A hypothesis alleging that the members of a coordinated group are, and/or were, secretly working together to commit illegal or wrongful actions including attempting to hide the existence of the group and its activities. In notable cases the hypothesis contradicts the mainstream explanation for historical or current events.
Example: Clinton campaign , Brennan ,Strozk , Page , Glen Simpson ,Fusion GPS, Bruce And Nellie Ohr , Christopher Steele , Comey , Mueller ,Wiessman , Downer , Misfud , McCabe, Schiff
And others creating a false dossier and then making an accusation of Trump working as an agent for Putin.

That is not what conspiracy mongering is. It promotes imagined plots without regard to essential facts, causality, and proof, including baseless accusations of "known liars" as rationalization for more bizarre promotions. Pronouncements that Google and the Kavanaugh hearings are CIA plots are subjectivist paranoia confused with reality, not "questioning statements".

Conspiracy theorist: someone who questions the statements of known liars.

I see that you have a massive, knee-jerk reaction to a queered use of freedom to force responsibility; however, I never said any such thing or implied it.

Taking responsibility for one’s own choices (freedom) is a completely separate point than forcing someone to act to provide others freedom. I never implied the later, but the former is a massive gap in today’s society, and the term “freedom” is used over and over. Connecting freedom to the outcomes of one choices is an obvious logical point that no one can argue, without taking the position that people need training wheels, which is the same as restricting freedom.

Agreed.

And that is my purpose for participating in this forum. To find other discussions are persuasive, not dogma, that people will actually hear.

It is clear and obvious to those who understand that individuals can and must think to live as human beings, that rationality is therefore a moral virtue, and that politics must therefore recognize and protect the freedom to do it.

"[A]sserting people are so imperfect they cannot be responsible; therefore they shouldn't have freedom" is exactly what has happened in centuries of bad philosophy, increasingly accepted, and leading to its progressively increasing imposition today.

But notice the direction of the logical dependence. It is the opposite of the conservatives' "freedom implies responsibility", by which they have typically meant some collectivist imposition imposing some duty as a supposed 'responsibility' (like military conscription). The "responsibility" they are talking about in that slogan is collectivist, not responsibility for one's own life. I use the example of the draft because I saw that argument over and over in the controversy over military conscription.

Yes, but that includes the proper content of education, starting at a very early age encouraging choosing to think and understand, not what passes for education today.

Exactly!!!!!

"Individuals are responsible for their own choices"

Exactly!!!!!!

Therefore, there con not exist individual freedom, without individual responsibility.

So perfect! So clear,. So obvious. Who can argue, except one asserting people are so imperfect they cannot be responsible; therefore, they shouldn't have freedom.
Good luck with that.

Exactly!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Here we are, on the precipice of the mountain of freedom!

Lighten up Francis.

Perhaps the solution lies in education?

We are talking about the use of Google on a freely accessible internet, not the Russian government. The choice to use Google has nothing to with medical addiction. Choosing to think is not overcoming "addiction". People do create their own bad habits in all kinds of realms, including evading thinking; Google does not impose that through a power causing addiction.

Individuals are responsible for their own choices because they make them, not because of political considerations such as a desire for a political outcome.

Individuals are responsible for their own choices because they are the ones who make them.

Thoritsu wrote: "I know it is difficult, but I (not you) get to make my point". That is a snide misrepresentation.

The day to day battles are still ongoing, but are not enough. You never win anything fighting government impositions: at best you get to keep most of what you started with less the loss in time and resources to defend it. And it has done nothing to reverse the overall downward trend, as you would expect. With the loss of the individualist sense of life in this country there also appear to be fewer in the younger generation with the ability and motivation to fight in their own self defense.

Meanwhile a handful of gurus like Prager and Shapiro become better known by a minority of zealous followers, as they become personally wealthy while undermining meaningful opposition.

On this supposedly Ayn Rand forum, their followers are still repetitively promoting fundamentally anti-individualism, allegedly in the name of defending capitalism. The latest 'capitalism is altruism' nonsense is repeated again here https://www.galtsgulchonline.com/post...

The anonymous ignorant cowards who 'downvoted' that should look up the fact that 'Googlebots' are in fact the "bot" software that scans the web to retrieve and update website information to be indexed and later ranked for search engine queries. Web searches are based on stored indexes; they do not go out in real time to find the information for each search query. Software that scans the web for new information is not a conspiracy of "religious zealotry" and "silencing techniques".

Ok, let me put words in your mouth then:

"Individuals must be responsible for their own choices, because it is the only way freedom can exist without forcing others to deal with the individuals choices"

How about that? If you don't like it, I welcome your wording.

In all Prager's, Shapiro's, et al, horror shows, I forget the day-to-day fights that are taking place like this.
It's good to know that stuff like this is happening.

They are individuals I have worked with personally, mostly in defending private property rights. Grass roots political action is done through organizing and communication on specific issues, staying focused and knowledgeable on specific issues and actions, and tactically and strategically dealing with current political realities, not generalities posted on the web.

People who do that and who are effective are not running around evangelizing religion or subjective feelings with conspiracy theories or promoting more government intervention. It's the opposite of what you see on much of this forum.

A very different realm than grass roots action, but still focused on very specific current issues, is the realm of court challenges in 'public interest law'. Good Judicial decisions, such as Supreme Court decisions, that you occasionally see in the news don't happen by themselves with some judges happening to make the right decision.

The cases are brought by knowledgeable, very good attorneys who specialize in some aspect of public policy such as private property rights. They are long, expensive, arduous processes. They file briefs and argue cases selected from abuses with a good chance of being stopped, publicize the cases, and remain in contact with non-lawyers fighting the abuses in different ways in order to maintain an up to date 'knowledge base'.

The biggest and most successful public interest law firm has been Pacific Legal Foundation, whose cases have been discussed on this forum several times, with most here not realizing what made the court victories and the reporting on them possible.

There are other, smaller such legal organizations, such as the "libertarian" Institute for Justice, which led the battle against the infamous Kelo takings case. They lost the case at the Supreme Court but publicized the abuse so effectively that it created an enormous nation-wide backlash resulting in at least some legislative reforms and more of a reluctance by government officials to repeat the abuse.

"There are some very good, honest, pro-individualists out there doing excellent work on specific issues in valuable alliances who should not be dismissed as the "religious and politically illiterate arm of the left wing"."
Do you have links I could look at?

You still haven't gotten back to my main question, which sounds silly, but it is not:

"Why individuals must be responsible for their own choices?"

A lot of people should know better than to be involved with O'Keefe's organization. So should O'Keefe himself. But they don't. Coppola is an engineer, dedicated to his work, and appears to have no expertise in or principled knowledge of politics. All his interview said about it is that he is Trump supporter. With O'Keefe's record, however, it is legitimate to ask the question, is there behind this than they have said?

Here is another one on O'Keefe's antics and apparent incompetence and sloppiness even in his own game https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/20...

This lengthy article seems to expose some documented facts about him, but is a leftist hit piece itself trying to create an image and should not be taken entirely at face value. You never know what they have left out or spun into misrepresentation. In particular it tries to whitewash the lefts' own worse political antics (including whitewashing Media Matters), but shows how systematically nasty politics has become.

But don't equate all conservative politics with O'Keefe "investigations" manufacturing and hyping scandals. There are some very good, honest, pro-individualists out there doing excellent work on specific issues in valuable alliances who should not be dismissed as the "religious and politically illiterate arm of the left wing".

"The rational discourse here is not written for them."
Yea I know :)

"Coppola, who gets credit as an honest man with some good observations avoiding the hype, is an engineer, not one of their "investigators"."
True, but he should know what's going on and refuse to take part in it.

"They do know about politics, and are playing the game of imagery and emotion. They don't have a rational political philosophy."
That's what I mean when I say they don't know anything about politics. Without this knowledge all they have is appeals to emotions, media games, scandals, etc, etc.
That's why I refer to conservatives as the religious and politically illiterate arm of the left wing.

"I don't remember their being caught staging fake accusers of Roy "Commandments" Moore."
https://mashable.com/2017/11/27/proje...
Basically they tried to discredit the honest accusers of Moore by putting forward fake accusers.

The rational discourse here is not written for them.

Coppola, who gets credit as an honest man with some good observations avoiding the hype, is an engineer, not one of their "investigators".

They do know about politics, and are playing the game of imagery and emotion. They don't have a rational political philosophy. They are notorious for hysterical attacks on the right of abortion and O'Keefe says he is going after Google to stop "anti-Christian bias".

I don't remember their being caught staging fake accusers of Roy "Commandments" Moore. It would be hard to accuse Moore of something worse than what he is.