There was no conspiracy practised by Galileo. He did not advocate for the overthrow of the government. In a country that seeks to be known for freedom of speech, it is wise to keep such violent adverserial actions under the control of government.
In the US we have the constitutional protection from such uncivilized behavior under the “establishment clause”.
Right. That person didn’t have the tools of science, nor did they live in a democracy with freedom of expression. Their rulers were the conspirators, an elite cabal that used a story of monsters that were always just outside the gates, about to destroy their way of life. It would have been reasonable for them to believe the rulers, not the scientists.
The labeling is still done today. People say global warming science is a scam to get grants and get people to buy solar panels. But, now we have methods to determine what’s true.
And choose to ignore it.
just say’n 
If you want to generalize like that sure. The way I look at it, we’ve been killing each other for a million years. Lying is just another way we marginalize and harm each other. As the video says, we can’t know for sure what the creators of the conspiracy theories are thinking. They are probably lying to gain power, but they might have convinced themselves they are right, or they are just wacko.
The psychology of the average people, the ones who share the misinformation, the ones who feel powerless so they go with the story because it makes them feel better, that psychology we can diagnose. They are not “choosing” in the sense of coming to a reasonable conclusion that it’s good to ignore facts and promote bad logic. They are reacting emotionally.
Obviously Galileo wasn’t a conspiracy theory nut. But from the perspective of ordinary church going folks and the church hierarchy he WAS a conspiracy nut who represented a threat to their lives. Of course they didn’t use the terms “conspiracy nut” but instead used the term “heretic”. But it’s the same basic thing. The authority at the time, the church, branded him a heretic, even though we, with the benefit of hindsight, know he wasn’t. And the same thing can happen in our present time. Whether we can figure out the truth or not is beside the point.
I’m saying basically the conspiracy nut is in the eyes of the beholder. We claim to have “modern” tools to figure things out. True, but we also have an advanced means of lying to the general populace, just look at the maganuts.
I’m saying it’s not. I’m saying if you say that, you are making a conspiracy theorist’s argument. There are memes out there about how the world is now “upside down”, that doctors make people sick and bankers take people’s money. That’s actually how the world was run for most of history, and there was little regulation to stop it. I don’t mean all people who called themselves healers really intended to harm people, but they had the same mentality that is described above.
That is, they believed something about some invisible evil power infecting people, and they believed they had the fix for it. The sincerity of their belief is not the point. The early Catholic Popes were most likely sincere in their beliefs, and since Rome was collapsing, some of the work they did actually helped people, but they still had to get others to conspire to grant them the power they had. Much later, there was a Pope that was openly atheist once he got in the position, and stated he just did it for the power. That’s an actual conspiracy, which maybe is a little off-topic.
I’m not sure how else to make my point. Without the ability of enough people to verify data and speak freely, the conspiracies were the governing bodies, the Church, the Royal Family, or smaller scales like Sheriff Buford Pusser. If you’re saying the “conspiracy nut” is just a misused term, and all those people would have called the people fighting for justice and equality “nuts”, well sure. But that’s an abuse of the term in my opinion.
Forgot the smoke-filled backrooms.
Though I get what you’re saying.
Besides, what’s a conspiracy but a bunch of people hatching a plan to accomplish something?
It’s not the conspiracy.
It’s the object.
. . . or something like that
I get your point. I guess what I’m saying is, whoever controls the information, controls who can be branded a conspiracy nut, or more generally, what counts as a conspiracy, and therefore what counts as false. So in Galileo’s time, it was the church, and they could easily brand him a nut and his ideas “evil”. At the time, when it counted the most (vs say 100 years later or now), he WAS a conspiracy nut espousing false ideas. And once we was branded a heretic, he was effectively dealt with (again, from the church and its followers perspective). Governments know how it works, and they can try to brand someone or some group as conspiracy nuts, even knowing full well the ideas they espouse are correct. Sort of like a false flag deal - the Gulf of Tonkin incident is a good example where anyone who claimed it was actually the US that fired on its own ship was a nutcase conspiracy monger. So until it was proven otherwise, much later, after the fact and subsequent actions, the government successfully buried the truth under the guise of conspiracy.
My larger point is - just because an idea has been labeled a conspiracy or heretical by the powers that be, doesn’t mean the idea is false. Now if an entity is sophisticated enough, it can control the dialogue so much that the “it’s a conspiracy” idea sticks, and the guilty parties get off scott free (the church back then, the US gov in modern times, for ex 911).
And I should add, truly effective powers-that-be add in some emotional element to seal the deal, for example by saying that believing anything Galileo says is downright unChristian, why do you hate Jesus, etc. Or for 911, how dare you say such un-patriotic things, why do you hate America.
As long as this is kept in mind, then I get what you’re saying. There needs to be objective truth. There are real conspiracies, like Watergate. QAnon type conspiracy theorists use this logic to their advantage, which is why I am careful with it. If you so much as hint at calling someone a conspiracy nut, they will pull up the CIA document that “proves” they created that term and use it to discredit people who are exposing the conspiracy. You then become a “sheeple”, supporting the conspiracy because you don’t believe the theorist.
Note, I’m not defending the CIA or claiming they don’t conspire with despots around the world.
As yet, I have not mistakenly identified a conspiracy as false when it was in fact true. A conspiracy theorist would say I’m either burying my head in the sand or that they are so good at covering up their conspiracy, we’ll never know.