How do we identify the lunatic fringe of conspiracy thinking?

[John Corbett]

LP--

One has to concede, whether LNT'er or CT'er, there are highly intelligent people on both sides of the issue.

One has to concede that highly intelligent people can come up with really stupid ideas.

[Lance Payette]

LP--
One has to concede, whether LNT'er or CT'er, there are highly intelligent people on both sides of the issue.

From my original post: "As we see with the JFKA, occupancy of the LF bears absolutely no relation to an occupant’s intelligence, education or knowledge of the subject."

"Smart people" really has nothing to do with whether one is in the lunatic fringe. If Niederwacky graduated from Harvard Medical School, I assume he has functioning brain cells. David Ray Griffin was beyond brilliant. If we can believe his self-puffery, MTG actually has academic credentials. And yet, they all believe absolutely crazy things.

Intelligence and education, alas, are not a guarantee of the ability to think rationally or analytically. Indeed, in his book Why People Believe Weird Things, Michael Shermer argues that "the number one reason why people believe weird things is because they're smart – they have a high IQ or they have an exceptionally creative intellect. Because he can rationalize away evidence, an intelligent person is better able to defend weird ideas to himself." From another source: "Highly intelligent people fall for ridiculous things primarily because their high intellect gives them the mental horsepower to rationalize beliefs they arrived at for emotional or social reasons. Instead of protecting against irrationality, high intelligence can act as a tool for sophisticated self-delusion."

How many raving CTers - or Young Earthers or Flat Earthers or Fake Moon Landing proponents - strike you as really dumb? I can answer that because I've dealt with all of these folks. The answer: pretty much NONE. They are uniformly intelligent, articulate and persuasive. It's among their followers and cultists that you will find the 15W bulbs.

And, of course, the conspiracy-prone mindset, like it or not, plays a huge role. Add a conspiracy-prone mindset to a high intellect and you have a recipe for lunacy.

I don't exactly know why - I wish I could tell people - but I was blessed to be able to step out of this trap. Partly it was my legal training, but mostly I think it was my long exposure to religion. To fit into a religious community, you must pretend to believe some wildly unlikely things or somehow convince yourself they are true. I listen to Christian talk radio several times a week where truly highly intelligent, highly educated people assert that the earth is 6,500 years old. No, sorry, it's not; that's a crazy belief, no matter how many "scientists" provide "scientific" reasons that the Grand Canyon was formed in a couple of hundred years.

In any event, at some point I was blessed with some sort of epiphany to be able to recognize the utter craziness coming from the mouths of "smart people" across all the many areas of weirdness in which I was involved. Where I used to say "Wow, tell me more!" I now say "Bullshit, prove it." Even in my OWN experiences that I have LIVED, as described in Duncan's new weirdness subforum, my initial reaction is one of intense skepticism. That's just how it has to be in the world where rationality and analytical thinking drive the bus.

Lest we forget: propinquity, it's all about propinquity. 

[Michael T. Griffith]

Crusaders like Lance Payette remind me of the leftist psychotherapists who declare that people who oppose allowing minors to get transgender surgery and/or who oppose allowing males who identify as females to play in female sports must either be uneducated or bigoted--or both. When faced with the fact that polls show that the substantial majority of Americans oppose both, they label those Americans with a host of pejorative terms.

I recall a recent TV discussion between a liberal female TV host and a parent who objected to allowing teen boys who claim to be girls to use female restrooms and to participate in female sports. The TV host made clear her disdain for this knuckle-dragging parent. At one point she said in a sneering voice, "You're just not familiar with the research. If you read the research, you might feel differently."

The TV host was quite taken aback when, much to her surprise, this Neanderthal parent responded by mentioning studies that documented the negative emotional consequences of transgenderism and by mentioning articles written by people who underwent transgender surgery as teens and who now deeply regret it, some of whom said their therapists pressured their parents into allowing the surgery. The TV host summarily dismissed these materials as "right-wing garbage."

As I mentioned in my previous reply, notice how narrowly Payette defines what supposedly constitutes "edging toward the lunatic fringe" of the pro-conspiracy camp: those who doubt that Oswald shot JFK and Tippit.

As we've seen, even by this revised definition (as opposed to his earlier definition), many successful and highly educated people with degrees in relevant fields, including university professors and former federal investigators, qualify as "edging toward the lunatic fringe." 

In other replies, Payette has been even more extreme, accusing a large number of scholars and researchers of being part of the "lunatic fringe," including Dr. David Mantik and Greg Doudna, two of the most careful and respected scholars in the JFKA research community.

I won't bother dealing with John Corbett's even more extreme definition of the "lunatic fringe" (i.e., merely doubting that Oswald shot JFK), since he knows little about the JFK case and really has no business pretending to be in a position to comment credibly on it.

Payette knows that if he changed his "edging toward the lunatic fringe" definition to include those who posit a Mafia and/or anti-Castro Cuban conspiracy with Oswald as one of the shooters and with Oswald as Tippit's killer, he would be forced to apply that label to a long list of reputable, well-educated authors, not to mention the House Select Committee on Assassinations.

This, in turn, would cast further doubt on Payette's dubious claim that those who disagree with him have "a conspiracy-prone mindset."

As many people here know, quite a few pro-conspiracy researchers and scholars initially accepted the lone-gunman theory and only changed their minds years later when they began to seriously research the subject.