Ho Hum

Nothing terribly new to report.  A reminder that most of my online output is now on substack, no longer Twitter, ever since Elon "Free Speech" Musk eternally suspended my account for some Leftist thought crime he (i.e., his Martian minions) refuse to specify.  The link takes you to a page that shows two substack accounts I created, "Hesperado's Newsletter" and "Towards a rational conspiracy theory".  Mostly (with some exceptions), the former is for more general somewhat lighter and peripheral postings related to conspiracy theory; the latter will be more directly related to the theory end, with some postings delving into analytical questions.

About a week or so ago, I fear I alienated Diana West, with whom I have exchanged emails now and again. This last time it involved Roy Cohn who, as a colleague of Joe McCarthy and reputed to be suitably anti-Communist, one would ordinarily respect and laud.  However, from my limited reading about him I found a severely disturbing penumbra about him -- nothing "actionable" as they say, but more on the level of the hunch.  I never proposed to Diana West that Cohn should have been arrested or convicted or imprisoned or lynched -- nor even did I claim he was guilty.  I just expressed dismay that anyone would claim they can't detect any sordid vibes from Cohn's life, and averred that anyone who doesn't is gaslighting.  I realized after I hit "Send" that my statement indirectly implied an accusation of her.  She responded "Spare me!"  I thought about it for a few days, then responded saying I did see her point and more or less agreed that I may have been leaning towards a kind of "MeToo" accusation without evidence; but I maintained my sense of something dark and unclean about Cohn which I'd have to get a lobotomy to no longer feel, and expressed a wish that she could at least meet me halfway in this.  I.e., she doesn't have to agree to indict Cohn of anything; just concede that he seems to have been a dicey character (at best).  She hasn't responded.  I wonder if there's some reason other than mere fidelity to the rules of data methodology explaining why apparently she can't smell anything amiss about Cohn.  In my reading on him I did notice an association with William Safire, who I believe was a mentor to Diana West when she began her life as a young journalist.  Perhaps that has something to do with her reluctance.