A Desert of Conspiracy

So Michael Shermer is an inspiration. Clean logic and good brand management to represent for those of us that default to Occam's shiny razor. With the G20 in full swing the conspiracy folks were out in force to protest the Novus Ordo Seclorum...ironically using the communication nets (to which they are addicted, and claim as a 'right'...got to love anarchists that like good leadership) provided by the ordo they fear and loathe to organize and 'report' on some provocateuring. Somebody had to say something.

Dr. Michael Shermer, the editor of Skeptic magazine, a publication dedicated to debunking conspiracy theories, urban legends and other fictions some individuals embrace as fact, is, as you might imagine, mostly skeptical.

"If we go back to Roman, Machiavellian times, you see political manipulations that happen high up and so conspiracies really do happen. People really do plot and conspire, and so we can't dismiss these things out of hand," Dr. Shermer says.


...To the conspiracy-minded, there are monsters under every bed. And if you can't see them, then you are simply one of the sheep. Conspiracy theorists operate under a "confirmation bias," meaning they look for evidence supporting what they already believe to be true while ignoring any evidence proving it isn't.


"In other words," Dr. Shermer says, "you remember the hits and you forget the misses. You notice the connections and ignore the non-connections and then, once you have it in mind that, 'OK, I think there is a conspiracy theory here,' then all you have to do is open the newspaper and start connecting the dots."

Read more: http://www.nationalpost.com/news/Conspiracy+theorists+riots+were+inside/3261906/story.html#ixzz0tf3XIoH7

But you don't have to go so far back in time as the medieval or the classical to find some truly melodramatic shenanigans..though it does seem to help to focus on Italy. Here is a pithy comment from Robert Anton Wilson (henceforth known as Bob, not to be confused with Bob Heinlein, both formative tutors) on a conspiracy scandal (the P2 Masons hatching plots) from the 80's that has a decent Wiki article associated:

In Italian, potere occulto means "hidden power," or the clandestine group behind the visible rulers. Roberto Calvi, murdered president of Banco Ambrosiano, was a fervent believer in potere occulto. Calvi believed that the secret of success was to find which hidden group held the most power and then join it. Since he ended up hanging from a bridge in London, he perhaps did not find the strongest group after all.

So with my mind on my conspiracy and my conspiracy on my mind, I've been looking around patriotically for the US manufacture of kibble for the paranoid. It's a disappointing lens. For one thing, the ability to keep secrets seems to have vanished from our national kit. Arrogance breeds inelegance, and with nothing more than greed and lust propelling our furtive collaborations (e.g. Iraq Management, Dick Cheney's 'secret' oil cabal coffee-klatch, and those morons over at C-street that couldn't even keep their rent a secret) we just don't have an A-game in the World Cup of nefarious collusion. Maybe the bureaucracy is just too big and mindless (brute-force is good enough, lcd thinking), maybe we just have artless, heartless power-players...I don't know.


Conspiracy in and of itself is fine; that word is really just a pejorative term for cooperation when the details are none-of-your-damn-business. What rankles is that since the founding fathers/framers masonic/deist masterpiece, apparently we've abandoned the subtle art of the manipulative subtle.

 Phrase of the day: "Dr Shermer says"...if you use it and someone gets the irony, you've found a friend.