Where's the part where MLK accuses the US government of giving AIDS to black people?

Pointless snark, Aaron, because if Wright had never said a word about the stupid AIDS conspiracy theory, mainstream Democratic politicians would still run away screaming from what he said about US foreign policy.

Donald,

Thank you. It's moments like that when I can feel in my chest why black men tend to die early of heart attacks. Because Aaron's pointless snark was even more pointless than you say.

It's true that, as you point out, it would have made zero difference if Wright has left out the AIDS stuff; King was attacked mercilessly for saying what he did in his later speeches, in exactly the same way Wright has been. People close to King were attacked in exactly the same way Obama has been.

But in addition, there's the preposterous standard that no one else in America has to meet. If a black person has ever said ONE CRAZY THING everything else he's said thereby becomes crazy, he's disqualified forever from all acceptable society, and every single other black person in America must denounce and reject him. And of course this standard was used against King. It's not like he never did or said anything questionable. Meanwhile, white politicians can make out with Pat Robertson on national TV and it's perfectly okay.

Wrong, not crazy. Look up the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male.

Well, it may be understandable in some sense, but it's still on crazy side. The government didn't invent syphilis in order to give it to the people being "studied." Nor did they even give it to them. They just left it untreated while pretending to treat it. Monstrous, but in the boring way white governments are monstrous, not in the Exciting Crazy Supervillain way of creating AIDS.

Yes, JS, the classic "Pat Robertson (or Jerry Falwell, or whoever) says nutty things, so it's okay for a black leftist preacher to say equally nutty things." You'll notice that I, like many other critics of Rev. Wright, never said anything to defend the loathsome Robertson.

I'm just trying to point out that MLK never said anything nearly as nutty as "the US government gave AIDS to black people." And yes, the fact that a supposedly responsible speaker like Wright said something like this DOES take away from the other things that he said.

MLK never said anything nearly as nutty as "the US government gave AIDS to black people."

Really? I heard he used to go around claiming some dude was crucified and then came back to life.

"Really? I heard he used to go around claiming some dude was crucified and then came back to life."

Did he actually say that?

Good comeback, Jon! I totally forfeit!

From FRANK ZAPPA concerning DR. Coop
Is your epidemic real
Are you leaving something out?
Something we can't talk about?
A little green monkey
Way over there
Kills a million people
That's not fair
Did it really go that way?
Did you ask the CIA?
Is it that mysterious?
Or have them been PROMISCUOUS?
Have they been promiscuous?

Roy: "Wright accused the USgov of giving AIDS to Africa, and American doctors, but specifically Jewish American doctors, of intentionally injecting black babies with HIV."

I see (possibly apocryphal) claims that Steve Cokely said in 1989 that "Jewish doctors were injecting black babies with AIDS," but I see no indication that Wright has said anything similar. Absent that evidence, or the evidence I requested earlier that Wright accused the US government of "giving AIDS to black people," it appears to me that people are just embellishing Wright's actual statements—as though he's personally accountable for every thing any black person may have ever said about AIDS.

Roy of Belmont, that was a GREAT comment.Thanks for posting it.

A little more Zappa---
The Surgeon General
Dr. Coop
Supposed to give you
All the poop
But when he's with
THE NRC
The poop he's scooping
Amazes me

Thanks for your comment, Dr. Belmont.

Roy: Thanks for the pointer to the Wright quote.

Roy, unless you have more evidence than that, I'm going to continue to regard the notion of HIV as a US government-created disease aimed at black people as sheer lunacy. Are all the scientists who study AIDS just too cowardly to speak the truth? That's what is so crazy about it to me--that something like this could happen and the world scientific community would simply fall for it or cover it up. Maybe I overestimate them, but I think there are many in the field who would certainly speak out if they thought there was a serious possibility that US research into biological warfare had killed millions of people.

And it does harm to indulge in a passion for very poorly supported conspiracy theories, because it discredits the ones that are supported by facts. I agree that the term "conspiracy theory", used in a way that implies all such theories are paranoid lunacy, is a bad use of language and I fell into it above. There are real conspiracies. But all the same, there are plenty of crazy conspiracy theories and they do real harm, because they help discredit the notion that our government does in fact commit real crimes against innocent people. I've run into this problem in real life, trying to convince people that our government supports terrorism and mass murder overseas. It all sound paranoid to some of my friends, and it's not helpful when there are people saying that 9/11 was done by our government or that ET's corpse is being hidden in New Mexico.

Who would ever believe that the planet's ENTIRE financial system would swallow subprime poison and when the symptoms show up say EVERYDAY that it has bottomed out and things are getting better.

Donald Johnson, with all due respect, you want it to be a simpler and safer world than it is, but you can't have that.
What you can have is a world where what you do and say are aligned with people who've acted on the principles you clearly share with them.
"that something like this could happen and the world scientific community would simply fall for it or cover it up"
Why do you assume "the world scientific community" would even know? Or know any more than you or I do?
Points of original HIV transmission are still debated. Haiti as sex-tourist destination. Green monkeys. Nigerian truck drivers who believe screwing virgins will heal you if you get it. Nobody's got instruments that will show precisely when where and how it began.
Le Carre sure makes it a believable scenario that BigPharm was using poor Africans as human lab rats. I didn't get the sense he was making that up out of whole cloth. How far will venal ruthless assholes go?
Were Gary Webb's accusations sheer lunacy? How'd that work out for him?
Was the CIA running coke into the US? Yes, no?
Wouldn't you think the "world journalistic community" or the "world drug enforcement community" or the "world diplomatic community" for that matter, would have been in the same predicament - to fall for it or cover it up?
Unless they could just sort of elide it from the discourse? Unless they already had filters in place to prevent disabling information from getting across the threshold.
Isn't that how it works?
Who killed Martin Luther King?
The only linkage the 9/11 and ET conspiracies have are your rejection of them both as fantasy. As well to link the pseudo-moonshot dorks with people saying Sirhan was a patsy even more setup than Oswald may have been. There's no link.
I understand that it takes a lot of time and work to get close enough to the bottom of these things that you can make an informed call. That's why the ones that are real have been so successfully hidden. Do you think the current social/political climate of the USgov is more, or less conducive to daylight generally?
It's looking to be pretty certain that most of the 9/11 hijackers were in the US on CIA paper. There's some massively hinky shit going on with airplanes and cocaine and federal employees starting in the 70's and continuing to this day.
Could it be the more outlandish versions of the events around 9/11 are chaff? Bits of tinfoil released to jam the radar?
Doesn't that give us even more responsibility to stay open-minded no matter how weird things get?
Things are weird and getting weirder. Triangulating your normalcy off the frenetic and bizarre is pretty knee-jerk, and predictable. You can be easily played from that position. It's complicity when it comes to El Mozote, and the long bloody list of provable obscene crimes the same government's guilty of in Central and South America, as I'm sure you agree. Spotlight on John Negroponte.
Throw South Africa into the mix.
Throw Sidney Gottlieb into the mix.
Yes it's weird, it's so weird it's like Alesteir Crowley's hovering in the air all around this shit. I can hear the theremins.
But those are real men, with real lives, who did terrible inhuman things, and they were paid by the government for doing them.
That testimony I posted's a Pentagon employee, a doctor, a scientist, asking for money to research the development of artificial infectious agents.
Motive and opportunity and a track record of heinous inhumanity. Not enough to convict, but more than enough to create and maintain interest.
Did you catch the turmoil coming out of the APA's last convention? Complicity in torture, professionally ethical or not? They had to debate it. The good guys lost the debate.
I'm not saying Wright's accurate, I'm saying it's decades too late to dismiss what he says just because it's too far outside consensus reality. Consensus reality is made out of papier mache and cheap epoxy now. It looks substantial with all that paint on it, but there's not much to it, and it won't last.

Roy Belmont,

Just a little advice on the type of argument you are having. The people most often you need to convince are already convinced that "something" other than the official story occurred. Those that aren't convinced are very often not honest players, and this fact should make arguing with them a not so valuable investment of time. Not always but often.

With conspiracies, it's sufficient to say X did not happen in the manner it was recorded, rather than explain in detail why X did not happen the way it was recorded. Or propose explanation why for the details of X. The reality is that unless those who committed X permit the story to get out we will never know.

Case in point is this Iraq situation. We know now, the majority of the public knows, it was purerly an imperial action that was driven by the executive for multiple powerful interests that wanted it to happen. We also know that those interests no longer care about even attempting a good deception. Many of the specifics of who what and when are a matter of the public record. The ultimate "why", is not really relevant. We can infer why based on the rewards to the winners.

All previous conspiracies should be boxed off in a smiliar fashion. It's a lot like the concept of the square root of -1. No one in the math community understands what the square root of -1 actually means. And to even think about it was a big controversy for many years. But then some brave souls decided to call it only with the symbol "i", and start playing with it according to the inferences they could make about what it would do if it was a number. And low and behold whole worlds of understanding opened up! Maxwell's equations, the relationship of electricity to magnetism. Modern society as a result. And yet we still have no idea what "i", really is, ie what's inside the box. And to keep on going we don't need to know.

In the modern era, refer to "i" and how it is used when dealing with arguments over "conspiracy".

I wouldn't put Gary Webb's claims in the same category with the AIDS thing. His claims seemed pretty substantive. The same for claims about US complicity in mass murder in umpteen different places around the globe. The HIV as government conspiracy--well, I'd like to see some articles making a serious case for this before I take it seriously. There are plenty of people, some of them scientists, who have enough integrity not to be bothered by being outside the mainstream consensus when they think the mainstream consensus is dead wrong.

Parience is quite correct, the ones who committed X know for sure. Perhaps one should quiz the CIA first, IF one truely desires an true answer.

Patience is quite correct, the ones who committed X know for sure. Perhaps one should quiz the CIA first, IF one truely desires an true answer.

Well no, Patience, we don't "know now...it was purely an imperial action... driven by the executive for multiple powerful interests...".
Any more than we "know" it was undertaken to lock down the dwindling global oil supply, or all the above. We have our suspicions, yeah, but nobody "knows" anything for sure.
These are the secondary explanations, waiting under the steaming piles of horseshit that got shoveled onto the airwaves lo these many years ago. Maybe they're only secondary, still more obfuscation.
The American Empire has taken a series of mortal blows from its idiotic and desperate violence in Iraq, so it doesn't seem likely to have been that.
Though that's the Childrens' Response.
Big stupid President, make him go away.
It may have been that Cheney and Bush were extorted into doing what they've done. Brainwashed even, or both.
It sure looks like that's what happened to Tony Blair.
Hotshot politicians with a few smudges in their past brought to heel by ruthless thugs with the incriminating goods in tidy packages. Do what we want or we'll wreck your life. Igor here has some training exercises that will help you.
There's a long history of that kind of thing. Cuba was once the spider's web of exactly that kind of entrapment. Sin City, with cameras. That's not theory, that's fact.
I'm not trying to convince anybody of anything, I'm trying to create a climate of open-mindedness - a receptivity to weird narratives. Because that's where the truth is now. Way out at the edges.
To "keep on going" we don't need to know anything, we just have to "keep on going".
But if it matters where we're going then we're going to require more than calm assurances from the clueless.
We'll need testimony, and witness, and maps.