And before anyone sniffs about linking to Infowars, let me ask you, looking back 15 years, who was right in predicting our current dystopia, Alex Jones, or his critics?
' "Conspiracy theory" is usually used as a pejorative label, meaning paranoid, nutty, marginal, and certainly untrue. The power of this pejorative is that it discounts a theory by attacking the motivations and mental competence of those who advocate the theory. By labeling an explanation of events "conspiracy theory," evidence and argument are dismissed because they come from a mentally or morally deficient personality, not because they have been shown to be incorrect. Calling an explanation of events "conspiracy theory" means, in effect, "We don't like you, and no one should listen to your explanation."
In earlier eras other pejorative labels, such as "heresy," "witchery," and "communism" also worked like this. The charge of "conspiracy theory" is not so severe as these other labels, but in its way is many times worse. Heresy, witchcraft, and communism at least retain some sense of potency. They designate ideas to be feared. "Conspiracy theory" implies that the ideas and their advocates are simple-minded or insane. '
Many conspiracies which have been irrefutably exposed continue to operate, simply because the majority of people dislike acknowledging uncomfortable facts - for example, Operation Gladio:
Current Dystopia?? I don't know where you live ... but if you're in the US (and the kind of person that would frequent this site) I assume that what you are living in is far from a dystopia. Let's keep some perspective in the conversation please.
> I'd wager that most of the great things we use today started as nearly ephemeral emanations from someone's mind, often late at night, or helped along by a snifter of brandy.
Somebody is saying this is inevitable - and whenever you hear somebody saying that, it's very likely to be a set of businesses campaigning to make it true. -- Richard Stallman
Whenever and wherever freedom and enlightenment rear their head in the form of specific people and specific insights, they are systematically fought. By all sorts of specific people for all sorts of specific reasons -- but not by laws of nature, or the laws of progress or whatever is dreamed up. Whatever road we're currently going down, it's one of many possible ones. And every step along it is made of people, decisions, and responsibility.
"And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward."
As a refugee from Amerika, I agreed with you all the way until your conclusion. What makes you think technological innovation will provide salvation?! It seems to me exactly the opposite. Increasingly, technical innovations are being used by the government against the people, and the people are becoming increasingly degenerate through their indiscriminate use of technology.
This is what McLuhan called the "agenbite of outwit", riffing on Joyce:
"With the telegraph Western man began a process of putting his nerves outside his body. Previous technologies had been extensions of physical organs: the wheel is a putting-outside-ourselves of the feet; the city wall is a collective outering of the skin. But electronic media are, instead, extensions of the central nervous system, an inclusive and simultaneous field. Since the telegraph we have extended the brains and nerves of man around the globe. As a result, the electronic age endures a total uneasiness, as of a man wearing his skull inside and his brain outside. We have become peculiarly vulnerable. The year of the establishment of the commercial telegraph in America, 1844, was also the year Kierkegaard published The Concept of Dread.
A special property of all social extensions of the body is that they return to plague the inventors in a kind of agenbite of outwit. As Narcissus fell in love with an outering (projection, extension) of himself, man seems invariably to fall in love with the newest gadget or gimmick that is merely an extension of his own body. Driving a car or watching television, we tend to forget that what we have to do with is simply a part of ourselves stuck out there. Thus disposed, we become servo-mechanisms of our contrivances, responding to them in the immediate, mechanical way that they demand of us. The point of the Narcissus myth is not that people are prone to fall in love with their own images but that people fall in love with extensions of themselves which they are convinced are not extensions of themselves."
http://www.infowars.com/33-conspiracy-theories-that-turned-o...
And before anyone sniffs about linking to Infowars, let me ask you, looking back 15 years, who was right in predicting our current dystopia, Alex Jones, or his critics?
' "Conspiracy theory" is usually used as a pejorative label, meaning paranoid, nutty, marginal, and certainly untrue. The power of this pejorative is that it discounts a theory by attacking the motivations and mental competence of those who advocate the theory. By labeling an explanation of events "conspiracy theory," evidence and argument are dismissed because they come from a mentally or morally deficient personality, not because they have been shown to be incorrect. Calling an explanation of events "conspiracy theory" means, in effect, "We don't like you, and no one should listen to your explanation."
In earlier eras other pejorative labels, such as "heresy," "witchery," and "communism" also worked like this. The charge of "conspiracy theory" is not so severe as these other labels, but in its way is many times worse. Heresy, witchcraft, and communism at least retain some sense of potency. They designate ideas to be feared. "Conspiracy theory" implies that the ideas and their advocates are simple-minded or insane. '
http://www.newdemocracyworld.org/old/conspiracy.htm
Many conspiracies which have been irrefutably exposed continue to operate, simply because the majority of people dislike acknowledging uncomfortable facts - for example, Operation Gladio:
http://www.corbettreport.com/mp3/episode256-lq.mp3