AluminumTheory
Senior Member.
I've been following politics for about the past decade and I was among the many naive hopefuls who voted for Obama in 2008 in hopes for a change. It wasn't long before I began to see that Obama is just a shill with no intentions of bringing real change. This lead to disappointment and a general feeling of frustration with government and so I began to ponder whether something larger is behind all of this. Sometime in 2010, I saw Jesse Ventura's show "Conspiracy Theory" and while I'll admit that even then I thought the show was a little on the goofy side, but I felt that they asked some very legitimate questions and so I became curious about this and I began listening to Alex Jones who made frequent cameos on Ventura's show.
I had known about Alex Jones since 2004 because a friend of mine listens to him, but I personally though he was crazy for obvious reasons. But this time around I decided to listen for a while and see if I could see past his persona. While I wasn't sure about H.A.A.R.P and the chemtrails stuff, but I was convinced of 9/11 false flag, and that other terror attacks were staged events and all that nonsense. So no matter how you slice this, I thought Alex Jones had credibility and yes I was a kool-aid drinkin tin foil hat wearing conspiracy theorist.
But then last spring, I began to notice things about Alex Jones, and the first thing that made me begin to doubt him was his constant embellishment and exaggerations. It seemed like he would always tell his listeners "This is the most important show we have ever done" or "we have bombshell breaking news to cover today", but he usually just ends up rambling on about various things and never gets to any of this "urgent news" that he claims he has to go over what he ends up talking about is usually the same crap he's been going over for years. So in my mind, I made the correlation between that and how advertisers try to sell stuff. It's basically like how every sale is always the biggest sale ever and how you'll never find a better deal, and right now is always the best time to buy, etc etc etc.... So yeah, it really is just a ploy to get people to stay tuned to his 3 hour long show everyday because I doubt alot of people do actually listen to every minute of every broadcast because most of us just don't have time for that. I even remember one time when he said he had 400 articles to go over in his show and I remember thinking to myself that means you would have to cover more than 2 articles every minute to allow enough time to cover them all with no commercials.
The next thing that I began to notice was how he's always predicting that something bad is going to happen and that it's just around the corner. He usually is just vague enough and never gives specifics to that he can basically say that he predicted something after the fact because he never has to go back too far to find out when he predicted something bad. It would be like if a weather man predicted a bad storm every single day knowing that odds are a bad storm will one day come, and using this method as a replacement for his lacking ability to predict storms with meteorological data. Or a more simple metaphor would be the old broken clock adage. A clock flashing 12:00 will be right twice a day because it will inevitably be 12:00 at some point in the near future. And the same thing goes for anything else like school shootings, terror attacks, storms, or whatever. Odds are crazy people are going to do crazy things, and storms are going to occur in places that are prone to storms. It's quite simply the weight of circumstances that cause things to happen. And of course we can look at the products that he sells and figure out why he always predicts disaster.
It didn't take long for me to start seriously questioning Alex Jones, but what sealed the deal for me were these two videos.
Like I said earlier, I've been following politics for about 10 years now, and so I'm pretty knowledgeable about the election process, exit polling, and how states vote in general and there is just a plethora of lies and half truths in these two clips. So much, that it would be another discussion in of itself just to go over them all. But to make it brief, Alex Jones tells his listeners that Mitt Romney had a lead in every poll and in every battleground state and that is completely false.
Real Clear Politics aggregates polling data from all of the major polls and posts them to their website www.realclearpolitics.com, and if you check these links you can see that what Alex Jones said is not true (link1 link2)
In the video with Bev Harris, they ramble on about the mysterious election process ass if the exit polls determine the winner and that the entire fate of the country is based on them. But at no point do they explain what exit polls really are and how they have nothing to do with the electoral process.
It was at this time that I realized that what conspiracy theorists do is ask a bunch of easily answerable questions while providing highly irrational conclusions based on lies and half truths that depend on their audience's lack of specific knowledge regarding the subject matter.
After all of this, I happened to catch Alex Jones' infamous interview with Piers Morgan, and I made another interesting observation.
Alex Jones has been a guest on other shows before, and some of you might be aware that he was on the daytime talk show "The View" a couple of years back, and seemingly unprovoked Alex Jones just goes crazy for no apparent reason (clip). When I first saw this, I thought it to be rather funny, but didn't think much else beyond that.... Until I saw his interview with Piers Morgan. Both of these interviews were broadcasted live with Alex Jones in the studio, and they are coincidentally the only two interviews where Alex Jones goes crazy. If you watch other interviews that were pre recorded or live via skype where they can basically cut the feed if he flies off the handle, Alex Jones manages to restrain himself and stay rather calm. Now this is just speculation on my part but I find it hard to ignore this coincidence. If your interests are persuasion than acting hysterical is not a good idea. But if your interests are increased website traffic, ad clicks, and thus generating revenue. Than making a complete fool of yourself might not be a bad idea. It's just an observation on my part so take it for what it's worth.
I recognize that some conspiracies are real, but the lesson I learned here is to only concern myself with what I can prove. While I realize that the news this day and age is far from perfect but are the conspiracy news outlets any better? The biggest question for me is; why do they need to lie so much? And the only logical answer to that is because the facts obviously do not support their claims.
I had known about Alex Jones since 2004 because a friend of mine listens to him, but I personally though he was crazy for obvious reasons. But this time around I decided to listen for a while and see if I could see past his persona. While I wasn't sure about H.A.A.R.P and the chemtrails stuff, but I was convinced of 9/11 false flag, and that other terror attacks were staged events and all that nonsense. So no matter how you slice this, I thought Alex Jones had credibility and yes I was a kool-aid drinkin tin foil hat wearing conspiracy theorist.
But then last spring, I began to notice things about Alex Jones, and the first thing that made me begin to doubt him was his constant embellishment and exaggerations. It seemed like he would always tell his listeners "This is the most important show we have ever done" or "we have bombshell breaking news to cover today", but he usually just ends up rambling on about various things and never gets to any of this "urgent news" that he claims he has to go over what he ends up talking about is usually the same crap he's been going over for years. So in my mind, I made the correlation between that and how advertisers try to sell stuff. It's basically like how every sale is always the biggest sale ever and how you'll never find a better deal, and right now is always the best time to buy, etc etc etc.... So yeah, it really is just a ploy to get people to stay tuned to his 3 hour long show everyday because I doubt alot of people do actually listen to every minute of every broadcast because most of us just don't have time for that. I even remember one time when he said he had 400 articles to go over in his show and I remember thinking to myself that means you would have to cover more than 2 articles every minute to allow enough time to cover them all with no commercials.
The next thing that I began to notice was how he's always predicting that something bad is going to happen and that it's just around the corner. He usually is just vague enough and never gives specifics to that he can basically say that he predicted something after the fact because he never has to go back too far to find out when he predicted something bad. It would be like if a weather man predicted a bad storm every single day knowing that odds are a bad storm will one day come, and using this method as a replacement for his lacking ability to predict storms with meteorological data. Or a more simple metaphor would be the old broken clock adage. A clock flashing 12:00 will be right twice a day because it will inevitably be 12:00 at some point in the near future. And the same thing goes for anything else like school shootings, terror attacks, storms, or whatever. Odds are crazy people are going to do crazy things, and storms are going to occur in places that are prone to storms. It's quite simply the weight of circumstances that cause things to happen. And of course we can look at the products that he sells and figure out why he always predicts disaster.
It didn't take long for me to start seriously questioning Alex Jones, but what sealed the deal for me were these two videos.
Like I said earlier, I've been following politics for about 10 years now, and so I'm pretty knowledgeable about the election process, exit polling, and how states vote in general and there is just a plethora of lies and half truths in these two clips. So much, that it would be another discussion in of itself just to go over them all. But to make it brief, Alex Jones tells his listeners that Mitt Romney had a lead in every poll and in every battleground state and that is completely false.
Real Clear Politics aggregates polling data from all of the major polls and posts them to their website www.realclearpolitics.com, and if you check these links you can see that what Alex Jones said is not true (link1 link2)
In the video with Bev Harris, they ramble on about the mysterious election process ass if the exit polls determine the winner and that the entire fate of the country is based on them. But at no point do they explain what exit polls really are and how they have nothing to do with the electoral process.
It was at this time that I realized that what conspiracy theorists do is ask a bunch of easily answerable questions while providing highly irrational conclusions based on lies and half truths that depend on their audience's lack of specific knowledge regarding the subject matter.
After all of this, I happened to catch Alex Jones' infamous interview with Piers Morgan, and I made another interesting observation.
Alex Jones has been a guest on other shows before, and some of you might be aware that he was on the daytime talk show "The View" a couple of years back, and seemingly unprovoked Alex Jones just goes crazy for no apparent reason (clip). When I first saw this, I thought it to be rather funny, but didn't think much else beyond that.... Until I saw his interview with Piers Morgan. Both of these interviews were broadcasted live with Alex Jones in the studio, and they are coincidentally the only two interviews where Alex Jones goes crazy. If you watch other interviews that were pre recorded or live via skype where they can basically cut the feed if he flies off the handle, Alex Jones manages to restrain himself and stay rather calm. Now this is just speculation on my part but I find it hard to ignore this coincidence. If your interests are persuasion than acting hysterical is not a good idea. But if your interests are increased website traffic, ad clicks, and thus generating revenue. Than making a complete fool of yourself might not be a bad idea. It's just an observation on my part so take it for what it's worth.
I recognize that some conspiracies are real, but the lesson I learned here is to only concern myself with what I can prove. While I realize that the news this day and age is far from perfect but are the conspiracy news outlets any better? The biggest question for me is; why do they need to lie so much? And the only logical answer to that is because the facts obviously do not support their claims.