Conspiracy Theories, Skepticism, and Critical Thinking

 A decade or so ago, I started reading the original books that inspired "firsts." I read Casino Royale (James Bond), Starship Troopers, Nothing Lasts Forever (Die Hard is based on this book), etc. I found it interesting to see what changed and how far things had come since those initial ideas. The most interesting part of this "mission" was finding out the origin of things we take for granted. Starship Troopers, for example, is the origin of the powered robotic solder suit or "mech" in science fiction. There are so many tropes in that book that are just normal now. I read Pride and Prejudice because that's the book that created the trope of the two people that hate each other that eventually get together. Largely I had forgotten that I did this until I read this week's section.  Chapter 2 is titled: "Socialism--Royal Road to Power for the Super-Rich" Why am I doing this again? No one is paying me for it...sigh, here we go.  Politically, I...

We left off last week discussing the person that is supposed to be an intellectual bulwark for the claims that Allen is making in this book (the book has two authors but it listed everywhere as just being Allen's work--I'm just going with that from now on). We ended with a quote by Prof. Carroll Quigley, the intellectual in question, where he discusses how Allen and people like him, misquote and fail to understand his work. Conspiracy theorists claim that Quigley is the one that exposed the secret cabal, and to some extent he did...but not in the way that Allen thinks.  What Quigley claims, to repeat from last week, is that a group of rich people exerted influence on public policy in the UK and then began extending that influence into the US. Taken broadly Quigley is warning us against the dangers of allowing the ultra-rich to exert this kind of influence--this is literally the same type of thing that Adam Smith warned about in 1776's Wealth of Nations, "People of the ...

Conspiracy theories are difficult to sustain if you have no information behind them. Even with information, it becomes difficult because that information is always out of context, irrelevant, or just plain wrong. Without it, it's just an idiot yelling. Look at conservatives' elevation of "Antifa" to some kind of Illuminati-like organization. All it shows is fear. Emotion can only sustain a theory for so long, eventually, they need someone to buttress their claim. Someone or something with esteem that can inject a foundation into their theory. This week we meet this person, and it does not go well.  The first thing we have to do is wrap up the attack on academics/intellectuals/liberals that was started last week. This brings us to a strange realization that I don't know if the authors (and those that agree with them are aware of): that they attack intelligent people for disagreeing with them. This is similar to religious people trying to stop education that isn...

 I was really hoping to get through the first chapter this week. Then I started reading from where I left off (I don't read ahead) and...nope I barely got through the next page. I imagine, and hope, that these posts will cover more ground. Conspiracy books like this get repetitive as the initial rage that fueled the first writings peters out and the author becomes more and more aware that they are lacking anything of substance. It can take a while, David Icke's books are 500 hundred pages long, but he pads the middle with genealogy charts and pictures. This book doesn't have that...I hope. Anyway, let's get into it. The first chapter is still trying to argue that we should take it seriously, which is not a good sign. You make your position known and then dive into arguing it with whatever method your chosen discipline uses: empirical evidence, argumentation, or logical/mathematical proofs. The title of the book is where the subject lies, if a person opens the book ...

Well, we will have to shorten that title to something because writing those titles is going to get stale. For those of you who have never read one of these, it’s pretty simple. I’ll read a section and then make commentaries. The posts are difficult to predict because I can’t foresee how long each section will last. I’ve done this a few times, and occasionally the section I read will be an entire chapter, but it can also be one paragraph. Whatever fills a thousand words is what I shoot for. You may also notice that I’m starting on page 9 instead of page 1. This is because, unlike most books, the introduction started on page 1, and I’m skipping that. Now, this is already a bad sign. As a person who just finished writing his dissertation, there are rules to this. Page numbers 1, 2, 3, etc.; don’t start until the body of the work begins. Introductions, prefaces, etc., should have lower case Roman numerals; i, ii, iii,…this allows correct citation of the work when the author of the introduc...

 First let's get the business out of the way: posts here have been sporadic due to some of my writing getting picked up by non-me publishers. For instance a much better version of the previous post is going to be published in the Skeptical Inquirer (a print magazine!!!). I have a different article coming out for the British skeptics society on pastel-q and how it recruits through wellness and health groups on social media. I will begin posting links as soon as I am able. The first article is embargoed for a week or so after publication.  More frequent posts are coming, it's that the other writing takes precedence. This blog is NOT dead, I promise you that. 

 Around 2015 or so; I warned a friend of mine, with whom I disagree with politically, not to take the newly named "alt-right" lightly. This person, whom I'm not going to name for obvious reasons, identifies as as conservative but was expressing some amusement at the worrywarts on the left over these people. These people, like Yiannapolis, Cernovich, Baldwin, Bannon, etc. were not just people that were disliked by the left, they were dangerous I warned. I was familiar with these people from the travesty known as gamergate. This occurred about a year before my conversation (2014) and was an organized campaign of harassment under the guise of wanting to protect the integrity of video game journalism. The entire shit show involved harassing anyone that dared to make mention of any kind of sexism in the video game industry--whether that sexism was in the games or in the industry that produced them. Paraphrasing one of the victims of gamergate in a twee yesterday, gamergate was...