Conspiracy Theories, Skepticism, and Critical Thinking

 When I started this book, I thought I’d be dealing with more “evidence.” So far, there’s been very little and there’s not that much left in the book itself. We enter into the last leg of this journey titled “Common Sense Questions” and I just know that this is going to end up being the “just asking questions” part of the book. What we begin with is not a good sign, “ There is an old Greek saying from the 1st century BC. ‘False in part, false in the whole.’” I am a philosopher this is not a Greek saying. It’s a Greek concept, but it only pertains to logical and mathematical reasoning. The Pythagorean theorem doesn’t work if part of it is false. A syllogism doesn’t work if a premise is false. Thus, the respective proofs of both will not be valid. The concept here involves logical necessity. Historical events do not apply. Another issue is that common sense considerations involve common sense, which is neither common nor sense. Let’s ask the locals what they think about jet propulsio...

 This chapter begins with a quote from Buzz Aldrin, that Kaysing has as "Col. Aldrin.” This is a trick that dumb people use when writing—they use the titles unnecessarily. You can just say Buzz Aldrin, he doesn’t need the distinguishing addition of Colonel, because Aldrin was the second person on the Moon. This is just like how you don’t have to introduce a quote by Martin Luther King with Reverand Doctor Martin Luther King—he accomplished enough to transcend the titles. Kaysing, and conspiracy theorists do this because they have a recognition that what they are saying needs the addition of the title to remind people of the authority of the person speaking. In the conspiracy world it’s never Dr. Fauci but it’s always Dr. Wakefield. The quote is Aldrin commenting about the feelings of the Moon landing, “ There was a lack of reality about everything, a kind of euphoric strangeness to all that was going on.” The chapter is titled “Were the Astronauts Manchurian Candidates?” and this ...

 The story is that Kaysing was commissioned to write this book. Skeptics will concentrate on the portion of that story where Kaysing would claim that he wrote it as a goof but then started to believe it; I want to focus on the other part. That someone paid him to write this because that implies some kind of editorial decision. An editor is what we need here because mid-chapter the format changes. Last week I criticized the ordering Kaysing presented: Baron’s testimony, then Baron’s report, then the Phillip’s report. I said that it should have gone Baron’s report, Baron’s testimony, then Phillip’s. This is because we have Baron’s findings, then the investigation into his findings, then a corroborating report. They didn’t do that for some reason. Now, we have something new, side-by-side comparison of the claims Phillips’ is making with Baron’s. This is fine, but either do this for the entire chapter or don’t do it all. Either choice is better than suddenly deciding to do it. What wer...

 For any new readers, the page numbers in the title refer to the PDF file found on the Internet Archive . The numbers do not line up with the page in the book, so far they are about five pages behind. Researching conspiracy theories has changed my brain in a few important ways. The first is that I cannot read the news without filtering it into a conspiratorial interpretation. It’s not that I believe it, but that I try and interpret the news as they would. For example, president-elect Trump’s pick for secretary of Treasury is just a normal big business executive; but I also know that he’s worked for both George Soros and the WEF (World Economic Fund) which makes it interesting for those people who rabidly support him. The second way that conspiracy theories have changed my brain is that I can longer just read a rhetorical question without getting angry at the writer. The “?” just hangs in a sentence in much the same way that a brick doesn’t. The rhetorical question is the path of th...

 We shall begin with the “who.” The author of this book is Bill Kaysing. He is not, as far as I know, a conspiracy theorist in the broad sense. He doesn’t appear to be an Illuminati believer, nor does he think the lizard people control everything. He has some other conspiracy beliefs about the CIA, privacy, and the federal reserve; and I get the impression that he is merely an anti-government theorist. A little biographical information: Kaysing was a Naval Officer in WWII, and afterwards became a dime store writer. His books include “How to Eat Well on Less than a Dollar a Day (1970),” “The Robin Hood Handbook (1974),” and “Great Hot Springs of the West (1984).” He has a few books in the “How to eat…” category and according to rationalwiki he was actually a decent food writer. He died in April of 2005. Kaysing claimed that he was originally approached to write this book as a satire. It was supposed to be a joke, here’s what the kooks believe, and let’s make it seem a little plausib...

This week's post is late because I had to have an emergency appendectomy this week. I'm recovering well.  Protocol 14 I cannot to say that I've come across any real atheist globalist conspiracy theories. Sure, atheists (of which I consider myself) have some irrational beliefs. There is the Sam Harris problem of blending Islam with Islamic nationalism; there are some martyrdom issues (of which some are exaggerated, some fabricated, but there are legitimate causes of concern); but once we get into a large scale conspiracy theories they evolve (devolve?) into a weird religious position. Cooper has got his version of Christianity throughout this book. The Flat Earth conspiracy theory is fundamentalist Christian at its center (I should note that there might be a version of fundamentalist Islamic flat earth since it is flat in a literal reading of the Koran); and only the 80s and 90s UFOlogy circuits were non-religious. Cooper comes out of the circuit so I may have to revisit tho...

I've covered this before , but that was five months ago and I've been really bad at making updates. Don't blame me, well, blame me, but I have a course on this stuff to teach and sometimes just making the lectures work takes far more work than I anticipated. However, I'm beginning a "Plan B'' in pursuit of my PhD and that's forced me to delve into the academic literature surrounding this topic...more than I had to before. One of the problems is that there is scarce literature on the topic. Sure there's enough but the debate is just beginning, and that means going backward to the years before conspiracy theories were not uttered out of the mouth of the president of the United States...at least publicly. The problem lies not necessarily with the scarcity of material but that within that set there is good and bad. So far the standard piece to work with is Brian Keeley's "Of Conspiracy Theories" (99). This work deals with laying out a s...