I think the main point of the story is not to convince us that he has a good proof. But rather to document how we convince ourselves, and how we latch on to small things and head down a path. Once we are on a path we become commited to it and it becomes hard to turn back. Notice how he talks about the "crazies" on the forum. How they would use aliases, log back in and mention their stupid "lightning" theory, and he h…
I thought that he was being pretty clear throughout the article that this was a description of his personal journey into becoming a "believer" - despite how ludicrous what he was believing in. I'm hoping that nobody seriously believes the NYT published this article backing the belief that MH 370 didn't crash. I mean, it starts with the title of the story - the key line in this entire story is this: And yet, once I st…
How crazy am I to think I actually know where that Malaysia Airlines plane is?
191–200 of 223 posts
Re: How crazy am I to think I actually know where that Malaysia Airlines plane is?
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can also ponder it from the perspective of a rational hijacker. Why fake BFO when you could have just had no pings at all?
You can also ponder it from the perspective of a state who are very keen to keep the news media as distracted as possible from what you're up to. If this was the goal, then it was achieved admirably - a mystery was provided, and the press took the bait, and largely ignored the brewing unrest in Ukraine. In terms of the plausibility of his theory... it's plausible. It doesn't mean it's right, but it's plausible. I've…
Making an aircraft disappear might have taken Ukraine off a few front pages, but the propaganda benefit to Russia was - as any reasonable person would have anticipated - minimal at best. It made essentially no difference to Western policy towards Russia, and if anything drew a bit more attention towards crashes involving Malaysian Airlines 777s than was good for Russian interests.
Conversely, the implications of being caught hijacking an aircraft full of civilians and flying it into their own airspace would have been very severe indeed, especially given the number of citizens of their neighbour and only major international ally on board.
Consider the reward is minimal at best, the cost of failure is exceptionally high, and the probability of failing to hijack and fly an aircraft several thousand miles over multiple jurisdictions without detection is comfortably above zero.
Assume that anyone with the acumen to pull this sort of stunt off successfully possesses the faculties to do some basic weighing up of risk and reward an ask yourself why on earth would they do something so risky for such a trivially achieved and insignificant objective as distracting news media
Just because a particular organization theoretically could pull off a particular course of action doesn't mean it's not ridiculous in the extreme to assume they would.
Re: How crazy am I to think I actually know where that Malaysia Airlines plane is?
#193Earlier quoted context omitted.
Full of Dutch nationals, not Chinese. Also, it's unlikely that "Russia" took it down, they merely supplied the weaponry to a bunch of incompetent hotheads who accidentally shot it down.
According to a report by the Berlin-based Correctiv & Der Spiegel [0], it was Russia's 53rd Air Defence Brigade that was directly operating the missile launcher. [0] https://mh17.correctiv.org/english/
Re: How crazy am I to think I actually know where that Malaysia Airlines plane is?
#194Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think a large portion of the conspiracy theorist population probably has a mental illness that makes them susceptible to delusional thinking. Delusional people can lead very normal fully functioning lives, but mix a certain topic that offers patterns which make their brain go down a certain path, and they suddenly become very adamant about believing something that is illogical and irrational. There is probably litt…
What's the prevelance of conspiracy theories? About half of Americans claim creationism explains the existance of man; only about 20% say humans evolved without God. 50% of Americans think there was a wider conspiracy behind the assassination of JFK. About 35% of Americans think that global warming is a hoax. What you're doing is probably the conjunction fallacy. You see people with odd beliefs. You then have a choic…
Re: How crazy am I to think I actually know where that Malaysia Airlines plane is?
#195> One was sure the plane had been hit by lightning and then floated in the South China Sea, transmitting to the satellite on battery power. When I kicked him out, he came back under aliases. I wound up banning anyone who used the word “lightning.” That's some seriously messed up moderation. Who is this guy and what forum is he talking about?
Re: How crazy am I to think I actually know where that Malaysia Airlines plane is?
#196I don't understand why an entity with "state level resources" would need to go through this elaborate procedure to acquire a jet (which they presumably want to use for nefarious purposes). 1) What nefarious purpose could they possibly use it for? e.g. let's say they want to turn it into a flying bomb - do they really think the rest of the world won't figure out where it came from / who did it, simply because they're…
Re: How crazy am I to think I actually know where that Malaysia Airlines plane is?
#197Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think a large portion of the conspiracy theorist population probably has a mental illness that makes them susceptible to delusional thinking. Delusional people can lead very normal fully functioning lives, but mix a certain topic that offers patterns which make their brain go down a certain path, and they suddenly become very adamant about believing something that is illogical and irrational. There is probably litt…
What's the prevelance of conspiracy theories? About half of Americans claim creationism explains the existance of man; only about 20% say humans evolved without God. 50% of Americans think there was a wider conspiracy behind the assassination of JFK. About 35% of Americans think that global warming is a hoax. What you're doing is probably the conjunction fallacy. You see people with odd beliefs. You then have a choic…
> half of Americans claim creationism explains the existance of man
This is a fantastic explanation, it just doesn't originate from science.
> 50% of Americans think there was a wider conspiracy behind the assassination of JFK.
This is a perfectly logical thing to believe even in the absence of evidence. It's reasonable for any assassination of a prominent figure.
> 35% of Americans think that global warming is a hoax.
This topic is super-politicized. Uncritical acceptance would be unreasonable (and many do accept one side of this without questioning it). Most people aren't going to do any research into the topic. The 65% who believe global warming probably didn't do any research either.
I think it's not even very fair to call these 'odd beliefs'.
Re: How crazy am I to think I actually know where that Malaysia Airlines plane is?
#198Earlier quoted context omitted.
Its important to look for supporting evidence and gather facts. Yes you're right the masses still believes everything they see on TV and other officially controlled media. The more time someone believes something, the more time it takes to break him out of it. As for conspiracy theorists these people generally have had atleast 1 experience in the past, where they had picked the right trail and were mislead. These guy…
> Its important to look for supporting evidence and gather facts. That's a reasonable stance. I tend to agree with you. It seems uncontroversial that it is important to look for supporting evidence and gather facts. I wonder what do you make of this public statement, published by Le Monde and written by 34 French scholars, made in February of 1979: "The question of how technically such a mass murder was possible shou…
This is bizarre, because you have written a confused set of paragraphs taken out of the playbook of Holocaust deniers. You have quoted a small piece of an article from Le Monde (out of context). The context was the need to debunk claims by Robert Faurisson, who was and is a notorious Holocaust denier.
You have also made truly outrageous claims about gas chambers, with justification, amazingly, from a television interview (unsourced) and a noted historian (unsourced). I am unconvinced.
The only way I can make sense of what you have written is as an ironic gesture -- an unhinged collage of junk from one of the oldest conspiracy theories, the one that believes in a Jewish cabal.
Re: How crazy am I to think I actually know where that Malaysia Airlines plane is?
#199The difficult thing with this sort of article is that while it generally sounds plausible, the layperson reader doesn't know about the specifics. I don't know anything about BFO spoofing or handshake rings. This means that all I can really judge this article on is its presentation and logical reasoning, and while both seem okay, there's no way for me to evaluate the premises and finer points that the piece critically…
If it was a conspiracy, it must have been carried out by some group. Who was that group? What are the goals of that group? Why did that group decide that the proposed plan was the best way to use their limited resources to achieve their goal, as opposed to some other plan?
I suppose the group here would be Putin and/or some group of Russian nationalists, and the goal would be to get the Ukrainian conflict out of the news.
Then the plan would involve a highly elaborate scheme of secretly designing sophisticated equipment, performing careful analysis, and smuggling highly-trained personnel onto a flight for the purpose of secretly diverting it to an obscure airfield. Then you'd have to execute all of the passengers who weren't in on it and dispose of their bodies and the plane somewhere where they won't be found for a long time, and make sure that none of the people who were in on it ever talk about it. And if you screw any of that up at any point, then you get the opposite of what your goal was - massive media attention of what a world-class asshole you are.
But if the goal is to disappear the flight for news coverage, why bother with all of that when 1% of the effort and even less risk would get it to crash somewhere in the Indian ocean, where it would likely never be found?
Why bother with any of it at all? Aren't there lots of much simpler ways to distract the news media? Does anybody in Russia even care that much what the Western media thinks?
Another thing - what about China? As far as I know, the US and Europe are currently unhappy at Russian interference in the Ukraine, but China don't seem to care much. There were a lot of Chinese nationals on that flight, though, and I bet China would be very unhappy indeed if it was ever discovered that they were killed by Russia in a ham-fisted attempt to distract the Western media. Possibly enough to lead to a change in the Chinese position on the conflict, including diplomatic, economic, and maybe military support for the Western position. Why would Russia take that risk, when there must be far simpler options out there?
I find that a lot of conspiracy theories fall apart under this type of analysis, without even paying much attention to the technical details. If you want me to believe that this happened, you've gotta come up with a group and set of goals that make it look like a good idea.
Re: How crazy am I to think I actually know where that Malaysia Airlines plane is?
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
If P is true, its negation is false. >In actuality nothing in science or in reality can be proven to be true. If this were the case, the word "true" would have no meaning. We prove things in science all the time. We proved that you can cross a river without getting wet, for instance. We proved that humans can travel to the moon. The examples are endless, really.
>If P is true, its negation is false. Not exactly sure what you're referring to here. Still let me give you some detail on how I negated that statement: I'm essentially negating phrases within the sentence using the distributive property from algebra: ~( ) = ( ) If the positive statement is valid the negated statement is also valid. Negating +2 into -2 doesn't make the -2 any less true then the +2, in fact it's not e…
Well, I'm sure that is proof of its correctness?
>What is happening is that you have formed a very reliable conclusion based on intuition, you haven't gathered proof.
That's what proof is. Saying proof is not proof is not all that useful a conclusion to draw.
>it is actually fundamentally impossible to establish a "proof."
See? That's why it's a stupid conclusion.
>None of your examples have been "proven."
Did we go to the moon or didn't we? If going to the moon is not proof that we can go to the moon, then I don't see what business you have to say any of this.
>It is fundamentally impossible to prove anything. It is only possible to establish correlations.
Correlations are what the word "proof" refers to.
>This is not some weird thing I made up, this is established knowledge.
Well, congratulations. You've just established that God exists, too.
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"Proof" is that which is convincing to a 'fair and rational' mind. All you need are correlations that marginalize error. Things that are proven are true up to the invalidation of your assumptions. In science, those assumptions are experiences. In mathematics, they are axioms. There is no fundamental difference between the two, because mathematical axioms are also observed linguistic experiences.