General – Page 69 – All Embracing (But Underwhelming)

CCE – Conspiracy Theories and Critical Thinking

It is that time of year again, the time of year where I advertise my Conspiracy Theories course to the world. If you’re rushing to enrol, then go here. If you are more circumspect, well, I’m not sure I can help you, although I can tell you that this year I propose to:

Expand on the Aoteroa/Te Wai Pounamu (New Zealand) section by adding in the ‘Celtic New Zealand’ thesis as a subject of discussion.

Talk even more about how Conspiracy Theories and Official Theories interrelate and how one can easily be the other.

Introduce the material from my upcoming talk to the New Zealand Skeptics ((More on this later.)) on Epistemically Authoritative Sources.

And (probably) lots more.

06/03/2009

Nicely played

Filler. This is an article well-worth your reading time. It’s on Pop Philosophy and the difficulty of expressing deep philosophical concepts to the laity.

I wish I had read it. I also wish I easily remembered enough Philosophy of Mind to make reading the first part of the article less traumatic.

06/02/2009

The Play is ‘The Thing’

I’m a Fortean rather than a Skeptic. I’m a sceptic rather than a believer and I’m, above (or below) all an epistemologist.

It is with some trepidation that I read the JREF ‘Swift’ blog; it presents a rather tiresome view of American skeptics as boring, curmudgeonly old men who do not understand the world. I thought this entry took the biscuit, but the latest missive from my (former) masters at the JREF really is something else ((By something else I mean ‘Appeals to the terrible moral high-horse Skeptics often try to sit on, not knowing that’s really an Ass.’))

(Just to clarify, the title of this post is only vaguely related to the post itself.)

05/31/2009

Balls

I was going to entitle this mini-post ‘More Celtic Nonsense’ but it’s really more 1421/Menzies nonsense. Scott has just given us the heads-up of more 1421-related wackness here.

05/26/2009

WolframAlpha

I’ve just spent a few unproductive minutes trying to coax interesting search results out of WolframAlpha about ‘Conspiracy Theory,’ with the only results being the films ‘Conspiracy’ and ‘Conspiracy Theory’ ((According to the WolframAlpha ‘Terms and Conditions’ I must now give you the citations: http://www60.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=conspiracy+theories http://www60.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=what+are+conspiracy+theories%3F http://www60.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=what+is+a+conspiracy+theory%3F http://www60.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=conspiracy+theory)). This hardly seems useful, although it does remind me that I haven’t seen those films…

05/22/2009

The Letters

Due to popular demand, here are the three letters sent to the Herald (mine included) dealing with the publication of the puff piece on the Celtic New Zealand Thesis.