"John Naughton’s comment that ‘sometimes governments and organisations do conspire’ is the place to start. If ‘sometimes’ is in fact frequently, perhaps routinely – and in my view it is – then ‘conspiracy theorising’ is not per se the irrational activity the project assumes it to be. Many conspiracy theoriests are incompetent and many of the theories proposed are false but Sturgeon’s law applies here: if 90% of conspiracy theories are crap, so is 90% of everything. It is easy to sneer at stupid conspiracy theories and mock the thinking processes of those who advocate them. But in doing so academics and journalists are contaminating the good theories with the bad, lumping together secret state research and David Icke’s reptilian delusions as ‘conspiracy theories’. Which is, of course, what the state wants us to do. (Footnote: John Naughton, one of the three directors of the project, tweeted: ‘The minute you get into the JFK stuff and the minute you sniff at the 9/11 stuff you begin to lose the will to live’. See http://www.conspiracyanddemocracy.org/blog/category/jfk/ . Yes, both subjects are full of crappy thinking and writing; and, yes, both subjects are now enormous and enormously complex. But tough shit: you cannot just pass on events of this size and expect to be taken seriously. Sturgeon’s law page on Wikipedia )"