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I don't believe for a single second that Dick Cheney earnestly and genuinely believed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Maybe Colin Powell didn't know he was lying, but the intelligence agents who cooked up the fake evidence he used most definitely did. Maybe I just find it hard to accept that they genuinely believed that given that I saw through the scheme as a small child, but c'est la vie. I agree that the motivation of stealing oil/profiteering doesn't explain everything, but I'd give the credit to PNAC, A Clean Break or Oded Yinon for the rest.
If I go back and look at my conspiratorial beliefs that I don't think panned out... the biggest and most obvious one is that I thought the COVID vaccine would be significantly more harmful than it actually turned out to be. I thought that the BRICS would develop an alternative to SWIFT and the US financial system substantially faster than they actually did. I thought there was insider trading/advance knowledge of the 9/11 attacks, but I'm not sure that's been proven wrong yet (or what the non-conspiracy explanation for the dancing israelis is). I've been wrong about plenty of other things (like what the left wing government in Australia would actually do...), and I've made several claims on here that could pan out to be false in the end (like on nuclear power) but in my experience beliefs that get attacked as conspiracy theories tend to be more accurate than ones that don't.
I only listed beliefs that I was called a conspiracy theorist for advocating and stating at the time - hell, I can look up one of the listed beliefs on wikipedia right now and it is directly labelled a "right wing conspiracy theory" (specifically the Russiagate disambiguation page). It might be different now, but the exact same arguments were in fact deployed against those beliefs you said aren't conspiracy theories at the time. While the poll itself is seemingly gone now, have a look at this MotherJones article from 2013 - https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/04/bush-lying-about-wmds-conspiracy-theory/ Belief that the WMD lie was in fact a lie was considered a conspiracy theory by the mainstream even after the point at which we had evidence demonstrating that was the case!
My apologies if it feels like I'm attacking you for this, because you're not the same people who made those attacks in the past, but this is actually one of the reasons why I don't particularly like the term "conspiracy theory" when used as a pejorative - the category is very slippery and hard to really pin down. Your definition, while it might be more accurate, very clearly isn't the one being used by the rest of society, and I don't think there's any real reason to actually preserve or try to save it. What value do you get out of being able to label something a conspiracy theory? What is the term actually communicating beyond "I think this theory is dumb and wrong, and the person who believes it does so due to faulty reasoning"?
Wikipedia is biased to the left. I wouldn't go to Wikipedia for information about whether it's correct to call something a conspiracy theory.
There are a lot of things that have a real definition, but are also abused to attack political opponents. "Conspiracy theory" is one just like "Nazi". Would you suggest that because Trump and the president of Ukraine are called Nazis, but I would not call them that, "Nazi" is a useless term?
It communicates that it is a particular type of faulty reasoning.
I can find multiple reputable, mainstream outlets referring to it as a conspiracy theory. It is still considered a conspiracy theory by vast swathes of the population, and many of those other claims were considered conspiracy theories by both the right and the left wing of politics. The NSA surveillance, for instance, was derided as a conspiracy theory by both sides of politics, as was the claim that Iraq didn't have WMDs (Tony Blair was ostensibly on the left). The rubric I actually use is "was I consistently called a conspiracy theorist for advocating this belief, and were others who espoused it similarly accused" and wikipedia was simply an additional piece of evidence (hard to provide evidence of quotes from in-person discussions two decades ago).
I unironically do believe that nazi, like fascism, is largely a useless term in the modern day. It had a meaning, once, but now it is effectively just a snarl word and it isn't really possible to draw a consistent or useful meaning out of the word without context. In the last week alone I've seen Israelis get called Nazis who then turn around and call their opponents nazis for opposing them - the term no longer even necessarily implies antisemitism. You can still use the word in arguments, but if you do I feel like you should be obligated to let the reader know what you actually mean by it.
Ok, what type? Can you actually provide a consistent definition that covers all the conspiracy theories I laid out in my first post?
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