Quotulatiousness

March 29, 2024

Politics on the fringe – “Every Single Grassroots Political Movement is populated by cranks of various amounts of semi-retardation”

Filed under: Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Kulak went to a political rally and came back with some thoughts on non-mainstream political gatherings of all flavours:

Kim Kelly on X: The chatter over Jake “Q Shaman” Angeli’s identity is missing a key element: his tattoos. He’s covered in Odinist symbols — Yggdrasil, Mjolnir, and, significantly, the valknut.

I attended a political event recently in my country, that a mainstream party had vaguely endorsed, but more of a general right wing-anti-tax protest. You had people from the fringe parties, and people and speakers from the fringe of the fringe parties.

We did the protests, then all ended at a large venue where there were coffee, donuts, and speeches … My god the speeches.

Some admittedly were well prepared, the representative of the mainstream party who showed up at the end was very professional befitting a former and probably future politician. But in-between you had rolling, unprepared, barely understandable speeches about chemtrails, sovereign citizenship, and UN Agenda 2030 conspiracies, all mixed with real concerns about local government taking property rights …

And I’ll admit I got damned frustrated. “This is why we lose”, I thought. Echoing a dozen different think pieces on the “Stupid Right” many from right wingers themselves. I was embarrassed that this was the state of political organization and human capital on the “far right”.

What is wrong with these people? I thought, and I’m sure many of have thought.

Well nothing. The problem is with you!

Unlike most online right wing intellectuals I’ve been involved in various type of organized politics, and I had friends who were involved in Left Wing politics who, when I was still an ideological niaf, I humored and attended their meetings.

Every Single Grassroots Political Movement is populated by cranks of various amounts of semi-retardation, and every single one spends an inordinate amount of time at best humouring them, or worse, taking them 100% seriously.

I’ve seen this in mainstream political parties when you talk to any of the volunteers. And I’ve seen this on University campuses where if you let your left wing friends drag you to one of their meetings you’ll be serenaded by barely articulate native activists, feminist extremists who want everyone to pray to Gaia, Black “we wuz” radicals, and every kind of queer identity you can possibly imagine, giving just as if not more retarded takes in even worse coherence, but seemingly actively trying to derail every attempt at meaningful policy advancement or coalition building in favour of struggle sessions and “consciousness raising”.

Say what you will about the sovereign citizen guy … He had a whole list of meaningful proposal with direct actions to take which, setting aside the theory, would actually make public employees and local councillors probably cave out of the sheer misery of dealing with it.

The queer, native, and black activists? Their proposals ranged from non-existent, to actively crippling the groups own organizational capacity in some purity/diversity spiral.

Beyond that however, this collection of right wing weirdos and concerned citizens was meeting in an ex-urban industrial building one of the organizer’s friends let them use. The left wing losers (of whom most were activists in the city, not students) were meeting in a limestone university campus with cathedral ceilings and snacks provided out of student dues and tax dollars.

The immediate organizers of the right wing protester were mechanics, the organizers of these left wing meetings were Professors, several of whom were even lest coherent or policy oriented.

What was their excuse?

Part of me thinks this is why Left wing organizers are perpetually convinced they’re the little guys fighting against a vast right-wing Koch Funded machine out to crush them … because, in spite of getting state funding for protests and stainglassed cathedral high rooms to organize from … They spend 80+% of their time listening to the losers of the losers.

So then why is it right wing intellectuals are convinced their side is stupid?

Well because left wing stupidity doesn’t count, in fact you’re racist for noticing it.

April 17, 2023

The lingering pandemic of fear

Filed under: Government, Health, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Liz Hodgkinson on the pattern of fear that the state, media, and public health messaging instilled into so many people during the Wuhan Coronavirus pandemic:

“Covid 19 Masks” by baldeaglebluff is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0

The Stoics of ancient times believed that in many cases it was possible to control pain by thought alone. To achieve this, they stoically, as it were, accepted painful or unpleasant sensations, viewing them with studied indifference. As such, the pain often went away of its own accord, although to be fair they did use a painkiller known as theriac, which contained opium.

The opposite is also true, in that you can induce pain or disease by thought alone, causing acute and sometimes lasting physical symptoms. Although ancient and tribal societies understood that the power of suggestion can be so strong that it may make people well or ill, this seems to have been forgotten in modern, mechanistic medicine with its insistence on tests, scans, screens and so on.

Because of this, I am now wondering whether as many people would have gone down with Covid (or what passed for it) if, instead of a flu-like illness being ramped up as the worst and most dangerous disease ever to affect humankind, it had been ignored.

As it was, around 80 per cent – and it may have been more – of the world’s population were gripped by such a fear of the bug that they actually thought themselves into illness. Once the PCR test was introduced, people began testing themselves, sometimes hourly, and if the test showed positive they waited for symptoms to appear. More often than not, they obliged.

Then people became terrified to step out of the house without wearing a mask, even though all the evidence showed that these muzzles were more or less ineffective and that even the surgical-quality ones lasted only a couple of hours, at most. People were also nervous of getting close to anybody else, edging away if somebody came within a few feet of them. Only the other day, as I was in a queue waiting to pay for an item, a masked woman in front of me turned round and said crossly: “Do you mind not standing so close to me?” I wondered about making a quick riposte but decided that there was no way I could penetrate this kind of stupidity.

There was also the handwashing ritual where shops, doctors’ surgeries, solicitors’ and estate agents’ offices, for instance, forced hand sanitiser on to you, and sometimes took your temperature as you walked in.

The cleaning nonsense went even further, with hotels, gyms and other places where people gathered announcing “enhanced cleaning”. This may or may not have halted the virus in its tracks but it certainly increased fear. I still see people in the gym furiously scrubbing down bikes, treadmills and other equipment in case a germ from a previous user has had the audacity to linger on the machine.

October 29, 2022

Witches, beware! It’s the Malleus Maleficarum!

Filed under: Books, Europe, History, Religion — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

It’s the season for ghosts, goblins, and — of course — witches, so Scott Alexander decided to review that famous book for witch-hunters, the Malleus Maleficarum:

Did you know you can just buy the Malleus Maleficarum? You can go into a bookstore and say “I would like the legendary manual of witch-hunters everywhere, the one that’s a plot device in dozens of tired fantasy novels”. They will sell it to you and you can read it.

I recommend the Montague Summers translation. Not because it’s good (it isn’t), but because it’s by an slightly crazy 1920s deacon every bit as paranoid as his subject matter. He argues in his Translator’s Introduction that witches are real, and that a return to the wisdom of the Malleus is our only hope of standing against them:

    Although it may not be generally recognized, upon a close investigation it seems plain that the witches were a vast political movement, an organized society which was anti-social and anarchical, a world-wide plot against civilization. Naturally, although the Masters were often individuals of high rank and deep learning, that rank and file of the society, that is to say, those who for the most part fell into the hands of justice, were recruited from the least educated classes, the ignorant and the poor. As one might suppose, many of the branches or covens in remoter districts knew nothing and perhaps could have understood nothing of the enormous system. Nevertheless, as small cogs in a very small [sic] wheel, it might be, they were carrying on the work and actively helping to spread the infection.

And is this “world-wide plot against civilization” in the room with us right now? In the most 1920s argument ever, Summers concludes that this conspiracy against civilization has survived to the modern day and rebranded as Bolshevism.
Paging Arthur Miller…

You can just buy the Malleus Maleficarum. So, why haven’t you? Might the witches’ spiritual successors be desperate to delegitimize the only thing they’re truly afraid of — the vibrant, time-tested witch hunting expertise of the Catholic Church? Summers writes:

    It is safe to say that the book is to-day scarcely known save by name. It has become a legend. Writer after writer, who had never turned the pages, felt himself at liberty to heap ridicule and abuse upon this venerable volume … He did not know very clearly what he meant, and the humbug trusted that nobody would stop to inquire. For the most part his confidence was respected; his word was taken.

    We must approach this great work — admirable in spite of its trifling blemishes — with open minds and grave intent; if we duly consider the world of confusion, of Bolshevism, of anarchy and licentiousness all around to-day, it should be an easy task for us to picture the difficulties, the hideous dangers with which Henry Kramer and James Sprenger were called to combat and to cope … As for myself, I do not hesitate to record my judgement … the Malleus Maleficarum is one of the most pregnant and most interesting books I know in the library of its kind.

Big if true.

I myself read the Malleus in search of a different type of wisdom. We think of witch hunts as a byword for irrationality, joking about strategies like “if she floats, she’s a witch; if she drowns, we’ll exonerate the corpse”. But this sort of snide superiority to the past has led us wrong before. We used to make fun of phlogiston, of “dormitive potencies”, of geocentric theory. All these are indeed false, but more sober historians have explained why each made sense at the time, replacing our caricatures of absurd irrationality with a picture of smart people genuinely trying their best in epistemically treacherous situations. Were the witch-hunters as bad as everyone says? Or are they in line for a similar exoneration?

The Malleus is traditionally attributed to 15th century theologians/witch-hunters Henry Kramer and James Sprenger, but most modern scholars think Kramer wrote it alone, then added the more famous Sprenger as a co-author for a sales boost. The book has three parts. Part 1 is basically Summa Theologica, except all the questions are about witches. Part 2 is basically the DSM 5, except every condition is witchcraft. Part 3 is a manual for judges presiding over witch trials. We’ll go over each, then return to this question: why did a whole civilization spend three centuries killing thousands of people over a threat that didn’t exist?

May 31, 2022

Conspiracy theorists, like the deeply paranoid, aren’t always wrong

Filed under: Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Chris Bray responds to a common response he’s encountered from people who are worried that everything we’re seeing is somehow part of a deep-laid, nefarious plan to … do something. Something evil, something terrible, something … undefined but wrong:

If all of our problems are caused by a secret cabal who are having a new Wannsee Conference [Wiki]— twelve assholes sitting around a table and carefully planning our destruction — then we could solve that problem in half an hour with a dozen lampposts. We just need some names and an address: problem solved.

I think it’s much harder if there’s no they and no plan behind an event like the Uvalde school shooting. You can kill a few plotters, but how do you fix a broadly distributed collapse of courage, honor, decency, competence, knowledge, skill, morality and … a bunch of other things, but that list is a good start. If identifiable actors are tearing things apart, you can know where to put your hands to stop them; you can act. If we’re just trapped in a miasma of vicious mediocrity and weakness, where are the levers that change our course? What’s the solution to widespread societal degradation, to a suicidal loss of shared values and ordinary ability?

Facing an endless string of metastasizing and coalescing implosions — the lockdown-induced mental health crisis among children, appalling growth in energy prices, severe fertilizer shortages, supply chain collapse, unacknowledged vaccine injuries, vaccines that make illness more likely, military failure and the madness of the Afghanistan debacle, an emerging food shortage that’s starting to look really disturbing — the easiest way to deal with it is to say that it’s all one crisis planned and implemented by one set of people. If that’s true, the solution doesn’t even require a full box of ammunition, and we could wake up tomorrow morning in a world that we’ve repaired.

But the problem is that I mostly don’t think it’s true. I think it’s all one interwoven societal crisis, but that it’s connected by the uselessness of overcredentialed weak people. As for the view that they’re planning all of this, I increasingly think that our bullshit elites, our highly compliant social climbers in positions of power, mostly couldn’t plan a plate of toast.

Now, this is important: This doesn’t mean that I don’t think any of it is ever true. Of course there’s fake news. There are false flags, there are staged ops, and there are crisis actors. (The Ghost Of Kyiv, Ukraine’s boldest fighter pilot, agrees with me.) It seems pretty clear at this point that the plot to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer, that terrifying thing, was some socially awkward dorks being urgently and persistently goaded by FBI provocateurs. And it’s no longer possible to pretend that the Capitol Police didn’t just open the doors on January 6 to the “mob” that “broke in”.

But the transition from “some things are fake” to it’s all a lie and a plan every step of the way is a bigger claim — he says, carefully — and one that doesn’t make that much sense. With regard to Uvalde and the cops who wouldn’t act, for example, cowardice and incompetence work just fine as an explanation, because we have examples to compare the moment to. Peacetime militaries build an officer corps around rules-focused behavior, around the ability to comply and to operate within a hierarchy; then wartime militaries go through a period of officer purges, as they work to find high-functioning leaders who can tolerate the chaos and pain of battle. Confronted with a high level of brutality and danger, some people just can’t do it. This strikes me as an unremarkable fact, and one that doesn’t require extraordinary explanations. The school district police chief, a bureaucrat for decades, pushing paper and going to meetings, was confronted with sudden shock and horror on an extraordinarily harrowing scale, and he lacked the ability to respond. McClellan also couldn’t bring himself to attack Richmond.

January 26, 2022

Three generations of the OG Puritans

Filed under: Americas, Britain, History, Religion, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

At Founding Questions, Severian considers the New England Puritans and the world they inhabited:

Portrayal of the burning of copies of William Pynchon’s book The Meritous Price of Our Redemption by early colonists of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, who saw his book as heresy; it was the first-ever banned book in the New World and only 4 original copies are known to survive today.
Engraving by F.T. Merrill in The History of Springfield for the Young by Charles Barrows, 1921.

Total cultural and intellectual uniformity, constantly reinforced. If those Puritans were going to go crazy, in other words, they’d do it within very carefully circumscribed boundaries. The only thing close to that level of mental control is Twitter … and I suppose I must put the disclaimer out front, so that you can factor it in if you disagree with me: I hate the Puritans. They’re just SJWs with balls and a slightly less tedious prose style. When they’re not obsessing over the tiniest motions of their pwecious widdle selves, they’re screwing you over for the hellbound heathen you are.

Credit where it’s due, though: If you need to go sodbusting in an unexplored continent, the Puritans are your guys. The original Plymouth Bay colony was thoroughly militarized, and they didn’t fuck around — when the local Indian tribes were beginning to wonder if they shouldn’t do something about these White devils they’d let loose, the Puritans attacked the fiercest tribe and wiped them out, as a show of force. Life was hard in the OG Plymouth Colony, but it was about as good as you were going to get in that era.

But the typical inheritance pattern soon took over. “Regression to the mean” is a behavioral phenomenon, too, not just an IQ one. Puritanism is an obsessive, paranoid creed; it can only flourish in times of high stress and dire insecurity. But by the 1690s, Plymouth Colony was arguably the healthiest, wealthiest, safest place per capita in Christendom (not a high bar, obviously, but still). The OG settlers were all gone by that time, of course — the original settlement, you’ll recall, was 1620 — and so were most of their almost as hardcore kids. The third generation was coming up fast …

… but finding their way blocked by the old men of the previous generation, who were as tediously, dogmatically Puritan as the OGs, but without the stones. This made them — the 2nd generation — enormous hypocrites, but even without the hypocrisy, imagine living in a world where the ultra-wealthy who control everything in society tell you that they deserve it all, because they’re God’s Elect, while you, sinner, deserve to live in a rented box and eat bugs and own nothing, because God hates you.

History’s full of weird stuff like that, and that was the situation circa 1690. One example will have to do: Since we probably all got to experience Nathaniel Hawthorne’s existential angst back in high school, consider that the ancestor who caused him so much grief, Judge John Hathorne, was born in 1641. He would’ve been 51, then, during his trial service – a ripe old age by 17th century standards.

Not only that, but the 2nd generation — the one that stubbornly refused to move on and let the kids take their place in the sun — had spent the previous twenty years grievously fucking things up. King Philip’s War nearly ruined the colony, there’d been widespread plague, and oh yeah, that whole Restoration thing back in England — the hardest of hardcore Puritan thinkers in the run-up to the Civil War had been colonials; guys like Col. Rainsborough were closely associated with Massachusetts, etc. Lots of bad blood on the other side of the water, and while the third generation was willing to let bygones by bygones, the 2nd generation wasn’t.

So: Hypocritical old throwbacks and cavemen, with a decades-long track record of dumbfuckery, who just wouldn’t get out of the way. As they got older, they got more insular and inward-looking, as old people tend to do … and “more inward looking” for a Puritan is a near-BCG level of narcissism. Meanwhile, the new generation is eager to take their place in the burgeoning Atlantic world, especially after the Glorious Revolution (1688) … but can’t.

October 9, 2021

The USSR: A Conspiracy Disguised as a Country – WW2 – Spies & Ties 09

Filed under: History, Russia, WW2 — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

World War Two
Published 8 Oct 2021

The Soviet Union is built on distrust and paranoia, giving birth to a system of intelligence and a huge spy network ran by agencies such as the GRU and NKVD. But what good is all that information if you don’t believe it?
(more…)

September 25, 2021

Samizdat from “Ozcatraz”

Filed under: Australia, Government, Health, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

Through some miracle of invisible ink, blind mail drops, and all the necessary modern cloak-and-dagger technical equivalents, James Morrow manages to get some news out of locked-down-to-the-nth-degree Australia:

You really have to feel for the poor people at Tourism Australia.

Having spent decades happily if not particularly creatively pitching their product to the world with the time honoured formula of “beaches, Opera House, outback, crocs”, they now have to figure out how to sell a country that looks more and more like a tropical North Korea.

That is, of course, if the federal government ever lets visitors in again without forcing them to first spend a week or two quarantined in some prefab hotel or desert facility in the name of “keeping Australians safe”.

The question thus becomes, both for those of us trapped here in Ozcatraz as well as bemused outside onlookers, how did a free and easy land of opportunity become gripped by a neurotic covid puritanism that truly believes any sort of fun or joy or sociability is deadly, and a place where protesters and cops are having pitched battles in the street over mandatory vaccinations?

If you don’t believe me, consider that in Melbourne — ground zero for Australia’s covid madness, the city just crossed the line to become the most locked-down city in the world — the state premier ordered playgrounds shut and had concrete bollards hoisted into skate parks to stop kids from riding their bikes.

A few weeks ago, after some wags took advantage of a loophole that allowed bars to offer takeaway cocktails and organised an al fresco pub crawl, outdoor consumption of alcohol was banned always and everywhere.

Even a tiny loosening of restrictions there to allow beleaguered residents to meet up for a brief, vaccinated, socially distanced picnics left the prohibition on alcohol in place, all in the name of the Holy Blessed Science.

In Sydney, which is comparatively sane and where there is at least a decent plan to get back to some sort of vague simulacrum of normal over the next few months, everyone still has to “mask up” when outdoors, even if not around anyone else. The only socialising allowed is under very limited outdoor circumstances, among the fully vaccinated, who are not allowed to travel too far to meet up with one another.

What makes it most bizarre is that even the state’s health minister recently admitted outdoors was the safest place to be and everyone understands that the mask rule was imposed largely to shut up a depressingly totalitarian press gallery that wasn’t going to shut up until everyone was welded into their homes Wuhan-style.

Yet, as Sydney moves into summer, every weekend sees Twitter flooded with photos of sunbakers on local beaches asking WHY IS THIS ALLOWED? and demanding police action.

On any given Monday in the local park where I exercise my spaniel, my very earnest bourgeoise-left neighbours grumble about it all not being “in the spirit” of the health orders while rabbinically parsing whatever latest decree has just come down from the Temple, er, Ministry of Health.

Update: Alex Berenson confirms much of the situation in Oz (h/t to SDA for the link).

Americans have the wrong idea about Australia.

Thanks to some brilliant tourism branding and Crocodile Dundee, we think of it as rough-n-ready frontier country, Montana with bigger beer cans. The dingo ate my baby!

In reality it’s Canada with a mean streak. The Karens are in charge and they are mad.

[…]

So when Covid rolled in, the Australian government (and lots of Aussies) saw it as just another ugly export from China that needed to be beaten back at all costs. To its credit, Australia pushed hard for an independent investigation of the origins of Sars-Cov-2 last year (the Chinese pushed back, going so far as to call for a boycott of Australia’s delicious wine).

But Australia also went cray-cray — the technical term — for the fantasy of zero Covid. It effectively closed its borders not just to other countries but to its own citizens. For most of the last two years, they have had a hard time coming home — and an even harder time leaving.

[…]

Until the last couple of months, the frogs were not just luxuriating in the pot but asking for a little more heat! Australians were so pleased to be Covid-free — for the entire first half of 2021, they had only one Covid death — that the majority happily tolerated these restrictions.

Yes, a few rabble-rousers complained, but even videos of police arresting people inside their homes or attacking (truly) peaceful protestors didn’t dent support for the creeping police state.

But in the last couple of months, and especially the last few days, the equilibrium has shifted. And — inevitably — the response of Australia’s fearless leaders has been to try even harder to stamp down unrest. As a result, the situation is increasingly unstable.

August 17, 2021

QotD: The “Crisis of the Third Century”

Filed under: Europe, History, Military, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

You can find huge shelves of books analyzing this, attributing it to every conceivable thing, from the ol’ “lead in the water pipes” to massive structural defects stretching into remote antiquity. There’s probably something to all of them, but the biggest proximate cause is probably one the Romans themselves had identified, as early as Sallust, way back in the last century BC: lack of purpose. Having defeated Carthage and salted the earth where once she stood, the Roman “security state” — the largest and most comprehensive ever assembled to that point — simply ran out of reasons to exist.

If you’ve read much about (or especially by) them, you know that the Romans were, for lack of a better term, paranoid. It was simply incompatible with the Roman psyche to have any large, organized group of non-Romans anywhere near the Empire’s borders … so the Empire kept expanding, first reducing, then Romanizing, every conceivable threat. They kept doing this long past the point of negative returns, such that the Empire collapsed under the strain of trying to hold itself together.

Stop me if this sounds familiar: A “government” whose only claim to legitimacy is naked force. A large, increasingly rapacious, increasingly class-conscious military with no obvious enemies to fight, and no ability to subdue the ones it settles for. A large, increasingly rapacious, increasingly caste-conscious bureaucracy that views the whole “Imperial” project as one big tax farming operation. Massive, ever-increasing wealth disparities that can only be very temporarily alleviated by debasing the currency, because structural reform is culturally impossible from above, and physically impossible from below. And to top it all off, a weird, apocalyptic religious cult totally destroying the few pan-imperial cultural institutions, including the military.

The history of the Third Century is insanely complex, not well understood in many respects even by field specialists, but the gist of it is clear enough: Some general somewhere decides he’d like to have a crack at emperorizing, so he gets his troops to throw a purple toga on him and proceeds to take on the incumbent. Some other general thinks that’s a pretty nifty idea, so he does the same thing, taking on both the incumbent and the pretender. Not wanting to be left out of the fun, the incumbent’s main general murders the incumbent and takes the crown for himself, fighting whoever’s left, plus whichever of his subordinate commanders decide they want a shot at the big chair. The Senate rubber-stamps one of these clowns, or some other general who decides he’d like to throw his toga into the ring, and civil war follows civil war until one of them temporarily triumphs … only for the same thing to happen again once the shine is off the new guy (usually in less than a year or two).

They called ’em the “Barracks Emperors” for a reason, y’all. And it’s actually worse than that, since lots of times the rebel generals didn’t bother going for the big prize back in Italy. Lots of them decided they’d do just fine ruling, say, Britain, or parts of Gaul, or Asia Minor or Egypt or what have you, while the other guys slugged it out for the increasingly marginalized, if not totally meaningless, “official” title. Declare yourself the Emperor of ___, issue some slapped-together coins with your picture on them, and go nuts. The “Gallic Emperors” had a run of nearly half a century like that — not bad at all for Late Antiquity.

Severian, “The Crisis of the Third Decade”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-03-18.

January 11, 2021

QotD: Conspiracy theories

Filed under: Media, Politics, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

It is hard to know, but most likely the conspiracy theory is one of the oldest parts of human society. In fact, the popularity of conspiracy theories is probably a good measure of social trust. Low-trust societies, like you find in the Middle East, tend to be shot through with conspiracy theories. High trust societies in Northwest Europe tend to have less of it, but even they are prone to bouts of conspiracy mongering. The Great Fear that swept through rural France is a good example.

In modern times, the conspiracy theory has been formalized. The assassination of John Kennedy is probably when this formalization process began. For example, a conspiracy theory needs a series of hard to accept coincidences. In the case of Kennedy, we have the amazing marksmanship of the shooter and then his unlikely assassination at the hands of a Jewish gangster, while he was in police custody. The Jack Ruby part is what made the whole thing perfect for the conspiracy theorists.

The first step in a conspiracy theory is that the obvious answer or the official answer must be eliminated as a lie or implausible. In the case of the Kennedy assassination, the start of the conspiracy dynamic was the dismissal of Oswald as the lone actor. It is a variation on the old Sherlock Holmes line. Once you eliminate the parsimonious explanation, then the more complex and convoluted explanations become more plausible. That opens the door to endless speculation.

We see this with the QAnon cult on-line. All of it starts with the assumption that the obvious answer is wrong. For example, it is plainly obvious that Bill Barr is covering up the FBI spying scandal. He’s had years to do what should have taken a few months. Instead of accepting that rather obvious and plausible explanation, the QAnon people reject it and instead weave wildly complex theories about how half of Washington is about to be charged with crimes.

Another aspect of the formal conspiracy theory is the liberal use of the associative property to connect unrelated events. Person A knows Person B and Person B once had lunch at the same place as Person C. If any of these three people can be tied to the event in question, then it is assumed the other two are connected. The weakest associations are enough to assume a conspiracy. The associative property is an essential element of the modern conspiracy theory.

In the case of Kennedy, for example, organized crime is a popular player, because Jack Ruby was a minor criminal. His tenuous association with organized crime opens the door for linking any number of underworld characters with the assassination. It also opens the door for all sorts of theories about the Kennedy administration’s connections to organized crime. The associative property then ties communism, organized crime and the Cuba situation to the assassination.

The Z Man, “Conspiratorial Rule”, The Z Blog, 2020-10-01.

October 27, 2020

Conspiracy theories grow thanks to mistrust of public officials and media

Filed under: Government, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

It’s commonplace to say that such-and-such a conspiracy theory is merely an intellectual playground for the paranoid and the gullible, but conspiracy theories don’t spontaneously generate — at least not the ones that gain wide audiences. Daniel Miller looks at some of the reasons these theories become attractive and gain adherents:

QAnon alleged clues about the NYC bombing, 10 December 2017.
Wikimedia Commons.

In the wake of six months of mixed-messages and baffling government policies, following four years, if not twenty years, of mystifying imponderables, the concept of a “conspiracy theory” has recently reentered the lexicon of semi-criminalized thought.

In August The New York Times stigmatized anti-lockdown protesters in Berlin as a worrying admixture of “neo-Nazi groups, conspiracy theorists as well as Germans who said they were fed up with the restrictions” and similar language was used about the protesters in London, as social media companies began purging accounts linked to the QAnon conspiracy theory, which conjectures that the world is controlled by a secret global cabal of blood-drinking sex criminals.

Believing conspiracy theories, evidently, is a Bad Thing, but any concept capacious enough to incorporate both the tens, even hundreds of millions of people skeptical about the global political response to SARS-2, and the much smaller number entertaining more involved explanations demands a careful analysis.

Really the first question is who you can trust. One answer is the official authorities, as represented by the esteemed New York Times, but the news website which welcomed the 45th US President to office with three years of spurious coverage of what turned out to be the Russiagate hoax, before pivoting to the historical phantasmagoria of the 1619 Project, no longer strikes everyone as the impeccable source which revealed the existence of Saddam Hussein’s WMD stockpile and links to Al-Qaeda before the 2003 invasion of Iraq, or whose Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Walter Duranty discounted rumours of a 1933 famine in the Soviet Union as “an exaggeration or malignant propaganda.”

This leaves individuals only to their own wits and devices in the face of a puzzling world in which information is everywhere, much of it questionable, not all the facts are available, and many are ultra-politicized, and meanwhile, unknown agendas are being continually carried out.

What’s really going on? As with any speculative enterprise, the problem is to construct a plausible hypothesis by using various models to interpret limited data. There is no question that, at different moments in history, individuals and groups have worked together in secrecy to launch conspiratorial exploits and there is no obvious reason for thinking this practice has now totally ceased. “People of the same trade seldom meet together,” observed Adam Smith in 1776, “even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public.” Still, this is not in itself evidence of any specific plot happening now.

August 20, 2020

The attractive nuisance of conspiracy theories

Filed under: Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In The Critic, Michael Coren pours scorn on the fans of QAnon and other conspiracy theories:

QAnon alleged clues about the NYC bombing, 10 December 2017.
Wikimedia Commons.

For those outside of the increasingly bizarre and surreal loop, something called QAnon is a pretty big thing in the United States, with increasing influence internationally. It’s a far-right conspiracy theory claiming that a secret deep state plot is at work against Donald Trump, who is the only person capable of smashing the power of a Satan-worshipping cabal of pedophiles composed of liberal and Democrat politicians, Hollywood celebrities, and high-profile mainstream media figures. There, nothing at all odd or bonkers about that. It goes on to allege that a planned coup by Hilary Clinton, Barack Obama, and – as always – George Soros was only prevented when President Trump hired former FBI director Robert Mueller to investigate.

The people who embrace all of this, and there are a large and increasing number of them, roar all sorts of quasi-religious language in their tweets and posts, speak of “The Storm” and “The Great Awakening” and are convinced that once they’re victorious, thousands of their enemies will be detained, incarcerated, likely sent to Guantanamo Bay, and the military will the take over the nation. Everyone loves a happy ending.

There’s plenty more involved, and every conspiracy theory one can imagine generally comes into play. Dive into social media and you’ll find the Q zealots, but look around a Trump campaign event and their posters and slogans will be just as common. Indeed, Republican candidate Marjorie Taylor Greene, a proud believer in QAnon, recently won the congressional nomination in Georgia’s 14th district. In that this area gave its last Republican candidate 76% of the vote it’s virtually impossible that Greene will not be a member of Congress. Many in her party were appalled but Donald Trump tweeted, “Congratulations to future Republican Star Marjorie Taylor Greene on a big Congressional primary win in Georgia against a very tough and smart opponent. Marjorie is strong on everything and never gives up — a real WINNER!” In other words, this is a serious concern.

Outside of democratic politics, the so-called Pizzagate scandal was part of the QAnon maze of lunacy. False claims were made that hacked personal e-mail accounts had revealed the existence of a child-sex ring involving several leading Democrat politicians. The whole thing was, it was alleged, based in a pizzeria in Washington DC. A North Carolina conspiracy believer then travelled to DC and opened fire in the restaurant with a high-powered weapon.

It’s likely that the people behind the entire Q madness are making a great deal of money and it could be that they’re not even directly politically motivated. Whatever their motives, it’s all gone well beyond its origins and was pushed into high gear when the apparently genuine case of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal came to light. His alleged links to senior lawyers, Democrats, and a member of the royal family, plus a bewildering suicide, were meat and drink to every conspiracy theorist with a mum’s basement worth the name.

Wikipedia says:

QAnon[a] (/kjuːəˈnɒn/) is a far-right conspiracy theory detailing a supposed secret plot by an alleged “deep state” against President Donald Trump and his supporters. The theory began with an October 2017 post on the anonymous imageboard 4chan by “Q”, who was presumably an American individual, but probably became a group of people. Q claimed to have access to classified information involving the Trump administration and its opponents in the United States. NBC News found that three people took the original Q post and expanded it across multiple media platforms to build internet followings for profit. QAnon was preceded by several similar anonymous 4chan posters, such as FBIAnon, HLIAnon (High-Level Insider), CIAAnon, and WH Insider Anon.

Q has accused many liberal Hollywood actors, Democratic politicians, and high-ranking officials of being members of an international child sex trafficking ring. Q also claimed that Trump feigned collusion with Russians to enlist Robert Mueller to join him in exposing the ring and preventing a coup d’état by Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and George Soros. “Q” is a reference to the Q clearance used by the U.S. Department of Energy. QAnon believers commonly tag their social media posts with the hashtag #WWG1WGA, signifying the motto “Where We Go One, We Go All”.

August 8, 2020

“The show exploits the most extreme disaster LARPers, but their visions of the apocalypse are typical”

Filed under: Media, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

Jen Gerson does a bit of disaster-watching, or rather not so much watching disasters as watching people prepping for disasters:

If you spend a few hours devoted to consuming episodes of the reality TV show Doomsday Preppers, it becomes impossible to avoid this obvious conclusion: doomsday preppers are probably the least prepared of any of us to survive the apocalypse.

Take Season 2, Episode 14, for example, in which a 44-year-old man in Hawaii believes that he will use his intuition and limited backcountry skills to survive a tsunami — his first such intuition is to get into a boat.

More typically, the television show documents Middle American families who believe they can buy their way out of society’s collapse by burying bunkers and stockpiling food, weapons and tactical gear.

Most of them seem paranoid. A few come off as genuinely disturbed. All of them seem sad.

Ask them what they’re so afraid of and they will list their apocalypse of choice: electromagnetic pulse, financial collapse, famine, drought, coup, a population-devastating plague.

The show exploits the most extreme disaster LARPers, but their visions of the apocalypse are typical. We were all prepared for zombies, and aliens — the surround-sound end-of-the world in which we would take up arms against invading forces and ferry our children to the bug-out Eden in the mountains.

Nobody pictured the apocalypse would like this; stuck at home for months at a time, pounding Oreos and beer at 11 a.m. and watching Doomsday Preppers on Netflix while faking a work day on the couch. For most, heroism has been an act of idleness.

May 21, 2020

QotD: Gullibility and belief in conspiracy theories

Filed under: Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

There are several cognitive processes going on here:

Anecdotal thinking vs. statistical thinking. We evolved to do the former so it is natural; science teaches us to do the latter, and it is unnatural. What is natural is to connect two temporally-close events as causally connected. A happens and then B happens. So they must be causally connected, right? I vaccinated my child and shortly after he was diagnosed with autism. They must be connected, right? Not necessarily (and in this case definitely not).

Patternicity: the tendency to find meaningful patterns in both meaningful and meaningless noise. If you already believe in UFOs or Bigfoot, strange lights in the sky or shadowy figures in the trees are interpreted as a meaningful pattern that supports the belief. Often such patterns carry an additional component that I call …

Agenticity: the tendency to infuse those patterns with intentional agents who act in the world. From conspiracies to ghosts, angels, demons, and gods, we tend to impute agency to the goings on around us, as if there’s someone/something out there pulling the strings.

Confirmation Bias: we look for and find confirming evidence for what we already believe and ignore or rationalize away disconfirming evidence. Once you believe that, say, “the Jews” are running the world, or that the U.S. government (or the Bush administration in the case of the 9/11 truthers) is involved in vast global cabals to control oil, it is easy to interpret daily news stories about the goings on of governments in the light of the conspiracy theory in question. Every bit of minutia becomes pregnant with meaning. It’s not chance or contingency, it’s a Vast Right Wing (or Left Wing) Conspiracy!

Michael Shermer, interviewed by Claire Lehmann, “The Skeptical Optimist: Interview with Michael Shermer”, Quillette, 2018-02-24.

March 19, 2020

Stalin’s Paranoid Military Purges – The Great Terror | BETWEEN 2 WARS I 1938 Part 4 of 4

Filed under: History, Military, Russia — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

TimeGhost History
Published 18 Mar 2020

In 1938, Stalin has his military leadership purged, and has thousands of his comrades killed or locked up. The reasons as to why he did it are still open for debate.

Join us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TimeGhostHistory

Hosted by: Indy Neidell
Written by: Joram Appel
Directed by: Spartacus Olsson and Astrid Deinhard
Executive Producers: Bodo Rittenauer, Astrid Deinhard, Indy Neidell, Spartacus Olsson
Creative Producer: Joram Appel
Post-Production Director: Wieke Kapteijns
Research by: Joram Appel
Edited by: Daniel Weiss
Sound design: Marek Kamiński

Colorizations by:
– Daniel Weiss

Sources:
From the Noun Project:
– Saluting Veteran by Eric Lamar Pearine
– Russian_soldier_1553396 (Edited) by Wonmo Kang
– Prison by FORMGUT
– Law_585610 by Delwar Hossain
Photos from Color by Klimbim

Soundtracks from Epidemic Sound:
– “Split Decision” – Rannar Sillard
– “Last Point of Safe Return” – Fabien Tell
– “Watchman” – Yi Nantiro
– “Disciples of Sun Tzu” – Christian Andersen
– “The Inspector 4” – Johannes Bornlöf
– “Not Safe Yet” – Gunnar Johnsen
– “Death And Glory 1” – Johannes Bornlöf
– “Dark Beginning” – Johan Hynynen
– “First Responders” – Skrya
– “The Charleston 3” – Håkan Eriksson

A TimeGhost chronological documentary produced by OnLion Entertainment GmbH.

From the comments:

TimeGhost History
1 day ago
This episode was hard to write, mainly because of the ambiguity that this topic is still clouded in today. There are no conclusive answers as to why Stalin did what he did, and why he stopped doing what he was doing in 1938. This episode features some of the explanations of the purges and the Great Terror. This certainly is a remarkable piece of Soviet History, and one that would dramatically influence the performance of the Red Army in 1939 and beyond. Those who followed our World War Two series know that already in December ’39, the direct consequences of the purges in ’37 and ’38 are gigantic. I would also like to note here that we would like the comment section to stick to factual debate.
cheers, Joram

February 17, 2019

Lyndon LaRouche, RIP

Filed under: Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

When I was first active in the Ontario and federal Libertarian parties in the mid-1970s, I’d sometimes get accused of being a follower of Lyndon LaRouche. Not by fellow Libertarians, I hasten to add, but by random members of the public. At that time I’d never heard of LaRouche, and I have no idea why some Canadians thought he had anything at all to do with libertarian philosophy or politics. He was, as Jesse Walker points out, pretty much the definition of an ANTI-libertarian in US politics:

Ordinarily I’m fond of cranks, maybe excessively so. You say extremist; I say charmingly kooky freethinker. You say cult; I say fascinating young religion. You say lunatic conspiracy theory; I say spooky new addition to America’s homegrown mythology. But even my tolerance has its limits, and one of those limits is Lyndon LaRouche.

LaRouche, who died Tuesday at age 96, was a despicable old fraud, and the warmest feeling I’ve ever been able to conjure for his devotees is pity. Fiercely authoritarian in both his political ideals and his personal life, LaRouche fed his followers a stream of lies, psychological abuse, and paranoid fantasies. Those fantasies featured a big cast of villains, from the queen of England to Aristotle to “Dope, Inc.” to gay people, not to mention whichever follower or ex-follower was the designated scapegoat of the moment. One such scapegoat, Ken Kronberg, committed suicide after the denunciations turned his way.

LaRouche didn’t limit his abuse to the people who chose to cast their lot with him. He aimed it outwards too — most infamously during “Operation Mop-Up,” when his followers in several cities used fists, bats, chains, and nunchuks to attack members of the Communist Party and other leftist groups. When those assaults began in 1973, LaRouche considered himself a part of the radical left; Operation Mop-Up, he hoped, would establish his “hegemony” over the competition. But a few years later he was aligning himself with Klansmen and the far-right Liberty Lobby. He had a habit of flipping positions like that.

He also had a habit of running for president — first as the 1976 nominee of the U.S. Labor Party, then as a recurring contender for the Democratic nomination. His biggest successes came in the North Dakota primary of 1992 and the Michigan primary of 2000, when he managed to outpoll everyone else on the ballot. This sounds less impressive when you learn that (a) in both cases, for quirky reasons, none of the major candidates were actually on the ballot, and (b) LaRouche still managed to lose both primaries. In North Dakota he was beaten handily by some write-in votes for Ross Perot, and in Michigan he was outvoted by “uncommitted.”

Most people’s direct encounters with LaRouchism came in one of two ways. The first was to stumble on one of the candidate’s prime-time infomercials, in which he’d inform viewers that Walter Mondale is a Soviet agent, that the government should “quarantine” people with AIDS, or whatever other idea had caught his fancy at the moment. (LaRouche pushed his AIDS idea with a front group called — I swear I am not making this up — PANIC, for the Prevent AIDS Now Initiative Committee.) The second was to run into his followers as they handed out literature in public places. My most memorable encounter with LaRouchie leafletters was in Ann Arbor in the early ’90s, where they had made a big sign that said “EATING ARAB BABIES ISN’T KOSHER.” (I’ve heard people call LaRouche a “coded” anti-Semite. In that case you didn’t have to work hard to crack the code.)

So, LaRouche’s ideas were all over the authoritarian map, but he must have been a really dynamic, engaging speaker to fascinate so many different people for so many years, right? One of those orators that just grabs the attention and plays on it like a fine musical instrument?

There are LaRouche TV specials that consist of nothing but LaRouche himself talking, but I didn’t want to inflict one of those on you. You know why? Because when he’s not saying something utterly crazy, the man is boring. Lyndon LaRouche was a child of the American Weird, but he was too dull to excel even at raving like a lunatic.

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