Conspiracy Theories, Skepticism, and Critical Thinking

We are five long pages into the chapter about the Bolshevik Revolution and we haven't had any Bolsheviks. That's going to change and we might be willing to excuse Allen for this overly long setup because the history of how the Russian revolution happened is important...but we shouldn't. We shouldn't because of how books work...the setup for this chapter should have taken place in the previous chapter with only a brief summary at the beginning of this one. In my dissertation chapter 2 only makes sense because of some background information. However, that background was found in chapter 1. So spending five long pages (made all the longer by our format shift) on the "history" of WWI doesn't make sense.  What else doesn't make sense is any of this. The problem with large-scale conspiracy theories is that they often times have to negotiate conflicting world events and push them into one coherent narrative. Take what we have learned so far about the Great Wa

 Ok, so the search for a pdf version that has page numbers continues. Every place that hosts a pdf of this book is using the same version. I could get a kindle/epub version but I'll be damned if I'm forking over a dime to the John Birch Society or whatever white supremacist/sovereign citizen group that is selling it. I didn't pay for the Turner Diaries and I am not paying for this. What I am going to do is just work of the page that the PDF itself (not the book) says that I am on. The PDF pages are longer so that's why we are back to page 37, it's all very confusing and if I hadn't run up about twenty bucks in late fees we'd still have the paper copy. Anyway, on with the post. I would never accept a paper from a student that was written like Allen's unfortunately influential book. It's just too scattered, it raises points just to forget about them, and uses discredited sources. However, that is all the point of the book. We ended last week discussing

First off: a bit of a format change. I had been using a library procured version of this book in hardcover, but I kept racking up fines. I returned that version but am now working off of a PDF that doesn't have the same page numbering. I'll work toward getting a different version, but for this week, we're just going with the first few pages of chapter 4. I make it a point to never learn anything about the people I'm a fan of. Nothing, zero. I don't want to know, I just want to enjoy the things that they make without having to worry about their personal views on things. Did Kurt Smith (of Tears for Fears) support Brexit? No idea. Did Britney Spears vote for Biden? Couldn't tell you and I willfully stay agnostic about their positions (also it's a fun playlist to combine the two as Tears for Fears and Britney Spears...it kind of rhymes). Think of  Paul Ryan's shock that Rage Against the Machine had political views. The old adage about not meeting your heroe

 There's a point where someone writing a work loses the thread. They don't necessarily run out of things to say, but they lose that initial umph that was motivating their earlier work. If you've ever tried to bullshit your way through a paper for a class that didn't matter, or even worse, given a presentation that you remembered all of the facts for but can't string together the point. We've all been there. I've seen it from both ends as a student trying to muddle a defense in Philosophy of Language, to the student two years ago who had all of the incriminating evidence on FIFA but couldn't put it together the right way.  In my case, as a student, it was just a course that I couldn't get my brain around. I knew the material enough to pass the tests but it was just difficult to formulate why Wittgenstein's position was so important. At least, however, I had the correct premise.  That brings us to this week's selection, a much longer one than u

A lifetime ago, I had a student confront me about 9/11. This happened while Bush was at the end of his second term, and we still didn’t know all of the details about the event and the conspiracy theories were just loving the redactions from the 9/11 commission. This student began asking me about the towers falling faster than gravity–which I still don’t know they think even with an inside job that happened. She then asked about Mossad and then how there were no Jews that died…and I cut her off. For the former part, I said that yes, Mossad has done some dirt. That however isn’t relevant unless you can connect Mossad to literally any part of the 9/11 attacks. As for the latter part I said that you really never want to finish that sentence because it makes you anti-Semitic. “How, I’m just asking how no Jews died in the 9/11 attacks? “Because the implication, the direct implication is that they were warned, and who else but ‘ their own people’  would warn them? It’s not a question, it’s a