Category: Conspiracy Corner

So, have you heard the tale of John McAfee? Maybe you know him as the guy whose anti-virus software you run (although he claims to not use it himself). Maybe you heard about him making drugs in Belize, or heard that he claimed he was making drugs just to pull a prank on drug users? Perhaps you know of his being sought for questioning about the murder of a fellow ex-pat in Belize and, rather than going to the police station, fled to Guatemala.

Or, just maybe, you know of him as a super-spy who preys on Central American countries.

Whatever you think (and maybe you think like these people), these are my thoughts (and you can borrow them if you like):

Two conspiracy corners in one day? Well, I was in Wellington last week and never got around to updating the site (i.e. I was having too much fun to worry about the internets).

The Sandy Hook Mutations

Note: I got the date completely wrong on when Sandy Hook occurred; it was post the election, not prior.

Sandy Hook is fast becoming a conspiracy theory that says the real victims of the shooting are not the dead, their families or friends but, rather, gun owners and conservatives. It is also a good example of what I think is a common set of mutations for such conspiracy theories, namely:

1. It didn’t happen (It was set up by the media or the president. Presumably to justify further erosions of civil liberties – narrowly defined as being about guns rather than, say the rights of women), or:
2. It did happen, but not the way we’ve been told (It did happen but there was a second shooter and some of the victims were invented – to make it look worse than it really was?) or
3. It did happen the way we’ve been told, but there’s another layer to it (The real cause was drugs, or video games or something not related to guns and the government and the media are deliberately making guns the real victims to hide other problems in society or there is a suspicious correlation between some other event).

More thoughts on all of this below.

So, I’ll get this out of the way now: I say the n-word in the first Conspiracy Corner of the year. Not because I’m now scripted by Quentin Tarantino or because I’ve adopted new and racist resolutions for the coming year but, because, it seemed like the easiest shortcut to get across a kind of racist mentality held by some people on the American Right.

However, I deeply regret using the n-word because, well, it’s offensive and, frankly, my audience is intelligent enough (for the most part: someone called in after the segment to protest that societies with gun control laws end up being totalitarian states; one of his examples was the Roman Empire…) to not need me to take such shortcuts.

So, no conditional apology from me.

So, with that said, last week’s “Conspiracy Corner with Yours Truly” was on Alex Jones’s now famous appearance on Piers Morgan’s talk show. You can watch this rather spectacular “Shout nonsense at Piers” in the clips below and then listen to my thoughts on the whole gun (not “gin” as I originally typed) control in the audio clip below.

Alex Jones and Piers Morgan

Conspiracy Corner

Ah, those pesky script kiddies and them dastardly Republicans, always trying to fix the election in some way shape or form. At least, that seems to a story doing the rounds at the moment (here’s a Salon article about it).