Conspiracy Theories, Skepticism, and Critical Thinking

Footnotes are fun things. When I first discovered that you could just toss in a footnote into a paper, you could essentially pad out the paper while at the same time being able to say just about anything.* I got a little footnote happy in grad school, and by the second time I was in grad school, I was cognizant of how to use them properly. The point of a footnote is to supplement the body of the work. The reader can read them or skip them, and it shouldn't make a bit of difference to the actual work. However, they should enlighten the reader if they have an obvious question about what they just read. The footnote addresses those, or they address an obvious objection that can be dealt with quickly. Sometimes you can get the idea that the author just wants to talk about something else for a bit. This footnote is none of these things, but it sure is enlightening about the author's beliefs.  I recently wrote in the May/June issue of the Skeptical Inquirer (I'd link the article,...

 Bill Kaysing was a survivalist and one of those off-the-grid types in the American 1960s. He wrote a few books directed at ex-city dwellers who moved to rural areas (white flight types), he wrote a book called "how to eat well for under a dollar a day." Yet, no one reading this knows these books, they know Kaysing though because he was the first person to publish a book claiming that the Moon Landing was faked. This was back in 1976 and nothing in the Moon Landing Hoax conspiracy theory is any different than today's theory.  I bring it up because Kaysing does something in his book that is repeated here: to argue that the conspiracy theory is true because there have been conspiracies in the past. Kaysing argues that the American involvement in South American, the U2 flight that was shot down over the USSR, and the project Ultra (the British effort at decrypting the Nazi Enigma code machine) were kept from the public. Those three events are examples of conspiracies so ther...

 Words have meanings. Specific meanings. Shared meanings, that's how language works, how information is conveyed, and not only how society functions but how it was created in the first place. Even the gruntings of our cave-dwelling ancestors had shared meanings. When we view the current political climate, we can see the problem over specific words. If we must debate over words it means progress must be halted until we can agree on a definition.  So in this week's section, we finally get to the author's definition of "communism/socialism" which is already problematic since those two things are not identical. That however is the least of our problems. Before we get into the text itself we should be mindful that the book was written during the cold war, not the current times. The Vietnam War was still going, with the U.S. clearly on the losing end of it. So the fear of Communism is different for the readers of the book than it is for the right-wing conspiracy theoris...