Category: Conspiracy Round-up

I really did mean to make these round-ups a monthly thing, but I guess that did not work out. I mostly managed to write a new post on a weekly basis, and hopefully next year I’ll commit to that in earnest. Then again, prepping the weekly podcast is actually quite a time consuming affair, and I have been engaged in a bunch of projects, most of which I can’t announce at this time. Irksome, to be sure. Just like this stereotypical opening paragraph that almost every blogger is writing to mark a less-than-successful year of blogging…

It’s very easy to blame conspiracy theories. After all:

Part of the appeal of conspiracy theories is their simplicity. In a complex, changing world, it is tempting to reduce multifaceted issues to the us-and-them narrative. It is a vision that meets little contradiction because reasoned facts are sidelined by emotion. It is a binary scheme, with “the people” on one side and “the system” on the other.

That’s from a piece in the Guardian, which basically wants to talk about how Marine Le Pen is blaming the Establishment, rather than tactical voting, for her party’s dismal result in the recent regional elections in France.

The topic of how people use the rhetoric of conspiracy to escape blame is an interesting one, but the Guardian article makes the typical and fatal mistake of conflating rhetorical moves with conspiracy theories themselves. No one doubts that people use the language of conspiracy to shift blame, but that tells us nothing about the merit of conspiracy theories. It just tells us that people like to sometimes allege conspiracies where none occur. So, bad show, Natalie Nougayrède.

Talking about rhetoric, what about Alex Jones and Donald Trump? In what was a minor story for some and a huge story for others, Trump made a half-hour appearance on Jones’ show. It’s pretty much what you would expect of the two men, but what’s interesting is just how little effect it’s had on Trump’s popularity. People though Trump talking to a known conspiracist would completely derail him, yet no one seemed to think that it perfectly fits Trump’s brand. Trump is – quite possibly – the conspiracy theory president the U.S.A. deserves.

And talking about Trump, theories abound that the Republican Party might conspire against their own in order to stop Trump from getting the nod. Although given his supporters, I’m not sure I’d blame them if they did. One of them, for example, is this guy:

John Captain, of Portland Tub and Tan, home of “Portland’s premier hot tubbing and tanning specialists with exclusive outdoor hot tubs year round” in Oregon, was glad that I called because he wanted to talk about his girlfriend, who he believes was a monarch mind control slave who was murdered by her family, part of the Illuminati and the New World Order.

More here.

In other charismatic leaders of the world news, someone is asking the question “Is Vladimir Putin immortal?”

This Vox article does a good job of summarising a recent paper on what motivates belief in political conspiracy theories in the U.S., but it kind of misses the point that belief in conspiracy theories itself is not necessarily a bad thing. Indeed, it kind of falls into the trap of saying “Look, those dastardly people [on the other side of the political spectrum from us] believe conspiracy theories, and isn’t that just a fiasco!” Part of that kind of analysis comes from the oft-repeated (but hardly ever analysed) claim that conspiracy theories are more popular now than ever. Yet that’s not necessarily true, and it kind of ruins the analysis in the second half of the post, where David Roberts decides to go beyond what the research actually says.

A #dirtypolitics update: Cameron Slater is still up to his old tricks. An advertiser has left his site because of organised hit pieces appearing on the WhaleOil site and the #dirtypolitics crew have a newsletter out that you probably don’t need to read. Meanwhile, Comrade Giovanni Tiso tells us about the raid on Nicky Hager’s house.

Sam Kriss writes on conspiracy theories. I felt the need to respond to this piece in the comments (which, I might add, doesn’t seem to have made it through moderation…), because whilst some of it is rather interesting, a lot of it really only makes sense if you think there’s no existing literature on the topic…

This week on the Podcaster’s Guide to the Conspiracy, we discussed Building 7, one of the lynchpins of Truther Movement at the moment. Here’s another 9/11 story, the subsequent invasion of Iraq for those pesky Weapons of Mass Destruction. Or was it all just a pretence to secure the oil?

Last week I wrote about the DUE AUTHORITY conspiracy theory; the claim that changing our flag changes our constitution. There are other flag referendum conspiracy theories in the offing, some of which are summarised here.

Actually, talking about me, I was interviewed for this article on conspiracy theories in the Florida Weekly.

You may have read recently that a group of psychologists tried to replicate a series of findings in their field, and the results were… Not great. Here are two pieces on issue. The first is from Daily Nous. The second from Crooked Timber. It’s a bit of fodder for some work Lee Basham and I are doing, looking at what social psychologists have said about conspiracy theorists.

Talking about social psychologists, here’s Daniel Jolley discussing how people who feel that they have a measure of control over a situation are less prone to think said situation is the result of a conspiracy.

Here’s another social psychologist talking about his recent research into belief in conspiracy theories. He mentions both the conjunction fallacy (something a colleague and I have been writing a piece on), and the fundamental attribution error (which Steve Clarke wrote on about a decade ago, and has since revised his views). What’s interesting about the piece, despite many reservations, is this:

Psychologists who study conspiracy theories do not investigate whether or not a particular conspiracy theory is true. Rather, we are interested in the social consequences and the psychological nature of widespread conspiracy ideation.

Moreover, it is a mistake to assume that these type of studies imply that believing that someone is conspiring against you means you must be crazy. That’s not what this line of research suggests. Clearly, people and governments have conspired against each other, throughout human history. Healthy skepticism lies at the very heart of the scientific endeavor. Yet there is something fundamentally dangerous and unscientific about the nature of conspiracy theorizing.

It’s that last sentence, “Yet there is something fundamentally dangerous and unscientific about the nature of conspiracy theorizing”, which troubles me. It’s a case of “Have your cake and eat it!”, where conspiracy theory theorists are perfectly happy to say “Look, conspiracies occur, but don’t dare theorise about them, because that’s bad, okay?”

Still, if we want to talk about dangerous conspiracy theories, you might be interested to know that on the 23rd of this month, a comet (or possibly a nuclear strike disguised as a comet impact) will cause North America and Europe to explode in a volcanic apocalypse.

And if apocalyptic scenarios are not to your liking, then there is always Alex Jones’ claim that the refugee crisis has been manufactured to oppress white people. Makes Donald Trump seem like a delightful dinner companion in comparison.

Talking about Trump… If you believe the British Press, either Jeremy Corbyn is the best or worse thing to happen to UK politics. In the States, however, the press by-and-large seems to be totally onboard the “Donald Trump sucks!” express. This Rolling Stone article certainly makes a case for Trump playing the “White victimhood” conspiracy theory card as an easy (and terrible way) to get into the Whitehouse.

Very soon the new series of Doctor Who starts. Someone asks the sensible question: Is the Doctor a Freemason? Now, the last time I poked fun at this kind of thing (and the writer of the article I’ve linked to is having fun with it, I should add), a gentleman by the name of Aspen came along and told me he would delight in bringing me down. Still waiting, Aspen. Still waiting.

In news “They don’t want you to know…” you may have heard the French courts have ruled that electromagnetic sensitivity is a thing. Except they kind of haven’t…

Finally, who wants to give me some money to send me on this conspiraSea cruise? Although there are a lot of alternative health practitioners going, I suspect attendance would cause me a certain amount of stress and maybe lead to heart palpitations.

#Conspiracy Round-up, August 10th, 2015

Mike Wood points out that the conspiracy theory might not be quite the scarlet letter [his words, not mine] people think. I know a little bit about this paper, having heard Mike speak to it at the Miami conference, and I think his conclusion shows he wants to have it both ways:

It’s possible that the label only works under some specific circumstances that these experiments didn’t cover, but even then it seems the label’s hardly as powerful as it’s been given credit for. On the other hand, maybe people in general just don’t have a negative view of conspiracy theories – maybe the intellectual stigma around the term simply doesn’t exist outside of academia (this is what Lee Basham, a philosopher from Wabash College, thinks). I’m not so sure.

Mike’s survey results shows that labelling something a conspiracy theory (and the experiment he did is really quite interesting) seems to have no effect on how people assess the merit of the explanation on offer. However, he wants to stick with some kind of academic orthodoxy that conspiracy theories are typically considered bunk, rather than go “Hmm, maybe our intuitions are wrong in this case.” Anyway, whatever the case, the results certainly are interesting (even if they are not exactly surprising).

Glenn Greenwald writes about how Western intelligence agencies are ruining the internet. Think of this as part of the wealth of information which shows that the prior probability a conspiracy is on-going here-and-now is higher than many people would like to think; conspiracies are just more independently likely than most people tend to think. and this is evidence for that supposition.

Now, I know several people who think that Edward Snowden (from whom Greenwald gets the elements of this story) might be a plant who is still working for the NSA. If that’s true (and I am of the view – given the damage the Snowden revelations have caused for relations with the U.S. abroad, as well as the on-going reviews of intelligence agency work outside America – that’s it not), whatever endgame the NSA and the U.S. State are working towards, they certainly are making it harder on themselves.

Talking about Snowden, the White House continues to say it won’t countenance pardoning him. Talk about the potential pardon or punishment of Snowden is incredibly confusing, given the morass of conflicting legal accounts as to what might happen to him, and whether there is any kind of public good defence he could mount, given the way in which the 1917 Espionage Act works (really, America, you probably need a new espionage act).

Meanwhile, in the U.K., the Police are still investigating reporters involved in the leak. Possibly the best bit of this story (if we ignore the icy chills in our spines) is the fact that an element of it is the “Plebgate Affair”. Plebgate!

Is Donald Trump really working for the Clinton campaign? Probably not, although I also think it’s clear Mr. Trump is not working for the Republicans. I think he might just be working for himself…

Donald Trump likes to question the sitting President’s natural-born status; here’s an attempt to trace the origin of the Birther Movement.

Lithuania is not just erasing the ugly period of Nazi collaboration, but it’s going out of its way to punish those who fought against the occupying Nazis.

Fun story: the title of this story in the French version is “Conspiracy theories kill!” It’s a piece on both our fascination with conspiracy theories and how sometimes they aren’t just views we should be laughing at. I get name-dropped in it, mostly because, as the author points out, Australasia seems to be the place where a lot of the philosophical work on conspiracy theories is getting done at the moment. David Coady, Charles Pigden, Steve Clarke, me… What is with Australians and New Zealanders being interested in these things? Must be the fluoride.

Old news by now, but Mullar Omar is dead for the fourth time and this time he died two years ago.

Forget 9/11 Truth; let’s talk Pluto Truth! (Also, here and here) Yes, the Pluto flyby is, apparently, a fake, and those super new high-res photos of our closest dwarf planet were likely filmed on a Disney soundstage.

Finally, in news that most people will cheer about but should give us some grounds for concern, Google is playing around with ranking pages on their truth. I’m in two minds about this; certainly, the trial programme – in which Google is using a lite version of its truth rankings with respect to searches about medicine – is good; ranking pages on their popularity when it comes to medicine seems like an awful idea. Yet I can also see how this might pervert some information online, because we’re not really talking about a truth-ranking but, rather, an expert-consensus ranking. Whilst I’m largely optimistic about how consensus works over the long term sometimes the consensus of experts gets it wrong here-and-now (for example, with the idea that there is something wrong with conspiracy theories).

I said “finally” but I lied. This is our last link; why expressing an opinion doesn’t mean you can’t be called out for being wrong. Opinions are, as Prince George probably say, like socks. “There’s lots of them about, but I’m not getting why people think they are important.”

This article on the fundamentalism in Fundamentalist Politics does some interesting (and presumably controversial) work defining fundamentalism. Having been accused of working with “interesting” definitions of both “conspiracy theory” and “conspiracy theorist” I find trying to locate fundamentalism in the intersection of superchurches and the heartland Right of the Republican Party really quite interesting. Nothing explicitly conspiratorial in this one, unless you could talk of talk of the silent majority as conspiracy-esque.

Talking about US Fundamentalism, it’s interesting that we don’t know much about it’s link to domestic terrorism because the person who was studying it lost his federal funding. The article both suggests a partisan conspiracy to deny links between extremist ideology in the U.S. and domestic terrorism, as well as a conspiracy to focus on Middle-Eastern sources for terrorism in the U.S.

Alex Proud from the Telegraph talks about how we are all conspiracy theorists now. It’s a standard list of conspiracy theories we should all agree turned out to be warranted. Still, always useful to have a little ammo when shouting “See!” and holding a placard about the imminent end of the world.

Edward Snowden; love or hate him, it’s hard not to appreciate the mess he’s made. Newly released documents to the public show that the NSA was keeping a large amount of information they shouldn’t have gathered in the first place, and detractors of Snowden are having a hard time trying to condemn Snowden whilst not also condemning the NSA. Sure, Snowden released personal information, but the NSA collected it and if we’re going to argue they have processes in place to stop personal information getting out, how do we explain Snowden being able to leak it?

What is more Welsha than replying to an OIA request in Klingon? Nothing, that’s what.

Nicky Hager is in court this week contesting the actions of the New Zealand Police when they confiscated his computer (given that it sets a chilling precedent for journalism in Aotearoa (New Zealand)). Here he talks about his machines being seized. Meanwhile, people are still interested in the identity of Hager’s source, Rawshark, and this piece is a very interesting analysis of what kind of hacker Rawshark is and what kind of expertise he likely has.

What is a Conspiracy Tound-up without a Cliff Kincaid piece to make fun of? Here he talks about the Christian genocide that is occurring (apparently) in the U.S. right now! Truly frightening (that Cliff Kincaid).

Would you like anti-slavery provisions to be included in the TPPA? Most people would seem to say yes, but, of course, we aren’t the ones doing the negotiation. It seems that the U.S. has stripped the anti-slavery provisions out, which is all-so-slightly funny/disturbing given the furore about that Confederate Flag and Charleston happening there right now…

Also on slavery, a discourse I didn’t even know existed: people who claim the Irish had it just as bad as the African slaves in the U.S. Here’s a rebuttal.

Mentioned on the podcast last week; there’s a plane and it’s been in space for over 600 days. No one knows what it is doing up there, and that kind of makes people curious.

Who wants to make sure Texas secedes from the Union? Vladimir Putin, that’s who. Truly, the survivalists and the nationalists are the real communists in America these days!

Is Trendy Veganism the Final Stage before Trendy Cannibalism? I kind of need to know, being vegan and all.

Person who supports the thesis the Chinese got to Aotearoa before the Māori ((The originator of that thesis claims the Māori are the offspring of Chinese sailors and Melanesian slaves, I might add.)) publishes new research about Aotearoa’s past and gets miffed people are questioning it because her previous research was highly questionable.

Hello Sunday morning readers (and a good night to those of you in other timezones)! Here’s a selection of conspiracy theory readings to tide you over brunch. We are doing brunch this week, aren’t we?

1. What should we make of all those fancy Toyota pick-ups ISIS are “sporting”? As this article points out, the sheer uniformity of their fleets (yes, plural) of Toyota pick-ups and SUVs is a bit weird. It’s almost as if someone gave ISIS a whole bunch of pristine cars…

Now, you don’t necessarily have to posit a conspiracy by the CIA to provide ISIS with a fleet of cars in this case; some of the cars were stolen from other terrorist groups the U.S. has been funding, and in many cases see cars were probably sold cheaply in the Middle East because it’s a great place to dump stock you need to get rid of quickly. Still, is Toyota happy with their seeming endorsement of brand ISIS? It’s all a bit suspicious (but not necessarily sinister).

2. This article asks the hard question of whether Leonard Nimoy faked his own death to aid the Illuminati?

The Hard Dawn website is an almost perfect parody of a certain class of conservative conspiracy theorist. I say “almost perfect” because some of the articles are a little too much on the nose, but it’s worth trawling through to find out about the atheist agenda to eat canine meat and the role of chemtrails in killing angels.

3. It’s hard to be a Pope, what with everyone telling you what to think, especially since you’re meant to be guided by god and all. Still, we should all feel just a little pity for Pope Francis; he’s have to deal with the Heartland Institute – America’s greatest think-tank for comparing people who believe that the climate is changing to the Unabomber – going to Rome to try and persuade him not to lend his “moral authority” to the fight against the changing climate. They’ve even taken along Lord Christopher Monckton, the man who likes to dish out the odd ad hominem but threatens people with legal action if they dare rebut him with actual evidence.

4. Mentioned on the podcast this week: is the proposed head transplant surgery really just viral marketing for Metal Gear Sold 5: The Phantom Pain?

5. Also mentioned on the podcast: Pepsi is ditching Aspartame as a sweetener, and this is definitely not a good thing. Aside from the fact there is no evidence Aspartame is a danger (despite lots of meta studies looking into its health effects), the replacement sweeteners have not been tested to the same level, so Pepsi may well be replacing a safe product with something with long term health detriments. This is a case where a vapid conspiracy theory has had a real and demonstrable effect, and thus is the kind of thing that will get used against me when I once again defend conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorising. Damn you Pepsi! Damn you to hell!

6. Not so much a conspiracy theory as the kind of thing dreamt of in conspiracy theories: the FBI’s hair analysis programme (the system that was widely used before the advent of DNA testing) was not really all that reliable. This is one of those things where people will go “But we’ve know that for a while” but the important thing to note is that whilst we might have known that for a while, it’s taken a long time for the FBI to admit that a) yes it’s true and b) swallow the fact that a lot of cases are going to be reopened because verdicts were rendered because experts asserted in courts x was guilty because of hair analysis. This is a great example of what my colleague and good friend Lee Basham calls a “toxic truth”: a fact about the world so chilling that no one really wants to report or acknowledge it because doing so would have disastrous consequences.

7. More evidence that there is no link between vaccines and the increase incidence of autism in the general population.

8. Friend and colleague Martin Orr gives a summary of his presentation at the Miami conference. You might note a shoutout to yours truly in the sidebar.

9. Andrew McKenzie-McHarg reviews said conference, and I get a mention.

10. A guide to lizard people.

11. Finally, Carrie Stoddart blogs on the story of Ben Rachinger, who claims inside knowledge of the Dirty Politics scandal that should have rocked last years General Election here in Aotearoa. It makes for some interesting reading…

This week on the Podcaster’s Guide to the Conspiracy we covered false flag operations. Another to add to our list: it appears the CIA thought about planting evidence of a nuclear device in Iran for inspectors to find.

At the tail end of the recent episode I asked whether we should dismiss cases of false flag operations that were never carried out (as we kind of had done through the podcast), given that even if governments don’t engage in this particular actions, it certainly bolsters the case for false flags being more common than they are if you say “And look, they planned this one, and this one, and this one…”

Oh, and here’s the list of false flags we covered in that episode. Only about thirteen of the forty-two actually occurred, but still, the ones which did are pretty disturbing examples of what governments and branches of the government sometimes get up to.

So, apparently it is easy to troll conspiracy theorists, or so this article claims. My problem with the article starts with the very first sentence, “Once conspiracy theorists were mostly relegated to the fringes of society …” since historians of belief in conspiracy theories often claim that belief in conspiracy theories was a) more common in the past than we like to think and b) considered more normal than it is today. Still, summary articles about academic publications tend to not be the most accurate of pieces, so expect a review of the article sometime in the next week.

Meanwhile, in Canada, Prime Minister Stephen Harper, Canada’s own Tony Abbott (or is Tony Abbott Australia’s Stephen Harper? And where does John Key fit into this?) is worried about foreign interests who are infiltrating the oil industry. Yes, the threat is real, and it’s all down to those pesky Koch Brothers.

This is one of those cases where it really does seem as if there might be some sinister corporate activity going on. If not outright conspiracy, the activity of Koch Brothers is akin to a shadowy, nebulous spider (I could have added in even more adjectives to make the analogy even more cliched, believe me), controlling things from behind the scenes. The fact that a conservative government is worried about even more conservative billionaires from across the border causing trouble is delicious.

Meanwhile, the search for MH370 continues, with new claims about what happened, why it happened and where the flight went. There is a new documentary out which suggests the flight headed towards Antartica. The conspiracy theories around MH370 are legion, but now I suspect we can add in claims that the flight was directed to head to one of the last remaining Nazi outposts, probably to collect bullion, or that the Elder Ones sent for some of their disciples. Whatever the case, the lack of a wreckage means this story is likely to have legs for a long time to come.

Did you know that Chester A. Arthur and Barack Obama share another thing in common, other than the fact they were (and are) US Presidents? Both men were opposed by their rivals on the basis of where they might have been born. Meanwhile, Bertrand Russell turns out to have been the kind of person who doubted the official story of the assassination of JFK.

Here’s an article for teachers of critical thinking out here, a lovely example of a term “vaccine safety” being used in more than one way and thus allowing the author to come to the conclusions vaccines aren’t safe.