Try minutes later.
Slavoj Žižek called it like 10 years ago during the Snowden leaks, I believe, that leaks don’t change anything anymore.
That you can have the evidence out there, and no one cares.
He was working off the evidence we had about the failures and lies about the Iraq War, and then the lies about illegal spying on US citizens, and in both cases, the evidence coming to light basically changed nothing about how the US government conducts itself in either regard.
I think he called it early, but was fundamentally correct, having the evidence out there means nothing anymore when the majority of society simply isn’t even paying attention.
54% of American adults read at below a sixth grade level, and I personally think that has something to do with it.
And you see some of those people here acting like they’re immune to propaganda, that they care when they blatantly disregard sources when presented to them on controversial topics (read: against the US State department line). As principled as they think they are, you talk about anything outside the US or whatever US vassal state they’re from, and it’s back to the chauvinism, but with a pink coat of paint.
I think Roderic Day had it right when he said this was an issue of westerners consenting to their own misinformation because they don’t want to face that they’re complicit by inaction in the horrible shit their governments have done to the third world for centuries and continue on a daily basis. And Zizek does that shit all the time too, arguing for western chauvinist shit but for “leftist” reasons, like he did in Against the Double Blackmail.
That you can have the evidence out there, and no one cares
We care actually but reasonable adults opinions on these issues are not considered by the owner class and their regimes removed in media and Congress…
In fact we are treated as if we don’t have an opinion.
No amount of shit posting gonna fix that but at least we ate creating a record.
Political process is captured and it has failed on systematic level. The longer people keep pretending that voting matters the longer these abuses will go on.
Michael Parenti, Dirty Truths
Those who suffer from conspiracy phobia are fond of saying: “Do you actually think there’s a group of people sitting around in a room plotting things?” For some reason that image is assumed to be so patently absurd as to invite only disclaimers. But where else would people of power get together – on park benches or carousels? Indeed, they meet in rooms: corporate boardrooms, Pentagon command rooms, at the Bohemian Grove, in the choice dining rooms at the best restaurants, resorts, hotels, and estates, in the many conference rooms at the White House, the NSA, the CIA, or wherever. And, yes, they consciously plot – though they call it “planning” and “strategizing” – and they do so in great secrecy, often resisting all efforts at public disclosure. No one confabulates and plans more than political and corporate elites and their hired specialists. To make the world safe for those who own it, politically active elements of the owning class have created a national security state that expends billions of dollars and enlists the efforts of vast numbers of people.
“Oh that was long ago they no longer do that. Well yeah, they’ve never apologized for the things they did, no one has ever faced any kind of justice, and the same people who did the thing last time are still in power. True, there are claims that they’re doing the same thing right now, but those are just conspiracies, I said they’ve changed already!”
The US did lie about Nelson Mandela being a bloodthirsty terrorist who would immediately genocide all the white people, but not about Hamas. Why don’t you condemn terrorists?
The state department did lie about Libya’s threat and was involved in the horrible dismantling of their state in favor of jihadi warlords, but not in Syria, why are you linking non credible journalists? No I will not check the leaked documents.
The CIA WAS confirmed to have instigated hundreds of coups as recently as the 2010s, but not in Ukraine. You’d have to be a bot to believe such nonsense.
The US did lie about Cuba being a brutal totalitarian baby murdering state, and did downplay how horribly exploitative and violent they were in their imperialism before the revolution, but you have to believe North Korean defectors, it’s not like they’re being bribed to say the biggest lie they can. Btw they had the Korean genuhhhhhh… War coming, they did invade the south of their own country and that’s the part the US wanted.
The corporations are feeling very cooperative today.
CIA is a psyops
Are there any examples of something that was a conspiracy theory being validated by confidential documents later? I can’t think of any, even though secret agencies sure did do a lot of crazy stuff.
Thanks, that’s a nice askreddit thread. A lot of these have the same problem though, which is that I have trouble believing (and have no idea how to find evidence, since they were well pre-internet) that these were conspiracy theories before they were revealed.
(I note now that I didn’t actually mention, in my comment, that by “was a conspiracy theory” I don’t just mean “sounds crazy” but rather “sounded crazy and there were actually people saying it”. I’m not interested in every insane thing secret agencies did*, I’m interested in stuff people successfully predicted.)
*well, I am, but it’s not what the question is about
There are plenty of books and articles discussing these things. This comment points to an excellent one you can read https://lemmy.ml/post/24336378/15865218
It’s not like information from before the internet is not accessible either. You can easily search for old news papers, and so on. This is a topic that’s pretty thoroughly documented.
Sure, the fact the US government spies on every single citizen without warrant or cause. The multiple CIA operations that overthrew various governments were conspiracy theories until they were proven.
Hell the existence of abu graihb and the idea the US military tortures and kills civilians was a conspiracy theory, until it was proven.
You want the real fucked up one… Stalin wasn’t crazy nor did he overreact with his actions against ‘enemies if the state’, the US genuinely did invest practically unlimited resources into trying to destabilize the ussr under Stalin, as supported by now declassified CIA documents, including recruiting from populations that aided nazi occupiers.
People still act like that’s a conspiracy theory today. I see mfs insisting it’s not or that it ain’t that bad and I gotta wonder if they’re paid disinfo, which, again, people treat like a conspiracy theory, but the US has by far the biggest psyop reach in the world.
Sure, the fact the US government spies on every single citizen without warrant or cause.
Ah, that’s true, I totally forgot about Snowden. Technically I don’t think I’ve heard of there being a conspiracy about it before 2013, but it’s a good example.
Stalin wasn’t crazy nor did he overreact with his actions against ‘enemies if the state’
Very questionable phrasing (I have some Soviet ancestors who spent years felling forests for the crime of being too educated and teaching things that didn’t quite align with the party line; that’s not an ‘overreaction’ to anything, but just tyranny), but anyway, this doesn’t count - it was definitely not considered a conspiracy theory in the Soviet Union to think that foreign states were doing espionage there.
You just proved it’s a conspiracy, that it was tyranny and not a logical, well reasoned response to the actions of others.
I’m not sure what you mean. Arresting random intelligentsia is not a “well reasoned response” to foreign interference. And it’s also unrelated to the topic - I’m asking about conspiracy theories that were later validated, and “foreign governments are trying to sabotage us”, in Stalinist USSR, wasn’t a conspiracy theory - if anything it was the party line.
Covid lab theory was thoroughly discredited by fake news but official government reports 2 years later indicated that it is a valid theory but can’t be confirmed
Mass government surveillance
Oh, the lab leak/zoonosis debate is a good thought, but I don’t think it counts as a conspiracy - if I search for news articles from before 2022 mentioning it, I immediately find, say, this BBC article from 2020 that treats lab leak seriously, so it was a mainstream-ish idea quite early on. This seems to match with my own memories, I’ve seen lab leak being discussed in 2022 and I think even earlier.
In general, though, there’s probably some good COVID-related example, even if I can’t think of one immediately (I think it’s pretty disingenuous how media demonized every prospective COVID drug, especially ivermectin - but they did turn out to be ineffective against the virus itself, and I don’t think there were any conspiracies about the drugs that ended up actually working, like Paxlovid).
It counts as a conspiracy that lab leak suspicions were suppressed. Aug. 2022: Why the Chair of the Lancet’s COVID-19 Commission Thinks The US Government Is Preventing a Real Investigation Into the Pandemic
