I still think crisis actors and conspiracies are nonsense. But it does not help that EVERY one of these frickers filmed while arrested sound just like a sovereign citizen vs police video. The scripting, the wording, the speech pattern and delivery.

It’s chipping away at the wall of my stubbornness.

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Posted by Toomer Deplorable

Team Bitter Clinger

Member since May 2020

18175 posts

Posted on 4/28/24 at 2:32 pm to LSU alum wannabe

quote:
conspiracies are nonsense

What conspiracies? You need to be a little more specific than that. History is often little more than a concentrated study of one conspiracy piled upon another.
….

“Anytime that a hard-nosed analysis is put forth of who our rulers are, of how their political and economic interests interlock, it is invariably denounced by Establishment liberals and conservatives (and even by many libertarians) as a ‘conspiracy theory of history, paranoid, economic determinist,’ and even ‘Marxist.’

These smear labels are applied across the board, even though such realistic analyses can be, and have been, made from any and all parts of the economic spectrum, from the John Birch Society to the Communist Party. The most common label is ‘conspiracy theorist,’ almost always leveled as a hostile epithet rather than adopted by the ‘conspiracy theorist’ himself.
….

Let us take an easy example. Suppose we find that Congress has passed a law raising the steel tariff or imposing import quotas on steel? Surely only a moron will fail to realize that the tariff or quota was passed at the behest of lobbyists from the domestic steel industry, anxious to keep out efficient foreign competitors.

No one would level a charge of ’conspiracy theorist’ against such a conclusion. But what the conspiracy theorist is doing is simply to extend his analysis to more complex measures of government: say, to public works projects, the establishment of the ICC, the creation of the Federal Reserve System, or the entry of the United States into a war.
….

In each of these cases, the conspiracy theorist asks himself the question cui bono? Who benefits from this measure? If he finds that Measure A benefits X and Y, his next step is to investigate the hypothesis: did X and Y in fact lobby or exert pressure for the passage of Measure A? In short, did X and Y realize that they would benefit and act accordingly?

Far from being a paranoid or a determinist, the conspiracy analyst is a praxeologist; that is, he believes that people act purposively, that they make conscious choices to employ means in order to arrive at goals. Hence, if a steel tariff is passed, he assumes that the steel industry lobbied for it; if a public works project is created, he hypothesizes that it was promoted by an alliance of construction firms and unions who enjoyed public works contracts, and bureaucrats who expanded their jobs and incomes.
….

It is the opponents of ‘conspiracy’ analysis who profess to believe that all events – at least in government – are random and unplanned, and that therefore people do not engage in purposive choice and planning.

There are, of course, good conspiracy analysts and bad conspiracy analysts, just as there are good and bad historians or practitioners of any discipline. The bad conspiracy analyst tends to make two kinds of mistakes, which indeed leave him open to the Establishment charge of ‘paranoia.’
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First, he stops with the cui bono; if measure A benefits X and Y, he simply concludes that therefore X and Y were responsible. He fails to realize that this is just an hypothesis, and must be verified by finding out whether or not X and Y really did so.

Well, how do we look at all this? Do we say that David Rockefeller’s prodigious efforts on behalf of certain statist public policies are merely a reflection of unfocused altruism? If so, it’s a coincidence that boggles the mind. Or are there more sinister political-economic interests involved? I submit that the naifs who stubbornly refuse to examine the interplay of political and economic interest in government are tossing away an essential tool for analyzing the world in which we live.” Murray Rothbard.

This post was edited on 4/28/24 at 2:38 pm

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