Why do people keep thinking National are doing a great job?

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Geektastic

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#1158130 19-Oct-2014 22:10

joker97: Usually by people who've never been exposed to overseas ways.

I met a man once in Wellington hospital who was 67 and had never even been to the south island, much less overseas.

My ghast was well and truly flabbered, I can tell you: I had no idea people that insular and parochial existed in the 21st century outside the Amazon rain forest.

BurningBeard

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#1158251 20-Oct-2014 09:59

heylinb4nz: LOL, the whole tin foil hat \ conspiracy theory label does get a bit tired and overused. Its human nature to question and seek truth. http://www.presstv.com/detail/2013/07/12/313399/conspiracy-theorists-vs-govt-dupes/

It's also human nature try to smooth-over uncertainty and blame/project the ills of the world onto a caricature of a "bad guy" - a popular scapegoat these days being The Rothschilds/The Jews. Humans don't necessarily always "seek truth", rather, "seek an explanation that suits them."

That study you cited is being widely mis-quoted as evidence of conspiracy theorists being "more sane" than skeptics. Like so many other articles that city the study, they've cherry-picked the hell out of it to create their own narrative, and this is dishonest. (I'm not surprised to learn that the author is himself a "truther" with a book to sell.)

From the study:
"In sum, our results are in agreement with predictions derived from prior research. Consistent with much of the existing literature on individual differences associated with conspiracy belief, comments that supported 9/11 conspiracy theories were more likely to express mistrust and to refer to other conspiracy theories favorably. Conspiracists were less overtly hostile than their conventionalist counterparts, and did not appreciate being called conspiracy theorists. Perhaps most importantly, however, the finding that conspiracists spend more time arguing against official explanations than for alternative explanations supports the idea that the conspiracy worldview is based more on disbelief than on positive belief. The coherence of the conspiracist belief system is driven by higher-order considerations such as a disbelief in official narratives, rather than positive beliefs in particular alternative narratives. This result also agrees with previous informal observations by conventionalist commentators, who devote a great deal of time to examining and debunking conspiracy theories. One tactic which conventionalists often accuse conspiracists of using is “anomaly hunting”: They imagine that if they can find (broadly defined) anomalies in that data that would point to another phenomenon at work. They then commit a pair of logical fallacies. First, they confuse unexplained with unexplainable. This leads them to prematurely declare something a true anomaly, without first exhaustively trying to explain it with conventional means. Second they use the argument from ignorance, saying that because we cannot explain an anomaly that means their specific pet theory must be true. I don't know what that fuzzy object in the sky is—therefore it is an alien spacecraft (Novella, 2009).
The observed tendency of conspiracy theory advocates to argue against conventional narratives rather than in favor of particular alternatives closely resembles this description of anomaly hunting, and also parallels Keeley's (1999) observation that conspiracy theories rely heavily on “errant data” rather than on crafting coherent alternative explanations (p. 117). We argue that in fact, anomaly hunting, or a fixation on errant data, is a manifestation of the way conspiracism is structured as a worldview. In general, conspiracy belief is not based around specific theories of how events transpire, though these may exist as well. Instead, conspiracism is rooted in several higher-order beliefs such as an abiding mistrust of authority, the conviction that nothing is quite as it seems, and the belief that most of what we are told is a lie. Apparent anomalies in official accounts seem to support this, even if they do not point to a specific, well-defined alternative. For many conspiracists, there are two worlds: one real and (mostly) unseen, the other a sinister illusion meant to cover up the truth; and evidence against the latter is evidence for the former."

It goes on to say...

"conspiracy belief is not about believing in particular alternative theories, but in disbelieving in whatever the official story is. This tendency has been informally noted by Dean (2002), who described most conspiracy theories as “bits and pieces without a plot… [that] fail to delineate any conspiracy at all. They simply counter conventional narratives with suspicions and allegations that, more often than not, resist coherent emplotment” (p. 92). Likewise, Clarke (2007) observed that conspiracy theories are often extremely vague, particularly in the Internet age."

http://journal.frontiersin.org/Journal/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00
409/full

The study wasn't anything to do with the "sanity" of the skeptics or the conspiratoids. It was a stud of online discussion on 9/11 conspiracies. If anything, it highlights the logical fallacies that conspiracy theorists fall into.

But conspiracy theorists have run away with the headlines on this one, without reading the footnotes (y'know, those folk that are always saying "do your research, maaaan."

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BurningBeard

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#1158262 20-Oct-2014 10:33

heylinb4nz:
LOL, the whole tin foil hat \ conspiracy theory label does get a bit tired and overused. Its human nature to question and seek truth. http://www.presstv.com/detail/2013/07/12/313399/conspiracy-theorists-vs-govt-dupes/

The article states: "The term was invented and put into wide circulation by the CIA to smear and defame people questioning the JFK assassination!”

It actually comes from the American Historical Review publication from 1909, by the AHA.

I think the reason skeptics appear to be so hostile is because they're sick of bashing their heads against a brick wall. We've got conspiracy theorists telling us to "wake up" all the time, and "do your research", then in the same breath quote this sort of thing (from above) and get upset when we call them out on using discredited sources themselves.

Then they shirk back, telling me that I'm a "paid NWO shill." It really is pathetic.

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Geektastic

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#1158283 20-Oct-2014 10:54

BurningBeard:
heylinb4nz:
LOL, the whole tin foil hat \ conspiracy theory label does get a bit tired and overused. Its human nature to question and seek truth. http://www.presstv.com/detail/2013/07/12/313399/conspiracy-theorists-vs-govt-dupes/

The article states: "The term was invented and put into wide circulation by the CIA to smear and defame people questioning the JFK assassination!”

It actually comes from the American Historical Review publication from 1909, by the AHA.

I think the reason skeptics appear to be so hostile is because they're sick of bashing their heads against a brick wall. We've got conspiracy theorists telling us to "wake up" all the time, and "do your research", then in the same breath quote this sort of thing (from above) and get upset when we call them out on using discredited sources themselves.

Then they shirk back, telling me that I'm a "paid NWO shill." It really is pathetic.

Maybe it's the hat?! Is it lined with tin foil?!

BurningBeard

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#1158292 20-Oct-2014 11:06

Geektastic: Maybe it's the hat?! Is it lined with tin foil?!

Shhhhh.
They'll find out!
Then I'll have to commission a chemtrail fly-over to erase their memory!

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Geektastic

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#1158923 20-Oct-2014 23:05

BurningBeard:
Geektastic: Maybe it's the hat?! Is it lined with tin foil?!

Shhhhh.
They'll find out!
Then I'll have to commission a chemtrail fly-over to erase their memory!

I know a bloke called Colin who can help with that......

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JimmyH

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#1159463 21-Oct-2014 18:38

Geektastic:
BurningBeard:
Geektastic: Maybe it's the hat?! Is it lined with tin foil?!

Shhhhh.
They'll find out!
Then I'll have to commission a chemtrail fly-over to erase their memory!

I know a bloke called Colin who can help with that......

No need for Colin's services. The Reptillians and the Illuminati are already onto it (cue the obligatory "Buwahahaha......")

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