The Conspiracy Theorist Glossary

[zappaman]

If you’ve ever scoffed when someone told you that JFK’s second gunman destroyed the World Trade Center with assistance from reptilian extraterrestrials as part of a plan hatched at Bohemian Grove to corner the gold market before the return of Planet X, you’ve probably found yourself subject to a bevy of indicting catch phrases machine gunned at you so fast your head spun.

To help decode the buzzwords that form the conspiracy theorist lexicon, the Skeptic Project developed a handy glossary. Here are some highlights:

Awake: the opposite of “asleep.” Essentially, the condition of believing in conspiracy theories and not believing (supposedly) any government or “mainstream media” source. CT’ers employ numerous variations on the “asleep”/”awake” concept, such as “I woke up,” “You’re asleep,” “Why did you go back to sleep?”, “When I was asleep I believed…”, “We’re trying to wake people up!”, “A lot of people are waking up,” etc., etc.

More at link

http://disinfo.com/2013/05/the-conspiracy-theorist-glossary/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+disinfo%2FoMPh+%28Disinformation%29#sthash.cJJyvSRY.dpbs

[frogmarch]

1. The article covers some of

the main CT buzzwords/buzzphrases, right on the first page. We see them right here in CS.

Along with Asleep are these:

Do Your Own Research

Enjoy Your Ignorance

Sheeple

You Lose

[zappaman]

2. "Why are you defending Bush?" n/t

[frogmarch]

3. ha! And

drinking the government Koolaid?

[ocpagu]

4. The only good point in the article...

... is the first comment about it:

"Its always interesting to me to what pains people will go to assert that simply believing what authority figures tell you at face value is sophisticated, whereas being skeptical and speculating about hidden agendas makes one a rube." - Ted Heistman

And...

"History is not happenstance: it is conspiratorial. Carefully planned and executed by people in power" - George Carlin

This modus operandi of ridiculing people who voice support for skepticism and reject blind acceptance to publicized explanations - as if the truth about the things of the world had to be certified by mainstream press and governments to be plausible - and stereotyping the same people with this kind of bullshit is typically authoritarian, Orwellian, anti-scientific - plainly stupid.

Oh... some people seem to forget that several of these "conspiracy theories" (controversies would be the more appropriate term for several of them) have been proven true.

[ZombieHorde]

5. There are two different things here.

1) Being skeptical about what one hears.

2) Assuming truth.

For example, there is a difference between wondering why the flag was "fluttering in the wind" during the first moon landing, and saying the first moon landing was a hoax.

Once a logical explanation is offered --the bar the flag was attached to wasn't fully extended yet, causing the flag to look like it was blowing in the wind-- pressing the same point starts to look silly.