I had a big sprawling comment laid out, and I lost it all when I accidentally refreshed the page, I cannot be bothered to try and write it again, so I'll just say that morality in cases such as Sandy Hook would be relevant since it's the general public: Medics, teachers, parents, construction workers: lots of people that are outside of the conspiracy being asked to keep it a secret for reasons they will not benefit from. Not only is the likelihood extremely high of someone breaking silence due to conscience or fame, but the knowledge for the conspirators that this is an extremely likely outcome would mean they couldn't risk such an act getting out over such a weak payoff (a short discussion about gun control that achieved nothing.)Strazdas said:The argument was that the government is too stupid to pull it off, which it clearly isnt. Not about whether it pulled this particular thing, which it quite obviuosly didnt do.Hero in a half shell said:snip
Your moral obligation leakage would hold if not two things:
1. you assume morality is universaly identical. It is not. There are people whos morality does not have problems with killing children, despite how much disgusting it sounds to you.
2. Government has done it before. They admited to it 40 years later. Not direct killing, but experiments with civilians without thier knowledge. Agent Orange it was called. There were whistleblowers. Government denied it. They were called conspiracy theorists and showed out of society.
You make good argument about fame of such whistleblower now as we tend to glorify them nowadays so the situation may have shifted slightly. But it really is just speculation considering that most news outlet is actually owned by same few people because thats how rampant capitalism ends up.
The big conspiracies that we didnt heard about... we still didnt hear about. You know how they say that US military technology is 20 years ahead of civilian level? Do we know about such tecnology? No, becasue they sucesfully hide it.
Whistleblowers have been listened to, your example of the Agent Orange whistleblower (Dr. Bob Bowman) was listened to, that's why he's called the Agent Orange Whistleblower: He wrote a very well respected book about it at the time and everything.
Other recent broken conspiracies have all been whistleblowers that were listened to, not ignored: The Suez Crisis, Watergate, Wikileaks and now the NSA scandal: All single men talking that took down empires. They were listened to, not shunned.
Finally the point about military tech, we do know what it is, F-22 Raptors, Predator Drones, M1A2 Abrams Battle tanks, Nuclear Submarines, Cruise Missiles, even the not yet operational tech like Navy lasers. We know these exist, we know their specifications, speed, damage, weight, range etc.
What we do not know are the exact ways they work: how exactly they function, but everything else is common knowledge, whether the military want it to be or not.