The website of Associate Professor of Philosophy M R. X. Dentith
Every Thursday, about 8:15am, Matthew talks with Zac on 95bFM’s “Breakfast Show” about conspiracy theories.
This week, an omnibus covering such topics as:
I’d say more but my hands are tied I’m currently working on a paper I’m giving early next week in Singapore.
Every Thursday, about 8:15am, Matthew talks with Zac on 95bFM’s “Breakfast Show” about conspiracy theories.
I freely admit that this week’s topic was last week’s news: I decided to discuss Kevin Barrett’s weird construal of a paper by Michael Woods and Karen Douglas, a topic I blogged about last week.
I have nothing more to add as I am currently working on a paper I am giving in Singapore next month defending the Earth against an alien invasion in “XCOM: Enemy Unknown”.
Every Thursday, about 8:15am, Matthew talks with Zac on 95bFM’s “Breakfast Show” about conspiracy theories.
This week we revisited the GCSB debacle and I got to talk about my “Yes, Minister” vs. “The Thick of It” hypothesis about the Civil Service.
Now, let me be clear that my analogy between the Civil Service being a slick, purposeful machine like the one characterised in “Yes, Minister” and the shambolic monster we see in “The Thick of It” is not meant to capture the entire spectrum of ways in which the Civil Service can be said to control political discourse. For one thing, it’s not always the case that the civil servants in “Yes, Minister” win. For another thing, elements of the Civil Service in “The Thick of It” might be quite competent, just not the people at DOSAC.
Frankly (and we didn’t really get a chance to touch on this properly), I think we can explain the whole GCSB Bill debacle with the claim “Labour would be doing this too!” Governments are beholden to their Intelligence apparatus, because that Intelligence apparatus has access to information mere Ministers do not. As such, there’s an implicit trust between Ministers and, say, the GCSB because the GCSB knows more about what they are doing than the elected politicians.
We see this play out all the time in politics. Prominent Labour and National MPs have championed having another look at the Peter Ellis case when in Opposition only to stop talking about it when in Government. Why? Well, one theory is that when they get into government, the Ministry of Justice or the New Zealand Police reassure them that justice was done and the conviction was safe. Given that MOJ and the Police know about these things in the sense they are qualified institutional authorities, you can understand why a new Minister might go “Oh, right you are then”.
So, when the Prime Minister talks with the people in charge of the GCSB and they say “There’s danger out there, and we’re at the frontline!” you can understand John Key’s frustration at all the opposition he’s getting when all he’s trying to do is keep us from harm. After all, the GCSB think they need these powers to keep our children safe ((The PM, in the Select Committee hearings, kept asking opponents of the bill “But what if a baby dies in a terrorist explosion?” I’m assuming someone at the GCSB has literally said to him “If you don’t pass this bill, your children might be next!”))
Of course, institutional authority doesn’t tell us anything about whether said authorities have the right epistemic expertise. The Kitteridge report makes it clear that the GCSB tolerates incompetence in its ranks; the organisation is afraid letting go of its idiots might lead to the GCSB’s secrets getting out. The Kitteridge Report gives us no reason to think the GCSB is a brain trust of any particular stripe. ((I’ve probably blown my chances of ever working for the GCSB because of statements like these.))
We also know that the GCSB does not operate in a vacuum; they rely on intelligence data and advice from our allies (who are very likely spying on us, because that is what friends do…). As such, the GCSB is part of the general environment of Intelligence gathering and attitudes. As they say, by all means choose your enemies but make sure to choose your friends more carefully. ((They probably don’t say that at all.)) The international intelligence environment can be charitably called one of “fear” and our biggest allies, who happen to be the ones waging wars overseas, have probably pressed on the GCSB, who in turn will haved pressed the same point on the PM, just how dangerous Western Civilisation has got ((What with all the invading of other people’s homes, the oppression of minorities and generally dragging the world into economic and environmental disaster just so I can own an expensive laptop.)).
So, I think it’s quite understandable why the PM is frustrated by the opposition to the GCSB Bill. Still, the fact he has no talking points other than “But what about the babies?” either indicates a lack of nous on the part of the CEO of New Zealand, Inc. or he really does think educated opinions have the same market worth as gut instincts.
Either way, goodbye privacy.
Every Thursday, about 8:15am, Matthew talks with Zac on 95bFM’s “Breakfast Show” about conspiracy theories.
A short-ish update on “Conspiracy Corner” this week, given that I’m working on a paper and trying to make sense of twenty-thousand words of new material for the book.
This week we talked about the “Black Knight” (hat tip to Zac for this week’s topic), a Fortean space object which may, or may not, be the creation of John Keel.
According to various sources, the Black Knight is a satellite in polar orbit above the Earth which may, or may not, be of extraterrestrial origin. It was first seen (apparently) in the mid to late fifties by the Americans, who naturally assumed it was of Russian origin. It has since been seen, not always in the same place, by crew members of various nations whilst sojourning in space ((That makes spaceflight sound so cosmopolitan.)). This site gives a handy accounting of most the stories and rumours surrounding sightings of the Black Knight.
So, what’s the conspiracy theory? Basically, because no one in a position of relevant authority (i.e. any of the various space agencies) will confirm the existence of the Black Knight, there is a suspicion by some people that whatever the Black Knight is, it’s existence and purpose is being deliberately kept from us.
As opposed to the possibility that such authorities simply do not believe it exists.
So, does it exist, and if so, what is it? Well, I have no idea. As I said in the show, it’s possible there really was an initial sighting of the Black Knight, qua a satellite in an unusual orbit (which may well have been a secret Russian spy satellite). Given that the subsequent sightings only seem to share the feature of “being unexpected objects in orbit around the Earth”, and thus don’t seem to be an especially close match for the initial sighting of the Black Knight, it’s quite possible that the story of the Black Knight is now just a mess of different objects being confused for one object with a highly usual orbit.
Or, of course, the Black Knight might be either completely fictitious or a story which has been “elaborated upon” by Keel. ((If you read “The Mothman Prophecies” and try to treat all of it as factual, then you’ll run into trouble.)) The inconsistency of the sightings and the unusual properties said object is said to have (such as broadcasting alien signals) certainly read like the product of Keel’s often brilliant imagination. The fact he linked it to Phillip K. Dick and the VALIS trilogy is just the icing on the cake.
Every Thursday, about 8:15am, Matthew talks with Zac on 95bFM’s “Breakfast Show” about conspiracy theories.
In the early hours of the morning, June 18th, 2013, Michael Hastings died in a freak automobile accident. “Freak” because it involved only one vehicle and “freak” because Hasting’s Mercedes C250 Coupé (I say, writing like Dan Brown at my 15″ MacBook Retina) was seen by witnesses to be driving at full speed before fishtailing and crashing into a Palm Tree (no, I don’t know what species it was. Albuquerque Red?) in a manner which was, apparently, not very Michael Hastings-like.
For those of you who don’t know who Michael Hastings was, he’s the journalist who helped bring down Gen. Stanley McChrystal. Hasting’s had the reputation of being a journalist who didn’t quite play by the rules (where the notoriously ambiguous notion of “the rules” here refers to, at the very least, Hasting’s ignoring the accepted protocol of being an embedded journalist, to whit failing to write a puff piece of his “tour” with the militrary).
So, Hasting’s, a man with at least one powerful enemy, died in a freak accident. So what?
Well, what if I told you Hasting’s was being investigated by the FBI at the time he died? Would that make you suspicious?
Now, I’m not going to tell you that; all I’m going to do is suggest it, because that seems to be the story here. Hasting’s believed he was being investigated by the FBI and, despite the fact the FBI have denied this, the story has taken on legs.
When someone dies mysteriously and that someone happens to be the kind of person who makes powerful enemies it’s not that unreasonable to think “Maybe it was foul play.” However, to move from a suspicion of foul play to asserting the existence of a conspiracy may well be unreasonable, if the evidence for the existence of the conspiracy doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.
So, that being said, is there/what is the evidence of foul play?
Let’s start with the e-mail Hasting’s sent to friends and colleagues the day before he died.
Hey [name redacted] – the feds are interviewing my ‘close friends and associates’. Perhaps if the authorities arrive ‘BuzzFeed GQ’, er HQ, may be wise to immediately request legal counsel before any conversations or interviews about our news-gathering practices or related journalism issues.
Also: I’m onto a big story, and need to go off the radar for a bit.
All the best, and hope to see you all soon.
Post Hasting’s death, that e-mail sounds panicked (excuse the lousy acting):
Imagine, though, that you got the e-mail the day before and you were a working journalist. You might have read it in a much more casual tone:
I would argue that the e-mail, on its own, doesn’t tell us much at all. Hasting’s was warning people that the Feds might be interested in his work, so if anyone asked about it, they should clam up and ask for a lawyer. Standard practice/warning, really. It’s only after the fact of his freak death that you might start thinking it should be read in a worried or harried tone. I.e. the tone of the e-mail depends an awful lot on what else we know about Hastings, and given he died in a freak accident, it’s easy to into the e-mail the notion he was panicked when, maybe, he was not.
So, what story was Michael Hasting’s working on, such that it might justify his assassination?
We don’t know. We might never know what he was working on.
There was a rumour circulating that he was investigating the relationship between Jill Kelley and David Petraeus, but His last story, “Why the Democrats Love to Spy On Americans” had been published eleven days earlier, but no one seems to be suggesting that piece would deserve state-ordered assassination.
Of course, all that aside, the actual accident was a freak one, and, as such, was weird/suspicious in nature. Richard Clarke, sometime advisor to four consecutive US presidents, has weighed in on the description of the accident and said:
What has been revealed as a result of some research at universities is that it’s relatively easy to hack your way into the control system of a car, and to do such things as cause acceleration when the driver doesn’t want acceleration, to throw on the brakes when the driver doesn’t want the brakes on, to launch an air bag. You can do some really highly destructive things now, through hacking a car, and it’s not that hard.
So if there were a cyberattack on the car – and I’m not saying there was, I think whoever did it would probably get away with it.
Now, Clarke has a background in cyberattacks (I questioned his qualifications in this respect in the radio segment, but on closer inspection he probably is the right kind of authority to refer to) but note that he’s not saying this was a cyberattack, just that it could have been. Sure, Hasting’s had powerful enemies, the kind who probably could have knowledge of how to cyberattack a car ((I’m not entirely sure what that would entail/require.)), but that doesn’t mean it happened. Clarke is basically musing out loud and presenting a candidate explanation for the event. It’s a possible explanation which accounts for how the accident occurred but its not necessarily among the pool of likely explanations. ((There’s some similarity here between the death of Michael Hasting’s and the notion it was caused by some device attached to the car, with Ian Wishart’s claims about how Paul White died. Wishart has always maintained that White’s freak automobile accident was suspicious and has posited that it was caused by the placing of a device on the car, such that the car’s flipped over and killing the driver was not due to bad driving but, rather, deliberately caused remotely.)).
After all, freak accidents are, by their definition, unusual and seemingly unlikely. Hasting’s death by car accident, the way the witnesses described it, was weird but not so weird that it automatically qualifies as being suspicious-qua-the result of outside forces. It’s only when you factor in who Hasting’s was that the death looks more than just merely freakish.
For example, if Hasting’s thought he was being investigated by the FBI and that they were on to him, the accident might have been caused by Hasting’s driving being erratic due to his thinking he was being tailed. That’s another candidate explanation, one which allows for there to be a conspiracy against Hastings, but one that isn’t responsible for his death.
Or, of course, he might just have been driving erratically. It could just have been an unfortunate accident. Of all the candidate explanations, this is probably the most likely, all other things being equal. Unfortunately accidents happen more often than we like to think (and, in most places in the world, more often than assassinations, state-sponsored or otherwise).
Some skeptics of conspiracy theories like to claim that the more likely explanation, in a situation where there is a conspiracy theory and some theory citing a coincidence, is always going to be the coincidence theory. That is clearly a bad argument. For one thing, in a choice between rival explanations we should judge the individual explanations by their merits. For another, it’s by no means clear we should prefer coincidence theories, given what we know about the level of conspiratorial behaviour that actually goes on in the world we live in.
However, in this case we have to ask “Is Michael Hasting’s death more likely to be a freak accident (a series of unfortunate events) or assassination (a conspiracy)?” I’m siding with the coincidence theory here. This is not to say that it’s outside the bounds of probability that Hasting’s was on to something with his latest investigation and thus was removed from the equation (a terrible way of saying “killed by the State”). No, I just think it’s more likely that he was involved in a car crash and he died because of it. He may well have been being investigated by the FBI, but that doesn’t mean they also intended to kill him. It’s possible to be under suspicion and be involved in a car accident of your own making.
Likely, even.
Every Thursday, about 8:15am, Matthew talks with Ethan and Zac on 95bFM’s “Breakfast Show” about conspiracy theories.
If there was a story in the last fortnight that was even more bewildering than Peter Dunne probably being the source of a leak, then it had to be PRISM, the story which just kept retracting itself. When we first heard about PRISM the story was focussed on the claim that the US Government, through the NSA, was not just hoarding all of our information but they were also processing it, bit by bit, phone call by phone call, in such a way that we appeared to have been living in a total surveillance state for the last decade without having ever noticed it.
Then the story began to slip away from grasp. Yes, the NSA was collecting data, but it was just meta-data. No, they weren’t analysing it in depth; indeed, they weren’t even analysing it unless they had just cause. Yeah, there was oversight (except that the oversight seems pretty toothless). The major IT companies, like Facebook, Google and Apple (no Microsoft, you are not in the hallowed set any more; you are being punished for the XBox One) all came out and said “Hey, despite an awful looking powerpoint slide, we’re not complicit in this at all!”
Even the original story in the Washington Post was carefully rewritten without warning, in order to retract some of the increasing false-looking claims.
Indeed, the story began to focus more on the leaker, Edward Snowden, than it did on the NSA and PRISM. Snowden’s qualifications were questioned. His choice of a place to flee to to avoid US-style justice (Hong Kong) was the subject of bemused speculation. His calm delivery and media savvy was attack, by Naomi Wolf of all people, as being evidence that he was a security apparatus plant, one designed to distract us from real issues. The fact that Snowden revealed the extent of the spying the NSA engaged in, showing that America was happy to spy on the leaders of their supposed allies, was taken as evidence of espionage; no true American would want to reveal secrets everybody already knew!
So, what can we make of PRISM? What can we make of Snowden?
On the subject of Snowden the world’s politicians and journalists have said much, most of which is not worth commenting on. However, this particular diatribe by John Aravosis over at America Blog is filled with hyperbole as he slams Snowden for a lack of patriotism, his argument basically boiling down to “You should only leak information I want you to leak!”
Then there’s Naomi Wolf’s bizarre channeling of Glenn Beck in these two posts; it’s as if she thinks we should only be supporting one celebrity leaker and she’d rather you supported her rather poor choice of Julian Assange.