| RavenBlog |
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| Comments on Friday 2 July 2004: |
| Today I've been digging around in various conspiracy theories, and have come to the conclusion that conspiracy theorists need to beef up their campaigns somewhat. The problem for conspiracy theorists is that they believe there is proof for their claims, eg. "Any American official wishing to challenge this has only to subpoena the telephone company and Justice Department records. There will be no phone charge originating from American Airlines 77 to the US Solicitor General." But who is allowed access to phone records? Not the conspiracy theorists, certainly. The FBI, NSA, CIA, other TLA, and police if they get the paperwork, but there is no way for your average conspiracy theorist to get this evidence. They genuinely believe there is conclusive evidence available, but have no conceivable way to get at it. So what can they do? The answer is simple - fight fire with fire. It's not like any of the information the public is given is true, so why does the information from conspiracy theorists have to be? Rather than saying "if you subpoena the phone records you'll see no call was made", say "click here to view the phone records" and link to a page of data that looks plausible, with highlighted bits where the missing phone call isn't, or, if you want to argue that there was a phonecall, highlight the bit where it is instead. Clearly whoever gets their evidence to the public eye first wins, no matter whether it's real. If the first evidence you saw after 9/11 was "that phone call the woman made was faked, look, here are the phone records" and a week later an FBI press release said "those phone records were forged, look, here are the real ones" which would you believe? I demand better-prepared conspiracy theorists. They should have their explanations ready before the event happens, with pictures and other documentation, just like the official story does. The most important thing, however, is to always tell the viewer what they see in a photograph, like CNN do. I would never have believed that these pictures are "a series of photos taken by a security camera that show the fireball from a hijacked airliner crashing into the Pentagon on September 11" if I hadn't been told, given that they used completely the wrong scale for showing a 757, were timestamped the wrong time on the wrong day (timestamp not shown in CNN's copy), and show time passing at an inconsistent rate. Luckily, the conspiracy theorists are already pretty good at the "tell the reader what they're looking at" part of propaganda. Could you pass me my tinfoil hat, please? It's getting awfully mind-controlly in here. [14:46] |