the coherence of kooks (was Re: [lbo-talk] Fisk avoiding facts? really?)

Shane Taylor s-t-t at juno.com
Fri Nov 21 15:54:55 PST 2003


Jon Johanning wrote:
> But one must also concede that even apparent "kooks"
> may be saying something we "saner" folks need to listen
> to. I am somehow reminded of someone like Dostoyevsky,
> who steadily moved over his life into a more and more
> repellant (to us lefties) political position, but nevertheless
> had some very penetrating things to say about political
> psychology, especially the political psychology of those
> who consider themselves revolutionaries. What are the
> Kennedy assassination, 9/11, etc., conspiracy theorists
> saying? I'm not sure, but it may be that the shiny, rational,
> Marxist-tinged image of things that most of us are
> comfortable with masks a real world that teems with
> creepy-crawly creatures that we are not at all comfortable
> with acknowledging the existence of.

I have no idea who shot JFK, and I don't even know where to begin a review of it. It's tiring to even think of the chore. Not for lack of interest, but for lack of patience with the bs sifting involved. Also, I appreciate what you and Justin are saying. (That, and I like James Ellroy and have always meant to read American Tabloid.)

There may be some people with fresh, intelligent things to say about economics, yet happen to be goldbugs. But I don't care to sift through the cranks to find them. Likewise, secret maneuvers by the powerful outside the law have happened before and will happen again, but I'm not wading through looped tape of conspiracy tropes to find out about it. It's a signal-to-noise issue.

Most importantly, there's a difference between the fact that conspiracies occur, that not all will be explained or even known, and the belief that they are _the_ discernable motor of history. There's a remarkable consistency to what Chip calls, for want of a better term, conspiracism. He quoted someone as saying "There is a shape, an architecture, to the paranoia." <http://www.santafe.edu/~johnson/articles.paranoia.html> It's such recurring tropes that define conspiracism for me. They have amazing staying power, and change little in substance over time.

I have learned one thing from conspiracy speculation and paranoia, especially from the experience of seeing Jim Marrs speak. Cynicism can be credulous, while passing itself off as the opposite.

-- Shane

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