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Why Do Conspiracy Theories Flourish? Because the Truth Is Too Hard to Handle |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=30258"><span class="small">Edward Snowden, Guardian UK</span></a>
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Saturday, 03 July 2021 08:17 |
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Snowden writes: "The greatest conspiracies are open and notorious - not theories, but practices expressed through law and policy, technology and finance."
Edward Snowden. (photo: Edward Snowden)
Why Do Conspiracy Theories Flourish? Because the Truth Is Too Hard to Handle
By Edward Snowden, Guardian UK
03 July 21
People need to explain to themselves their immiseration, their disenfranchisement, their lack of power. Conspiracies do that
 he greatest conspiracies are open and notorious – not theories, but practices expressed through law and policy, technology and finance. Counterintuitively, these conspiracies are more often than not announced in public and with a modicum of pride. They’re dutifully reported in our newspapers; they’re bannered on to the covers of our magazines; updates on their progress are scrolled across our screens – all with such regularity as to render us unable to relate the banality of their methods to the rapacity of their ambitions.
The party in power wants to redraw district lines. The prime interest rate has changed. A free service has been created to host our personal files. These conspiracies order, and disorder, our lives; and yet they can’t compete for attention with digital graffiti about pedophile satanists in the basement of a DC pizzeria.
This, in sum, is our problem: the truest conspiracies meet with the least opposition.
Or to put it another way, conspiracy practices – the methods by which true conspiracies such as gerrymandering, or the debt industry, or mass surveillance are realized – are almost always overshadowed by conspiracy theories: those malevolent falsehoods that in aggregate can erode civic confidence in the existence of anything certain or verifiable.
In my life, I’ve had enough of both the practice and the theory. In my work for the United States National Security Agency, I was involved with establishing a top secret system intended to access and track the communications of every human being on the planet. And yet after I grew aware of the damage this system was causing – and after I helped to expose that true conspiracy to the press – I couldn’t help but notice that the conspiracies that garnered almost as much attention were those that were demonstrably false: I was, it was claimed, a hand-picked CIA operative sent to infiltrate and embarrass the NSA; my actions were part of an elaborate inter-agency feud. No, said others: my true masters were the Russians, the Chinese, or worse – Facebook.
As I found myself made vulnerable to all manner of internet fantasy, and interrogated by journalists about my past, about my family background and about an array of other issues both entirely personal and entirely irrelevant to the matter at hand, there were moments when I wanted to scream: “What is wrong with you people? All you want is intrigue, but an honest-to-God, globe-spanning apparatus of omnipresent surveillance riding in your pocket is not enough? You have to sauce that up?”
It took years – eight years and counting in exile – for me to realize that I was missing the point: we talk about conspiracy theories in order to avoid talking about conspiracy practices, which are often too daunting, too threatening, too total.
It’s my hope in this post and in posts to come to engage a broader scope of conspiracy-thinking, by examining the relationship between true and false conspiracies, and by asking difficult questions about the relationships between truth and falsehood in our public and private lives.
I’ll begin by offering a fundamental proposition: namely, that to believe in any conspiracy, whether true or false, is to believe in a system or sector run not by popular consent but by an elite, acting in its own self-interest. Call this elite the Deep State, or the Swamp; call it the Illuminati, or Opus Dei, or the Jews, or merely call it the major banking institutions and the Federal Reserve – the point is, a conspiracy is an inherently antidemocratic force.
The recognition of a conspiracy – again, whether true or false – entails accepting that not only are things other than what they seem, but they are systematized, regulated, intentional and even logical. It’s only by treating conspiracies not as “plans” or “schemes” but as mechanisms for ordering the disordered that we can hope to understand how they have so radically displaced the concepts of “rights” and “freedoms” as the fundamental signifiers of democratic citizenship.
In democracies today, what is important to an increasing many is not what rights and freedoms are recognized, but what beliefs are respected: what history, or story, undergirds their identities as citizens, and as members of religious, racial and ethnic communities. It’s this replacement-function of false conspiracies — the way they replace unified or majoritarian histories with parochial and partisan stories — that prepares the stage for political upheaval.
Especially pernicious is the way that false conspiracies absolve their followers of engaging with the truth. Citizenship in a conspiracy-society doesn’t require evaluating a statement of proposed fact for its truth-value, and then accepting it or rejecting it accordingly, so much as it requires the complete and total rejection of all truth-value that comes from an enemy source, and the substitution of an alternative plot, narrated from elsewhere.
The concept of the enemy is fundamental to conspiracy thinking – and to the various taxonomies of conspiracy itself. Jesse Walker, an editor at Reason and author of The United States of Paranoia: A Conspiracy Theory (2013), offers the following categories of enemy-based conspiracy thinking:
- “Enemy Outside”, which pertains to conspiracy theories perpetrated by or based on actors scheming against a given identity-community from outside of it.
- “Enemy Within”, which pertains to conspiracy theories perpetrated by or based on actors scheming against a given identity-community from inside of it.
- “Enemy Above”, which pertains to conspiracy theories perpetrated by or based on actors manipulating events from within the circles of power (government, military, the intelligence community, etc.).
- “Enemy Below”, which pertains to conspiracy theories perpetrated by or based on actors from historically disenfranchised communities seeking to overturn the social order.
- “Benevolent Conspiracies”, which pertains to extraterrestrial, supernatural or religious forces dedicated to controlling the world for humanity’s benefit (similar forces from Beyond who work to the detriment of humanity Walker might categorize under “Enemy Above”).
Other forms of conspiracy-taxonomy are just a Wikipedia link away: Michael Barkun’s trinary categorization of Event conspiracies (eg false-flags), Systemic conspiracies (eg Freemasons), and Superconspiracy theories (eg New World Order), as well as his distinction between the secret acts of secret groups and the secret acts of known groups; or Murray Rothbard’s binary of “shallow” and “deep” conspiracies (“shallow” conspiracies begin by identifying evidence of wrongdoing and end by blaming the party that benefits; “deep” conspiracies begin by suspecting a party of wrongdoing and continue by seeking out documentary proof – or at least “documentary proof”).
I find things to admire in all of these taxonomies, but it strikes me as notable that none makes provision for truth-value. Further, I’m not sure that these or any mode of classification can adequately address the often-alternating, dependent nature of conspiracies, whereby a true conspiracy (eg the 9/11 hijackers) triggers a false conspiracy (eg 9/11 was an inside job), and a false conspiracy (eg Iraq has weapons of mass destruction) triggers a true conspiracy (eg the invasion of Iraq).
Another critique I would offer of the extant taxonomies involves a reassessment of causality, which is more properly the province of psychology and philosophy. Most of the taxonomies of conspiracy-thinking are based on the logic that most intelligence agencies use when they spread disinformation, treating falsity and fiction as levers of influence and confusion that can plunge a populace into powerlessness, making them vulnerable to new beliefs – and even new governments.
But this top-down approach fails to take into account that the predominant conspiracy theories in America today are developed from the bottom-up, plots concocted not behind the closed doors of intelligence agencies but on the open internet by private citizens, by people.
In sum, conspiracy theories do not inculcate powerlessness, so much as they are the signs and symptoms of powerlessness itself.
This leads us to those other taxonomies, which classify conspiracies not by their content, or intent, but by the desires that cause one to subscribe to them. Note, in particular, the epistemic/existential/social triad of system-justification: belief in a conspiracy is considered “epistemic” if the desire underlying the belief is to get at “the truth”, for its own sake; belief in a conspiracy is considered “existential” if the desire underlying the belief is to feel safe and secure, under another’s control; while belief in a conspiracy is considered “social” if the desire underlying the belief is to develop a positive self-image, or a sense of belonging to a community.
From Outside, from Within, from Above, from Below, from Beyond … events, systems, superconspiracies … shallow and deep heuristics … these are all attempts to chart a new type of politics that is also a new type of identity, a confluence of politics and identity that imbues all aspects of contemporary life. Ultimately, the only truly honest taxonomical approach to conspiracy-thinking that I can come up with is something of an inversion: the idea that conspiracies themselves are a taxonomy, a method by which democracies especially sort themselves into parties and tribes, a typology through which people who lack definite or satisfactory narratives as citizens explain to themselves their immiseration, their disfranchisement, their lack of power, and even their lack of will.
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The Truth of the Fourth: A Minority Report |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=47905"><span class="small">Garrison Keillor, Garrison Keillor's Website</span></a>
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Friday, 02 July 2021 12:42 |
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Keillor writes: "Nobody gives Fourth of July speeches that I'm aware of because what can you say about beer and barbecue except (1) take small helpings and (2) stay out of the sun and (3) watch what you say and whom you say it to."
Garrison Keillor. (photo: Getty)
The Truth of the Fourth: A Minority Report
By Garrison Keillor, Garrison Keillor's Website
02 July 21
 obody gives Fourth of July speeches that I’m aware of because what can you say about beer and barbecue except (1) take small helpings and (2) stay out of the sun and (3) watch what you say and whom you say it to. This is not a united country and the divisions may well extend into your own family, a beloved uncle may cling to cherished ideas that qualify him for full-time supervision lest he spread them to your children. Any speech you’d give about American democracy would consist of four vague generalities wrapped in platitudes and frosted with mythology.
In our country today, a considerable minority of our fellow citizens believe that the 2020 election was stolen in plain sight by left-wing mathematicians in Venezuela who devised algorithms to rig voting machines to overturn a landslide Republican victory and elect a senile Democrat and his communistic base to run the government who want to confiscate your guns and make everyone ride bicycles and live on tofu and kale and who invented a fake Chinese influenza so they could force immunization with a vaccine that makes people passive and accepting of state control, which allows vampires to move freely and drink the blood of small children, but in August, when the rightful president is reinstated and our borders are secure, we can breathe freely again and make America great.
I take no position on that. Strange things happen every day. I am only an observer; I don’t make the rules. As I have said on so many occasions, “You kids work it out among yourselves.”
The history we were taught in school was far from complete. The Revolution of 1776 was held up as a heroic struggle for democracy in the face of tyranny, whereas it was more like a battle of one privileged class against another privileged class. And it could easily have turned out otherwise. The French once held a large piece of the Midwest and Canada where their explorers had penetrated and fur traders followed, but the French didn’t care that much about fur and their northern territory, they cared more about the sugar from their Caribbean colonies, and when, in 1763, they lost the war for the interior, Louis XV was relieved to cut his expenses and Voltaire said, “All we lost was a few acres of snow.” But still, the French were not averse to taking revenge on the English, and a decade later, when the English colonies rose up in rebellion, France encouraged them, and when the Revolution came down to a deadlock, France threw in on the rebel side and blockaded the English from rescuing Lord Cornwallis at Yorktown, and that is what turned the tide. Had the French held onto the interior, they wouldn’t have bothered, and the East Coast would be New England and the West would be New Spain and Detroit wouldn’t be Motown, it’d be Ville du Moteur and Fox News would be Nouvelles de Renard. My ancestors in Rhode Island and Connecticut would not have fled to Canada, as they did, and lost all their property, but would have prospered here and our ancestral mansions would be visited by tourists and I would’ve gone to Yale and I’d be a breeder of thoroughbreds and ride to hunt foxes and half the Vermeers and Van Goghs at the Met would have my name on a little brass plaque underneath.
It could easily have gone that way. Plenty of people were opposed to independence. They didn’t do opinion polling in the 18th century because they wanted to think well of their neighbors and not know how ignorant and benighted they were. In 1776, plenty of people waited to see which way the wind was blowing before they committed themselves.
Am I bitter that my family was driven out of the country when our only offense was to stand up for law and order? No, not one whit, not a speck, not a jot or tittle. It was unjust, and the Constitutional Convention was a gigantic scam, and when documents we have in our possession are made public, we will be reinstated and our stolen fortune returned to us with interest and a great deal of Connecticut and Rhode Island will be rightfully ours and Britannia shall rule, love it or leave it, down with the stripes and up with the Union Jack, and God save our gracious Queen.
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Rumsfeld's Much-Vaunted 'Courage' Was a Smokescreen for Lies, Crime and Death |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=43437"><span class="small">Richard Wolffe, Guardian UK</span></a>
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Friday, 02 July 2021 12:42 |
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Wolffe writes: "We are still living with the catastrophic consequences of Rumsfeld and his gang. And it's not as if this chain of events was unimaginable at the time."
'Donald Rumsfeld was not a very good man. He was the polar opposite, even on his own terms.' (photo: Mannie Garcia/Reuters)
Rumsfeld's Much-Vaunted 'Courage' Was a Smokescreen for Lies, Crime and Death
By Richard Wolffe, Guardian UK
02 July 21
We are still living with the catastrophic consequences of Rumsfeld and his gang. And it’s not as if this chain of events was unimaginable at the time
 t is customary, at times like these, to gloss over the failures and foibles of recently deceased officials: to paint a portrait in broad brush strokes about their achievements and qualities and public service.
In the case of the newly departed Donald Rumsfeld, the defense secretary who led the catastrophic war in Iraq, this would be a monumental dereliction of duty. And the old war criminal was a stickler for duty.
So let’s cast aside the nuanced but respectful formulations of the Washington Post (“one of history’s most consequential as well as controversial Pentagon leaders”) and the New York Times (“a combative infighter who seemed to relish conflicts”).
Somehow those quibbles didn’t make it into the overwrought words of Rumsfeld’s former boss and enabler, President George W Bush, who praised his “steady service as a wartime secretary of defense – a duty he carried out with strength, skill and honor”.
“We mourn an exemplary public servant and a very good man,” he added.
Donald Rumsfeld was not a very good man. He was the polar opposite, even on his own terms.
One of his famously pithy Rumsfeld rules, collected over a career of power in government and business, included this advice for people in the White House: “Remember the public trust. Strive to preserve and enhance the integrity of the office of the Presidency. Pledge to leave it stronger than when you came.”
By Rumsfeld’s own standards, he failed. He destroyed the public trust, the integrity of the presidency, and left America’s reputation far weaker than when he came.
How did he do all that in the fevered five years between the 9/11 attacks of 2001 and his resignation in 2006?
We could start with his disastrous decision to turn away from the hunt from Osama bin Laden in Afghanistan to pursue Saddam Hussein in Iraq: one of the most baffling, harebrained and ultimately bloody choices in the history of American national security.
We now know that Rumsfeld was contemplating this bizarre plan within days, if not hours, of the attacks. He pursued an illegal aggressive war with no link to al-Qaida but with all the dogged skills he had learned from a career inside Washington, concocting a case for war that destroyed international trust and the integrity of anyone who touched it.
He wasn’t the only one, for sure, and the buck stops with President Bush himself. But he was central to the cabal, alongside his old friend Dick Cheney, who dragged the United States and its allies – especially the UK – into an entirely avoidable quagmire that left tens and probably hundreds of thousands dead and maimed.
We are still living with the catastrophic consequences of Rumsfeld and his gang. There’s a direct line from the Iraq invasion to Syria’s civil war, along with the immense suffering of millions of civilians, and the political strain and instability caused by so many refugees to this day.
It’s not as if this chain of events was unimaginable at the time.
Rumsfeld himself was just about smart enough to flick at the lid of the Pandora’s box he was about to detonate. In one of his classically cryptic memos to his inner circle of warmongers in late 2001, Rumsfeld casually raised an eyebrow over the chaos he was unleashing on the world.
“We ought to think through what are the bad things that could happen, and what are the good things that can happen that we need to be ready for in both respects. Please give me a list of each,” he wrote. “Thanks.”
Rumsfeld might have been talking about Afghanistan, where Kabul was about to fall and Bin Laden was ready to run for the mountains at Tora Bora. Or he might have been talking about Iraq, where Rumsfeld was already planning his war. Either way, he botched them both by failing to give a damn about the messy business of rebuilding nations after war.
Nation-building was scorned by Bush, Rumsfeld, Cheney and the gang because it was all so soft and cuddly and liberal. You don’t have to be a professor at the National War College to realize that macho ignorance might just be why their record in Afghanistan and Iraq was so utterly disastrous after the initial, apparently successful, military action. We are now exiting Afghanistan after two decades of failure rooted in Rumsfeld’s original plans.
It was this mixture of extreme arrogance and incompetence, along with a cavalier disregard for human suffering and integrity, that was the hallmark of Rumsfeld’s short and bloody reign. His policy chief, Doug Feith, bragged about how going to Baghdad was just a milestone on the road to Tehran.
But when Iraq fell apart, their hawkish allies in the White House turned on Rumsfeld’s team for failing to have any kind of credible plan to run a country ravaged by decades of sanctions, airstrikes and corrupt government.
Rumsfeld did have a credible plan for torture, however. It’s not the stuff of polite conversation or political debate to concede that the charismatic and quippy Washington man was, in fact, entirely comfortable with torture. But he was very comfortable with it, and couldn’t understand why anyone could feel any different.
When his team wrote up detailed torture plans for prisoners at Guantánamo Bay – including being forced to stand for hours on end – Rumsfeld made it clear they weren’t being tough enough. “I stand for eight to 10 hours a day,” he scribbled on one memo authorizing torture in 2002. “Why is standing limited to four hours?”
When he wasn’t mimicking Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men, Rumsfeld was blaming everyone else for a few war crimes here and there. It was Rumsfeld who presided over the grotesque abuse of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. At the time, he offered to resign and expressed some regret, but mostly argued that he was very busy, the war was quite a big undertaking, and that bad stuff happens in prisons.
Far from growing more reflective or responsible after leaving office, Rumsfeld regretted nothing, apologized for nothing and learned nothing. In his 2011 book, he claimed that the Abu Ghraib photos were the result of “a small group of prison guards who ran amok”, and that the whole torture thing was just some political hot air.
Rumsfeld, like many hawks in those years after 9/11, liked to quote Winston Churchill. One of his famous Rumsfeld rules cites Churchill as saying: “Victory is never final. Defeat is never final. It is courage that counts.”
Rumsfeld’s victories were illusions. His defeats will outlive him. And his much-vaunted courage was a smokescreen for lies, crimes and deaths. If he was an exemplary public servant, we need to reimagine what public service actually means.
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FOCUS | Oops: The Trump Organization Kept Literal Spreadsheets of Its Crimes |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=44994"><span class="small">Bess Levin, Vanity Fair</span></a>
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Friday, 02 July 2021 11:23 |
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Levin writes: "In life, a good rule of thumb is to not engage in the sort of behavior that could result in being charged with numerous felonies; in other words, don't do crimes."
Ivanka, Donald and Donald Jr. Trump with Allen Weisselberg at a press conference at Trump Tower. (photo: Timothy A. Clary/Getty)
Oops: The Trump Organization Kept Literal Spreadsheets of Its Crimes
By Bess Levin, Vanity Fair
02 July 21
Which is something one should probably avoid if one is hoping to avoid prison time.
n life, a good rule of thumb is to not engage in the sort of behavior that could result in being charged with numerous felonies; in other words, don‘t do crimes. But if you’re going to ignore that rule, and you don’t want to spend years in prison, another piece of advice is to not leave such an obvious paper trail of said crimes that you might as well have stuck a Post-it note on a stack of files that reads, “Hey, everybody, come check out all the laws I’ve been breaking! It’s all right here! Get the handcuffs ready!” Which, based on the indictment unsealed in a Manhattan courtroom today, is basically what the Trump Organization and its longtime CFO did, for more than a decade. Whoops!
Yes, in a turn of events perhaps unsurprising given Donald Trump‘s frequent pronouncements that he‘s “like, really smart,” it appears that not only did the Trump Organization and Allen Weisselberg engage in so many scams that they were hit with a whopping 15 criminal charges—including conspiracy, grand larceny, and multiple counts of tax fraud and falsifying records—but they were really, really stupid about it. Despite the fact that Weisselberg and the company were very effective at (allegedly) hiding all sorts of income from the Internal Revenue Service—largely through fringe benefits like apartments, cars, and private school tuition the Trump Org paid for that were never declared as income—they apparently never envisioned a scenario in which they would be investigated, hence the decision to keep meticulous records of all the taxes they were allegedly dodging. (In total, Weisselberg was accused of dodging taxes on $1.7 million worth of perks.)
As one delightful section of the indictment reads:
Weisselberg caused the Trump Corporation to issue corporate checks made payable to a Trump Organization employee who cashed the checks and received cash. The cash was given to Weisselberg for his personal use. The Trump Corporation booked this cash as “Holiday Entertainment,” but maintained internal spreadsheets showing the cash to be part of Weisselberg’s employee compensation.
Oops! Great work, dummies! Here’s another fun example:
For certain years, the Trump Organization maintained internal spreadsheets that tracked the amounts it paid for Weisselberg’s rent, utility, and garage expenses. Simultaneously, the Trump Organization reduced the amount of direct compensation that Weisselberg received in the form of checks or direct deposits to account for the indirect compensation that he received in the form of payments of rent, utility bills, and garage expenses. The indirect compensation was not included on Weisselberg’s W-2 forms or otherwise reported to federal, state, or local tax authorities, and no income taxes were withheld by the corporate defendants in connection with the indirect compensation.
Weisselberg, who pleaded not guilty on Thursday alongside the ex-president‘s business, is now facing more than a decade in prison, if convicted on all charges. And while prosecutors are presumably still hoping he’ll flip and testify against Trump, according to former Trump Organization attorney Michael Cohen, the government will still be able to make its case without him:
The Supreme Court gives voter suppression the green light
Nothing to see here, just the high court‘s conservative justices declaring it‘s A-OK for states to disenfranchise minority voters. Per The Washington Post:
The Supreme Court on Thursday upheld two Arizona voting restrictions that a lower court had said discriminated against minority voters, a ruling that suggests that it will be harder to challenge a spate of new laws passed by state legislatures in the aftermath of the 2020 election. Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote the opinion in the 6-to-3 ruling, with the court’s conservative majority in charge. The court’s liberals joined an opinion by Justice Elena Kagan protesting that the decision weakens the shield provided by the Voting Rights Act (VRA), first passed in 1965 to forbid laws that result in discrimination based on race.
Liberal election law experts said the decision is part of a pattern in which the Supreme Court has systematically weakened legal protections for minority voters. “The conservative Supreme Court has taken away all the major available tools for going after voting restrictions,” said Richard Hasen, an election-law expert at the University of California at Irvine. “This at a time when some Republican states are passing new restrictive voting laws.” He said the court “makes it harder to prove intentional racial discrimination in passing a voting rule,” which is likely to affect the Biden Justice Department’s newly filed complaint about Georgia’s new voting laws.
Responding to the news, Joe Biden said in a statement: “I am deeply disappointed in today’s decision by the United States Supreme Court that undercuts the Voting Rights Act, and upholds what Justice Kagan called ‘a significant race-based disparity in voting opportunities.’ In a span of just eight years, the Court has now done severe damage to two of the most important provisions of the Voting Rights Act of 1965—a law that took years of struggle and strife to secure.”
Team Trump rolls out strangely named social media network that looks a lot like Twitter but worse
Will GETTR be scrubbed from existence as quickly as Trump’s blog? Stay tuned! Per Politico:
The site, called GETTR, advertised its mission statement as “fighting cancel culture, promoting common sense, defending free speech, challenging social media monopolies, and creating a true marketplace of ideas.” The app is currently in beta form and will be officially launched on July 4 at 10 a.m.
Trump’s former spokesman, Jason Miller, is leading the platform, he confirmed via text. Former Trump campaign spokesperson Tim Murtaugh is involved as a consultant on the app. Trump’s involvement with the project is unclear as is whether or not he will set up an account on GETTR and use it. “The former president is going to make his own decision, it’s certainly there and ready for him should he make the decision—we would welcome that. There is an account reserved for him and waiting for him but that’s a decision for him to make,” said a person involved with the app.
In an interview, Miller told Fox News that GETTR uses “superior technology” and, even more hilariously, that the conservative hellscape will “be the envy of the social media world.”
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hen Vice President Kamala Harris visited the U.S.-Mexico border in El Paso, Texas, on June 25, she repeated the claim she made during her trip to Guatemala and Mexico earlier that month: The Biden administration is serious about addressing the root causes of Central American migration.
