I went on a bit of a mini-rant yesterday on Twitter about assholes using the #falseflag hashtag immediately after the Boston Marathon bombing, mostly because people who scream “false flag” are almost always assholes, because yelling “false flag” doesn’t really have anything to do with the plausibility of a conspiracy theory, but instead relies on the desperate need of people – and, let’s be honest, generally white dudes, because it is white dudes who comprise the overwhelming majority of conspiracy theorists – to feel victimized when something bad had absolutely nothing to do with them.
Like, we’re going way beyond “I got passed over for a promotion because I’m white” levels of victimization here. False flag theories are inevitably stupid – like, well beyond “the moon landing was faked” stupid. I mean, the fake moon landing theory you could feasibly pull off with about a couple dozen people (leave most of NASA clueless, set up a stage somewhere else and just hijack the radio signal with a couple of key inside guys, then get the astronauts to say “yeah, we did that” afterward), assuming nobody simply looked at the moon afterwards and noticed that the lander and flag weren’t there (which they are).
Compare this to the Newtown shooting false flag theory, which involves the Evil Black Helicopter People Who Are Directly Commanded By Obama (or whoever) disappearing an entire classroom full of kids, hiring numerous actors to portray Newtown residents, bribing or threatening dozens or even hundreds of journalists and local residents – this is insane. And it’s all the more insane when you remember that falseflaggers explained that the point of this supposed conspiracy was to get restrictive gun laws enacted – something everybody was grimly saying, right afterwards, would not happen because the gun lobby owns one party entirely and has deep roots in the second. (And what has happened? The most conservative Democratic Senator and a conservative Republican Senator worked “bipartisanly” to create a bill that requires background checks for some, but not all, non-gun-store sales of guns, and which incidentally also outlaws a federal gun registry and makes it easier to transport guns across state lines – and conservative Senators from both parties are refusing to vote for it because it’s too restrictive.)
And so we come to the Boston false-flag theorizing, which is even stupider because all that happened was that an asshole built a bomb and set it off to hurt people, which assholes have done before and will do again. But the falseflaggers are out to explain that, no, this was military-grade ordnance that was used (based on no evidence whatsoever) and that this happened because the Gubmint wants to put more restrictive laws in place to interfere with your civil rights. Of course, the government has been doing that for decades and they haven’t felt the need to bomb anybody because they know perfectly well that they can just restrict civil rights by passing laws and nobody will say boo to a goose, most of the times, because “it’s not my problem” trumps civil rights concerns for ninety percent of the population (just ask any black person about how nobody seems to care when their civil rights are trampled), but whatever, bombs away, am I right?
But falseflaggers don’t care because their theories aren’t about logic or reason or anything at all. Their theories are about making tragedies that happen to other people about them. It’s a fundamentally narcissistic response to tragedy – to not only ask “how does this affect me” but to twist the facts of the event to create a narrative so that you are more likely to be affected. It’s an asshole move, plain and simple, and falseflaggers deserve to be treated like assholes, because they’re assholes.
(And finally, can we again be pissed off once more at police departments who planted agent-provocateurs in protests, who all by themselves gave the entire false-flag belief far more steam than it ever deserved to have?)
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Frankly, The FBI, CIA and Secret Service couldn’t cover up a blowjob. How do you expect them to pull this shit off?
Small correction: “Of course, the government has been doing that for decades and they haven’t felt the need to bomb anybody…”
Nobody in the USA, anyways. Unless you count MOVE, which you probably should.
Though I suppose, in the context of “bombings in order to further remove civil rights”, neither the recent wars, nor MOVE, were done with that particular goal in mind.
boo to a goose???
When government decides to do shady unethical stuff, typically the last thing they want to do is, y’know, call attention to it.
“I’ve drafted a new bill to give us complete control of all milk production in the country. But first, let’s blow up a few thousand cows so everyone’s attention will be firmly on the dairy industry. THEN we’ll sneak it by them. Heh, heh heh.”
The magic of conspiracy theories is that they don’t need to make any sense whatsoever.
Jaap, it’s a phrase meaning everyone’s going to be timid and not speak up.
I would like to throw in another reason: Believing in conspiracies makes you smart. Any time you get an online discussion of this kind of thing, someone will announced that while the official story may fool the sheeple couch potatoes who accept whatever lies the mainstream media spoonfeed them, smart people look behind the lies and uncover the truth! As CS Lewis once observed, this is an awfully seductive delusion.
Pedantry: I believe, but am not sure, that the plural form of agent-provacateur is “agents-provacateur.”
Like Attorneys General, or Courts Martial.
@Fraser: “smart people look behind the lies and uncover the truth!”
The irony of conspiracy theories is precisely that they fool otherwise relatively smart people who look behind the lies into thiking that because it was behind the curtain, this isn’t just another layer of lies.
“Well, I could think that the problems in society are vastly complex social issues where responsability is diffuse, and even when some social classes are clearly more culpable than others even the victims are in a way somewhat complicit in maintaining this system, and there isn’t even really any intelligence behind it, it’s just a huge machine without a brain. But no, let’s assume about a hundred people who are rich/reptiles/Jews/ are behind it all and we can solve all this just by getting rid of that small bunch of guys. Because social change is *hard* work.”
Found this when it got RT’d by Wil Wheaton…
Not to gainsay your point, which I think is on the whole good, but —
(1) “the majority of conspiracy theorists are white males” != “the majority of white males are conspiracy theorists.” You probably realize this, of course, but your first sentence contains some sloppy wording re: that point that IMO detracts from your argument.
(2) Would you group 9/11 “truthers” in with false-flag theorists? I think I would. I ask because (though you don’t specify) this essay has the flavor of “aren’t these right-wingers crazy,” and I think this brand of crazy crosses ideological lines. (It may well be my error in imagining that you thought otherwise.)
Yes. Also anti-vaxxers and chemtrail paranoids, while we’re at it.
@ Fraser, yeah I got what he was saying it’s just that, I wasn’t aware saying boo to geese was a thing
Now, now. There are 9/11 truthers on both sides of the political isle. The leftie morons in the case are pretty obvious: Bush == bad, and there’s mounting evidence that he knew it would happen but wanted to let it go to justify a war for oil. The rightie morons in the case are more circuitous. They’re more of the survivalist sort, who say, “Yeah, we went to war with them brown fellers, but just wait…that ATF is comin’ fer us next.” They look at the Iraq war as the chocolate coating for that bitter pill (or, sometimes, as how those nefarious Jews were actually pulling the strings to get us to attack their most dangerous enemies in the region).
In either case, the mind of a true conspiracy theorist is generally a twisty, tangled mess of vipers. Unfortunately, neither crazy nor stupid respect ideological lines, no matter how seductive it might be to think so.
Wait, anti-vaxxers? Really?
They’re conspiracy nuts, but how does their particular flavor translate to false-flagging? I thought it was just straight-up paranoia: “the medical-industrial complex is suppressing information that these vaccines will hurt your darling child in order to safeguard their profits.”
How does that translate into thinking bad vaccines are a false flag operation? Wouldn’t it have to “the medical-industry complex is deliberately poisoning your children in order to ?”
(I’m sure there are people who believe that, but the ‘mainstream’ anti-vaxxers, the people who actually appeared on news shows and suchly, never seemed to go that far.)
I’d heard that outlandish idea after Newtown… and it leaves me with one thought about such conspiracy theorists: are these people completely out of their minds?
The answer is yes.
Neil Armstrong once said that the only thing harder than landing men on the moon would’ve been convincingly faking landing men on the moon.
Not sure which I like more; that quote, or Buzz Aldrin’s response to a fake landing type who’d been harassing him, naming punching the guy out.
Looks like someone is on the exact same page:
Augh, this didn’t post: http://bostonmarathonconspiracy.com
I did a post on this for Skeptoid. In short, false flags are real, and have nothing at all to do with Boston, Sandy Hook or any other recent terrorist attack.
http://skeptoid.com/blog/2013/01/21/false-flag-attacks-myth-and-reality/
The most succinct response to most conspiracy theories is Hanlon’s Razor “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” It’s harder to believe the government is SO good that they can keep every leak under wraps, than it is to believe that they can’t stop EVERY attack. Heck, it’s not even necessarily a case of incompetence, it’s just that a 100% success rate is not realistic at all, something is bound to slip through.
I imagine that there is some crazy, and some disingenuity when it comes to things like false-flagger theorists – but like all conspiracy theorists, I suspect that a lot of it stems from fear. See, if people go crazy and do bad things, or even just don’t like you very much and do bad things to you for reasons you don’t understand, it’s scary.
Hell, it’s terrifying.
You’re confused, you’re hurting, and you want the reason that a bad thing happened to you to be comprehensible and understandable – not least because if bad things just -happened-, there’s nothing to say that it won’t happen again. If there’s some kind of conspiracy, it means that at the very least it can be guarded against, even if that conspiracy is absolutely crazy.
So Mike what should we call a false false flag?
Meanwhile, http://www.addictinginfo.org/2013/04/12/yet-another-conspiracy-theorist-facing-charges-after-harassing-victims-of-aurora-shooting-video/
I’ve always found the idea of the government conspiracy to be pretty out there. These are people who can’t even handle the post office.
The government, at best, can stop news from breaking. It is complete shit at stopping things from leaking.
I, for one, take comfort in this. There’s enough to worry about in the world, but I rest easy knowing that there are not, in fact, seventeen men who rule the world.
“Feeling victimized when something bad ,had absolutely nothing to do with them” isn’t necessarily a bad thing; this is how sympathy is supposed to work (or is it empathy? I can never keep those two straight).
I think the difference is that these angry white guys have to make it all about them. By jumping in to announce that the attack was “really” targeted at them, they minimize the actual, still-bleeding victims.
I think this tactic has become S.O.P. for the Crazy Wing these days; conspiracy and media bias are invoked incessantly. It just sticks out more at times like these, when such vivid tragedies like Newtown and Boston force us all to take notice of just how crass and outlandish the claims are.
Murc asked “How does that translate into thinking bad vaccines are a false flag operation? Wouldn’t it have to “the medical-industry complex is deliberately poisoning your children in order to ?”
Yes, some of them are accusing the British government of needlessly hospitalizing measles victims to spread fear and drive up vaccination rates.
Other are accusing the British government of deliberately spreading the virus to spread fear and drive up vaccination rates.
You see, the CDC is in cahoots with BigPharma and they vaccinate children to give them all kinds of chronic diseases so BigPharma can make money off them.
eeeep, my tinfoil hat is melting.
You know what? Here’s two conspiracy theories that are just as plausible or based in reality, but are equally absurd.
First off, they used pressure cooker bombs, so clearly it’s a chef conspiracy to reign terror because their candidate lost on Top Chef!
Alternatively, the Liberal’s just elected Justin Trudeau as the leader and there were Canadians in the marathon. Ergo, it’s a resurgant FLQ making their presence know.
because it is white dudes who comprise the overwhelming majority of conspiracy theorists
No, that’s not true. Not even a little. White conspiracy theories usually lack a germ of truth though, maybe that’s what you’re reaching for. For example.
Jaap, it’s a British (and apparently Canadian) phrase.
In fairness to the conspiracy theorists, it’s perfectly true governments do lie about things, stage things and organize what could reasonably be called conspiracies–the massive spying on the left wing in the 1960s, accompanied by agents provocateurs, is one example.
the leap from that to assuming something must be or probably is a conspiracy solely because it fits better with your worldview (whoever you are and whatever your view happens to be) is where logic falls into an empty grave to die.
But that’s PART OF THE CONSPIRACY!!! They DELIBERATELY mess up the post office to make you THINK they’re incompetent!! 🙂
@Murc: http://www.theonion.com/articles/william-safire-orders-two-whoppers-junior,3351/
Yes, and not with low res images from 2002. Check out the high resolution images from the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiters of the Moon
Let me try that again. LRO site.
And, if not, here, just cut and paste the URL
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LRO/news/apollo-sites.html
Point being, with time the Truth is made plain, from the Gulf of Tonkin to the Gulf War. But for right now, there exists a gulf or reason between us and them.
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