Did you read the article? His answer is yes, all organized action qualifies as a conspiracy, and that it's important to distinguish between conspiracy theory and conspiracy practice

> all organized action qualifies as a conspiracy

The dictionary definition disagrees. It adds qualifiers like 'secret' and 'unlawful' and/or 'harmful'.

I mean, how do would this present the FBI action against social movement groups in the 1970s?

The actions against the black panthers, for instance, were secret and harmful to the group and the question of the legal status of those actions is open. The same could be said with regards the US treatment of the American Indian Movement, or many, many actions taken against labor organizers in the late 19th C.

Much could be said of about anything the CIA has done in its history.

IMO, it's more useful to just open up the term to any organization that acts in concert, because then a lot of the fuzzy distinctions between, say a government that isn't acting in the direct interests of its entire population and a criminal cartel.

Those are clearly different kinds of organizations, but "harmful" and "legal" become questionable in many situations.

In one definition. In another it simply says that "conspiracy" is "the act of conspiring" and one of the definitions of "conspire" is:

to act in harmony toward a common end

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/conspire

That said, I don't think there's much question that the more common-place, colloquial definition includes the "secret" and probably "unlawful" aspects. But somebody who uses these terms in the other sense isn't necessarily wrong.

agree.. fragmenting words by colloquialism tends to obscure the deeper and more complete 'sense' that existed before the fragmentation - so we're left with more precise words, but less linguistic cohesion

a similar example of a word that has become so loaded by the negative sense would be 'propaganda' - technically all political speech is propaganda, but in colloquial usage the term is so bogged down to mean roughly 'blatant and overt totalitarian propaganda' that we can hardly see the inherent political bias in 'acceptable' political statements, and are more prone to be influenced by them as a result

Ed does try to make the distinction between a 'true' conspiracy (ie one that is actually happening) and a 'false' one (one that's just made up, and doesn't actually exist except as in the minds of its believers) - one is possibly justifiable paranoia (for example what Ed showed us about the NSA), the other mass delusion (cough-q-cough)

Ed? Do you know him?

How is that different from everybody here calling Mr. Thorwalds by his given name?