Richard Roeper's Top 10 list of conspiracy theories etc.

[Mange]

Not sure if this should go into SLAM or off-topic... Richard Roeper has published a Top 10 list of conspiracy theories and urban legends of the 21st Century he created as research for a new book (a must read, obviously). It's a great list, check it out here.

[Lord of the Abyss]

4. President Bush wears a communications device so he can receive coaching from aides at press conferences.

I don't think this really belongs with the others; it's way more plausible, and there is that photo of him with something obviously under his clothes.

[Velthuijsen]

1. Flight 93 landed in Cleveland.

Heh this one is funny because flight 93 was a 757 but the conspiracy nuts refer to a 767 that landed at Cleveland as flight 93.

2. A missile, not a Boeing plane, struck the Pentagon.

Only the really cook sites have this one after a skeptic scientist trounced this by putting up a very plausible overlay on how the plane moved and why all objections (like no ruts in the ground supposedly made by the plane belly) were spurious.

[JediToren]

Creationism and the "Moon Landing was a Hoax" should be on that list. I mean, half the US population believes the first one.

[JediToren]

Ghetto edit: By Creationism I really mean "Evolution/Science as Presented/Distorted by Creationists," since in order to accept Creationism you also have to accept that all scientists in all fields of science have been engaged in an anti-religion/christian/biblical conspiracy for however many centuries since science first figured out that the Earth and/or Universe was older than 6000 years.

[Wicked Pilot]

Creationism and the "Moon Landing was a Hoax" should be on that list. I mean, half the US population believes the first one.

21st century only.

[Cos Dashit]

Creationism and the "Moon Landing was a Hoax" should be on that list. I mean, half the US population believes the first one.

21st century only.

How long have some people believed the moon landing was a hoax? I was only aware of the belief beginning about 4 years ago.

[Wicked Pilot]

How long have some people believed the moon landing was a hoax?

You could probably find some people coming up on 38 years.

[Cos Dashit]

How long have some people believed the moon landing was a hoax?

You could probably find some people coming up on 38 years.

It wasn't particularly widespread then, though.

[Drooling Iguana]

Creationism and the "Moon Landing was a Hoax" should be on that list. I mean, half the US population believes the first one.

21st century only.

How long have some people believed the moon landing was a hoax? I was only aware of the belief beginning about 4 years ago.

There was a reference to it in Sneakers, which was released in 1992.

[Darth Raptor]

How long have some people believed the moon landing was a hoax? I was only aware of the belief beginning about 4 years ago.

Some Russians as early as 1969.

[JediToren]

How long have some people believed the moon landing was a hoax? I was only aware of the belief beginning about 4 years ago.

Bill Kaysing first published his book "We Never Went to the Moon" in 1974. A friend of mine claimed his grandmother believed it was a hoax within minutes of seeing Armstrong walk on the moon.

[Flagg]

4. President Bush wears a communications device so he can receive coaching from aides at press conferences.

I don't think this really belongs with the others; it's way more plausible, and there is that photo of him with something obviously under his clothes.

Yeah, he definately wore something at that debate. IIRC the NYT had a NASA imaging specialist who flat out said he was wearing one.

[Darth Wong]

This list makes no sense. How does he decide what gets on the list? Popularity or absurdity? He lumps together theories that almost no one has ever heard of and theories that are so widely accepted that they are routinely spouted as fact across the country. He lumps together theories which could easily be pulled off by a handful of guys and theories which violate the laws of physics.

Let's go over them:

1. Flight 93 landed in Cleveland.

This would require a truly vast conspiracy of silence and fabricated evidence, hence it is unlikely to say the least. A fair choice, except that it's rather obscure.

2. A missile, not a Boeing plane, struck the Pentagon.

Ditto, but this is a much more popular theory.

3. The towers were felled by explosives that had been planted in advance.

This one is so utterly absurd that it beggars the imagination, and it is quite popular too. It's a good choice, but really, there are better choices for the top handful.

4. President Bush wears a communications device so he can receive coaching from aides at press conferences.

This would require literally a couple of guys to pull off. Hardly comparable to other crazy-ass conspiracy theories.

5. As a boy, Barack Obama was enrolled in a radical Muslim school.

I honestly don't see how this particular urban legend can be considered anywhere near the top of a century list. There are far more widespread (and unrealistic) urban legends out there, such as the one about Einstein flunking math.

6. Secular activists are waging an ongoing "war" against Christmas.

Definitely an urban myth, but it's also of fairly recent origin.

7. The outcomes of professional sports events, including the NBA playoffs and the Super Bowl, are influenced by the television networks and league officials.

How common is this one? I've never heard anyone seriously propose it.

8. There was a conspiracy among MPAA voters to deny "Brokeback Mountain" the Best Picture Oscar.

Tony Curtis came right out and said he was voting against it because he won't vote for a gay cowboy picture. There can be no doubt that others felt the same way but didn't actually mouth off to the press about it. A conspiracy is not needed when large numbers of individuals probably engaged in this behaviour. Not only that, but it's a very recent and fairly obscure conspiracy theory.

9. The tsunami of 2004 was man-made.

This one actually violates the laws of physics, in the sense that the sheer amount of energy required for this event is far beyond anything that we humans could generate with our entire nuclear arsenals.

10. After Hurricane Katrina, the media deliberately under-reported scores of murders and rapes at the Superdome.

How many people believe in this one?

BTW, it irks me that he calls it the "Top 10 Conspiracy Theories and Urban Legends of the Century", yet he clearly means "21st century", which is only 7 years old. When you say "top 10 of the century", you normally expect it to be a somewhat more grandiose list. And some of those entries are way too obscure to make such a list.

Old standby bullshit like the Moon-landing hoax and alien spaceships at Area 51 are still going strong in the 21st century, and take far more public mind-space than most of the entries on Roeper's list. Of his list, only #3 and #6 really deserve to be on there. They're widespread and have no basis whatsoever in fact, which are the hallmarks of a good conspiracy theory or urban legend.

[Darth Wong]

Here's my list of Top Ten conspiracy theories and urban legends of the century:

1: Jesus Christ will return very soon now.

2: The entire world scientific community is engaged in a gigantic international hoax to convince people that we humans evolved from apes, because they are all godless sodomites and want to destroy Christianity so they will no longer be held accountable to God for their evil actions.

3: The Moon landing in 1969 was a hoax.

4: The government is covering up evidence of alien visitation.

5: The World Trade Center was destroyed by a "controlled demolition" on September 11 2001. Some variations of this myth claim that every Jew in the WTC evacuated the building before the planes hit.

6: The UN is attempting to create One World Government, and has an army of black helicopters which is standing ready to seize control of the United States.

7: The World Jewish Banking Conspiracy is secretly in control of America's government, and is using black people in order to weaken the white race.

8: There is a super high-efficiency piece of technology which the oil companies and/or automakers are keeping under wraps because they don't want to go out of business. It used to be a 100 mpg carburetor, and nowadays it's a 200 mpg fuel injection system. Sometimes it's a solar cell which somehow achieves far more than 100% efficiency and can drive a car as if it was running on gas.

9: When you die, your soul passes out of your body and your body drops in mass by 21 grams. Therefore, a soul has a mass of 21 grams.

10: At any given time, young people are always less moral than they were approximately 3 to 4 decades earlier.

[Patrick Degan]

9: When you die, your soul passes out of your body and your body drops in mass by 21 grams. Therefore, a soul has a mass of 21 grams.

Huh...?!

[PainRack]

9: When you die, your soul passes out of your body and your body drops in mass by 21 grams. Therefore, a soul has a mass of 21 grams.

Huh...?!

Its based on some old experiment where dead bodies "apparently" weighed 21 grams less than when they were alive.

[darthbob88]

9: When you die, your soul passes out of your body and your body drops in mass by 21 grams. Therefore, a soul has a mass of 21 grams.

Huh...?!

Its based on some old experiment where dead bodies "apparently" weighed 21 grams less than when they were alive.

Indeed. Duncan MacDougall.

[darthbob88]

Ghetto Edit: Leaving aside the existence or non-existence of the soul, there were some problems with the experiment as conducted.
First, Dr MacDougall only used 6 subjects, and small sample sizes are not good.
Second, of those 6 tests, two of them were discarded as worthless, two showed an increasing loss of mass over time, and one of them showed a "bounce" in the mass, where it lost mass, gained it, and lost it again. Only one test showed the 21g figure.
Thirdly, when is the moment of death? How can one determine when the soul leaves the body without knowing the physical properties of the soul?

[Lord of the Abyss]

10: At any given time, young people are always less moral than they were approximately 3 to 4 decades earlier.

That's more like "conspiracy theory of the last few milleniums", not just the century.

[Jack Bauer]

Huh...?!

Its based on some old experiment where dead bodies "apparently" weighed 21 grams less than when they were alive.

Indeed. Duncan MacDougall.

It was also a movie by the same name.

[Beowulf]

9. The tsunami of 2004 was man-made.

This one actually violates the laws of physics, in the sense that the sheer amount of energy required for this event is far beyond anything that we humans could generate with our entire nuclear arsenals.

It may violate the laws of physics, but people don't understand energy when it gets to the truly large amounts. And so, stupid people believe it.

[Jim Raynor]

7. The outcomes of professional sports events, including the NBA playoffs and the Super Bowl, are influenced by the television networks and league officials.

How common is this one? I've never heard anyone seriously propose it.

I was never a big sports fan growing up, and only got into the NBA a few years ago because of my friends (and after just a few short years my devotion has already fallen off quite a bit because of the idiotic behavior of many players and fans). Still, just from reading a few of the more prominent forums, it appears to be quite common among fans on the internet.

When people speak about Michael Jordan's careers, they often mention "superstar calls," saying that he got a lot of undeserved free throws because of who he was. During the LA Lakers' run of 3 consecutive championships, the team consistently got more free throws than their opponents (thanks in no small part to Shaq's highly physical playing style). A common gripe was that the league was fixing games in the Lakers' favor because they were in a big market city and the league wanted a dynasty. But go to a Lakers forum and the LA fans would claim that their rivals, the San Antonio Spurs (or as they called them, the "San Antonio Sterns," because they were supposedly the commissioner David Stern's pet team) were the ones benefitting from favoritism. Today, lots of fans and NBA players claim that young superstar Dwyane Wade receives a ton of undeserved foul shots (ignoring the fact that he also plays a very physical style), to the point that his career and championship ring are founded upon the refs, and not his skills and physical ability.

The thing is that it's very inconsistent. As I showed above with my Lakers/Spurs example, if you go to any fan forum, they will claim that their team is being abused while their rivals receive preferential treatment. It basically boils down to a ton of fanboy bitching.

Anyway, I agree with you that this sports fan bitch doesn't deserve to be on a list of the top conspiracy theories. There are a lot of conspiracy theories which are crazier, involve much more serious allegations, and are more widespread.

[Starglider]

9. The tsunami of 2004 was man-made.

This one actually violates the laws of physics, in the sense that the sheer amount of energy required for this event is far beyond anything that we humans could generate with our entire nuclear arsenals.

The rest of your post is fine but this is simply wrong on several counts. There are various estimates for the energy release of the earthquake, but they're all in the low exajoule range (e.g. this estimate, but googling will find several more). You of all people should be very familiar with converting between joules and megatons - the earthquake was actually equivalent to a nuclear detonation somewhere between 250MT and 1GT. The current declared US nuclear arsenal alone is a little over two gigatons.

That said, energy coupling from the earthquake to the tsunami was somewhere around 1%, which is fortunate as the tsunami caused all the actual damage. I don't have the figures for how much energy from a submerged nuclear detonation ends up in the pressure wave, but from what I recall of the effectiveness of nuclear depth charges it's considerably higher than 1%. This would could easily cut the megatonnage required down to something the US could actually plausibly deploy (particular if a string of closely spaced bombs are used to generate the wavefront). Finally the actual energy came primarily from the slippage of stressed continental plates, with some additional input from underwater landslides. In principle the whole event could've been triggered with a much smaller energy release in exactly the right spot, though this is somewhat less plausible as finding the 'right spot' and correctly predicting the results would be extremely hard.

Of course it's still a stupid conspiracy theory, as it's extremely unlikely nuclear explosions on that scale would fail to be detected, never mind the near impossibility of covering up the operational details and the silliness of the notion that the US leadership would plan and authorise such a thing in the first place. But your statement that the claim violates the laws of physics on energy grounds is wrong.

[Darth Servo]

2: The entire world scientific community is engaged in a gigantic international hoax to convince people that we humans evolved from apes, because they are all godless sodomites and want to destroy Christianity so they will no longer be held accountable to God for their evil actions.

You forgot, "and said scientists are responsible for every atrocity of the last 100 years, including the holocaust, Stalin's purges, WW1, the Japanese atrocities, etc, etc, etc."