If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post (even in Discussion), then it goes here.
Notes for future OT posters:
1. Please add the 'open_thread' tag.
2. Check if there is an active Open Thread before posting a new one. (Immediately before; refresh the list-of-threads page before posting.)
3. Open Threads should be posted in Discussion, and not Main.
4. Open Threads should start on Monday, and end on Sunday.
Maybe I'm misusing the terminology somehow, but I wouldn't regard a theory that says the September 11 attack was carried out by a generic terrorist group asked to do it by a single rogue government official acting alone as a "conspiracy theory", and I don't think that's close to what "9-11 truthers" mostly think. (Also, I'm not sure how it would work. Most terrorist organizations don't take instructions from random rogue government officials.)
Isn't the usual "truther" story that the US government -- meaning something like "the President, some of his senior staff, and enough people further down to make it actually happen" -- were responsible, with the goal of justifying an invasion of Iraq or stirring up support for the administration on the back of fear and anger, or something like that?
(Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you mean by "a single government agent"?)
Yes, you might. Were you expecting me to disagree? My claim isn't that (what are commonly called) conspiracy theories are all so insane that no one could embrace them unless seriously mentally disordered. It's that they have enough features in common, other than being disapproved of by the person mentioning them, that "conspiracy theory" isn't a mere term of abuse.
(For my part, though my opinion of the Russian government is extremely negative, I would not at all expect it to start massacring random Russian citizens in order to manufacture outrage against "Galician fascist terrorists", not least because they'd be likely to get caught and I'd expect them not to want that.)
I agree that there's (so to speak) an evaluative element in the term "conspiracy theory". But I don't think it's what you say it is (i.e., that the only difference is whether the person using the term wants to ridicule the theory in question). It's more like the evaluative element in the term "murder". You don't call a killing a murder if you think it was justified, but that doesn't mean that "murder" just means "killing the speaker disapproves of". Most opponents of the death penalty don't call executions murders. Most pacifists don't call deaths in war murders. (Some might, in both cases.)
And it seems to me that this is precisely part of what distinguishes "conspiracy theories" from other theories involving conspiracies.
Some theories about NSA attacks on crypto would have been rightly classed as conspiracy theories, although unusually plausible ones because, e.g., doing things of that general sort and keeping them secret is the NSA's job. Some of those now turn out to be true. So something formerly classed as a conspiracy theory is true, and conventionally is no longer called a conspiracy theory. I have no problem with any of this, and I don't see why anyone else should have either.
I have the impression that you have a not-quite-correct impression of my opinions, so let me make some things more explicit. I think that for something to be called a "conspiracy theory" it is neither necessary nor sufficient for it to involve a conspiracy and be thought ridiculous by the person so calling it. Rather, it needs to be lacking in evidence, explain this in terms of an implausible large-scale conspiracy to keep it secret, require the people involved to be more evil than there's other reason to think they are, and be thought untrue by the person referring to it. When a conspiracy theory turns out to be true after all, it is simply a conspiracy and belief in it is no longer called a "theory" (unsurprisingly as the word "theory" in common use is restricted to things that don't have a convincing preponderance of evidence in their favour; this differs from scientific usage). And I think some things classified as conspiracy theories turn out to be true, but relatively few because to be a conspiracy theory something needs to involve unlikely elements and be widely thought untrue.
So, for instance, if someone believed a few years ago that the NSA was deliberately attempting to insert backdoors into widely available cryptographic software, that would have been something of a borderline case. There wasn't a lot of evidence; for the theory to be true the activity would indeed have had to be kept secret by a lot of people, but it was actually pretty plausible that they'd do so; it would maybe require a slightly higher level of evil than a naive observer might expect from an agency like the NSA, but not much; and it was thought untrue by a lot of people. Now we have better evidence that they did it, which has raised general expectations of their level of evil, and fewer people think it's untrue, so this has made the shift from "maybe just about a conspiracy theory" to "not really a conspiracy theory, just a plausible and probably correct theory about a conspiracy". (The Snowden revelations have maybe pushed it in the other direction a little, by reducing our confidence in the NSA's ability to keep such things covered up. But I think the direction of the overall effect is clear.)
I remember September tenth, and if you'd said that to me then, I'm not sure I would have called it a conspiracy theory (I might have), but I certainly would have thought you were wildly overconcerned.