Comment by mikeyouse | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mikeyouse | Hacker News Reader

    Admit it, Michael Hastings' Death is Weird and Scary

No it isn't.

Car engines separate from crashed vehicles fairly regularly. [1]

Car fires are not uncommon. There were 306,800 vehicle fires per year from 2002 - 2005. Of these, almost 10,000 were the result of a collision, and the collision-started fires are responsible for almost 60% of the deaths from vehicle fire. Also, young males are the most likely to have vehicle fires. [2]

While Hastings was a good journalist, he also had previously crashed a car while drunk, he had admitted to a drinking / addiction problem, and he had admitted that he had smoked crack cocaine.

A person with admitted drinking / drug problems was driving his Mercedes at a high rate of speed in Hollywood at 4am, and people are wondering if his accident was a CIA hit? Save it for Alex Jones.

[1] - https://www.google.com/search?q=car+crash+%22engine+ejected%...

[2] - http://www.nfpa.org/assets/files/pdf/research/vehiclefires08...

Readers of this thread should be made aware that there is an actual article following that headline. Here's some of it:

Just for the record, I am not advancing a theory here. I noticed a lot of people who I don’t consider knee-jerk conspiracists were made particularly uncomfortable by Hastings death, especially when details of the accident emerged. Predictably, there was the customarily strong push to belittle these suspicions with talk of tinfoil hats and conspiracy theories and nutjobs.

Though I don’t generally embrace most conspiracy theories, I also don’t find knee-jerk anti-conspiracism any more thoughtful or satisfying if it isn’t predicated on something weightier than the assumed essential decency of the state and its agents, or presumed knowingness about how conspiracies work or don’t. This has always struck me as a form of exceptionalism that ignores both our own domestic history and this country’s foreign policy now and in the past.

I don’t think reflexive, a-historic, exceptionalist defenses of the state are something that radicals should countenance without grounds, particularly when these defenses aim to belittle and stigmatize people who are more suspicious. To me it is far more realistic to credit the state with limitless ruthlessness in maintaining control — even with flawed theories — than to keep insisting that everything wrong is ‘right out in the open.’

I posted this in part as resistance against the silencing aspect of anti-conspiracism and also on the assumption that people are more likely to draw more correct conclusions about the incident if they have the opportunity to discuss it.

I posted this in part as resistance against the silencing aspect of anti-conspiracism

There is less resistance today than at any point in human history. Post a Youtube video with some cleverly cut news stories and you can have everything from the imminent collapse of the United States to the silencing of journalists by the CIA.

We need more skepticism about these conspiracy theories because there's more ways to propagate them than ever.

Reflexive skepticism just limits our ability to think. We don't need more of it. We need intelligent people to debunk conspiracy theories, not just say 'that smells like a conspiracy theory'.

Sure, if it seems like a reasonable conspiracy theory a healthy debunking is acceptable. In a fair number of cases, however, some of these conspiracies are so outlandish that we really should punish the perpetrators via public shaming.

No. The more 'outlandish' a theory is, the more trivial it should be to dismiss with a simple statement. Bullying is never called for.

At best, he's engaging in the typical "tell both sides" fallacy where sanity and insanity are given equal footing. At worst, he's engaging in disingenuous "I'm not saying this is true, but here are a bunch of very suggestive, selective facts".

Start with the crazy headline. Then read the first paragraph, where he says it "looks weird". Then read the second paragraph where he uncritically accepts eyewitness testimony that "It sounded like a bomb went off" to mean there was an actual literal explosion. You have to get pretty far down before he mentions anything non-crazy.

This is like an article about the Apollo program titled "Admit it, the moon landing is weird" that says, "The lack of stars in the supposed photographs from the moon's surface is telling. A writer from a photography site addresses this and says that the stars would be very clear on the moon's surface, due to the lack of an atmosphere. Furthermore, radiation from the Van Allen belts would have killed the astronauts before they arrived. However, a commenter who claims to have been involved in the space program doesn't agree that these are problems."

Sounds like the guy was probably driving drunk and way too fast and got himself killed in a sadly routine way. If the conspiracy theorists have any merit, then they need to present something more compelling than the mundane explanation. Nothing in this article comes even close. By presenting the crazy as if it were just "both sides", then saying "I am not advancing a theory", he's being ridiculous.

If the author thinks 'the assumed essential decency of the state and its agents' is the reason people are against conspiracies, he's got no understanding of the issue at all.

Some of us object to conspiracy-mongering because we know people are only human, and have a limited capacity for outrage and action - there's only so much we can do beyond taking care of our families. At the same time, we know that plenty of objectionable things that deserve our attention are happening every day - things that are known and acknowledged to be happening, things that may be perfectly legal and constitutional but are nonetheless repugnant.

When the public's attention is drawn to an entertaining and sexy conspiracy theory, something that might have happened but very very probably didn't, the public's attention is no longer focused on the absolutely-100%-objectionable things taking place every day. That's why conspiracy-mongering is a net loss for society, and why I'll happily crack tinfoil hat jokes at the author's expense - it's not because I think the government's a big group of lovable folks, it's because all that time we're collectively spending writing the script for a future episode of Ancient Aliens could be so much better spent.

Several days after a car accident just happens to incinerate a controversial journalist, it's extremely unfair to label questions about potentially suspicious circumstances as a "conspiracy theory." Suggesting that it's possible Hastings was murdered is not "conspiracy-mongering."

The author is likely right that people who assume the essential decency of the state and its agents are likely to prematurely dismiss such questions and falsely label them conspiracy-mongering when they are not.

When the public's attention is drawn to an entertaining and sexy conspiracy theory, something that might have happened but very very probably didn't, the public's attention is no longer focused on the absolutely-100%-objectionable things taking place every day. That's why conspiracy-mongering is a net loss for society, and why I'll happily crack tinfoil hat jokes at the author's expense - it's not because I think the government's a big group of lovable folks, it's because all that time we're collectively spending writing the script for a future episode of Ancient Aliens could be so much better spent.

Meanwhile, while you are busy cracking tinfoil-hat jokes, your attention is no longer focused on the "absolutely-100%-objectionable things" taking place every day...

It's true there is a cottage industry of conspiracy mongering with minimal basis in reality that serves essentially as entertainment for its consumers. It's irrational and counter-productive. But there is a much larger and more influential industry that makes money selling indignation, contempt, and outrage; none of which do anything to address real problems.

Given that the "anti-conspiracy" here is predicated on statistics and not an assumpion of beneficence by the state, I really wish the author would have taken his own advice.

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