Thai a blue bracelet 'round the old, oak tree...

Odd -- though unsurprising, given how often Baron Boddissey prevaricated incoherently on the problem of Islam -- juxtaposition of a byline by him putting in sneer quotes "pandemic" yet introducing a piece on how Covid is adversely affecting Thailand.

His correspondent, H. Numan, proceeds to recount in detail how terrible the virus is, and even goes so far as to cite with a straight face a supposedly drastic uptick in "cases".  Anti-Leftists like the chaps over at Gates of Vienna should know by now that "cases" are so riddled with confounding factors and corruption as to be worthless, and certainly not to be relied upon for gloomy news.  

As I indicated, I noted over the years (on my previous blog, The Hesperado) the incoherence of Baron Bodissey regarding the problem of Islam; an incoherence that more generally besets the Counter-Jihad Mainstream. So it's no surprise he would exhibit incoherence on Covid too.

Further ruminations on an RTC...

 

I haven't fully developed a methodology for a Rational Conspiracy Theory (RTC); in fact, I haven't developed one at all.  What I have done is conceive of the concept, and taken a few stabs at what it might entail.  

Perhaps the crux of it is the concept of relative power imputed to the Cabal.  ("Cabal" would be a technical term to use with regard to any discussion of conspiracy theory, as it unremarkably denotes that collection of individuals who are cooperating to direct & manage their conspiracy.)  We assume it is not rational to impute omnipotence to the Cabal -- much less to its various operatives, many of whom may be not fully cognizant of the full details of the conspiracy.  Once we let that sink in, that the Cabal has relative power, it means they are limited. The question is how limited? -- a question that can unfold in complex ways, depending on the conspiracy being supposed.

One of the complexities involved with this concept of relative power is figuring out (unavoidably entailing degrees of speculation) what parts of the Mainstream are part of the conspiracy, and which parts are not, how those two areas interact, and which one at any given moment in sociopolitical time is more powerful -- though "more powerful" may be complicated, involving interlocking aspects of more or less powerful in different contexts and at times in a tug-of-war jockeying.

All of the above is an abstract meditation on general principles, still in the "groping" stage far from developing an actual methodology, but aiming towards one.  The abstract meditation can be tested, so to speak, with specific issues/questions.  For example, we have the startling claims of Maria Zack, more recently reiterated and amplified in two interviews she gave -- namely, that she and her colleagues have determined specifically who actually shifted the votes from Trump to Biden during the wee hours of Election night.  What pertains to my abstract meditation here is the relative optimism Zack expresses as she describes the Macchiavelian plot (even if her description has many maddening lacunae), even implying that there are in fact good guys in high places who will right this catastrophic wrong.  This more broadly implies there has been a dynamic configuration for months now where the bad guys seem to have the upper hand (after all, they "won" the Election, or rather the Coup) and the entire Mainstream (including even people like Tucker Carlson) are reinforcing that upper hand's legitimacy, but somehow the good guys will undo that nefarious victory.  The hope we may wish to have in that would depend on the good guys actually having at least the potential for a power differential on their side.  On what basis would we rest that hope?  Maria Zack, unfortunately, gives us little substance on this precise point we can hang on to.

Complexity Denial

 

One problem with blogging for years is that important links you used way back when can become defunct.  This wouldn't be too much of a problem if you don't blog that much, but the blogging I put in over at The Hesperado spanned some 11 years, with 1,427 postings in all, each posting often riddled with links; so there's no way I'm going to go combing through my archives to check every link.  At best, I have repaired any links I happen to come across whenever I re-read an old posting.

As I just did tonight, in fact.  A conversation came up in my Paltalk chat room (The Sane Asylum) when I mentioned how Bill Clinton raped Juanita Brodderick.  A chatter indicated he'd like to see evidence of that, and I recalled I had penned a posting years ago on that very subject -- it turns out back in 2012.  So I hunted that posting down (Recipe for a National Rape Cover-Up, reprinted on my auxiliary blog) and refreshed my memory that the evidence is more complicated than a mere slam-dunk, and depends on an article by Jeffrey Lord published at The American Spectator also back in 2012.  My posting linked to that article, but when I clicked it tonight, it only took me to an error page.  So then I spent about 15 minutes delving into archives at the The American Spectator site and finally found it, titled Bill Clinton and Legitimate Rape.

That's not really why I called, however.   What I really wanted to say here today was that on re-reading my posting of yore, I was struck at the concept I articulated in the first three, brief paragraphs:

"Jeffrey Lord at The American Spectator has marshaled an impressive array of facts and analysis about the outrageous hypocrisy of the Democrats during this campaign (of 2012).

"Unfortunately, there are so many intertwining facts to present, with so much explanatory weaving together required, that I worry it tends to lose its punch.

"Lord knows Jeffrey Lord does his best, and it’s not really his fault, but just the nature of the complexity of the issue."

What I articulated in passing is a concept that applies to many issues -- for example, the problem of Islam, the problem of Climate Change, and the problem of Covid.  While the issue Jeffrey Lord was grappling with was somewhat complicated, it doesn't come close to holding a candle to the monstrous complexities Islam, Climate Change, and Covid present, each in their own way.  So my analysis of the problem is that much more searingly apt with regard to those. 

This came to mind again recently in a mildly dismaying exchange I had on Twitter with Christine Massey, a diligent activist in the radical wing of the Covid Dissident movement (such as it is) -- radical measured by the fact that they pull the virology rug out from under the whole debate, based on their proposition that there is no virus in the first place (nor any viruses at all).  I simply pointed out to her that the issue is too technically complex for most laypersons who only (at best) know the bare rudiments of biology to understand adequately.  She shot back effectively saying, "Nah it's not complex at all -- it's simple!"  It may be simple to her, but that doesn't mean it's simple to the layperson.  

With her attitude on this important facet in the War of Ideas, she will end up only preaching to the choir -- which includes a very few adequately science-educated folks who actually can grasp what she and David Crow, Andrew Kaufman and Tom Cowan are explaining; and a larger number of laypersons who don't really understand why they are assenting to the claims of the aforementioned.  My position on this is that when an issue is so complex, as with Climate Change and Covid, the layperson has to defer to experts; so the epistemological burden of assent becomes relocated from understanding the actual issue, to determining which experts you want to place your trust in.  Ideally (and I don't think it's too ambitious an ideal) this would entail exchanges and/or debates between those Covid Dissenters who do accept orthodox virology vs. those who don't -- exchanges and/or debates for the benefit of the vast majority who are laypersons.  In the minds of the laypersons in the audience, these exchanges and/or debates wouldn't necessarily create actual understanding of the scientific technicalities -- but they could help the layperson come to a clearer decision of which camp is the more honest and cogent.  It's not a perfect process, and more often  than not will be liable to shadows of doubt.  But hey, that's life, usually.

The complexity of the Islam issue is somewhat different, because there it doesn't really depend on technical concepts that involve scientific training, but rather just a sheer quantity of data and dots to connect, with gigantic subsets of frameworks of data (example, the Serbian-Bosnian conflict, as a subset of the problem of Islam, by itself would probably take 100 hours of laborious study to begin to get a toehold into -- ditto for the Israeli-"Palestinian" issue).  There are facets of the Islam issue that do unavoidably lead to a reliance on experts -- e.g., a knowledge of Arabic in examining foundational texts such as the hadiths and the Koran -- but the intelligent layperson can demarcate those facets and distinguish them from others that do not require such technical expertise.

The Conundrum & Coordination of Counter-Covid Communication

By "Covid" in my title, I don't mean the putative virus, but the massive, strange, complex, possibly sinister welter of reactions to it by governments and their media/medicine proxies around the world.

The "Communication" concerns both communication among Covid Dissenters, and their communication to the world outside their apparently still small, albeit growing movement.

Part of the "Conundrum" is that there is, as yet, no cohesive movement per se, with a coherent message.  The first order of business, it would seem, would be for all people who feel  disaffected and disturbed by this freaky year we've been having since approximately March of 2020 to consciously come together -- for now, merely to be aware of being part of a relatively like-minded community.

As I put it in a tweet about a week ago (probably only seen by 4.5 people):

1st step -- just set up a basic virtual home base where we all merely acknowledge that we have joined together. No other obligations, no other discussions. Just our names/nicknames + contact information (can be an anonymous email or a personal blog). Nothing else. 2nd step later.

Whether people heed me or not, it remains the logical first step.

Once we're all knowing we're together and we have a place somewhere on the Internet to hang our hats, so to speak, we can think about scheduling a global town meeting, using that place or some other platform.  I recommend a chat service called "Paltalk" where chatters can type text and converse vocally with mic chat.

No doubt part, or much of the process of discussion -- and inevitable disagreement -- will be messy, but that's life.  

The first topic we should discuss at the town hall, it seems to me, is to iron out a single platform to our movement -- coming to a general agreement on the wording that will balance two competing qualities:  

a) it should be as comprehensive as possible; and 

b) it should also be attentive to internal disagreements.  

An example of disagreements includes those who believe there is a Covid virus that is deadly vs. those who maintain that evidence for a Covid virus (deadly or otherwise) has not been presented.

To recap:

If the movement is to cohere at all, it must sequentially proceed through 3 steps:

1) Everyone joins up at a single agreed-upon place on the Internet.

2) Once #1 has settled in, we schedule a global town meeting.

3) At that town meeting, we hammer out a single platform that represents us all, despite any potentially significant disagreements.

Coffee with Art

 

Back in January of 2016, I penned a posting on my long-defunct blog, The Hesperado an essay that marked a major milepost in my disillusionment with the Counter-Jihad, aptly titled "The Desperado".

Somewhere in that depressing essay, I made allusion in passing to "my other life, Art (I'm a fiction writer and musician)."

I then went to pose the question:

What meaning does Art have, when it no longer has a civilizational cosmion (at least one that's not stupidly doomed, as ours is) in which to exercise the tension between Art and Reality?  But that may be the subject of a future essay.

That may serve as a reminder for me to take a stab at this interesting question someday soon here on this blog -- a question whose purport & import has in the meantime (and I mean mean) acquired an acutely disturbing jolt of electricity, given the two catastrophes since that halcyon time in 2016 when all I had to worry about was the Stealth Jihad and the dim-wittedness of the Counter-Jihad: namely, the alarming glimpse of the Swamp we saw this past November when a virtually transparent Coup replaced a US Presidential Election; and the protracted insanity-cum-conspiracy of the unfolding Covid Regime.

More on my old friend Art (not Linkletter, though he was a cool guy) later...

Just checking in...

 

I see my last blog posting was January 25, and I was still ruminating about a "rational conspiracy theory".  I've had more thoughts about it since then, but have more or less pretty much put that on a back burner.

I haven't been entirely unproductive, eructation-wise in the meanwhile.  In my "non-virtual life" I've been embarking on a long-neglected project to revamp my many fiction writings with extra words and phrases I have spent years amassing in a long list numbering to hundreds if not a thousand or two; and to date I've done this with about 4 works (one of them involving the creation of a new epilogue to a novel I wrote nearly 10 years ago that was already some 1,200 pages).

Other productivity (such as it is) may be seen at my Twitter account.  Over the past 11 months I've been active there I've learned the hard way that it's not in fact a place to spark conversations or discussions with other people, apparently.  Oh well.

I also lodged my "anniversary" posting on my old battle-scarred battleship, my long-defunct blog The Hesperado (a tradition I began on February 21, 2018).  

Anywho...  Think I'll stop in at this truck stop for a cup of hot brown.  Catch ya on the flip side.

Towards a Rational Conspiracy Theory

A rather circumscribed microcosmic example one can examine is the case of Abigail Shrier, who wrote the book Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters.  While it is ironic that Shrier as a regular contributing journalist to the Wall Street Journal and other Mainstream venues, comes out of the Mainstream milieu (for those who have been tuning in, the Mainstream is dominated and steered by the Left), it is ironic also that the various forms of Leftist cancel culture assaults on her & her book have likely helped her book sales and her fame to spread her message, rather than hurt her as they intended

Of course, a Rational Conspiracy Theory wouldn't make sense if you summarily dismiss the possibility of conspiracies in general (or at all). At any rate, Rational Conspiracy Theory proceeds on the assumption that there is a conspiracy, but hasn't yet palpated its contours reasonably.

So, assuming there's a Leftist/Communist conspiracy afoot, it's reasonable to assume the cancel culture phenomenon would be a major weapon in their arsenal, and Abigail Shrier, being an important figure challenging a major Leftist trope, would logically be a figure the conspirators would want to cancel.

The fact then that Abigail Shrier has been helped rather than hurt by the cancel culture attempts against her work means either that the conspirators are inept, or that there is no conspiracy there -- or it means that there are limitations on the ability of the conspirators to succeed in their agenda.   

What are these limitations?  Why do they exist?  And how do the conspirators interact with the non-conspiratorial parts of the sociopolitical ocean in which conspirators and non-conspirators alike swim?  These are fundamental questions a Rational Conspiracy Theory explores.

As usual, important questions raise further questions, such as:  Are the non-conspiratorial elements of the one common world in which we all live -- conspirators and non-conspirators alike -- more numerous and more powerful than the conspiratorial elements?  Or are they roughly equal in number and power?  Or are the conspiratorial elements dominant? (This last option seems to be one hallmark of the irrational conspiracy theory.)

More to come...

Still hanging on by my fingernails

 

Back on September 14 of 2020, I began a post this way:

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).

Well now, on the morning of January 11, I see I haven't posted anything since October 19.  That goes well beyond a Holy Moly, almost to a Moliest of Molies.

That September posting, by the by, also alludes to a running theme that had increasingly preoccupied me over the course of 2020, and reached a nerve-rattling crescendo with the protracted trauma of the Presidential Election and its surreal, Orwellianly Kafkaesque aftermath -- receiving an added jolt on January 6 -- from which the nation reels and staggers to this day toward an uncertain future.  The running theme of which I speak has become clarified in my mind as the ongoing philosophical quest to develop a rational conspiracy theory.  More about that (and I've taken various stabs at it here on this blog) anon.

Perhaps the most searingly acute and stunningly concrete representation of that theme involves the interview Mara Zack gave on America Can We Talk, a YouTube channel hosted by Debbie Georgatos, on January 6.  That video has been consistently taken down by YouTube -- the latest instance being in the wee hours of last night as I write.  I had the video in hand late last night, and this morning when I went to retrieve it, it was gone, even though other videos by Debbie Georgatos are still on her YouTube page, many of them "far right" analyses of the Election etc.  If the reader looks at her YouTube page, they will see videos dated Jan. 5 and Jan. 7, but nothing for the 6th.  Luckily, a website has preserved the audio of that interview.

The peculiar -- to the point of being eerie -- thing is that nobody, not even Trump supporters, are talking about Maria Zack's astounding claim.  I worry about her safety, since I have not heard from her since January 6.