Category: General

Disinformation

I’m sick with the bug that is doing the rounds at the moment and it’s left me good for nothing, really. I’ve spent most of the last week moping and occasionally scanning in articles for various courses I am going to be teaching (as well as indulging in one of my many secret shames; rewatching ‘Remington Steele’). In amongst my back catalogue of readings I found a piece by George Case (who you may well be hearing a lot more of) from a 2006 issue of ‘The Skeptic’ (wherein, soon, my work shall appear). Case writes on matters conspiratorial and his 2006 article is an attack on vulgar intellectualism:

Everyone loves a good mystery, for a start. There’s an emotional satisfaction that comes with solving a puzzle or learning a secret; figuring out a scam, however dastardly, carries intellectual prestige. Second, spotting a conspiracy or cracking a ciher entitles us to look down on the next guy and wrap up any argument with an appeal to our own specialized knowledge–let the doubters dwell in their ignorance. … It is this element of elitism that especially distinguishes accusations of media brainwashing. “Disinformation” is not so much a political concept as it is a cultural one, a way of contrasting the critical few with the gullible many.

Well, at least, an attack on vulgar intellectualism is really the charitable interpretation; his real foe is The Disinformation Company, publisher of such tomes as You Are Being Lied To: The Disinformation Guide to Media Distortion, Historical Whitewashes and Cultural Myths, Everything You Know is Wrong: The Disinformation Guide to Secrets and Lies, 50 Things You’re Not supposed to Know, and Abuse Your Illusions: The Disinformation Guide to Media Mirages and Establishment Lies [list taken from the article, I freely admit].

Case’s argument, in a quoted nutshell is:

White Rose wannabes who cry “Big Brother” at any public assertion but their own may imagine they are resisting a tyrannical party line, but in fact they are merely getting their turn in the constant debate over political, economic, moral and philosophical issues that is a feature of modem democratic life. Too often, their turns are forfeited by cheap shots and easy answers.

A healthy suspicion of officialdom and popular opinion is a valuable intellectual quality. But the self-congratulatory, more-cynical-than-thou posturing of The Disinformation Company cheapens that cautionary sensibility into a pointless rejection of all things “mainstream” that offers no practical, positive options in its place.

Now, on one hand, I agree. There’s too much vulgar popular sentiment when it comes to anti-establishment views. Anyone who has been on a protest march in recent years (and I’m including you right-wingers; John Boscawen be praised for showing that side up) will know the embarrassment of finding out who has flitted to your cause’s side. However, Case, to my mind, ruins his argument in two ways. Firstly, he brings in the Nazis.

In Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, society was built on the deliberate fictions of a cruelly secretive ruling class, and the pamphleteers of the White Rose and the samizdat writers behind the Iron Curtain risked (and often lost) their lives to contradict them.

Whilst he doesn’t say it outright the implication seems to be that we’re lucky to be alive now. Which may be true, but that doesn’t mean we should blithely ignore blatant media bias, be faithful without reason towards our elected officials and the like. Sure, things could be worse. They also could be a lot better.

Secondly, he chooses targets which, quite frankly, make me think he’s anti all intellectuals. He singles out Harold Pinter for comment and in the next breath talks about elitism. It seems that he tars everyone with the same brush, and yet the figures he really is aiming towards, the authors of The Disinformation Company’s ever-growing back catalogue, aren’t really touched upon at all. It isn’t fair to lump in different categories of people and then apply a one-fits-all argument to them; that’s a Strawman, and them be fallacious [Hicksville accent ends].

It’s not even a particularly good argument when applied to just The Disinformation Company, either. I’ve flicked through a number oftheir books and whilst some are merely pandering to a scared public others are written by appropriated qualified experts who know what they are on about and, in a great many of the volumes, engage in fairly erudite discourse about their topics. These books cannot be dismissed out of hand as vulgar intellectualism; they need to be evaluated on their merits.

Case has written other articles on Conspiracy Theories and, given the tone of this one, I’m keen to read the others. I suspect, based upon this piece, that he’s not sympathetic to the notion that we should be open-minded about Conspiracy Theories. I think he probably is an adherent to the Cock-up Theory of History and maybe he’s even a bit Chomskian. I may well be wrong and I’ll tell you if I am. Until then, however, I have some light scanning and some heavy-duty recovery to do.

05/15/2008

Books books books

Oh, the reading. I’ve currently got ‘The Hollow Men,’ ‘Oddzone’ and ‘Absolute Power’ on the go (and that’s just the Aotearoa Conspiracy Theory material).

Vicki Hyde’s ‘Oddzone‘ (New Holland, Auckland, 2006) is, for me, a mixed bag. I probably know just a little too much on the subjects it covers for this to be useful; I either know more detail than the chapters cover or the critical thinking material is just a little too thin (for someone who, in the words of the FHG, is a ‘professional critical thinker’).

I also have some small but niggling issues. On what is really a very minor matter Hyde claims that UFO just means Flying Saucer (p. 36), which isn’t a given (although I do approve of her using UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena)). On a far more important issue I think she a bit of sneaky trick. It’s towards the end of her introductory critical thinking chapter.

Hyde presents what appears to be a logic puzzle and then states that amongst all the answers people have come up with to it, virtually no one ever claims the answer is that she is either lying or mistaken (p. 28). I don’t think this is a particularly fair trick to play on people; if you pose a conundrum (her label) most of your audience is going to think that it is solvable (even if it requires a piece of clever thinking). Psychologically, I think it is fair to say, we write off the possibility that the person posing the conundrum is lying (that there is an answer); indeed, the way the conundrum is posed makes it look as if it can be answered. A response of ‘You’re lying’ doesn’t seem to solve the puzzle.

(The other response she thinks should be offered, ‘You’re mistaken’ also seems to be psychologically locked off because, at least in her case, if you’ve asked someone to come along and give a talk to your group you’re not expecting them to be (overly) mistaken in their thinking…)

Now, Hyde is right to say that we should be sceptical (at some appropriate level) in regards to the utterances of others (we should, at least, admit the possibility that some testimony is false), but the conundrum she poses isn’t the right kind of example to teach this important lesson. This is because the conundrum doesn’t solicit the principle in the right way; people who hear it are, I suspect, going to feel just a little cheated by its solution. Which is a pity, because, overall, the chapter is quite good as an introduction to some core principles of critical thinking and if I decide to teach another introductory course on scepticism in the near future I’d be keen to use it.

(I’m also somewhat curious as to whether Hyde really thinks the example belongs in that chapter; it’s printed as an aside and part of me wonders whether it is there to fill the book out rather than as an illustration vital to the discourse. Then again, this might just be a reflection of my prejudices about layouts coming to the fore.)

05/12/2008

Pejorative [Updated]

[Just an update to say that the Dentith Files has been postponed a week due to illness, chiefly mine but I’m willing to let the World in on grounds of Climate Change.]

Over at George Washington’s blog (no, really) the author asks why the term Conspiracy Theory is a dirty label. He then goes on to point out that if you do a search of the term Conspiracy in legal judgements the system can’t properly display the results; that’s just how often the term comes up (and this is in respect to convictions upheld on appeal).

So why is it we’re sceptical of Conspiracy Theories.

I’ve covered this recently. One answer is that the past incidence level of Conspiracies may not tell us much about the contemporary, let alone future, incidence level of such things. Induction isn’t much help to us in matters like this (where ‘matters like this’ is really hand-waving in regards to notions of regularities in the Social).

Another answer is that criminal and civil conspiracies might well be different compared to Political Conspiracies.

It fascinates me that the Epistemology of Conspiracy Theories is still largely about Political Conspiracy Theories. I seem to be alone (in respect to my field) in the thought that surprise birthday parties are of interest to people waxing philosophical about Conspiracy Theories.

Yet I can see why. Firstly, people accept that corporations conspire against consumers, people accept that people conspire, in criminal activities, to hide the fact of their actions. Criminal and civil conspiracies are not all that interesting to the public. Political conspiracies are.

In part it is because political conspiracies are relatively rare compared to civil and criminal instances. Thus when they occur people are outraged, fascinated and confused. Add to this the large number of false allegations of political conspiring and you can see why people treat the term Conspiracy Theory as a pejorative. The mistake a lot of people make, on the side of Conspiracy Theorists, is to appreciate that people don’t mean Conspiracy Theory, as a pejorative, in a general sense of applying to Criminal, Civil and Political Conspiracy Theories; the lay public know that civil and criminal cases of conspiracy happen all the time. They just don’t expect people to use the term Conspiracy Theory in relation to it (perhaps the lay public expect you to use ‘allegation of conspiracy’ in situations where you mean a civil or criminal instance).

At least, that’s my view (at this time). Check back with me in a year.

05/09/2008

Other people’s thoughts (and my own)

Recently Münzenberg, at Soob, wrote a little piece on Conspiracy versus Conspiracy Theory. A lot of it dovetails nicely into my recent paper on what it is that Conspiracy Theorists believe; Münzenberg’s argument is that just because people believe wacky Conspiracy Theories isn’t a reason to have a wholesale dismissal of belief in potential Conspiracies now. Münzenberg uses the example of pre-9/11 conspiracy theorising:

The example was FBI field agent Ken Williams who wrote the Phoenix Memo about the possibility of Al Qaeda members training in flight schools. His memo was discounted by his leadership. Whether or not they thought his views were conspiratorial we don’t know, but Williams uncovered a smaller part of a greater conspiracy and he was discounted. We all know what happened after Williams theory was discounted right? Thousands of people died. But that is ok, because LE guys like Williams with his crazy theories are “prone to believe in nonsense” according to Shrinkwrapped.

Münzenberg raises the important object to wholesale scepticism of Conspiracy Theories; some of them will turn out to be warranted. We should not forget that.

I (of course) wrote a paper on this very subject just over a year ago (at that Kaikoura conference), which I kept promising to upload the final version thereof and never did. Well, now I have. LaTeX-ed and slightly reformatted (for the modern age), I present:

Conspiracies Then, Now and Tomorrow: How Do Past Instances Affect the Likelihood of Similar Events Now?

05/05/2008

The Real History Behind Pseudohistories

Poneke’s review of ‘Absolute Power’ (which I’ve already linked to) has got me thinking (additionally; my normal state is thinking, it’s just that I’m thinking more [if that makes any sense whatsoever]). I’m currently updating my coursebook for the forthcoming Conspiracy Theories course and this week’s reading of choice is Sharan Newman’s ‘The Real History Behind the Templars.’ One of the appendices is entitled ‘How to Tell if You Are Reading Pseudohistory’ and it struck me that if biographies are a kind of historical text, and that some of them will be bogus, then some purported biographies will be pseudohistories.

(Indeed, pseudohistories-cum-patently false biographies will be interesting beasts. Some will be largely bunk, others will be based upon a thick slate of truths with just a few, select lies put in, et al. The most interesting ones will be those that stick with the ‘facts of the matter’ but introduce new and novel interpretations on those acts, such as, say, the future Prime Minister of Aotearoa drowning kittens as a child not because that is what a person does when they grow up on a farm but because it made them happy…)

Newman provides three hints that suggest you are reading a Pseudohistory:

1. The author uses terms such as ‘Everyone agrees that…’ or ‘All historians know…’ This is just a mark of sloppy research where the author hasn’t bothered to provide arguments and reasons for their position. The kinds of things historians all agree upon are trivial issues such as ‘The pyramids are examples of astounding engineering skill’ and ‘The Battle of Hastings was in ACE1066.’

2. The author insists that crucial evidence for their theory isn’t freely available because there is a cover-up, or that they have a secret source.

3. The author makes supposition after supposition, assumes they are all true and then uses them to prove other suppositions.

(Newman, Sharan ‘The Real History Behind the Templars,’ Berkley Books, New York, 2007, p. 412-3)

Now, as I continue to state (like a MP3 on repeat) I have not read ‘Absolute Power.’ I have read an awful lot of commentary on the book which hasn’t convinced that I need to buy it, but for those of you who have read it, two questions:

1. How much does it, it at all, resemble a pseudohistory (qua Newman’s definition), and

2. What would you add to the list of suspect qualities to such texts? (I have a few ideas myself which, if I get comments, I’ll collate together with your own)

Answers on a comments thread.

05/02/2008

In which Wishart responds…

Not on this blog, but on Poneke’s. I’m currently addicted to the comments accruing on Poneke’s review of ‘Absolute Power’ (which I still would like a copy of to read and review myself – hint hint). Not only do we get Ian Wishart responding to criticisms against his book in trademark style, but Keri Hulme, Book[er; silly me with my dropped suffixes…] Prize winner, has joined in. Allegations of a feminist conspiracy theory with links to Soviet Russia abound; indeed, Trevor Loudon, whose Soviet Conspiracy Theories I have already touched upon (here and here) has already been cited.

Exciting stuff. I find myself wishing there was a RSS feed for this post so I didn’t have to keep hitting the site to find out which new version of events Wishart was switching to next.

04/30/2008