The problem with universalizing claims about conspiracy theories is that those claims break when some proportion of those conspiracy hypotheses end up turning out to be conspiracy facts. MKUltra or Project Northwoods or the Tuskegee Syphilis Study are now officially backed conspiracy facts,for example. Arguably, the Manhattan project was a conspiracy fact. Disbelieving these things doesn't make you a clever scientist, it makes you a denier of the official narrative.
There's a similar problem with the term science denier. The nature of science is such that if you're doing the process correctly, most of science will be denied by the process of science. Some of the most famous and respected scientists of the 20th century were science deniers. Einstein and Heisenberg for example denied Newtonian physics that were "the science" and helped create relativity and quantum physics.
In a sense, both terms end up smuggling in epistemological certainty that isn't necessarily warranted. Some of the scientists who put a man on the moon believed in science that today the sort of people who use terms like "science denier" would deny, given how many of them were German national socialists. Nobel prize winning scientists have ended up wrapped up in pseudoscience and using their status to push easily falsifiable claims that are certainly wrong. To deny what they say isn't science denialism in spite of their high status as scientists. The truth is the truth, and that which is not the truth is not.
- replies
- 1
- announces
- 0
- likes
- 3
Some of the scientists who put a man on the moon believed in science that today the sort of people who use terms like "science denier" would deny, given how many of them were German national socialists.
Isn't it the same today? "No, I won't be using this software — its developers say bad things and for that I call them Nazis, I'll wait for some for some genderqueer furry bro to fork it and use it then" Those were bad Nazi rockets until US captured these scientists and Nazi rockets became "freedom rockets" — most people don't care about the underlying rather complex things, they need some framing/branding they can stand behind — this is nothing new.
The problem with universalizing claims about conspiracy theories is that those claims break when some proportion of those conspiracy hypotheses end up turning out to be conspiracy facts.
Seymour Hersh was instrumental in bringing COINTELPRO (among other things) to light, but today he makes outlandish claims about US blowing up Nord Stream 2 and sings to the tune of Russian propaganda (what a goddamn disgrace ). So what's the difference and who is he today? COINTELPRO thing was based on stolen FBI papers and NS2 thing, according to his own words — on a single anonymous source and there are valid reasons to believe that this source speaks Russian, so either he makes it all up or is getting played by KGB/GRU. When you have a consistent explanation that doesn't match the official narrative, but fits the facts really well and can offer some, often indirect, proof to back it up — you're a brave investigative journalist; when you offer a theory that simply diverges from the official narrative, but marrying it with well-known facts requires a great deal of mental gymnastics and there exist far simpler explanations, and the best you can offer are dubious sources or none at all — you're a "conspiracy theorist" and I can totally see where the negative connotation comes from.