Category: Conspiracy Round-up

White men all around the country want you to know that they think about Waitangi Day; I’m one of them!

Paul Moon, historian at AUT and a controversial figure when it comes to Aotearoa’s colonial history (he thinks the coming of Christianity was a good thing because it stopped the cannibalism, essentially) decides to have his cake and eat it in this somewhat bewildering New Zealand Herald article on the role of Te Tiriti O Waitangi (the Treaty of Waitangi) today. It’s both an historical relic which has had its day and an important document here-and-now (apparently).

Talking of confused white men talking about the Treaty, Gareth Morgan’s recent book, tour and Herald articles are also equally bewildering. His Herald series (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4) sets out Morgan’s vision for a bicultural Aotearoa. However, as Morgan Godfrey has argued eloquently:

[Gareth Morgan] supports “rangatiratanga”, yet he opposes “unique political rights for Māori”. This is rather contradictory because rangatiratanga is a unique political right for Māori: it is the right to our “unique” indigenous systems. Surely, for the sake of credibility if not consistency, you cannot support something in one breath and then condemn it in the next. Yet Morgan seems intellectually unfazed.

You can read more of Godfrey’s analysis here. Stephanie Rodgers also has things to say about Gareth Morgan’s views.

Gareth Morgan went to Orewa, along with Don Brash, the other day to talk about the Treaty in the place where Brash gave his famously racist, Māori-bashing speech. Only 19 people turned up, which is kind of interesting, but to my mind the real meat is Brash’s constant refrain that Māori are a “stone age people”. ((He also talks about the “grievance industry”, which is shades of John Ansell.)) Don Brash is adamant he’s not racist, but his dialectic begs to differ.

In my “Do a good deed today” mode, I just want to put out a reminder to my readers in the media: David Rankin is not a Ngāpuhi elder. Rather, he is an old man who happens to be Ngāpuhi. He does not speak for his iwi and many in his iwi wish he would just shut up. So, when he talks about the threat of extremist Islam in Māoridom, just walk away; definitely do not report it. He’s just trying to get airtime in order to bolster his non-existent stature. He also has some fairly weird views about who came to Aotearoa first…

Why not end this round-up with some classic Pākehā racism in the form of a song. So, here’s “Puha and Pakeha”.

Hmm, racist!

Welcome, Fortean Times readers! (and welcome back readers who predate my brief claim to fame, ala having written an article for the February 2105 issue of FT). If you liked that article you might like to buy (or suggest your library buy) my book, The Philosophy of Conspiracy Theories. You might also be interested in the podcast I co-host, The Podcaster’s Guide to the Conspiracy

Meanwhile, in conspiracy news…

In local news the big question of the week is “When did the PM find out about the Mike Sabin allegations?” This question follows on from other such questions like “When did the PM find out that a dirty politics operation was being run from his office?” and “When did the PM find out that the person he appointed run the GCSB was a close, childhood friend?” When the PM doesn’t know things you think the PM ought to know, it’s fair to ask whether the denials are actually the product of a conspiracy to deceive.

Sticking with politics and deceitful Prime Ministers, the ongoing investigation into pedophilia in the UK just keeps getting worse. Margaret Thatcher, beloved on the Right, might well have had a part in trying to keep secret the allegations against Peter Morrison and Peter Hayman. Unlike the John Key situation, where it seems at least possible that the Government is just incompetent, these cases seem to show that there existed an active conspiracy to hide abhorrent behaviour on the part of people who supported or were in the government of the day.

Moving on, or rather backwards, when it comes to 9/11 conspiracy theories, the notion that someone in the US Establishment had prior knowledge of the attacks or helped foment them is a common thread to some 9/11 Truth/Inside Job hypotheses. When Bush was in power everyone pointed towards the New American Century document; now that Obama is the President of the United States people are looking at his appointees and working out whether they had something to do with the September 11th attacks. Ashton Carter, Secretary of Defense nominee, is the latest person to be vetted. Why? Well, because, like many people in the establishment, Carter has written on American foreign policy and imagined just how a terrorist attack might change or motivate that policy. It’s claims like this which, for certain elements of the Truther community, signals that people like Ashton Carter were in on 9/11. This particular article, however, gets bonus points for its probability estimates that Al-Qaeda hijackers could really have been able to pull of 9/11. As they say, “ONE IN A QUINTILLION”.

“I think privacy is actually overvalued!” says Court of Appeals judge in the US. Well, Judge Richard Posner, the Government of the United States would tend to agree with you. Seriously, though, there is a debate going on in the US at the moment about the NSA’s data collection policies and opposite attempts by people and corporations to keep their privacy, and it seems that the old policy of “Deny that its happening” (the “It turned out to be warranted!” conspiracy theory about America spying on everyone) is going to turn into “Business as usual!”

Week before last Josh and I talked about the conspiracy theories of Naomi Wolf (Season Two, Episode Two). Here’s the motivation for that podcast, her article on the FBI crackdown on the Occupy Movement. And her article suggesting the ISIS beheading videos were faked. And her claim that Edward Snowden might be a plant, because he’s too smooth a talker. Which nicely leads into this New Statesmen article that suggests Naomi Wolf has always been a conspiracy theorist, one who happened to get it right with respect to The Beauty Myth.

Here’s a tale of two competing conspiracy theories. According to local conspiracy theorist celebrity, Trevor Loudon (who mostly writes about how Marxists control America), John McCain is working behind the scenes to remove Tea Partiers from crucial positions in the GOP, particularly in Arizona. This wouldn’t surprise me at all, given how toxic the Tea Party seems to be in relationship to the more moderate Republicans. Still, if true, it probably does count as a conspiracy against the Tea Party.

Meanwhile, rumours abound that the Koch Brothers, who previously helped fund presidential hopeful Mitt Romney not only asked Romney not to run for president again but are deliberately thinning out the potential pool of candidates so they don’t get another string of problematic failures, like Romney and Palin, in 2016. This rumour all started after Romney didn’t get an invite to a Koch Brothers donor retreat. The Koch Brothers plan to spend 900 million dollars promoting candidates for the 2016 election. Which is to say:

However, if they chose to do so, the Koch brothers have enough wealth to buy the total advertising time of every television and radio station in America—meaning they could exercise their right to “free speech” by silencing every other voice in the country. [WSWS]

Now, some political scientists will happily claim that there’s precious little evidence that money actually buys elections. Still, 900 million…

Welcome to the future! Well, the passing present. I might have news in a week worthy of its own blogpost, but, for now, here’s a round up on matters conspiratorial.

First and foremost, Josh and meself recorded the first episode of season two of The Podcaster’s Guide to the Conspiracy, and reviews are good ((Well, the one review we’ve had is good. Still, that counts.)) Why not give it a listen?

Just a week ago I was complaining to anyone who would listen that people on the far Right – particularly Libertarians – keep complaining about “Cultural Marxism this, Cultural Marxism that!”, mostly as a cover for their bigotry and selfishness. I was thinking that I should write something on the spectre of Cultural Marxism and how people like Trevor Loudon couch their conspiracy theories in terms of a “Liberal Agenda”, but someone has done the work for me. This piece by the Guardian’s Jason Wilson lays out what people on the Right think Cultural Marxism is, and how they must fight against it.

And if you want an excellent example of a local libertarian pumping his fist against Cultural Marxism, why not read Jamie Whyte’s atrocious new column? My favourite bit is how he sneaks in the erosion of the right of employers to be racist into his list of sins the Government commits.

Being a president seems like a bad idea, given that its a highly political role in many countries and sometimes people want to kill you. If you happen to be the president of Turkey and are a despotic autocrat, then that just makes the job worse. Especially if, despite all your efforts in curbing Press freedoms and arresting members of the Police you don’t like, it turns out that some Twitter user in your inner circle just continues to leak damaging information about you. If the leaks are to be believed – and thus far they have been reliable – the president of Turkey seems to be conspiring against his own people and organising faux terror attacks. It’s interesting reading.

I just finished reading Jovan Byford’s Conspiracy Theories: A Critical Introduction, which came out in 2011 from my publisher. It’s a book I found out about too late in the process of writing The Philosophy of Conspiracy Theories, which is a shame because some of Byford’s skepticism of conspiracism plays into my discussion of how people confuse conspiracy theories with belief in conspiracy theories. Still, one section I was particularly perplexed with is Byford’s dismissal of the current literature which treats belief in conspiracy theories seriously. Part of my “Huh?” moment was focussed around incidents like this, where automobile manufacturers and associations sought to make roads suitable for cars only. As I might try to explain in another blogpost, incidents like these seem to suggest that we should take the worries of conspiracy theorists seriously, because all sorts of conspiratorial activity is much more common than most of us think.

Unsurprisingly, the CIA spying on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence – which was looking into the “enhanced interrogation” programme, was not a bad idea. At least, that’s what the Review Board has said, and it should know: three of its five members are CIA. So, no conspiracy there.

Local immortal and MP, Winston Peters, has been banging on about this for years: German U-Boat entered our harbours.

Finally: Sounds of Sodomy might very well be the next Irish music extravaganza.

Christmas is for giving and what says “Hey, Yuletide!” better than a bunch of conspiracy theory links. You are welcome; where’s my gift?

Gay people destroyed Wellington. Well, someone’s god punished Wellington for gay people. Apparently. File this under “The Government doesn’t want you to know the true cost of queerness.”

Following on from “Things the Government does not want you to know”, did you realise that terrorism is really just organised crime? On some level that’s actually true: a lot of the actions we talk about as “terrorist” are really “criminal, but occurring in a hotspot America is (unduly) interested in”. That’s why lots of seemingly terrorist activity by Caucasian Americans doesn’t seem to get called “terrorist”. But I’m digressing/polemicising. Did you know that terrorism is actually organised Jewish criminal behaviour? Yep, file this “report” under “Anti-semitic conspiracy theorising”.

Going back to talk about terrorist activity on American soil; apparently Edward Snowden released smoking gun evidence that 9/11 was an inside job. The details in this piece are really very hazy, but the gist is that the nano-thermite theory was actually part of a disinformation campaign by the Government to hide the fact that the Twin Towers were brought down by mini-nukes. Factionalisation in the Truther community sometimes gets very weird.

Ars Technica produces an argument (well, summarises and comments on the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry open letter) for calling people who doubt the scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change “deniers” rather than “skeptics”. It’s all a matter of framing, and the Skeptics want their label back.

On the subject of framing: Americans aren’t so into Creationism as maybe we non-Americans like to think. Turns out that if you prod that belief the less sure some people become. It’s still a disturbingly high percentage of Americans who believe that a) god created the world and b) Adam and Eve were the progenitors of the human race, but still, vague hope?

Someone who doesn’t provide a glimmer of hope for the American people is Charles C. Johnson (not to be confused with Chuck Johnson). If you don’t know who he is and why he’s a spreader of often vile conspiracy theories, this New York Times piece is a good primer.

The Pope has been found guilty of conspiring to hide drug, human and child trafficking rings by the International Common law Court of Justice. Never heard of that court? I don’t blame you; it basically doesn’t exist outside of the imagination of Kevin Annett. Expect an episode of The Podcaster’s Guide to the Conspiracy to investigate these claims in more depth.

Also, this:

Not only is it creepy to watch Michael Jackson, who is dead, appear totally real on stage, dancing and singing with extremely sexually graphic female dancers, but there is so much satanic symbolism in this video, I can’t even begin to explain!

More here.

Other dead pop star news: the Beatles never really existed.

Finally, Julian Assange is fundraising to erect a life-size statue of himself. I don’t think I’ll be contributing any of my monies towards it.

When people ask me “Why do people believe in conspiracy theories?” I say part of the answer is in the public’s growing distrust in the political establishment. The recent report on the USA’s enhanced interrogation/torture programme is a great example: it’s now the accepted wisdom that the USA used torture (rather unsuccessfully if the report is to be believed – and I think it is) and no one seems to be about to be punished for it. When elements of the political establishment can get away with torture, you can kind of understand why elements of the public think conspiracies are causally responsible for some of the other bad things which happen in daily or public life.

The Senate Intelligence Committee’s torture report’s release (read here) was followed up by an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal by a group of former CIA directors (and this astonishing website, CIA Saved Lives). That was then followed up by Sen. Ron Wyden – who was on the committee – writing a point-by-point critique of the flaws in the WSJ op-ed. Read that here.

Fascinatingly, a number of the CIA’s claims now about the effectiveness of the torture/enhanced interrogation programme are contradicted by their internal records. So, either the CIA is being dishonest with the public about the effectiveness of torture or they keep pretty piss poor records. Whatever the case, it’s a bad look.

James Mitchell was the architect of the enhanced interrogation programme and doesn’t like the criticism it or he has been receiving. Like a lot of people connected to the CIA at the moment, he’s claiming the report about the effectiveness and harshness of enhanced interrogation is just plain wrong (although, like our local Cam Slater about that Judith Collins report, he’s coy as to what errors have been committed; it’s just that there are errors). The Guardian interviewed Mitchell and it’s interesting reading.

In re the actual report, Rolling Stone has a list of the ten most crazy (I’d say “disturbing”) things in the report.

Also, even people in the CIA were aware, whilst the programme was on-going, that it was not effective.

If you want an example of something really disturbing, consider this story about an innocent detainee who underwent “enhanced interrogation” and how the CIA framed the failure to get any useful information out of a suspect as evidence that other sources were bad. There’s justifying a practice and then there’s really justifying a practice.

Finally, one of the many unintended consequences of programmes like the use of torture/enhanced interrogation can be summed up with an analogous story, that of the rise of ISIS and how America played a role in its establishment. This piece by Martin Chulov strongly suggests that if the US had not been in Iraq, then ISIS would not exist. A similar argument is made by some former CIA operatives about the existence of the Taleban in this article looking at how realistic “Homeland”‘s portrayal of the CIA is.

Hello!

You might remember me from such blogposts as “Murky Politics” or “I wrote a book”. You probably don’t recall that ages ago I decided to do weekly, or fortnightly, or, as it turns out, bimonthly “Conspiracy Round-ups”, giving you a list of articles you could read (so as to better understand the mind that is Matthew R. X. Dentith).

Well, it’s time for one of those round-ups. Some of these links may now be considered “Of Historical Interest”.

Recently Josh and me’self talked about the Moon Landings and how one of the more interesting arguments against the hoax hypothesis is that we didn’t have the camera technology at the time to fake the footage. Now, friends of mine will now that I’m a gamer and I enjoy discussions about GPUs (ask me about vertexes someday!), so this article on graphics card maker Nvidia’s new lighting tech being used in the Unreal 4 engine to show that the so-called “anomalies” in the Moon landing footage are not anomalous at all almost makes my gaming look like research (which reminds me, I need to finish that post about the Assassin’s Creed games).

Another topic covered by the Podcaster’s Guide to the Conspiracy – the disappearance of MH17 – has got a new lease of life with the release of the preliminary report into the crash basically not really confirming or denying anything much at all. This post by Ken Perrott over at Open Parachute is a good summary of an altogether brief (34 page) report.

Dirty Politics update

Lest anyone think the publication of “Dirty Politics” put a dent in the dirty politicking machine that is elements of National’s support base (yes, and possibly the Party itself), the actions of Cam “Award winning blogger” Slater post the election should be the perfect antidote:

And there was “Slightly Left of Centre” which was to be the Whale Oil of the Left. A mysterious story, made all the more myterious-er by it having served its purpose (?) and promptly disappearing.

And in old news to most of us, but still important news nonetheless, there was that inquiry into how Cam Slater obtained classified SIS documents before anyone else. Danyl at the Dim-Post posted his analysis and my take on the entire affair is that this is precisely the kind of thing certain conspiracy theorists keep warning us about: evidence of governmental malfeasance is being routinely reported and yet nothing seems to change. Given that the Government has just given our intelligence agencies even more power, it is not unreasonable to ask whether the Government governs for the people who for the organisations who claim to have the best interests of the said people at heart.

Meanwhile…

Alice Walker, of “The Colour Purple” fame, seems to have like for some variation of the theories of David Icke.

The Jesuits own the official Illuminati website. Also, news: The Illuminati have an official website?

You know how people hide important social commentaries in their popular works? This video demonstrates the second layer to Anna Kendrick’s “Pitch Perfect”.

Finally, this isn’t so much about conspiracies (although it’s possible to parse this as one): It’s OK to admit that H. P. Lovecraft was racist.

Because he was, and arguably some of the horror in his fiction came out of Lovecraft’s distaste towards anyone who wasn’t of decent English or Germanic stock. As people are claiming, possibly as a kind of defensive reaction to the apparently sudden realisation Lovecraft was really very racist indeed, he has been a major influence on modern horror, as argued here.