Home › Forum Online Discussion › Practice › Conspiracy theories supported by logical fallacies
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July 24, 2010 at 6:33 pm #34825StevenModerator
(Response to post “not paranoia at all” below)
I’m not sticking my head in the sand as you imply.
It’s just that these conspiracy theories are hedged by
logical fallacies . . . very clever ones mind you, but
logical fallacies nonetheless.In particular, the wide range of this conspiracy, which
ultimately becomes some kind of fanatical conservatism is filled
with “guilt-by-association” and non-sequitur fallacies.If we take the last article for example, basically it says:
Betty Friedan promoted feminism.
Betty Friedan believed feminism helps the communist agenda.
Communism is bad.
Therefore feminism is bad.To understand why this a logical fallacy,
consider the following “argument”:The internet helps stalkers do their stalking.
Stalkers are bad.
Therefore the internet is bad.Just because STALKERS find that the internet helps their goals,
and since we don’t want to help stalkers, does not mean that
therefore we should view the internet as a force for “badness”.In the same way, just because the BANKING CARTEL finds that
feminism and gay rights helps their goals, and since we
don’t want to help the banking cartel, does not mean that
therefore we should view feminism and gay rights as bad.The flaw in the reasoning is to take the precedent out of context
and only consider possible negative consequences,
ignoring positive consequences . . .
which in many cases outweigh the negative ones.Another example (same idea) of a flawed argument in this style:
Wood stoves cause air pollution.
Air pollution is bad.
Therefore, wood stoves are bad.OK, we don’t want air pollution, but is that any reason to
be against wood stoves? Especially when you consider all
of the benefits, such as LESS pollution than the energy budget
from refinement of gas for a gas stove, the fact that the
cost to heat a small cabin over the winter is cheaper, and
the wood stove keeps you warm. Not so cut and dried.Basically, these are all “guilt-by-association” logical fallacies,
and is the flavor of the articles by Henry Makow etc, so
I stand by my previous comments about him being a misogynistic
homophobe (in my opinion).Many of the other logical fallacies are simple non-sequiturs, i.e.
A DOES NOT IMPLY B flaws. The reason why people haven’t
“connected the dots” is because there aren’t dots to connect!This is ultimately why I don’t worry about conspiracies.
Because I know in my heart of hearts that if it is really involved
and it is really secret, then probably it is hedged by faulty
logic, and not worth worrying about.Every conspiracy does have a germ of truth, and I do think
that there is a banking cartel whose goal is power; but extensions
beyond that to pornography, gender roles, feminism, gay rights, etc.
I do NOT believe.In any action, I ask myself whether or not it helps to empower
people and whether or not it is heart-centered . . . and guess what
I think treating women equally and treating homosexuals equally
satisfies both of those bills, so that IN ITSELF tells me that
“the application of the conspiracy to these realms” is
fear-mongering.In fact, one could argue that the mantra against feminism and
against gay rights as purported by the conspiracy sayers (i.e.
Henry Makow) is conservative fear of change . . . AND FEAR
IN GENERAL is one of the tools used by groups over the millennia
to get people to give up their rights to oppressive regimes.In other words, I could argue that FEAR about feminism and gay rights
could equally well be used by the BANKING CARTEL for its goals of
getting people to give up their power for security.The solution I think to all conspiracies is to take actions
in everyday life that increase people’s self-empowerment,
compassion, and connection to their heart, and not worry about
whether you can discover (or debunk) intricate conspiracy claims.I’m not naive enough to think that this post will convince
anyone not to believe in their favorite XYZ conspiracy, but
maybe to use the above guidance of self-empowerment and compassion
to be a guiding star. Spending time trying to root out
flawed logic is not really necessary; connection to the heart is.Steven
July 24, 2010 at 11:32 pm #34826ribosome777Participantwhere are you?
earth
what is the point of life
what is the future
what is the past
what exists on earth and what is occurring to what end
ANSWERS:
time may be flexible
space may be permeable
industry is juvenile
sciences are the pursuit of truthaliens may be out there
figure out what you are and whether you have a soul and what you are destined for
the answer could
A: be a resounding and futile flop
B: ultimate incontrovertible and eternal purposehave fun in between
you may be space food
cling to a fallacy and your soul may be a lie
August 9, 2010 at 9:35 am #34828ChiFiendParticipantI realize that I am pissing on something which is a sacred cow for many people. I fully support that all people should have equal rights under the law, regardless of race, color, creed, gender or neurotic type (homosexual or whatever). The problem with the feminist movement is that it used the subject of rights as a cozy buzzword in order to rally every one behind the movement.
Granted, the movement accomplished more equality under the law for women, but at the cost of tremendous weakening of the core of western society. The real agenda was to turn the women against the men and destroy the family unit and that is what they are accomplishing. Look at the communist manifesto. The family unit always was one of the key targets in order to undermine and subdue any society.
The bankster cartel opened up both barrels. They used key media/CIA people like Gloria Steinem, and they used activists (from communist front groups) like Betty Friedan.
>> I stand by my previous comments about him
>> being a misogynistic homophobe (in my opinion).Whenever someone states a viewpoint which is not politically correct, they immediately get vilified with the current psychobabble-onian put downs (homophobic, yadayada).
Don’t shoot the messenger. Dr. Makow is making some very good points.
In fact, the dots are there and I am sure that anyone who is open-minded and can think logically on the subject can see the dots and connect them.
>> . . . to take actions in everyday life that increase
>> people’s self-empowerment, compassion, and
>> connection to their heart, . . .I certainly can’t argue with that. Sounds like a great approach to living. 🙂
August 9, 2010 at 11:20 pm #34830StevenModerator>>>I fully support that all people should have equal rights
>>>under the law, regardless of race, color, creed, gender
>>>or neurotic type (homosexual or whatever).OK, now you are saying that homosexuality is a neurosis?
That’s not a very heart-centered philosophy.
You may want to carefully examine the hate and fear that
lies behind this judgment. Even the American Psychological
Association has disavowed such a negative view. Just
because the majority of the population is heterosexual,
does not mean that homosexuals suffer from neurosis, anymore
than the 10% of the population that is left-handed suffers
from neurosis. Or should left-handers be viewed as a scourge
that should be pitied and attempts made to convert them
to more common right-handedness? Oh wait. People actually
believed that 100 years and so ago. When my grandmother
went to school, they used to tie the left hands of lefties
behind their backs and beat them with a stick if they
tried to use their left hand. Such ignorance caused a lot
of damage. Thankfully people woke up to their fear and hate
that lefties were “evil”, and not in their “right” mind.As to the other things you mentioned, I’m not going to
reiterate the logical fallacies I already explained.
There’s a difference between something having a germ of truth,
and the actual truth. The “germ of truth” during the 1930s
that the Jewish lending practices might be not be helping the
collapse of the German economy is what lead (through FEAR) to
the rise of Nazism and Adolf Hitler, and the extermination
of the Jews. Every radical organization carries a germ of truth,
such as the material presented by the Aryan Nation or the Black
Panther Society, etc. But they all suffer from the same
disorder . . . namely extrapolating from the germ of truth to
a larger destructive conspiracy through logical fallacies
and a position of fear and hate.Fear and hate is the real enemy.
They are the seeds from which real evil is born.It is a real simple task to determine what is right.
One just needs to determine if certain ideas flow from an
open heart of compassion; if so, they are inherently good,
despite preconceived ideas from the mind. If they flow
from fear and hate and serve to be closed-hearted to
others, lacking compassion, they are reprehensible.Being open-minded is not the solution;
being open-hearted is.S
August 9, 2010 at 11:27 pm #34832StevenModeratorI don’t anticipate I’m going to change your mind through words alone.
You may want to try the Inner Smile meditation, especially the
yang outward version, say on Michael’s “Way of the Inner Smile” CD.
It may help you to understand where I’m coming from a little better.
SAugust 11, 2010 at 1:17 am #34834ChiFiendParticipantOnce again you shoot the messenger because you don’t like the message.
I am not a hateful or fearful or evil person. Thank you very much.
By the way, you are starting to sound like Bush, Jr. with that axis of evil stuff.
At one of my most recent contracts in the USA, there were many nice people that I worked with. My very best friend there was a young openly “gay” man. Every day we took our breaks together and shared our most personal thoughts on a regular basis. I did not care what other people thought of our special relationship. He was a great friend. Even he knew that there was a psychological component to his “sexual preference”. He talked about issues with his father which he felt may have pre-disposed him to being homosexual.
A family member of mine (rest in peace) was homosexual. He had outrageous feelings of total rejection from his father that dated back to his infancy. His brother, who had always felt totally secure about their father’s love, is heterosexual.
As a youth I had a homosexual acquaintance who confided in me about his extremely anxious relationship with his father and how he felt that had something to do with his homosexuality.
A lesbian associate whom I worked with used to go on incessantly about how screwed up her relationship with her mother was.
The shrinks had some understanding of this before the bankster/media campaign to bestow normalcy on the subject of homosexuality went into high gear. The Amer. Psychological Ass. and the Amer. Psychiatric Ass. both forfeited their integrity on the subject as soon as the banksters cracked their media whip.
In general, the integrity of both Asses was already very low — for instance, lobotomies were still a commonly accepted practice back in those days. And nowadays it’s even worse, the way that they are dishing out their dangerous psychotropic drugs (which in some cases amount to chemical lobotomies) as if they were M&Ms.
It’s one thing to say that everyone should be compassionate, etc. That, however, does not change the truth. You are not doing homosexuals any favors by encouraging them in their aberrant behavior. Try tough love instead.
Try telling them what they need to hear rather than just being politically correct or just telling them what they think they want to hear.
Only the truth will set them free. The term gay when applied to homosexual males is one of the biggest misnomers of all time. These are, by and large, deeply troubled individuals. Drug and alcohol abuse and promiscuity are rampant and many of them have shortened life spans.
Getting back to the subject of feminism, there is a best-seller (now out of print, but not hard to find in used book stores or try Amazon) that you should read called, “The Power of Sexual Surrender” (1969), by Marie N. Robinson M.D. Dr. Robinson was a psychiatrist who helped a lot of women with frigidity problems back in the 50’s and 60’s.
She explains how she and other psychiatrists of that time period treated women who manifested one of the types of frigidity. They had a pretty standard procedure which they followed and they were routinely getting very good results.
In brief, after defusing the neurosis as much as possible through psychoanalysis, they found that they almost always had to debunk the effect of feminism on these women. Almost one for one, they found that these women had been significantly adversely affected by feminist ideas which they had subscribed to, and which were not very heart centered, to say the least.
Their minds and consequently their hearts had been poisoned against men and all things masculine, setting them up for unfulfilled sex lives with their husbands. So, in the long run, even the women also suffer from the unintended consequences of subscribing to the hateful feminist ideology. From that perspective, doesn’t that make feminism itself misogynistic? Perhaps not, since it is harming the men and the women equally.
Of course, nowadays a psychiatrist would just tell a frigid woman that she is depressed and give her a prescription for some pills. They would not dare to say a word against feminism, being the sacred cow that it is, for fear of being driven out of business or even losing their license. So, millions of women have to suffer with frigidity or worse because they are confused, having been lied to by the media, the politicians, their teachers, their textbooks and even their shrinks.
It’s not heart-centered to subscribe to ideologies which are going to lead to misery on such a broad scale. The result has been frigidity just for openers, not to mention many, many dysfunctional and/or broken families.
I know that you are a very compassionate man, but misdirected compassion often does not reap its intended results. Compassion directed by the truth is far more likely to be fruitful.
August 11, 2010 at 10:29 am #34836StevenModerator>>>Once again you shoot the messenger because you don’t like the message.
Read my post again carefully.
I never attacked YOU. I attacked your ideas.
Frankly, I don’t care what you personally believe.By the way, you are setting up a STRAW MAN here by claiming I’m going after you;
when I’ve done nothing of the sort. This is a convenient way to avoid
acknowledging my argument.>>>I am not a hateful or fearful or evil person. Thank you very much.
I never said you were.
This is your personal extrapolation only.
If you want to self-identify with ideas I attack, that’s your business;
but I’ve said nothing of the sort.>>>By the way, you are starting to sound like Bush, Jr.
>>>with that axis of evil stuff.Did you actually read my post?
At any rate, I’m going to ignore this obvious AD HOMINEM attack.Now to address the actual CONTENT of your post:
As far as women/feminism, frigidity has as its cause the storing
of psychic emotional garbage and trauma in the womb space. This
is part of what the Jade Egg practice from Healing Love is meant
to help with, as well as the many other psychological tools
for self-evolution that are in the Healing Tao toolkit.Oftentimes, anger and other manifesting problems such as frigidity
can arise later on, and only after emotional baggage that had
previously been SUPPRESSED is able to start to be given a voice.
This is part of the HEALING process, not an indicator that the
woman was “better” being in a suppressed state.Of course, everyone has the capacity to take things to extremes,
and have the pendulum swing beyond equality to an
anger-driven superiority, but this is more the exception than
the rule I think.As to the homosexual issue, you know people have been arguing
nature vs. nurture issues for a long time, and it’s a debate
that could go on without end. The article you linked is
an over-generalization, a convenient hyperbolic fairy tale,
that doesn’t even come close to painting the complete picture of
what is going on.“Gay conversion therapy” has a very low success rate.
At best, in the few cases where it appears to work, it just creates suppression;
by and large it causes a lot of additional psychological trauma that
then has to be extensively undone through a lot of additional therapy.
This is one of the reasons it has been disavowed. If it actually worked,
success stories would spread like wildfire, and there would be a flood
of people to such programs, as no one wants to feel stigmatized.
The bottom line is that such a thing is a fairy tale, and it
damages people . . . akin to the old practice of “retraining lefties”
I mentioned earlier.But saying that people are “supposed to be” a certain way is a
fear-based judgment. These are just convenient ways to “shoebox” people
and put them into categories . . . put people into neat little discreet
roles and say “this person” is in “this category” and “that person”
is in “that category”. If you are a man, you are supposed to grow
up playing with trucks and playing sports, and then grow up and
hunt and fish and be the breadwinner; if you are a woman, . . . etc.
Neat little prepackaged roles and categories to put people into, so
that people can feel SAFE. People aren’t prepackaged COGS for a
machine, and they shouldn’t have to be. The truth is that there
is inherent continuous DIVERSITY all across the spectrum. This is
Anthropology 101. People aren’t in neat categories.
The lifeforce is not rigid like that; it is fluid, flowing, across all spectra.Also, FYI, you might want to be careful about making generalizations
about mental stabilities, neuroses, etc. with regard to homosexuality.
In particular, there is a SENIOR Healing Tao instructor that is
half of a homosexual couple, a coupling that has lasted a really long
time–longer than a lot of standard heterosexual marriages; I know
this person quite well. Moreover: unstable, disturbed, neurotic, etc.
this person is NOT; one of the most well-grounded people I’ve met.By the way, since it appears no one else on this list cares about
this conversation, and since I feel I’ve already said my piece
adequately, I don’t know that I’m going to respond further to these
political propaganda rants.Have a nice day,
StevenAugust 12, 2010 at 12:16 am #34838ChiFiendParticipantOkay, well I now feel that I have posited sufficient dots out there. Anyone who chooses to should be able to connect them without too much effort.
In the meantime, as Steven says, it’s best not to get too caught up in trying to prove or disprove these various complex issues. One’s time would be better spent performing Taoist practices.
Thanks for the stimulating conversation.
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