A Beginner's Guide to the Conspiracy Game

[Guest]

3 hours ago, Cliff Varnell said:

You can't have fun without screaming?

Pathetic.

See, Cliff, I can either go to the trouble of underlining what I want to emphasize or put it in CAPS.  If you regard this as screaming, I feel your pain.  Shall I also put cia, fbi and mk-naomi in little letters to avoid jolting your sensibilities?  BTW (oops), the caps in the last post were just to tweak you, but you're too far gone to get it.  See Item 11.e of my original post.

Edited September 1, 2019 by Guest

[Guest]

3 hours ago, Paul Bacon said:

You seem to require irrefutable proof of a conspiracy, for example Harvey and Lee, yet, as far as I know (haven't read the paper yet this morning) there is no irrefutable proof of the existence of God but you are a believer. 

My comment probably seemed a little obscure to you because I only paid attention to the last little bit of your OP.  Yet again, I couldn't bring myself to scale your wall of words.

No, I do not require irrefutable proof of a conspiracy.  I require conspiracy to be the best explanation derived from the best evidence in accordance with the established standards and procedures for historical research.  The Conspiracy Game is pretty much the antithesis of that.

Sorry, I don't do "Twitter posts."

[Guest]

3 hours ago, James DiEugenio said:

Why anyone wastes time with this guy escapes me.

To which one might reply:  Then why are you here?

The Lincoln Conspiracy was solved?

Powell said, "They didn't catch but half of us."

Oh, Lord, I should've known.  Perhaps you can change your snake-oil formula to Lincoln, Kennedys and King, The Elixir of the Conspiracy Game.

 

[W. Niederhut]

1 hour ago, Jim Harwood said:

I hate to do this it's tantamount to hijacking but here is Lance quoted in the book "Animals and the Afterlife" claiming he spoke with his dead dog Milhous while it came to him in a dream. He's definitely British, like the genocidal kook Prince Charles talking to his plants.

https://books.google.com/books?id=-t6jn3Zj_agC&pg=PA220&lpg=PA220&dq=lance+payette&source=bl&ots=3Ep_yFriud&sig=ACfU3U3lOKgsBTar8rinTGwwHpSd915Ohw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjoiIzihbDkAhUCIqwKHenCAhY4ChDoATAPegQICRAB#v=onepage&q=lance payette&f=false

 

 

Never trust a guy who would name his dog, "Milhous."

[Guest]

1 hour ago, Cory Santos said:

So if it is found in the UFO field, do you agree it does not discount your experience nor the field overall?

Also, are you going to the Area 51 storm event in September? 

No, I lost interest in the whole Area 51 thing at least 20 years ago.

I think we're talking apples and oranges here.  Unlike the JFK assassination, with UFOs it's very difficult to pin down what the Subject Event even is.  It would have to be something like "Hundreds of thousands of reports of difficult-to-explain aerial phenomena over a period of hundreds or thousands of years, together with certain other related phenomena and experiences."  As I said, my experience could have an entirely mundane explanation.  The entire phenomena might have entirely mundane explanation, although that seems unlikely.

No, the fact that a large percentage of the UFO community plays the Conspiracy Game ("Aliens are abducting humans to develop hybrids, and the government knows it!!!") does not have any bearing whatsoever on my real-world experience, whatever it was.

The Conspiracy Game within ufology certainly does greatly embarrass the field and impede serious research.  Ditto for the JFK assassination.  But unlike the JFK Assassination, there is really no Lone Assassin equivalent for UFOs because we do not have any firm grasp of what the phenomenon/phenomena is/are.  There are competing theories of varying degrees of plausibility as to what the phenomena represent, and within several of those theory groups are one or more sub-groups who play the Conspiracy Game with a vengeance.

[Guest]

20 minutes ago, W. Niederhut said:

Never trust a guy who would name his dog, "Milhous."

That pooch was indeed named after Nixon.  I received Milhous as a gift shortly after the Watergate brouhaha.  I thought it was catchier than "Agnew."

In a weird coincidence, I named my dog in college "Kleindienst" after a then-candidate for Arizona governor.  That candidate, Dick Kleindienst,  later became Attorney General of the United States under Nixon.  Fifteen years later, he became my law partner and good friend.  When I moved to my present town, I discovered that I was living in the Kleindienst Addition subdivision, named after his family in the 1930s.  Run those coincidences through your Conspiracy-O-Meter and see if it doesn't blow a fuse!

Edited September 1, 2019 by Guest

[Guest]

I’m genuinely sympathetic to the JFK Conspiracy Brotherhood, particularly since I was once caught up in gee-whiz conspiracy mania myself.

What makes the JFK assassination such fertile ground for the Conspiracy Game are such things as:

1.  A huge number of individuals and organizations, domestic and foreign, had reason to welcome the death of JFK either because they would benefit in some way or would exact revenge for something JFK had done.

2.  Some of those individuals and organizations had done and perhaps continue to do some truly nefarious things; they certainly would have had the means to carry out a Presidential assassination.

3.  The event itself occurred during the noon hour in a public square in a major American city with hundreds of people in the immediate vicinity.

4.  Chaos understandably reigned in the aftermath of the event.

5.  It is certainly true that individuals such as J. Edgar Hoover and agencies such as the FBI, CIA and Secret Service had egg on their faces even if Oswald was the lone assassin and might well have fudged reports to make themselves appear less culpable and engaged in other activities that might reasonably be described as a “cover-up.”

In these circumstances, as I well know, the Conspiracy Game is almost irresistible.  It’s a no-brainer to zip right past the Lone Assassin explanation and dive into the Conspiracy Game with both feet.

And yet, the Lone Assassin explanation requires nothing more than connecting the dots from Oswald’s troubled childhood to his bitter experiences in the Marines to his utopian defection to Russia to his disillusioned return to the U.S. to his complete lack of success everywhere he turned to his attempted assassination of Walker to his grandiose hope to emigrate to Cuba to his dysfunctional marriage to the anger, frustration and golden opportunity of the last week of his life.

It’s a straightforward, straight-line solution, replete with motive, opportunity and means, that requires none of the silliness that I have described as the Conspiracy Game.  It does not require reinventing Oswald and fitting this fictional character into some elaborate conspiracy that is implausible past the vanishing point.

How many people here, I wonder, have given anything like a week of serious thought and investigation to how much sense the Lone Assassin explanation makes and how well-supported it is by what is really the “best evidence.”  No, you all know that no one in his right mind accepts the Lone Assassin explanation anymore.  You don’t need to even bother with it.  You can let snake-oil salesmen like – well, we don’t need to name names, do we? – do your thinking for you.

[Cliff Varnell]

35 minutes ago, Lance Payette said:

See, Cliff, I can either go to the trouble of underlining what I want to emphasize or put it in CAPS.  If you regard this as screaming, I feel your pain.  Shall I also put cia, fbi and mk-naomi in little letters to avoid jolting your sensibilities?  BTW (oops), the caps in the last post were just to tweak you, but you're too far gone to get it.  See Item 11.e of my original post.

The wiki on "all caps"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_caps

<quote on, emphasis added>

In typography, all caps (short for "all capitals") refers to text or a font in which all letters are capital letters, for example: Text in All Caps. "All caps" may be used for emphasis (for a word or phrase). They are commonly seen in legal documents, the titles on book covers, in advertisements and in newspaper headlines. Short strings of words in capital letters appear bolder and "louder" than mixed case, and this is sometimes referred to as "screaming" or "shouting".^[1] All caps can also be used to indicate that a given word is an acronym.

Studies have been conducted on the readability and legibility of all caps text. Scientific testing from the 20th century onwards has generally indicated that all caps text is less legible and readable than lower-case text.^[2][3] In addition, switching to all caps may make text appear hectoring and obnoxious for cultural reasons, since all-capitals is often used in transcribed speech to indicate that the speaker is shouting.

<quote off>

Because Lance suffers from a severe case of confirmation bias I doubt he can process the above.

 

[Paul Bacon]

38 minutes ago, Lance Payette said:

Sorry, I don't do "Twitter posts."

I'm sorry, that's all it's worth.

[Guest]

3 minutes ago, Paul Bacon said:

I'm sorry, that's all it's worth.

How would you know?  You had just said you didn't read it.  If you want to match wits with me, pal, you're going to need to bring your "A" game - and your batting helmet.

Edited September 1, 2019 by Guest

[Paul Bacon]

2 minutes ago, Lance Payette said:

How would you know?  You had just said you didn't read it.  If you want to match wits with me, pal, you're going to need to bring your "A" game - and your batting helmet.

See Lance, it's just a game, like the "Conspiracy Game", just a game... you're taking yourself pretty seriously, aren't you.  These posts don't take me but a minute, while your wall of words must take hours...

[Guest]

6 minutes ago, Cliff Varnell said:

The wiki on "all caps"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_caps

Because Lance suffers from a severe case of confirmation bias I doubt he can process the above.

 

Goodness, Cliffmeister, I can see that this is a deep and emotional issue for you.  Because I'm a kindly and genial Lone Nutter, I shall henceforth refrain from the use of caps except in accordance with the Associated Press Stylebook.  My "confirmation bias" extends to whether caps do or do not constitute shouting, does it?  I'm not sure what that even means, but perhaps you're right.

Bwahahahaha!  (That would have been much more effective in caps, but I'm a new and better man.)

[Jim Harwood]

58 minutes ago, Lance Payette said:

An odd admission, I must say.

Are you having some sort of meltdown?  I looked at the Wikipedia article for the Seligman Sunbeam and have utterly no idea what you're talking about.

Animals and the Afterlife was an incredibly successful book that launched the author onto a very successful career.  I had been told that my little story - which occurred more than 30 years ago, with the book being published (I think) in about 2000 - hadn't made the cut, but then I received a free copy of the book and there it was.  It was simply a dream involving a dead, beloved dog that could be interpreted as precognitive because it also involved a beloved cat who died shortly thereafter.  I am happy for others to read it - I have had what are called After Death Communications that were a hell of a lot more startling than THAT.

No, I am not British.  I have never even been to England.  Prince Charles is a "genocidal kook," is he?

Yes I thought parts of your first post was structured very similar to articles printed and distributed by the Seligman Sunbeam, so why is that a  melt down? 

 

[Guest]

1 minute ago, Paul Bacon said:

See Lance, it's just a game, like the "Conspiracy Game", just a game... you're taking yourself pretty seriously, aren't you.  These posts don't take me but a minute, while your wall of words must take hours...

It did indeed take hours, but it was part of a larger and more substantial project.  Your "Twitter posts" take but a minute and say precisely nothing - this is your idea of a game, is it?  Does the game have any point, or is it truly mental masturbation?  Is that a banana in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me here?  (Mae West, for the uninformed.)  My point is simply that even your one-liners better receive more attention than they seem to be receiving, or I will cheerfully reduce you to rubble.

[Cliff Varnell]

3 minutes ago, Lance Payette said:

Goodness, Cliffmeister, I can see that this is a deep and emotional issue for you.  Because I'm a kindly and genial Lone Nutter, I shall henceforth refrain from the use of caps except in accordance with the Associated Press Stylebook.  My "confirmation bias" extends to whether caps do or do not constitute shouting, does it?  I'm not sure what that even means, but perhaps you're right.

Bwahahahaha!  (That would have been much more effective in caps, but I'm a new and better man.)

Somehow I doubt that.