Holy Moly, I haven't posted anything in nearly 2 months! This Corona Madness messes with your sense of time (not to mention with your life).
I also have unfinished business, with 2 or 3 postings where I began a "Part 1" and promised parts deux but have yet to deliver...
Most particularly, my meditations on the concept of "conspiracy theory" in an essay I published here June 13, Corona Conspiracy...? (Part 1). If I were to write a Part 2 (and I really should get cracking on it), I would explore its crux: namely, the question, what is the nature of the conspiracy? The exploration should not revolve around whether there is a conspiracy or not -- one can table that as a distinct question and keep it unentangled from the crux -- but rather, if there is a conspiracy, what follow-up questions ensue?
Who is involved in the conspiracy?
Why are they involved?
What are their goals?
What are their motives?
What factors enable their conspiracy but couldn't reasonably be supposed to be part ot it (example: the sheeplish compliance by millions of ordinary people, even often expressing itself in ardent support)?
When these questions are probed and palpated (and there could be more one could come up with), it often "smokes out" the kinds of conspiracy theorist one wants to avoid -- the clearly loony people whose theories quickly morph, in response to the first question listed above, into the Illuminati, the Masons, the Rothschilds, the Lizard People, etc. Then hopefully, one can pursue the questions more soberly -- without necessarily rejecting positive answers to them out of hand on an a priori basis flowing from the axiom that "there could never be a conspiracy EVER, so don't even go there, girlfriend".
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P.S.: A note about my dearly departed blog, The Hesperado.
While my last essay there before closing up shop with door-slamming finality was on February 21, 2018, I subsequently hit on the novel idea of posting one essay a year on "anniversaries" of that date. My last posting was, of course, on February 21, 2020, Another year down the pike... It amazes and grimly amuses me how blithely Covidless that essay was. How close to the threshold I was -- we all were -- at the end of February, before the shit of madness began slowly unraveling to hit the fan mere weeks later.
