Conspiracy theorists and GWB are more alike than they think. Discuss.

Something that has soaked up a lot of my time of late (mainly to relieve work stress of getting the new aircraft rack finished) on the internet is visiting 9/11 conspiracy theory debunking websites such as this, this and this (Jon being the one to blame for my interest). For those not familiar with such things, it's more or less akin to the various other conspiracy theories such as those surrounding the JFK assassination or the moon landings. For the most part, they're not quite as sinister as Holocaust denial or as ridiculous as David Ike's lizard people, but there's quite a lot out there, most revolving around the whole shebang on September the 11th being organised by the US government to justify everything that has occurred since, such as the Iraq war. It seems that most of the people coming up with this are either the ones who actively want to believe the worst about the government, the ones who like to think that they're in on some big secret or the plain and simple attention seekers.

Most of this I just find mildly entertaining, but the bit that really winds me up is the continual misuse of science and critical thinking. I do both for a day-job and hate to see them messed around with and as a result, I love seeing the perpetrators put in their place. The straight-up lies and bogus physics are painfully easy to smack down and fanciful interpretations almost as much so. Beyond that, you simply have pure speculative stuff that is impossible to prove either way because the theorists can't back up their facts and they automatically disbelieve anything the authorities say otherwise. And then you have the odd person who claims to have insider knowledge but is in fact full of crap.

The bit where the spurious arguing sets in is when they start cherrypicking facts and deliberately ignore anything that might contradict their arguments. The classic example is poring through transcripts of witnesses' testimonies and picking out any reference to seeing flashes or hearing bangs as evidence of explosives being used in a controlled demolition. The bit they never, ever tell you is exactly when and where these things were reported because they they often occur minutes or even hours in advance of the collapses, which of course means they had to have been something else. This kind of mentality is sent up brilliantly in the spoof Loose Trains.

I peer-review papers all the time for my job and one of the most obvious things that gets alarm bells ringing is when the authors proactively avoid any possible counterarguments to their argument rather than meeting them head-on and systematically explaining why their theory is the more plausible. Conspiracy theorists do this all the time, not in most cases because they are deliberately out to deceive but because they are so sure in their convictions that they are right that they will latch onto anything that supports their case. Everything else, no matter how comprehensive or authoritative, they develop this blind spot towards, dismissing it as meaningless or part of the conspiracy.


Which brings me nicely onto a parallel with the conspiracy theorists' arch-nemesis, the Bush administration. The fact that they told a bunch of lies to justify the Iraq invasion is not in question, but this story caught my eye today, which is basically a retelling of a documentary on CBS. If their version of events is correct, all the stuff about chemical weapons etcetera was based on a lone bullshitter from Iraq who wanted to claim asylum and get a green card. The US authorities should have had reasons to doubt his testimony (the Germans, who had picked him up, expressed reservations about his credibility) but instead decided to base a big chunk of their WMD intelligence on it. Subsequently, the powers that be played innocent, saying they were only acting on information they were presented and they couldn't help it if it was flawed and so on, but I can't help but to think that if they had been willing to look at the whole picture instead of the bits they liked, they would have come to more factual conclusion. Not that that was ever the objective for them, of course. They had a war to start.

I just find it very entertaining though that for all the claims of the governments being these inhuman puppetmasters and so on, it turns out that they're not that different after all. Bush doesn't need some clandestine plot to blow up buildings and blame it on someone else. He just uses the same logical fallacies that the conspiracy theorists have at their disposal. Although, I'll admit, what he achieved with those was far more devastating.