Interlude

 No post this week. It's the end of the semester and I must focus on grading. 

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Gun-Fu: Behold a Pale Horse pp. 182-184

 The chapter begins like all of Cooper's chapters with a title and then a bunch of sub-titles. The title of this chapter is "Lessons from Lithuania" and then it subtitles with the Second Amendment--surprisingly the whole thing. Cooper does not ignore that inconvenient first half that modern gun fetishists concentrate on. He then goes on to Patrick Henry's famous quote, but again he gives the full thing: " I know not what others may do. But as for me, give me liberty or give me death."  Cooper is unlikely to know this: it's very doubtful that Patrick Henry uttered these words. What we know is that he gave a speech in Virginia in 1775 which pushed the Virginia legislature toward desiring independence from England, but his speech was never recorded. The line comes from the recollection of people decades later. As much as I would like to attack Cooper for getting this wrong, I cannot do so, he would not have access to the scholarly research on the subject, a...
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Taxonomy

The biggest hurdle in dealing with conspiracy theories is how to define them. A later post will deal with the term "Conspiracy Theory" in much greater detail but for now let's just assume the common parlance of the term and discuss what exactly we mean and more importantly how we can divide the various conspiracy theories into their proper categories. In an earlier post I referred to two types of CTs: Academic and Historical. Academic theories, properly understood, are those dealing with specific knowledge that is hidden from the public. These include hidden cures, ancient aliens, secret discoveries, etc. Historical theories deal with the secret behind historical events, e.g. the truth about assassinations, disasters, and the actual workings of governments. Since I made that claim though I realize that this is an insufficient categorization. Which makes this type of analysis all the more tricky since finding a top-level taxonomy can only begin with the proper definit...
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