracies rest on factual inaccuracies.
Only question I'd have about that is what Iraq declared to OPCW in 2009? http://www.opcw.org/news/article/status-of-chemical-demilita...
It says "chemical weapons" and I thought chemical weapons are WMDs...
For most of my life I believed Oswald wasn't the killer. Then I found a web site that was pointing out all the problems with the Oliver Stone film and it completely convinced me that Oswald killed the president and acted completely alone (I'm not going to look for it, but this should be enough info to go on).
There are problems with the official story and their are things that were locked up in the archives. But all those problems come from the Kennedys not anywhere else. The reason was that the Kennedys were trying to hide JFK's numerous medical problems (e.g. his horrible case of gonorrhea that a doctor had been unsuccessfully treating for years). Some of which he had openly lied about during his campaign and that info coming out could have wrecked Robert's political future as well. So the family took steps to limit the effectiveness of the autopsy (it was clear how he died anyway, right?) opening the door for all the crazy conspiracy theories surrounding the assassination.
I saw that elsewhere you mentioned the "back and to the left" thing. This is explained on the site as well. If you watch closely you can see that his wife is holding his suit jacket and his head does jerk forward initially but after hitting resistance (her hand holding his suit) it goes back the other way.
If the US government had come up with credible evidence of WMDs before, and then showed off WMDs that they had found in Iraq, and then it had been shown that these were all fake, then that would demonstrate that governments are good at this stuff and can manage realistic and persuasive conspiracies. As it is, the WMD incident shows that when the US government does try to stage a real faked conspiracy, they fail at it from start to finish.
One could only be sure that understanding a vacuum cleaner is unrelated to understanding the universe in hindsight.
I personally blame self-help literature that borrows scientific terms to construct a fantasy magical world where their readers can actually help themselves by [insert stupid idea here].
And I cringe when someone says something represents a "quantum leap" from something else.
Evolution/creationist crackpots?