More: http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2002/apr/21/uk.medicalsc...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jf0khstYDLA
It's one of the many conspiracy type videos out there, and I don't endorse the content in any way.. I just find this stuff fascinating
This is the reason I don't watch documentaries on modern "issues". The story presented is all very manipulated and you're certain to get an incorrect set of evidence.
What is boggling is how smart people _stay_ convinced by conspiracies, after contradictions are pointed out. But changing your mind is a hard thing to do, so perhaps it's not that surprising?
That's true of essentially any source but I don't know that becoming ignorant of anything that happened during your lifetime is the right answer.
And I agree, there are many documentaries on modern issues that are pure junk.
I was out of there like a shot.
[edit] typo
I love this implication that you're probably dumb if you think the government sometimes engages in conspiracy. Like mass surveillance. Or bacterial experiments in San Francisco.
What is dumb is seing a few bright pixels in a New Horizons image and saying "that's a swarm of alien space ships", when in fact it's just a cosmic ray distorted by the JPG lossy compression algorithm.
As if the logic gate in the brain suddenly stopped working.
I remember reading and hearing that one of the reasons young people get addicted to things like heroin, etc., is due to the fact that schools, parents and government told them that things like beer and marijuana were deadly in any amount - then they would go on to have a few beers at a party, and maybe smoke a joint, and when they wake up the next morning with no negligible negative effects, they reject everything else they've been taught - including warnings about things that are that dangerous.
Maybe what you're seeing is more like belief in the possibility rather than belief in the fact.
For instance, after I learned about Operation Northwoods and a half a dozen other cases, I am completely open to the possibility that 9/11 was an inside job. (edit: And people who are not open to that possibility seem completely illogical to me.)
An "inside job" comes across like the government explicitly set the terrorists on the path they took (or some of the terrorists were government agents). It seems more likely to me that certain elements in the government could have become aware of the plot and turned a blind eye.
I don't put it outside the realm of possibility. There is a lot of motivation to invading Iran/Iraq under a guise and what better way to usher in a surveillance state than "preventing terrorism and keeping you safe"?
People in power have a lot of motivation to remain in power. That includes keeping "the masses" ignorant and satisfied with their lives. Satisfied people don't rebel or overthrow systems of power that appear to be working in their favor.
After hundreds of years of history repeating itself with same/similar stories over different time periods. I find myself thinking people are completely ignorant of history when they full trust their own government at its word. I will always entertain the possibility my government did something bad. Because history proves that it isn't all that unlikely...
Now entertaining the possibility of and actually believing it occurred are two different things. I cannot disprove 9/11 being an inside job - and I can see motivations as to why a government may do it (if I didn't see why a government would, I wouldn't entertain the thought). The fact that, as an individual, I can see motivation for a government to commit an act against its own people means the government itself might reach this same conclusion. So the idea is possible.
Do I think it was? No. I think it was simply government negligence. Failing to respond to warnings we received from Russia (2001 wasn't much past the 90's) and general disorganization.
Loyalty and support in exchange for protection. Scholarship and industriousness in exchange for liberty. Moral behavior in exchange for justice. Voluntary taxation in exchange for uniform public benefits.
You need not show that the government was directly involved, if you can support the assertion that the government did not effectively use its granted authority for the benefit of the public. Conspiracy theories are primarily useful for convincing those people who demonstrate too much faith in their public institutions that they should be a bit more skeptical.
Whether you think that 9/11 was the work of Al Qaeda terrorists or CIA terrorists, the facts remain that the efforts of the government were ineffective to prevent the deaths, injuries, or destruction of property, and the resulting public grief and outcry was used inappropriately to justify almost entirely unrelated shifts in policy.
The idea that someone, somewhere might have said, "That many deaths? Hooray! We can go have a war now!" is just grossly abhorrent to me, and I can't shake the feeling that it actually happened.
I do think it's a lot more complicated than "the government" knew or "the government" did not know.
But, when we look at history, it is probably more logical to be skeptical. Our history is replete with Massively Bad Things that are nearly unbelievable in scale, and we would certainly prefer not to believe humans capable of such things, if given a choice.
At the same time, we also know that there are people with a vested interest in creating certain beliefs and outcomes.
So, what I find interesting is people's determination to believe something, simply because it is offered as the "official story". These stories don't require nearly the same degree of evidence, or even plausibilty to be accepted, as long as they are mainstreamed as official. The logic gate is then not even activated by the masses. Yet, the moment an alternative is posed, it is immediately (and often angrily) seized upon by those same people who now suddenly require a massive degree of evidence.
I believe that a default position of skepticism is far healthier in a society than blind acceptance of official stories. Where I believe skeptics get into trouble is when they move beyond questioning to actually posing an alternative story that is no more provable than the official one.
Those are not skeptical. They are believers, just like the people that believe on the official version.
And, I assumed others could connect those dots. :)