the ascent of 'counterknowledge' - HibeesBounce.com

**egb_hibs** · 12-01-08, 21:11

i think this fella has a point.

it's not surprising either. post modernism (and it's catastrophic destruction of the academy), deracination, and contemporary ennui, make fertile soil for it.

"Outright fiction is being peddled as historical and scientific fact, warns Damian Thompson in an extract from his provocative new book

George Bush planned the September 11 attacks. The MMR injection triggers autism in children. The ancient Greeks stole their ideas from Africa. "Creation science" disproves evolution. Homeopathy can defeat the Aids virus.

The fantasy that the US government was behind the 9/11 attacks has wormed its way into the mainstream

Do any of these theories sound familiar? Has someone bored you rigid at a dinner party by unveiling one of these "secrets"? If so, it is hardly surprising. In recent years, thousands of bizarre conjectures have been endorsed by leading publishers, taught in universities, plugged in newspapers, quoted by politicians and circulated in cyberspace.

This is counterknowledge: misinformation packaged to look like fact. We are facing a pandemic of credulous thinking. Ideas that once flourished only on the fringes are now taken seriously by educated people in the West, and are wreaking havoc in the developing world.

We live in an age in which the techniques for evaluating the truth of claims about science and history are more reliable than ever before. One of the legacies of the Enlightenment is a methodology based on painstaking measurement of the material world.

That legacy is now threatened. And one of the reasons for this, paradoxically, is that science has given us almost unlimited access to fake information.
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Most of us have friends who are susceptible to conspiracy theories. You may know someone who thinks the Churches are suppressing the truth that Jesus and Mary Magdalene sired a dynasty of Merovingian kings; someone else who thinks Aids was cooked up in a CIA laboratory; someone else again who thinks MI5 killed Diana, Princess of Wales. Perhaps you know one person who believes all three.

Or do you half-believe one of these ideas yourself? We may assume that we are immune to conspiracy theories. In reality, we are more vulnerable than at any time for decades.

I recently met a Lib Dem-voting schoolteacher who voiced his "doubts" about September 11. First, he grabbed our attention with a plausible-sounding observation: "Look at the way the towers collapsed vertically. Jet fuel wouldn't generate enough to heat to melt steel. Only controlled explosions can do that." The rest of the party, not being structural engineers (for whom there is nothing mysterious about the collapse of the towers) pricked up their ears. "You're right," they said. "It did seem strange…"

Admittedly, no major newspaper or TV station has endorsed a September 11 conspiracy theory. But more than 100 million people have watched a 90-minute documentary, Loose Change, directed by three young New Yorkers who assembled the first cut on a laptop. The result is super-slick: computer-generated planes glide menacingly towards their targets, to the accompaniment of a funky soundtrack; buildings collapse in a comic theatrical sequence. This is one cool movie – and a masterpiece of counterknowledge.

The makers suggest that a missile, not an airliner, hit the Pentagon; that the occupants of Flight 93 were safely evacuated at Cleveland Hopkins airport; that the panicked calls made by the passengers were faked using voice-morphing technology.

The directors make basic errors and play outrageous tricks: quotes from experts and official documents are cherry-picked and truncated. Airline parts are misidentified and pictures cropped in a way that leaves out inconvenient rubble and wreckage. "Expert testimony" is lifted from the American Free Press, a hysterical news service with strong links to the far Right.

Yet the makers of Loose Change are pushing at an open door. More than a third of Americans suspect that federal officials assisted in the September 11 attacks or took no action to stop them. September 11 conspiracy theories have gained such a following in France that even a member of President Sarkozy's government has suggested that President Bush might have planned the attacks. Christine Boutin, the housing minister, when asked in an interview whether she thought Bush might have been behind the attacks, said: "I think it is possible."

Another who believes this is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran, who reckons that September 11 could not have been executed "without co-ordination with [US] intelligence and security services". Ahmadinejad is also a well-known Holocaust denier, having referred publicly to "the myth of the Jews' massacre".

In the world of counterknowledge, wild theories are constantly mating and mutating. As the editor of Skeptic magazine, Michael Shermer, puts it: "The mistaken belief that a handful of unexplained anomalies can undermine a well-established theory lies at the heart of all conspiratorial thinking, as well as creationism, Holocaust denial and the various crank theories of physics."

more...

Sancho Panza · 13-01-08, 20:40

Sounds interesting, dude. You may like Francis Wheen's book: http://www.amazon.co.uk/How-Mumbo-ju...0256247&sr=8-1 which deals with some similar topics altough not 9/11. Ostensibly it's about the long retreat from reason and post-enlightenment thinking, which seems to be proceeding apace.

Talking of 9/11 conspiracy theories and the tin-foil hat brigade, I recently saw and excellent episode of South Park where it was suggested that the 9/11 conspiracy theory (that 9/11 was perpetrated by the Bush administration) was itself concocted by the Bush administration to convince everyone how omnipotent and effecient it really is!

p.s. any idea how to make a URL appear as a line of text?

**egb_hibs** · 13-01-08, 20:48

Quote:

Originally Posted by Sancho Panza

Sounds interesting, dude. You may like Francis Wheen's book: http://www.amazon.co.uk/How-Mumbo-ju...0256247&sr=8-1 which deals with some similar topics altough not 9/11. Ostensibly it's about the long retreat from reason and post-enlightenment thinking, which seems to be proceeding apace.

Talking of 9/11 conspiracy theories and the tin-foil hat brigade, I recently saw and excellent episode of South Park where it was suggested that the 9/11 conspiracy theory (that 9/11 was perpetrated by the Bush administration) was itself concocted by the Bush administration to convince everyone how omnipotent and effecient it really is!

p.s. any idea how to make a URL appear as a line of text?

do this sancho [xrl=put url here]put text here[/xrl]

change x's to u's obviously. i've done that so you can see it, ie it doesn't get translated as html

**madkink** · 13-01-08, 21:36

the thing is in the 1st few paragraphs he mentions the autism theory, yet this "counter-knowledge" is something that is based on years off observational science, yet not proven by actual science (as yet) so i feel that he was unfair to sight that as an example,

But on general i can see his general points

**egb_hibs** · 13-01-08, 21:48

Quote:

Originally Posted by madkink

the thing is in the 1st few paragraphs he mentions the autism theory, yet this "counter-knowledge" is something that is based on years off observational science, yet not proven by actual science (as yet) so i feel that he was unfair to sight that as an example,

But on general i can see his general points

i'm wary of getting into this one as i've not studied it, and i know that people on this board have autisitic children.

however, i was under the impression that far from being the product of years of observational science, the mmr link was put forward by a single researcher whose acquaintance with scientific rigour was not what it could be, and who was sponsored by companies with an interest in his findings. i may be mistaken, but i'm pretty sure it was a bit of a poor show and has wrought untold misery as well as opening the door for the resurgence of measles.

**madkink** · 13-01-08, 22:06

Quote:

Originally Posted by egb_hibs

i'm wary of getting into this one as i've not studied it, and i know that people on this board have autisitic children.

however, i was under the impression that far from being the product of years of observational science, the mmr link was put forward by a single researcher whose acquaintance with scientific rigour was not what it could be, and who was sponsored by companies with an interest in his findings. i may be mistaken, but i'm pretty sure it was a bit of a poor show and has wrought untold misery as well as opening the door for the resurgence of measles.

Before i put my point i have an autistic brother and sister (my sister is the one that singsm was recently in EEN)

The scientist/researcher who put this forward was acting on years off perents saying that after the MMR triple vaccine there child changed, and i have seen this 1st hand, now at no point has anyone said the the MMR causes autism, but a trigger, and this is what was to be researched, and the researcher never once said it was/could just that it may, and he based this on the observations off the perents,

My brother was a "normal" child up until he had the MMR, now it wasn't an instand change, he had a convultion, was burning up and from that point he changed, this was all after the MMR, now we suspect that the MMR trigered something, weither it reacted with a dorment gene, or an infection or something,

Based on the the maker off the MMR was the one who put the idea forward for the research, to hopefully clear them, and the problem all along with the MMR debate was the the makers of the MMR vaccine has not listened to what was really said,

The MMR does not cause autism, but triggers something dorment in the child already, and that is where the problem lies, and no amount off science and "counterknowledge" can escape that truth

Colr · 13-01-08, 22:15

Quote:

Originally Posted by madkink

Before i put my point i have an autistic brother and sister (my sister is the one that singsm was recently in EEN)

The scientist/researcher who put this forward was acting on years off perents saying that after the MMR triple vaccine there child changed, and i have seen this 1st hand, now at no point has anyone said the the MMR causes autism, but a trigger, and this is what was to be researched, and the researcher never once said it was/could just that it may, and he based this on the observations off the perents,

My brother was a "normal" child up until he had the MMR, now it wasn't an instand change, he had a convultion, was burning up and from that point he changed, this was all after the MMR, now we suspect that the MMR trigered something, weither it reacted with a dorment gene, or an infection or something,

Based on the the maker off the MMR was the one who put the idea forward for the research, to hopefully clear them, and the problem all along with the MMR debate was the the makers of the MMR vaccine has not listened to what was really said,

The MMR does not cause autism, but triggers something dorment in the child already, and that is where the problem lies, and no amount off science and "counterknowledge" can escape that truth

The chap that did the research was part of a team which was not investigating MMR/autism at the time. He took sample from children attending a (birthday) party without their parents consent. If I recall correctly there were only about 8 samples (may be wrong). He was only one member of the team - the rest retracted or didn't support his conclusions. Per review has failed to replicate his findings. He was also being paid by a group of parents who were trying to find a link between MMR and Autism. The Lancet said it regretted publishing his paper.

I know of quite a few kids who have been VERY ill with measles and mumps as a result of not being vaccinated. Folk these days forget how dangerous childhood illnesses can be but its beyond living memory these days so folk are complacent.

**egb_hibs** · 13-01-08, 22:16

Quote:

Originally Posted by madkink

Before i put my point i have an autistic brother and sister (my sister is the one that singsm was recently in EEN)

The scientist/researcher who put this forward was acting on years off perents saying that after the MMR triple vaccine there child changed, and i have seen this 1st hand, now at no point has anyone said the the MMR causes autism, but a trigger, and this is what was to be researched, and the researcher never once said it was/could just that it may, and he based this on the observations off the perents,

My brother was a "normal" child up until he had the MMR, now it wasn't an instand change, he had a convultion, was burning up and from that point he changed, this was all after the MMR, now we suspect that the MMR trigered something, weither it reacted with a dorment gene, or an infection or something,

Based on the the maker off the MMR was the one who put the idea forward for the research, to hopefully clear them, and the problem all along with the MMR debate was the the makers of the MMR vaccine has not listened to what was really said,

The MMR does not cause autism, but triggers something dorment in the child already, and that is where the problem lies, and no amount off science and "counterknowledge" can escape that truth

i'm so very sorry to hear about what happened to your bro and sis. nevertheless this does sound like a firmer conclusion than anything i've read elsewhere.

i have no doubt you've read more about the subject than me, but i was under the distinct impression the link has been increasingly discredited. i've also heard other explanations for the apparent correlation, one being as simple a suggestion as autism starts to manifest around the age when the mmr jag is given.

whatever; it's a terrible thing that seems to be worryingly on the increase. let's hope the scientific community make some serious progress on it before long.

Colr · 13-01-08, 22:19

Quite a good paper, more on the site:-

http://www.cochrane.org/press/MMR_final.pdf

**egb_hibs** · 13-01-08, 22:19

ps this is typical of the reports i have read that led me to believe that the link had been almost totally discounted:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4311613.stm

**egb_hibs** · 13-01-08, 22:21

i would love for there to be an absolutely definitive rebuttal of the mmr thing. it breaks my heart to think what parents must go through, not only coping with autistic children, but blaming themselves for being party to the thing that caused it.

Colr · 13-01-08, 22:21

Autism is a spectrum disorder. There has been a suggestion that there have been increased rates of diagnosis at he milder ends (or even over diagnosis or mis-diagnosis) of late.

I assume that MMR is used in other countries - I wonder of there is a corelation abroad.

**egb_hibs** · 13-01-08, 22:23

Quote:

Originally Posted by Colr

Autism is a spectrum disorder. There has been a suggestion that there have been increased rates of diagnosis at he milder ends (or even over diagnosis or mis-diagnosis) of late.

that's my understanding too. there seems to be all kinds of speculation around the subject. i read recently that they're now linking it to the increase in older fathers and thus - in the way paper's love to neatly package things - there may be a 'male menopause'.

Colr · 13-01-08, 22:26

Quote:

Originally Posted by Colr

Autism is a spectrum disorder. There has been a suggestion that there have been increased rates of diagnosis at he milder ends (or even over diagnosis or mis-diagnosis) of late.

I assume that MMR is used in other countries - I wonder of there is a corelation abroad.

Mid-1960s in the USA apparently.

**Archie** · 13-01-08, 22:46

On a broader theme, I wonder how much of this is due to a breakdown of trust in politicians. It seems strange now, but not all that long ago they were held in reasonable regard. I'm not sure when that started to change - kennedy assassination maybe. These days there is a counter theory for almost everything, no matter how wacky - I mean, take lady di's death. Imagine a pissed driver doing twice the speed limit in an underpass being somehow responsible for a crash!

Colr · 13-01-08, 22:48

Quote:

Originally Posted by Archie

On a broader theme, I wonder how much of this is due to a breakdown of trust in politicians. It seems strange now, but not all that long ago they were held in reasonable regard. I'm not sure when that started to change - kennedy assassination maybe. These days there is a counter theory for almost everything, no matter how wacky - I mean, take lady di's death. Imagine a pissed driver doing twice the speed limit in an underpass being somehow responsible for a crash!

...or the media which gives these kookie ideas a platform for the sake of sensationalism (and the twallies that have no critical functions when they read it).

**wee 162** · 14-01-08, 09:24

My problem is not so much believing conspiracy theories but wanting concrete evidence of anything which is claimed. AFAIC that is the way to go, and it should be what everyone tries to do. Obviously no-one has the time or inclination to do this with everything, but you can treat everything with some suspicion imo.

And just to point out the glaringly obvious, anyone who claimed that Iraq didn't have WMDs before the invasion of Iraq was put into thhe loony category, and their opinion was summarily dismissed out of hand by government and media alike. Which left most of the public completely convinced there was no case to make as well. That's the problem with trusting those who give us our information with anything. People can laugh at conspiracy theorists all they want, but they don't cause the death of hundreds of thousands of people...

Colr · 14-01-08, 10:00

Quote:

Originally Posted by wee 162

My problem is not so much believing conspiracy theories but wanting concrete evidence of anything which is claimed. AFAIC that is the way to go, and it should be what everyone tries to do. Obviously no-one has the time or inclination to do this with everything, but you can treat everything with some suspicion imo.

And just to point out the glaringly obvious, anyone who claimed that Iraq didn't have WMDs before the invasion of Iraq was put into thhe loony category, and their opinion was summarily dismissed out of hand by government and media alike. Which left most of the public completely convinced there was no case to make as well. That's the problem with trusting those who give us our information with anything. People can laugh at conspiracy theorists all they want, but they don't cause the death of hundreds of thousands of people...

Remember the story that did the rounds about Saddam loading all the WMDs onto ships and sending them out to float round the oceans until the Americans had gone?

HenryLB · 14-01-08, 15:00

I think a major problem lies not just with the credulous who indulge these ideas but also with the way that information is disemminated nowadays. Everyone now has such an understanding of the media and how it shapes opinion that its manipulation is second nature to almost every large organisation. Whole departments exist to "spin", not just in politics (where it is most obviously prevalent) but also in corporations, interest groups and state structures.

Think of the police in the wake of the Jean Charles de Menezes shooting. Their PR wonks immediately began a whispering campaign against a wholly innocent victim: he was wearing a bulky jacket, he jumped the barrier and ran to the train, he had a dodgy history. All bollocks, and they knew it, and - which is worse - they must have known it would come out that it was a tissue of lies. But they went ahead and fabricated the information anyway because they knew it would give them the critical breathing space to get the story from page one to page five. A small but rather ill-won victory.

All this creates an atmosphere of distrust, and the more fertile minds naturally leap to the most extraordinary conclusions.

12-01-08, 21:11	#1
egb_hibs Khmer Radge Join Date: Jul 2002 Location: From the Capital Posts: 19,699 Casino cash: £23054 vCash: 10000 My Mood: Thanks: 0 Thanked 5 Times in 5 Posts Rep Power: 28	the ascent of 'counterknowledge' i think this fella has a point. it's not surprising either. post modernism (and it's catastrophic destruction of the academy), deracination, and contemporary ennui, make fertile soil for it. "Outright fiction is being peddled as historical and scientific fact, warns Damian Thompson in an extract from his provocative new book George Bush planned the September 11 attacks. The MMR injection triggers autism in children. The ancient Greeks stole their ideas from Africa. "Creation science" disproves evolution. Homeopathy can defeat the Aids virus. The fantasy that the US government was behind the 9/11 attacks has wormed its way into the mainstream Do any of these theories sound familiar? Has someone bored you rigid at a dinner party by unveiling one of these "secrets"? If so, it is hardly surprising. In recent years, thousands of bizarre conjectures have been endorsed by leading publishers, taught in universities, plugged in newspapers, quoted by politicians and circulated in cyberspace. This is counterknowledge: misinformation packaged to look like fact. We are facing a pandemic of credulous thinking. Ideas that once flourished only on the fringes are now taken seriously by educated people in the West, and are wreaking havoc in the developing world. We live in an age in which the techniques for evaluating the truth of claims about science and history are more reliable than ever before. One of the legacies of the Enlightenment is a methodology based on painstaking measurement of the material world. That legacy is now threatened. And one of the reasons for this, paradoxically, is that science has given us almost unlimited access to fake information. advertisement Most of us have friends who are susceptible to conspiracy theories. You may know someone who thinks the Churches are suppressing the truth that Jesus and Mary Magdalene sired a dynasty of Merovingian kings; someone else who thinks Aids was cooked up in a CIA laboratory; someone else again who thinks MI5 killed Diana, Princess of Wales. Perhaps you know one person who believes all three. Or do you half-believe one of these ideas yourself? We may assume that we are immune to conspiracy theories. In reality, we are more vulnerable than at any time for decades. I recently met a Lib Dem-voting schoolteacher who voiced his "doubts" about September 11. First, he grabbed our attention with a plausible-sounding observation: "Look at the way the towers collapsed vertically. Jet fuel wouldn't generate enough to heat to melt steel. Only controlled explosions can do that." The rest of the party, not being structural engineers (for whom there is nothing mysterious about the collapse of the towers) pricked up their ears. "You're right," they said. "It did seem strange…" Admittedly, no major newspaper or TV station has endorsed a September 11 conspiracy theory. But more than 100 million people have watched a 90-minute documentary, Loose Change, directed by three young New Yorkers who assembled the first cut on a laptop. The result is super-slick: computer-generated planes glide menacingly towards their targets, to the accompaniment of a funky soundtrack; buildings collapse in a comic theatrical sequence. This is one cool movie – and a masterpiece of counterknowledge. The makers suggest that a missile, not an airliner, hit the Pentagon; that the occupants of Flight 93 were safely evacuated at Cleveland Hopkins airport; that the panicked calls made by the passengers were faked using voice-morphing technology. The directors make basic errors and play outrageous tricks: quotes from experts and official documents are cherry-picked and truncated. Airline parts are misidentified and pictures cropped in a way that leaves out inconvenient rubble and wreckage. "Expert testimony" is lifted from the American Free Press, a hysterical news service with strong links to the far Right. Yet the makers of Loose Change are pushing at an open door. More than a third of Americans suspect that federal officials assisted in the September 11 attacks or took no action to stop them. September 11 conspiracy theories have gained such a following in France that even a member of President Sarkozy's government has suggested that President Bush might have planned the attacks. Christine Boutin, the housing minister, when asked in an interview whether she thought Bush might have been behind the attacks, said: "I think it is possible." Another who believes this is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the president of Iran, who reckons that September 11 could not have been executed "without co-ordination with [US] intelligence and security services". Ahmadinejad is also a well-known Holocaust denier, having referred publicly to "the myth of the Jews' massacre". In the world of counterknowledge, wild theories are constantly mating and mutating. As the editor of Skeptic magazine, Michael Shermer, puts it: "The mistaken belief that a handful of unexplained anomalies can undermine a well-established theory lies at the heart of all conspiratorial thinking, as well as creationism, Holocaust denial and the various crank theories of physics." more... __________________ "Twice a year Gordon Brown fills his party's sails with pride. His tornado of facts and figures magics up images of untold national wealth and success." P Toynbee, Guardian, Dec 06

13-01-08, 20:40	#2
Sancho Panza Radge from La Mancha Join Date: Jul 2005 Location: La Mancha Age: 43 Posts: 415 Casino cash: £773 vCash: 10000 Thanks: 0 Thanked 0 Times in 0 Posts Rep Power: 4	Re: the ascent of 'counterknowledge' Sounds interesting, dude. You may like Francis Wheen's book: http://www.amazon.co.uk/How-Mumbo-ju...0256247&sr=8-1 which deals with some similar topics altough not 9/11. Ostensibly it's about the long retreat from reason and post-enlightenment thinking, which seems to be proceeding apace. Talking of 9/11 conspiracy theories and the tin-foil hat brigade, I recently saw and excellent episode of South Park where it was suggested that the 9/11 conspiracy theory (that 9/11 was perpetrated by the Bush administration) was itself concocted by the Bush administration to convince everyone how omnipotent and effecient it really is! p.s. any idea how to make a URL appear as a line of text? __________________ We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time

13-01-08, 21:36	#4
madkink HGV Learner RADGE Join Date: Dec 2005 Location: KELTY Age: 26 Posts: 4,821 Casino cash: £26481 vCash: 17272 My Mood: Thanks: 83 Thanked 197 Times in 107 Posts Rep Power: 16	Re: the ascent of 'counterknowledge' the thing is in the 1st few paragraphs he mentions the autism theory, yet this "counter-knowledge" is something that is based on years off observational science, yet not proven by actual science (as yet) so i feel that he was unfair to sight that as an example, But on general i can see his general points __________________ www.bebo.com/rayd93 www.bebo.com/samanthaemusic WWW.MYSPACE.COM/SAMANTHAEMUSIC My Countdown Is........ Counting down to: HGV DRIVER TRAINING START DATE TIME TO START DRIVER TRAINING - BE CAREFUL - I AM ON THE ROADS AS YOU READ

13-01-08, 22:19	#9
Colr The Radge Doon the Road Join Date: Jul 2002 Location: London Age: 41 Posts: 20,440 Casino cash: £37763 vCash: 10000 Thanks: 0 Thanked 0 Times in 0 Posts Rep Power: 37	Re: the ascent of 'counterknowledge' Quite a good paper, more on the site:- http://www.cochrane.org/press/MMR_final.pdf __________________ There is a simple answer to every question..........and it's wrong. Einstein

13-01-08, 22:19	#10
egb_hibs Khmer Radge Join Date: Jul 2002 Location: From the Capital Posts: 19,699 Casino cash: £23054 vCash: 10000 My Mood: Thanks: 0 Thanked 5 Times in 5 Posts Rep Power: 28	Re: the ascent of 'counterknowledge' ps this is typical of the reports i have read that led me to believe that the link had been almost totally discounted: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4311613.stm __________________ "Twice a year Gordon Brown fills his party's sails with pride. His tornado of facts and figures magics up images of untold national wealth and success." P Toynbee, Guardian, Dec 06

13-01-08, 22:21	#11
egb_hibs Khmer Radge Join Date: Jul 2002 Location: From the Capital Posts: 19,699 Casino cash: £23054 vCash: 10000 My Mood: Thanks: 0 Thanked 5 Times in 5 Posts Rep Power: 28	Re: the ascent of 'counterknowledge' i would love for there to be an absolutely definitive rebuttal of the mmr thing. it breaks my heart to think what parents must go through, not only coping with autistic children, but blaming themselves for being party to the thing that caused it. __________________ "Twice a year Gordon Brown fills his party's sails with pride. His tornado of facts and figures magics up images of untold national wealth and success." P Toynbee, Guardian, Dec 06

13-01-08, 22:46	#15
Archie Radge Private Member Join Date: Jul 2002 Location: Here Posts: 1,174 Casino cash: £3900 vCash: 10000 Thanks: 0 Thanked 0 Times in 0 Posts Rep Power: 11	Re: the ascent of 'counterknowledge' On a broader theme, I wonder how much of this is due to a breakdown of trust in politicians. It seems strange now, but not all that long ago they were held in reasonable regard. I'm not sure when that started to change - kennedy assassination maybe. These days there is a counter theory for almost everything, no matter how wacky - I mean, take lady di's death. Imagine a pissed driver doing twice the speed limit in an underpass being somehow responsible for a crash!

14-01-08, 09:24	#17
wee 162 Bounce Flag Co-Owner Join Date: Jun 2002 Location: Sunny Leith Age: 34 Posts: 12,467 Casino cash: £14933 vCash: 10000 Thanks: 0 Thanked 0 Times in 0 Posts Rep Power: 28	Re: the ascent of 'counterknowledge' My problem is not so much believing conspiracy theories but wanting concrete evidence of anything which is claimed. AFAIC that is the way to go, and it should be what everyone tries to do. Obviously no-one has the time or inclination to do this with everything, but you can treat everything with some suspicion imo. And just to point out the glaringly obvious, anyone who claimed that Iraq didn't have WMDs before the invasion of Iraq was put into thhe loony category, and their opinion was summarily dismissed out of hand by government and media alike. Which left most of the public completely convinced there was no case to make as well. That's the problem with trusting those who give us our information with anything. People can laugh at conspiracy theorists all they want, but they don't cause the death of hundreds of thousands of people... __________________ “Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition.” Timothy Leary

14-01-08, 15:00	#19
HenryLB On the Wagon Radge Join Date: Dec 2002 Location: London Posts: 3,405 Casino cash: £1090 vCash: 10000 Thanks: 0 Thanked 0 Times in 0 Posts Rep Power: 10	Re: the ascent of 'counterknowledge' I think a major problem lies not just with the credulous who indulge these ideas but also with the way that information is disemminated nowadays. Everyone now has such an understanding of the media and how it shapes opinion that its manipulation is second nature to almost every large organisation. Whole departments exist to "spin", not just in politics (where it is most obviously prevalent) but also in corporations, interest groups and state structures. Think of the police in the wake of the Jean Charles de Menezes shooting. Their PR wonks immediately began a whispering campaign against a wholly innocent victim: he was wearing a bulky jacket, he jumped the barrier and ran to the train, he had a dodgy history. All bollocks, and they knew it, and - which is worse - they must have known it would come out that it was a tissue of lies. But they went ahead and fabricated the information anyway because they knew it would give them the critical breathing space to get the story from page one to page five. A small but rather ill-won victory. All this creates an atmosphere of distrust, and the more fertile minds naturally leap to the most extraordinary conclusions. __________________ At Easter Road they stay...