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Comment by koolkat | Hacker News Reader

I don't think being a "conspiracy theorist" is delusonal at all if there are overwhelming facts supportig the theory. When did it become crazy to "...have an explanatory proposition that accuses two or more persons, a group, or an organization of having caused or covered up, through secret planning and deliberate action, an illegal or harmful event or situation." Watergate, Iran-contra, prism, the cia drug trafficking during Vietnam, Cia torture programs. All of them can be defined as conspiracies yet they are true. Something is not false just for being a conspiracy. Almost everything secret agencies do can be defined as a conspiracy.

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I don't think "conspiracy theorist" is really accurate term to define what is going on in most of these cases.

The vast majority of "conspiracies" are more like Underpants Gnomes business models. There's no explantory proposition anywhere. There's no overwhelming theory - put ten truthers in a room and you'll get ten wildly different theories (if you get a theory at all), and no overwhelming facts.

Watergate didn't require any theory - people connected with the Nixon administration were caught red-handed breaking and entering. It's obvious why they might do what they did and to ask who knew what/when. It was obvious people had a motive for covering up a criminal action. It was just a matter of documenting it.

When Iran leaked the Iran-hostage story via a Lebanese newspaper, nobody had a conspiracy theory before that. There was no "why would Reagan do that?" - the motivation was obvious and it was in print. When the -Contra side came out, no one had a conspiracy theory about a connection there. It was more investigation/leaks and a total surprise.

So I don't see where Conspiracy Theories really equate to uncovering Criminal Conspiracies. They seem to be more exclusive than related to each other.

Conspiracy theories are bizare explanations of events that don't fit reality.

Thus, Iran-Contra is not a conspiracy theory because it's true, even though it is a conspiracy.

That's a ridiculously narrow and exclusionary definition of conspiracy theories, one that's set up to only include those theories that are clearly delusional.

If you asked a average person three years ago whether they thought that all their calls were being recorded and that the NSA was hacking into companies and stealing data you would have been called delusional and your explanation would have been bizarre and unreal. Yet here we are today with clear evidence that all these things are being done with no repercussions for the perpetrators.

Ie, it's not because you're paranoid that they're not after you.

> If you asked a average person three years ago whether they thought that all their calls were being recorded and that the NSA was hacking into companies and stealing data you would have been called delusional

A person can still be operating under a conspiracy theory and talk about pervasive government surveillance. Just because it's true doesn't make it not a conspiracy theory.

But also, for your example, anyone paying attention had been saying, pretty loudly, that governments were surveiling their populations. See, for example, the EU parliament report into ECHELON. We know about ECHELON in the early 1990s. Thus, if someone had said "They've done it before, look at ECHELON, they're probably doing it now" -- that's a reasonable bit of evidence and a reasonable conclusion. If someone says "I hear clicks on my phone line and so the government is spying on me" that's a conspiracy theory (because the evidence is bogus) even though it's true (governments do spy on citizens).

I agree.

It's also a typical trait of conspiracy theories (in the negative sense) that they pretend to have figured out more than they possibly could have.

I mean they don't just sell you suspicions (that might even be reasonable), but overdetailed debunkings which are clearly fabricated.

As if they believed that the winner is whoever provides more details, wherever these would come from.

If Iran-Contra was not discovered you'd think it is a 'bizare explanation' and a conspiracy theory. And it was only by a chance that it was discovered. This is even more evident in the case of Watergate.

It just graduated from conspiracy theory to conspiracy fact.

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