No. Critical thinkers know better than to use the same "False Flag" explanation for every evil perpetrated in their compass. Boston Bombing? False Flag. Oklahoma City Bombing? False Flag. Sandy Hook? False Flag. 9/11? 7/7? False Flags. Drummer Lee Rigby? False Flag. Now...
Charlie Hebdo?... Errr... let me see... well, it could be the act of a small number of individuals acting out of their frustration with the ghettoisation of the Muslim community in France, enthusiastically taken in by a message purporting to be Islam, that rather better reflects the violent, puritanical, misogynistic, honour-esque ethics of the nasty young man who thinks he is the shit, rather than any particular religious doctrine. That would explain the character of the killings being very much like Charlie Hebdo said something about their mum and they went to sort him out.
The motivations of the killers are clear: they are frustrated with being marginalised and are liable to act out. They have been given, "Indoctrinated in to" if you will, a fantasy system of punishments and rewards that cast them as vessels of divine vengeance who will gain only rewards for carrying out punishment. This ethic uses their anger and the fact they are young men liable to act violently if given an excuse - the more 'honourable' or 'holy' the better.
But all this is quite complicated, isn't it? It requires a scant knowledge of race relations in France (not good), a quick pop-psych of the perps, and... no, wait, I feel my 'critical thinking' coming on... FALSE FLAG. It's obviously a false flag! These attacks were PERFECTLY TIMED with MILITARY PRECISION and the MEDIA reports have CHANGED. Obviously, it's AN INSIDE JOB. The FEDS are SENDING A MESSAGE to the MEDIA, they're trying to TERRORIZE THE PEOPLE into TOWING THE LINE.
Critical thinking is EASY. ALL it requires is PARANOIA and a CAPS LOCK key. Granted, you never get to understand the motivations of the perps themselves, or an adequate explanation as to what the false flag gets the feds that they couldn't have got the usual way (assuming that false flags aren't the usual way). Sure, the murderers are reduced to automatons acting at the behest of unseen actors, but the world makes a lot of sense.
It is split into three camps: THEY are the first. THEY try to dominate, manipulate, depress, divide and conquer the rest of the world. The next is WE, meaning us, the people who can see what's going on; the critical thinkers. Then there are the SHEEPLE who aren't THEY but aren't WE either. SHEEPLE don't agree with WE because they're blind and asleep. They're not necessarily stupid, they just won't see what's obvious to WE. SHEEPLE are why THEY are still in power.
The self-satisfied implication of all of this is that the conspiracy theorist is capable of a level of critical thinking that the sheeple are not, meaning that the more conspiracy theories they can concoct or become aware of, the smarter they are in their own eyes and those of their fellows. Aside from being infuriating, this is a self-sustaining vortex of paranoid delusion leading to self-affirmation leading to paranoid delusion leading to self-affirmation leading to paranoid delusion leading to self-affirmation...
In a way, conspiracy theorists are critical thinkers - in fact they are pure critical thinkers, in that they are presented with a news event like Sandy Hook, like 7/7, like Charlie Hebdo, and without reference to any pertinent facts outside of the news reports, critically think about how the tragedy fits into their worldview - they reorder the news to be commensurate with how the omnipotent THEY are trying to get SHEEPLE to react. Their paranoid delusion leads to self-affirmation as the epiphany strikes that it's all planned.
Of course, the world isn't planned: it's just a chaotic mess. That isn't very satisfying and it's not self-affirming, but whoever said it was going to be?
