

Admit it, Michael Hastings’ Death is Weird and Scary - taylorbuley
http://ohtarzie.wordpress.com/2013/06/19/admit-it-michael-hastings-death-is-weird-and-scary/

======
mikeyouse

        Admit it, Michael Hastings' Death is Weird and Scary
    

No it isn't.

Car engines separate from crashed vehicles fairly regularly. [1]

Car fires are not uncommon. There were 306,800 vehicle fires per year from
2002 - 2005. Of these, almost 10,000 were the result of a collision, and the
collision-started fires are responsible for almost 60% of the deaths from
vehicle fire. Also, young males are the most likely to have vehicle fires. [2]

While Hastings was a good journalist, he also had previously crashed a car
while drunk, he had admitted to a drinking / addiction problem, and he had
admitted that he had smoked crack cocaine.

A person with admitted drinking / drug problems was driving his Mercedes at a
high rate of speed in Hollywood at 4am, and people are wondering if his
accident was a CIA hit? Save it for Alex Jones.

[1] -
[https://www.google.com/search?q=car+crash+%22engine+ejected%...](https://www.google.com/search?q=car+crash+%22engine+ejected%22+-hastings)

[2] -
[http://www.nfpa.org/assets/files/pdf/research/vehiclefires08...](http://www.nfpa.org/assets/files/pdf/research/vehiclefires08.pdf)

~~~
jccc
Readers of this thread should be made aware that there is an actual article
following that headline. Here's some of it:

 _Just for the record, I am not advancing a theory here. I noticed a lot of
people who I don’t consider knee-jerk conspiracists were made particularly
uncomfortable by Hastings death, especially when details of the accident
emerged. Predictably, there was the customarily strong push to belittle these
suspicions with talk of tinfoil hats and conspiracy theories and nutjobs._

 _Though I don’t generally embrace most conspiracy theories, I also don’t find
knee-jerk anti-conspiracism any more thoughtful or satisfying if it isn’t
predicated on something weightier than the assumed essential decency of the
state and its agents, or presumed knowingness about how conspiracies work or
don’t. This has always struck me as a form of exceptionalism that ignores both
our own domestic history and this country’s foreign policy now and in the
past._

 _I don’t think reflexive, a-historic, exceptionalist defenses of the state
are something that radicals should countenance without grounds, particularly
when these defenses aim to belittle and stigmatize people who are more
suspicious. To me it is far more realistic to credit the state with limitless
ruthlessness in maintaining control — even with flawed theories — than to keep
insisting that everything wrong is ‘right out in the open.’_

 _I posted this in part as resistance against the silencing aspect of anti-
conspiracism and also on the assumption that people are more likely to draw
more correct conclusions about the incident if they have the opportunity to
discuss it._

~~~
Zimahl
_I posted this in part as resistance against the silencing aspect of anti-
conspiracism_

There is less resistance today than at any point in human history. Post a
Youtube video with some cleverly cut news stories and you can have everything
from the imminent collapse of the United States to the silencing of
journalists by the CIA.

We need more skepticism about these conspiracy theories because there's more
ways to propagate them than ever.

~~~
embolism
Reflexive skepticism just limits our ability to think. We don't need more of
it. We need intelligent people to debunk conspiracy theories, not just say
'that smells like a conspiracy theory'.

~~~
Zimahl
Sure, if it seems like a reasonable conspiracy theory a healthy debunking is
acceptable. In a fair number of cases, however, some of these conspiracies are
so outlandish that we really should punish the perpetrators via public
shaming.

~~~
embolism
No. The more 'outlandish' a theory is, the more trivial it should be to
dismiss with a simple statement. Bullying is never called for.

