“The burden of proof is on the conspiracy theorists. Start accepting that burden.”

The conspiracy theorists, that would be the US government, no?

Then there was the use of torture to extract confessions from the alleged 9/11 masterminds held at “undisclosed locations,” which became the basis for the story of the plot as told by the 9/11 Commission, with one-quarter of its citations leading back to said “testimony.” Curiously, even the 9/11 Commission heads have in the meantime have hedged and backed off from their own acceptance of this form of “scientific method.”

Can you remove the first version and leave the second? Thank you!

In the name of scientific inquiry I hereby call on the NSA, CIA, FBI, Bush administration and subcontractors, allied or front organizations to make available all documents and all members for vigorous public questioning under subpoena on anomalies in the official story of Sept. 11th, specifically with regard to surveillance prior to 9/11 of the alleged hijackers in Germany, Malaysia, the US and elsewhere; all warnings and signs of foreknowledge that the Sept. 11 events would take place; funding of the alleged hijackers and financial transactions relating to possible foreknowledge; behavior of the chain of command and air defense response on the day; wargames and military or other homeland defense and justice exercises planned for the day; omissions and distortions in the statements and official reports presented since; destruction of evidence and obstruction of justice relating to Sept. 11 evidence; use of infiltrators within Islamist jihad groups to encourage and plan attacks; relations since 1989 between the Bin Ladin network and US and allied intelligence agencies; and planning, preparation and intent prior to 9/11 to invade both Afghanistan and Iraq.

Oops, they’re not playing along to provide evidence that might allow falsification of hypothesis. Nothing suspicious in that, is there?

This is not a question of science. It is a matter of probable cause standards having been met for criminal investigation of complicity and orchestration of the Sept. 11th events by actors within or associated with the US state and covert services, and of the failure of investigative bodies and media to address the issues in an honest and substantive way.

In the name of scientific inquiry I hereby call on the NSA, CIA, FBI, Bush administration and subcontractors, allied or front organizations to make available all documents and all members for vigorous public questioning under subpoena on anomalies in the official story of Sept. 11th, specifically with regard to surveillance prior to 9/11 of the alleged hijackers in Germany, Malaysia, the US and elsewhere; all warnings and signs of foreknowledge that the Sept. 11 events would take place; funding of the alleged hijackers and financial transactions relating to possible foreknowledge; behavior of the chain of command and air defense response on the day; wargames and military or other homeland defense and justice exercises planned for the day; omissions and distortions in the statements and official reports presented since; destruction of evidence and obstruction of justice relating to Sept. 11 evidence; use of infiltrators within Islamist jihad groups to encourage and plan attacks; relations since 1989 between the Bin Ladin network and US and allied intelligence agencies; and planning, preparation and intent prior to 9/11 to invade both Afghanistan and Iraq.

Oops, they’re not playing along to provide evidence that might allow falsification of hypothesis. Nothing suspicious in that, is there?

Noone dislikes a true conspiracy theory. That is to say, PROVE your theory. People dislike listening to endless conjectures, which is what most “conspiracy theories” are. There are only 24 hours in the day, and I’d rather my ears not be inundated with idle speculation.

Scientists don’t throw out idle speculation. When they are serious about a theory, they set out to prove it. They either succeed or fail. If they succeed, they publish their data.

Conspiracy theorists do none of this. Their process is:

1) Come up with a theory.

2) Shout this theory out to the world, as frequently and loudly as possible.

3) When the theory is debunked or even when evidence is mounted against it, ignore it. Repeat step 2.

Time is a resource. It takes time to debunk theories. This time consideration should be taken up by the conspiracy theorists themselves, not by those who the conspiracy theorists suppose to be “obligated” to debunk their nonsense.

Just like I don’t have to debunk every scientific theory that hits the road, I don’t have to debunk every conspiracy theory that hits the road. Collect data, do experiments, PROVE your theory and THEN publicize it. Until this happens, conspiracy theorists will continue to get disrespected, as they deserve.

All theories are theories about reality. Why take some martyred position about being a conspiracy theorist? Just understand what you’re doing as exploring political reality itself – the question of whether or not a political event is a conspiracy (a few guys get in a room and map something out, such as Enron) or an organic event brought about by shared interests.

Conspiracy theorists aren’t scientists – they are media self-promoters. They are more like Oprah than Einstein. Get SERIOUS and then the world will start taking you seriously.

The burden of proof is on the conspiracy theorists. Start accepting that burden.

So why am I a truther? Why do I think we do it?

We don’t tolerate lies when those lies:

a) have killed a million people and are threatening to kill millions more

b) are destroying our constitutional rights and democracy

c) allow the terrorists to go on with their terrorising

We know we are right not to tolerate those lies and it is an affront to humanity to leave those lies unchallenged. And that’s the truth in truther.

So rather than trying to rescue “conspiracy theorist” from an almost always inaccurately applied denotation and a hopelessly compromised and conditioned connotation of smelly wacko, why not challenge the debunkers on the undeniably positive terms of skepticism and free thinking, which also happen to more accurately describe the reasonable doubt of the official 9/11 story?

for example, it includes this:
“Conspiracy theory” is not a slur. It is exactly what it describes: A theory that parties are conspiring; whether that be to achieve a certain goal, suppress some information or technology, or keep a certain activity secret, etc. — NRen2k5, 20:32, 16 February 2008 (UTC)

Well, no, it isn’t a slur in its literal meaning. The denotation is not negative in the least. However, it has successfully been made into a slur. I suspect that if you had some control over people and you were in a conspiracy and people started suspecting it, you would want their theory about your activities to be slurred, so you would use your control to promote whatever they call it as theory attributable to nutcases. And what do they call it? They call it a “conspiracy theory.” I think any reasonable person would assume that some people who have control over others sometimes engage in conspiracies. It would be intellectually negligent to assume that such parties would never attempt to slur those who seek to bring such conspiracies to light. We all know that lots of movies, books, and TV shows provide nutcase characters with “conspiracy theories” so that whether or not it is intentional, the term has taken on negative connotations. An encyclopedia that ignores the connotations of terms is a piece of propaganda. Let’s try to protect WP from that.Dscotese (talk) 21:37, 17 February 2008 (UTC)

and here’s another take from the Columbia Journalism Review:
http://www.cjr.org/politics/those_loopy_conspiracy_theorie.php?page=2

Opinions are easily manipulated. This is why many (completely) believe the official story of 9/11. This is why the 9/11 truth movement is framed as “theorists”. We have “theories” about 9/11. We don’t have anything we can “prove”. This is the perception that the MSM wishes to reinforce and caricature.

What about conspiracy facts?

“[Is] it a “conspiracy theory” that not one single person within the FAA, NORAD, FBI, CIA, etc was fired or reprimanded after the events of 9/11? Is it a “conspiracy theory” that those most responsible for preventing the attacks were promoted? It is a “conspiracy theory” that investigations into the 9/11 attacks were blocked by the Bush administration for more than a year, or that evidence was destroyed or is being withheld? National Post, were the 9/11 war games involving hijacked airliners on 9/11 as reported by credible news sources a “conspiracy theory”? Is it also a “conspiracy theory” that NORAD intercepts aircraft hundreds of times a year, but on 9/11 we are told… well actually we were told three contradictory stories by NORAD! So when NORAD tells us three contradictory stories in an attempt to explain why they couldn’t intercept any planes on 9/11, is that a “conspiracy theory” too? Senator Mark Dayton said in testimony during a Senate Governmental Affairs Committee hearing that NORAD officials “lied”.”

If you made a list of things that the MSM virtually never talks about, it would be the facts that:

1. No one was fired or reprimanded and many got promotions following the 9/11 attacks
2. War Game Scenarios that NORAD held on 9/11 involving Hijacked airliners
3. NORAD gave three contradictory timelines for their actions on 9/11. They gave no explanation for why false timelines were given.

I wonder why the MSM will not discuss these issues? I wonder why they call anyone who questions the official story of 9/11 “theorists”, when there are plenty of facts about 9/11 that obviously show that people in the U.S. government are lying and no one is getting ANY significant scrutiny for any of this.

Garnered the following response:

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I think there is a fallacy here that’s clear in the examples chosen at the end. “Nigger” and “queer” were insults, but they were also denotationally synonymous with the persons thus described, i.e., in their basic definition they refer generally to all African-Americans and homosexuals, respectively, two groups that in some grander sense of social theory may be constructed, but both of which can be identified with clarity in a consensus of observers. Thus the persons slapped with these derogatory terms have the (perhaps questionable) freedom to turn them around and force a positive connotation.

Any consensus on what constitutes a “CT,” however, is strictly in the minds of those who are using the term as a weapon. The term is applied selectively to refer only to those who hypothesize a socially unacceptable conspiracy. There are many socially acceptable hypotheses involving conspiracy, in which case the word conspiracy is usually not even used. Those in the US who attribute bad things to the covert and concerted actions of Muslim terrorists, communists or Russians, the “liberal media,” or Europeans afraid of Iranians, to take a few examples, are almost never called conspiracy theorists. The CT anti-brand is reserved for those who see crimes by actors in government, corporations and banks, and the military.

“Conspiracy theory” is also often applied to straight-up sociological observation, class or institutional analysis (Chomsky gets called one by right-wingers all the time), or criticism of reigning mythologies (such as the collusive nature of the two-party system). In practice, even the observation that an announced, overt policy of the US government is criminal can qualify one for the CT label.

In addition, but crucially, the term creates a false dichotomy, as though we are forced into mutually exclusive choices between “conspiracy” and “institution,” or “conspiracy” and social forces, or “conspiracy” and random agglomeration of motives in a chaotic universe, or whatever. Of course all of these elements can operate in a given situation. So whereas turning around “nigger” may have been a liberating experience for an actual black person, accepting the “conspiracy theorist” label freezes the thinking person who has been so branded into a single mode. Thought ends.

I submit that in the ideal case of empirical apprehension of the world, one analyzes sets of facts carefully, trying to take all relevant matters including context and history into account, and should be free to conclude that a given set of facts shows a conspiracy (secret criminal action by a concert of given actors), assuming that conclusion can indeed be made plausible or compelling. That doesn’t make one a conspiracy theorist, or even necessarily a theorist. That makes one an observer, and an analyst of what is observed.

So to sum up, I think the author’s proposal is naive and fatal, a tactic that accepts a term that is both false and variable in definition, and cements the intellectual ghetto position forced on those who refuse to ignore the role of parapolitics and deep politics in shaping events and social realities. To Sheila Casey I would say: You are never going to turn “conspiracy theorist” into something cool, any more than you could do so with the term “moron.” And if you did, you’d have accepted the wrong definition of what you are doing (or should ideally be doing): understanding the world without prior limits on what conclusions you may adopt.

So I’ll take skeptic and free thinker as my labels, thank you.

Even though these abstractions also don’t fit perfectly into the actual geography of ideas, it’s worth nothing they have been claimed by the “debunker” class. In secular matters, skeptic has been perverted to mean a doubter of ideas from below, rather than of those from above. Free thinking has been reduced to that which is already within a given bandwidth of acceptable wisdom. It seems to me far more productive for doubters of the official 9/11 narrative to contest the “debunker” ownership of terms that one can wear proudly (and that may be marginally more accurate), and that can never be completely drowned in negative connotations, rather than to carry the burden of an essentially Orwellian anti-brand.

Tomorrow we can have a discussion about the word patriot.

I admire people who have the courage to speak the truth and news sources such as DV who give them a platform. Good work!

I didn’t believe our govt walks on water — far from it — but I also didn’t believe that they are as evil as they are. To come to terms with the truth about 9/11, or JFK, MLK, or RFK, is to experience loss, shock and grief. Perhaps people get angry at conspiracy theorists because they doubt whether they are strong enough to bear those feelings.

Unfortunately, their denial can only last so long, cause we are sliding rapidly into fascism and soon the truth will be painfuly evident to all.

I think a lot of people need to attempt to conceal the truth about 9/11 (and other things) because they don’t know how to live in a world in which their illusions are shattered.

Regarding 9/11 I have noticed that people just ignore evidence and logical argument and instead revert to meaningless put-downs and name-calling. Examine the evidence, that will be sufficient.

It’s like a form of grief. You know that poor old sweet Aund Esmerelda has died, but you can’t quite take it in.

To many Americans (the rest of the world has much less of a problem with the truth regarding 9/11) regard government, and especially the Presidency as somewhat deified. So the notion that 9/11 was concocted at high levels (PNAC and VP offices) is akin to saying that Jesus can’t walk on water. I prefer to think that the laws of physics apply to everyone, and that they were suspended neither for Jesus nor for 9/11.

Maybe the truth will out, but then there is still the odd fool who thinks Oswald killed Kennedy.