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Re:Conspiracy: In Theory and Practice by AndrewBissell on Wednesday June 30, 2021 @03:45AM (#27686025)
> Chomsky responds with the typical comment that it would take an unprecedented amount of coordination to have so many people keep the secret that it doesn't even make sense.

Let's say that someone came out tomorrow and said, "9/11 was an inside job, and in my role as Undersecretary of the Army I was instructed by Donald Rumsfeld to do X, Y, and Z to help carry it out." What is it, exactly, that Noam Chomsky believes would happen? Does he think this whistleblower would get a segment on 60 Minutes? Fawning mugshots on the cover of Time magazine? No, they'd be easily marginalized, pathologized as a crank, and ultimately disposed of. What would even be the incentive for someone to throw themselves into the buzzsaw of our complicit media and its credulous consumers?

This is something ignorant people (including Chomsky himself) also will often say about the JFK assassination, "oh someone would have come forward and said something." Well, people did come forward and say things, dozens of them, and they were ignored, mocked, harassed, and sometimes killed. With this kind of intimidation down to a science and communications channels more thoroughly surveilled than ever, coordinating a large action (especially with the standard spycraft techniques of compartmentalization and need-to-know) is probably easier than ever.

The lies are never foolproof, they're just delivered within a resilient system which controls how (and whether) the lies are talked about.

Re:Conspiracy: In Theory and Practice by fighterpilot on Wednesday June 30, 2021 @07:31AM (#27687274)
Chomsky's point is that the N people that need to be involved is large, so even if you think it's unlikely that one co-conspirator would come forward (you are right on that), when N is large then the probability that at least one will come forward, 1-pow(1-p, N), becomes much more likely.

Your other point about people not being believed is a separate point to the above. Has there been people claiming to have been involved in 9/11 on the inside that haven't been believed?

Re:Conspiracy: In Theory and Practice by atatatat on Wednesday June 30, 2021 @01:13PM (#27691015)
You don't need to keep them all quiet, just yank their YouTube videos or arrest them for their machine having child pornography.
Re:Conspiracy: In Theory and Practice by fighterpilot on Thursday July 01, 2021 @02:42AM (#27696874)
So not only is there a 9/11 conspiracy, there's also a conspiracy to suppress and frame anyone who's coming forward over the next 20 years.

As the conspiracy theory gets more and more complicated like this, it also gets more and more implausible.

Re:Conspiracy: In Theory and Practice by AndrewBissell on Thursday July 01, 2021 @02:45AM (#27696887)
It's an absolute miracle the mafia ever got off the ground!
Re:Conspiracy: In Theory and Practice by fighterpilot on Thursday July 01, 2021 @04:06AM (#27697220)
An example that proves my point, since the mafia itself and its prosecution under RICO are both well known to the public.