When sceptics fight back
By Arran Frood
Conspiracy theorists have used the internet to co-ordinate increasingly slick attacks on the accepted versions of events, but now a group of scientists and sceptics has decided it's time to organise and fight back.
Conspiracy theories are pervasive and popular.
A poll for the Scripps Howard media organisation in 2006 suggested 36% of Americans suspected government involvement or deliberate inaction in the 9/11 attacks, and belief in a Kennedy conspiracy ran at 40% in the same poll.
FIVE CONSPIRACY THEORIES
- World Trade Center: Destroyed by controlled explosions or using thermate
- Pentagon: Hit by missile rather than airliner
- Princess Diana: Murdered rather than being killed by reckless driving on part of Henri Paul
- Apollo 11: Moon landings never took place, were staged on earth
- JFK: Lee Harvey Oswald not acting alone, part of underworld or wider conspiracyA decade after Princess Diana's death, one survey found a fifth of Britons believed she was murdered. And to millions across the world, 2009's Apollo Moon landing 40th anniversary was a hollow sham because we have never been there.
Conspiracy theories predate the internet but the web has provided a fast, accessible platform for groups to unite, gather research and disseminate information without even meeting or leaving their houses.
While many people find harmless fun, others believe there is a darker truth - that conspiracy theories are rewriting history, warping the present and altering the future. Enough is enough they say - it's time to fight back.
Isolated sceptics
Enter the sceptics with the gathering of The Amazing Meeting (TAM) in London, the first of the conferences outside the US. A fundraising offshoot of the non-profit James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF), TAM London saw scientists, writers and comedians target conspiracy theories - and their close cousins pseudoscience and medical quackery - in front of an audience loosely allied by their desire for more rational, critical thinking.
"A lot of sceptics feel very isolated," says psychologist and magician Prof Richard Wiseman. "It's not a popular position to be saying 'Father Christmas does not exist' so it motivates people and acts as a springboard for people to see what we're up to."
This brand of scepticism is not new. The movement was first galvanised in the early 80s when spoon-benders like Uri Geller claimed not to be magicians, but to really have paranormal powers. It was an age that saw a test of Geller's abilities make its way into the prestigious journal Nature.
The internet era has changed everything. The web-only film Loose Change, which questions the findings of the 9/11 commission, had already been viewed 10 million times by May 2006. It has had a massive impact. But the sceptics are also using the internet to organise loose networks of informal meetings.
However, using the same medium to fight back is not easy, as British investigative journalist Jon Ronson found when he posted on the British 9/11 Truth Campaign website. Abused and ridiculed, his integrity was questioned because he is Jewish. "When I found myself being attacked by 9/11 conspiracy theorists I found the sceptical community very supportive," says Ronson. "When believers turn on you it is horrible. I've stopped engaging with them because it's like prodding a snake."
Ronson has spent a lifetime lifting the lid on the unusual. He is about to come to greater prominence after being portrayed by Ewan McGregor in the upcoming film, The Men who Stare at Goats, also starring George Clooney. Ronson's book of the same name revealed that the US operated a secret army of psychic spies in the 1970s and 80s.
But the sceptics movement is not just about tackling conspiracy theorists who spread their message by independent means on the internet, there is also a drive to tackle bad reporting of science in the mainstream media.
Direct access
Dr Ben Goldacre's Bad Science website has served as a conduit for those who want to help counter the ceaseless torrent of articles pushed out by snake oil sellers, lazy journalists and badly behaved editors. He has been the leading critic of the media's treatment of the MMR scare.
His solution is to bypass conventional routes to the public. "Mainstream media has repeatedly shown itself to be worse than useless in reporting science and health in many, many fields," says Goldacre. "Scientists should communicate directly with the public via blogs."
These sceptics can garner a good deal of public support. David Aaronovitch has given popular talks to accompany his anti-conspiracy theory book, Voodoo Histories. Goldacre speaks at contemporary music festivals.
And TAM London's 600 seats - at £175 a pop - were snapped up in 52 minutes - despite sceptics' high priest James Randi not attending due to ill health. Instead, Randi addressed an enraptured audience via video link like a general before battle, telling delegates that "it wasn't easy to get people out of beliefs in the woo-woo world".
Randi's foundation was established in 1996 to help debunk paranormal and pseudoscientific claims, but his Paranormal Challenge prize dates back to 1964 when the sceptic offered $1,000 to anyone who could prove the paranormal was real. Donations swelled the booty to more than a million dollars, but no applicants have passed the preliminary test.
The energy at events like TAM London is tangible, but are sceptics just preaching to the choir and can their success be measured?
JREF president Dr Phil Plait cites the myth that an egg laid on the first day of spring will stand on one end. Plait says that 10 years ago half of his audience had heard of the story - now that figure is less than 10%, which he says is down to using the web to disseminate articles that prove the claim is nonsense. "Legends do die," he says.
Then there is the image or branding problem. Not all delegates like the term "sceptic" because it has negative, "anti" connotations, similar to the way atheists are defined by something they don't believe in.
As a result, some delegates prefer to call themselves rationalists, free-thinkers or Brights. "Out there in the audience is the next generation of bloggers and media professionals," Plait says.
But even if the word is spread, will conspiracy theory believers ever listen?
Adam Savage, presenter of the television programme Mythbusters, which uses science to challenge urban legends, is not overly optimistic. He says he doesn't know of any conversions following his Emmy-nominated programme that tested Moon hoax theories.
"They want to believe desperately that someone is in charge," he says. "Even if it is someone who is working against us."
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Latest BBC Hit Piece (4 posts)
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Posted 15 years ago #
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its a nice shortcut to simply slap the label "conspiracy theorist" on anyone who questions the official accounting of history.
but - is all history rendered flawlessly to the public - pristine and pure? it is laughable to claim that it is.
how many generations of revisionist history did it take to acknowledge the genocide of the amerindians?
what this article - and countless others before it - fail to understand (either willfully or as a result of sheer stupidity) is that there is a world of difference between being a 'conspiracy theorist" and being an advocate for transparency and truth.
I do not need to forward any CONSPIRACY THEORIES to point out, correctly, that lies and cover-ups permeate and saturate our media and the official narrative of our history. any journalist worth his salt knows this.
Oswald - a professed communist who defected to Russia and surrendered his US citizenship - somehow regained entry into the US and landed a job with a security clearance to work at base developing photos from secret U2 aerial surveillance spy missions? That's not a THEORY - that's a fact. In an age when Joseph McCarthy ruined lives for even a whiff of communist affiliation?
And 40 years later whistleblowers like LTC Anthony Shaffer - a decorated soldier working in the Pentagon on 9/11 - are ignored and their lives ruined because journalists like Arran Frood lack the intellectual curiosity - or intellectual honesty - to find out why.
Posted 15 years ago # -
Why do the people who write these pathetic pieces always have names like Arran Frood?
Jon Ronson and his new movie, I believe, are playing an important role in showing how silly the US government's psychic/mind control/occult experiments were. Just like the section on mind control in "The Century of the Self," we can all comfort ourselves in laughing at our government's incompetence and stupidity. Meanwhile, the ruling class consolidates power and destroys the world.
Also, straightforward political conspiracies, which are accepted as real all across the "other" parts of the world--assassinations, coups, false flag ops--are being equated with trying to make a goat explode with your mind, when considered in the "civilized" world. If the government is/was doing stuff this silly, and failing, we couldn't possibly imagine them succeeding in anything devious and deceptive.
despite sceptics' high priest James Randi not attending due to ill health. Instead, Randi addressed an enraptured audience via video link like a general before battle, telling delegates that "it wasn't easy to get people out of beliefs in the woo-woo world".
"They want to believe desperately that someone is in charge," he says. "Even if it is someone who is working against us."
Hmmm, what does this guy believe--that no one or no group is in a position of power and tries to maintain or strengthen that position?
Posted 15 years ago # -
the "no moon landing" hoax is probably just a creation of the psyops campaigns. the debunkers are correct to point out there's a lot of irrationality in society, but a smart journalist would look at the claims for each issue, not lump good claims and nonsense together, unless, of course, that was the whole point of the article (to discredit by association).
it is worth remembering that the "no plane crash" claim came first from Donald Rumsfeld (oct 12 2001) and the demolition theories were first promoted by conspiracy websites that also promote a wide variety of blatantly false information. Meanwhile, the evidence for foreknowledge and suppression of efforts to stop the attacks (ie. Complete 9/11 Timeline, Crossing the Rubicon) gets ignored by the media and by much of the so-called truth movement.
It's rare to find anyone who believes the Warren Commission, but most people also don't have much awareness of what the evidence does show re: JFK. Many are persuaded the mafia did it, but the mafia lacks the ability to corrupt the Secret Service protection of the President and to ensure a four decade plus continuing coverup in the media. The best book on this topic is James Douglass "JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why it Matters."
JFK And the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters (Orbis Books, 2008) by James Douglass
"One must give the CIA (and the assassination sponsors that were even further in the shadows) their due for having devised and executed a brilliant setup. They had played out a scenario to Kennedy's death in Dallas that pressured other government authorities to choose among three major options: a war of vengeance against Cuba and the Soviet Union based on the CIA's false Mexico City documentation of an assassination plot; a domestic political war based on the same documents seen truly, but a war the CIA would fight with every covert weapon at its command; or a complete coverup of any conspiracy evidence and a silent coup d'etat that would reverse Kennedy's efforts to end the Cold War. Lyndon Johnson, for his part, took little time to choose the only option he felt would leave him with a country to govern. He chose to cover up everything and surrender to Cold War prerogatives. However, he was not about to attack Cuba and the U.S.S.R. His quick personal acceptance of what had to be would only emerge more gradually in public. Rather than end it all quickly and heroically against Castro and Krushchev, he would ride gently, through the 1964 election, into the full fury of Vietnam." -- pp. 81-82
Posted 15 years ago #
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