Conspiracy Theories, Skepticism, and Critical Thinking

  We’ve done this before, back in the first French Revolution days where Webster did her thing mentioning something as crucially important, I do a bunch of reading on it, and then she drops it three sentences later. On the plus side I did not have to that much reading for this week, but her style is still annoying. To refresh the memory (I did have to refresh my own memory), syndicalism is another economic/political system. Socialism is equal distribution of authority and economy; the former was accomplished through some process of election or merit. Anarchy is a system where every person has a say in everything. Plato hated this form of government which he equated with Democracy. Aristotle believed Anarchy was a corrupt version of Democracy. People like Bakunin didn’t believe that any person should have more authority than anyone else, no matter what that meant for the rest of society. Syndicalism is a system wherein the various aspects of society are run by the experts in those...

Engaging with ideas is beyond the capabilities of conspiracy theorists, that’s why they are conspiracy theorists. They’ll give lip service to wanting engagement but in the end they just have their misdirection, ad hominem, and non-sequiturs. This weeks’ section is all three. Anyway Socialism/Anarchism is bad, so are Socialists/Anarchists. We have been reading a chapter that is supposed to be about the development of Socialist/Anarchist movements throughout the 19 th century but she really hasn’t delivered. What we have gotten are a list of petty squabbles, some gossip, and a list of bad things that her alleged enemies have done. She doesn’t address the arguments of these movements. It’s easier to raise the ire of people by discussing how they killed the Tsar of Russia. The course of Socialism should take us to America, and it does for two sentences when she mentions that American Anarchists led by Johann Most “ gave evidence of their presence by a dynamite explosion in the Haymark...

 Many of us took hobbies during the year of the pandemic, then decided that these hobbies were too much work, and went back to the conspiracy spiral on social media. Last week we met a person who did much of the same thing, Leopold Engel. Engel was going to restart the actual Illuminati, and like a person who doesn’t understand how difficult being a Dungeon Master actually is, abandoned the project pretty early. Webster is trying to weave her story, but at this point I don’t think she remembers what it is supposed to be. Engel’s group is out but Webster needs to carry it forward. So she changes gears giving us the “Philadelphes” group which was, possibly, the name of a Masonic lodge that used to be count Gracchus Babeuf as a member but not has a branch in London. Of course, the word “Philadelphes” just means brotherly love and is such an obvious name for a fraternal organization that it is almost a cliché. She quotes at length from an article in the New York World. This article isn...