Category Archives: Conspiracy

On Conspiracy Theories

Conspiracy, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Old Right, Reason, The State, War

By now, my thinking on conspiracy theories should be known; they are the refuge of the weak-minded. Remember Hannah Arendt’s Banality of Evil? Reality is bad enough; there is no need to look beyond it. That is tantamount to conjecture and fantasy. As I said in the introduction to my book, the state presides over the disintegration of civil society, but it does so reflexively, rather than as a matter of collusion and conspiracy.

The premise for imputing conspiracies to garden variety government evils is this: government generally does what is good for us (NOT), so when it strays, we must look beyond the facts—for something far more sinister, as if government’s natural venality and quest for power were not enough to explain events. For example, why would one need to search for the “real reason” for an unjust, unscrupulous war, unless one believed government would never prosecute an unjust war. History belies that delusion.

Conspiracy is not congruent with a view of government as fundamentally antagonistic to the individual and to civil society, a position I hold. I see most of what the behemoth does nowadays as contrary to the good of the individual, and aimed reflexively at increasing its own power and size. Even if government embarked on a just war, it would find ways to prolong it, since this involves the consolidation of fiefdoms. Soldiers don’t benefit, but their superiors—those “generals” everyone reveres so—do. Our government, given its size, reach, and many usurpations, is a destructive and warring entity. It is natural for such an entity to pursue war for war’s sake. The constituent elements of the behemoth continuously work to increase their spheres of control. This is why we must curtail the state’s powers.

Propensity for conspiracy is yet another facet paleoconservatives and paleolibertarians share with the hard-left. I pointed out in “Deriding Dershowitz,” and elsewhere, that the far-out right has made common cause with the far left on quite a number of fronts. That’s a shame. You’ll find no such incongruities in my thinking. By way of example, my anti-war sentiments have never strayed into these murky precincts—don’t look for any war-for-oil-&-Israel kookiness here.

Updated: Is the FBI Entrapping Idiots? (& No, Timothy McVeigh Was No Idiot)

Conspiracy, Fascism, Government, Law, Media, Terrorism

CNN reports that seven Miami-based men “concocted a plot to ‘kill all the devils we can,’ starting by blowing up Chicago’s Sears Tower, according to charges in a federal indictment revealed Friday.”

It transpires that this information was elicited by an “FBI operative posing as a member of the terrorist network.”

I watched the sister of one of the suspects enter “The Situation Room” with Wolf Blitzer. The woman, bless her, was illiterate and probably borderline retarded. Let me tell you something: If American schools are producing the likes of this poor woman, homegrown retardation is more urgent a problem than homegrown terrorism.

Entrapment is equally worrisome. If the woman’s brother, also one of the accused, is as simple as she, then a wily and intelligent FBI agent could have a field day leading him on. The FBI is supposed to uncover existing plots, not help develop them by leading on a bunch of very simple, if unsavory, characters.

Rich Lowry has compared the hapless Miami bunch to Timothy McVeigh, who, according to Lowry, was also not very bright. This is a manifestly unperceptive observation. McVeigh was certainly intelligent. Read the interview he gave TIME and tell me it doesn’t reflect considerable intelligence. Read the interview the sister of the terror suspect gave Blitzer and tell me it doesn’t reflect extremely poor cognitive skills.

Compare this:

Asked by TIME magazine who were his favorite authors of political philosophy, McVeigh said:

“Patrick Henry, John Locke, of course many of the Founding Fathers: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Samuel Adams. I thought those men were, at the time they were extremely well-educated. They could talk us in circles these days, we wouldn’t know what they were talking about. I really respected their observations and analyses of history past.”

To this:

Asked by Blitzer about her terror-suspect brother, Marlene Phanor said:

“Actually, he’s, um, he was, he was working and he got into this group and they started going to church, trying to help the community. But the guy, the leader, I never know where he came from, who he was. Actually, my brother and them don’t even know where he come from. But he came positive for them. He came to them where he can help them and help the community and humble their minds and humble their souls and everything.”

Morality aside, a couple of IQ standard-deviation points separate these two. To compare McVeigh’s intelligence to the likes of Phanor is a little strained, to say the least.

Provided the sister doesn’t represent a genetic anomaly (and her accused brother and his associates are bright), I’ll repeat my contention: it would have been easy for the FBI to ensnare this group.

Updated: HIV Deniers and the Mercer HIV-AIDS Connection Assay

Africa, Conspiracy, Pseudoscience, South-Africa

Some people shed darkness wherever they go, and on whatever topic they tackle. Thabo Mbeki, South-Africa’s Leader for Life, and the primitive who runs what is fast descending into a banana-less banana republic, is one of them. About his attempts to deny that the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) causes Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome (AIDS), Kate Scannell, an assistant clinical professor of medicine at UC-San Francisco and author of the book “Death of the Good Doctor: Lessons From the Heart of the AIDS Epidemic,” writes this:

While most HIV deniers (who are mostly white Americans) neither give care to people with AIDS nor conduct HIV research, they do spend a considerable amount of time building a political base. For many years their ideas have languished in the margins of both the scientific and activist communities, but this summer they got a boost when South African President Thabo Mbeki allowed the work of famed HIV denier and University of California at Berkeley professor Peter Duesberg to be incorporated into this month’s 13th International AIDS Conference in South Africa. Duesberg, whose AIDS research has been criticized by most AIDS researchers, has consistently maintained that HIV does not cause AIDS. He cites as evidence the failure of HIV to comply with specific scientific postulates (the “Koch postulates,” created in 1840 and 1890, before the discovery of viruses) or to follow cardinal rules of virus behavior. Rather, Duesberg and the deniers believe that AIDS is caused by chromosomal damage, certain lifestyles, drug abuse, malnutrition, poor sanitation and parasitic infections…
While deniers rigidly believe that HIV is nonexistent or incidental, they have yet to articulate a coherent explanation for its nearly universal presence in people with AIDS. Nor have they explained the documented efficacy of drugs that specifically suppress HIV in prolonging AIDS patients’ lives and preventing infection in newborns of HIV-infected women. Furthermore, in the face of such data, they have not articulated a moral defense for their advice against anti-retroviral treatments that actually work to save human lives. At best, their position is surreal; at worst, it is blatantly immoral…
Deniers also believe that AIDS researchers are somehow organized into a conspiracy that profits in its singular and rigid focus on HIV as the cause of AIDS. Those of us who actually do research find this humorous. Like their hero, Duesberg, we tend to be a fiercely independent and competitive lot who keep our research secret from colleagues, hoping to be the one to find the new truth and debunk the old one. Any “mainstream” scientist would love to discover another cause of AIDS. The rush of excitement and notoriety that such a discovery would bring are what researchers strive for during their repetitive, dreary work in crowded and underfunded labs. Still, no one so far, including Duesberg, has found another cause for AIDS…
The fact is that [Mbeki] has aligned himself with a handful of white American deniers and disagreed with a vast multicultural group of world researchers who claim that HIV causes AIDS. In his alliance with people whose stubbornly abstract beliefs would deny millions of impoverished people one viable if partial remedy, Mbeki’s attempt to forge a “uniquely African solution” looks like a familiar picture of valuing political power over human lives.

Here is a dry as dust dissection of the science, for those unhealthy, irrational minds who can never quit contemplating conspiracy. “The Relationship Between The Human Immunodeficiency Virus And The Acquired Immunodeficiency Syndrome” is linked on the website of Robert Todd Carroll, of the Skeptic’s Dictionary.

In any event, there’s a foolproof empirical test that’ll prove HIV causes AIDS. If the HIV denier takes blood from someone who is HIV positive or has full-blown AIDS, and injects a good quantity (just to be safe, although a small amount will do the trick) directly into the blood stream, and then refrains from taking anti-retroviral drugs, he or she will acquire the disease sooner or later. Why, they could even try and isolate the retrovirus from other factors in the blood so as to refine the experiment. The usual warnings apply.

I wonder why these mouth breathers have not put their money were their worthless mouths are?

Update: So far I have received letters from the conspirators. These consist of assertions, not verified facts. The fact that some of these people are scientists, yet commit errors one learns to avoid in Logic and Statistics 101, is distressing, but not surprising: mythical thinking is encouraged in schools and pervades every nook and cranny of the Zeitgeist.

For instance, if a reader asserts that there are a million Americans who are infected with the HIV; have been infected for decades, but are perfectly healthy, he would need to, at the very least, provide VERY good proof of that from credible sources. He’d need, for example, to supply data to indicate these people are not on antiretroviral treatment.

Dissent is welcomed on Barely a Blog, but BAB will not be facilitating junk science and irrational conspiracy.

Twin Deceits: Shakespeare And Holocaust Denial

Anti-Semitism, Conspiracy, English, Literature, Pseudo-history

Shakespeare too has been the victim of the assault on history and truth. Assorted conspiracy kooks identify “the seventeenth Earl of Oxford, a courtier poet with some twenty fairly conventional lyrics to his name,” as the real deal. Writes Brian Vickers, in the August 19 & 26 issue of the Times Literary Supplement: “There are several insuperable objections to Oxford’s candidature: he died with a dozen of Shakespeare’s sole and co-authored plays unwritten (or at least unperformed); the style of his poetic oeuvre is extremely limited and un-Shakespearean; he led a busy and wasteful aristocratic existence abroad and at home.”

The Oxfordians, says Vickers, have performed all manner of chicanery to get around these difficulties, including to re-date plays and to “invent a new chronology, improbably dating Shakespeare’s early comedies to the late 1570s, and postulating that Oxford left drafts of all the remaining plays for Shakespeare to touch up and pass off as his own, either completely hoaxing everyone connected with the Globe [one of the theatres the busy Shakespeare managed—he worked daily with a host of theatre people], or relying on their connivance.”

“The Oxfordian cause has been vigorously pursued, with perverse enthusiasm…Supporters may sustain themselves with a sense of cocking a snook at official culture, or exposing an evil conspiracy whose existence was unsuspected for 300 years. But whatever the Oxfordians are producing, it is not scholarship.”

Scott McCrea’s The Case for Shakespeare: The End of the Authorship Question is “the latest in an honorable line of books reaffirming Shakespeare’s authorship, of which the most notable are H. N. Gibson’s The Shakespeare Claimants (1962), Samuel Schoenbaum’s Shakespeare’s Lives (1970; revised edition, 1991), Irving Matus’s Shakespeare in Fact (1994) and Jonathan Bate’s The Genius of Shakespeare (1997).” McCrea’s book is said to be of a high scholarly standard.

“In his final chapter, ‘All conspiracy theories are alike,’ [McCrea] suggests that ‘denial of Shakespeare follows exactly the same flawed reasoning as Holocaust denial’ in that it rejects the most obvious explanation of an event, and reinterprets evidence to fit a preconceived idea (‘the ovens at Auschwitz baked bread’).

[Curiously, when reporter Johann Hari went Undercover with the Holocaust Deniers,” he ran into our Shakespeare denier.]

Facts that contradict the theory are explained by conspiracy, but this ploy means that ‘conspiracy theories are really not theories at all,’ but faiths, which cannot be proved false. McCrea recognizes that, despite his subtitle, ‘there can never be an end to the Authorship Question,’ [ditto Holocaust denial], a depressing prospect.

He maintains a good-humored tone, a pleasant contrast to many works in this field, but one can be too cool. As we survey the never-ending flow of anti-Shakespeare books it is hard not to share the bitterness of Georg Brandes, moved in part to write his William Shakespeare (1898) by the ‘ignorant and arrogant attack’ of the ‘wretched group of dilettanti‘ who have ‘been bold enough… to deny William Shakespeare the right to his own life-work.'”