Yesterday, when very tired and half-awake, I linked to a piece of conspiracy-theory nonsense because while it looked unlikely to me, it didn’t look impossible.
Today, looking at it fully awake, it’s *clearly* impossible, so I’ve removed the link. Sorry for this lapse – the stress of campaigning is obviously getting to me.
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Good man. I hate conspiracy theories almost as a rule.
Has anyone around here read Voodoo Histories by David Aaronovitch? I’m thinking of picking it up.
Well it was interesting to see a number of presumably not fascist commentators treat it as being too *good* to be true. Bit of a challenge to the old empathy muscles, but it’s important to remember how divergent some people’s perspectives are from our own.
But it’s a clear fabrication.
Number may be a bit impolitic, I don’t mean to imply that support for the BNP or “Leninist” anti-leftism is anything other than negligible among conservatives.
Zom – Voodoo Histories is a fair read, given that Mr Aaronvitch tends strongly towards the prosaic in his style and could bore for England when he’s on his high horse. But it’s a good primer where the basic insanities of 99.999% of conspiracy theories are concerned.
The problem is that he’s determined to argue that there are pretty much no conspiracies in history, and that any suspicion of conspiracy is a sign of shoddy, if not insane, thinking. Which is itself a stupid stance, given how history is absolutely saturated with secret treaties, cartels, monopolies and so on. It’s one thing to argue that Israel wasn’t behind 9/11 – well of course that’s insane. But that doesn’t mean there are no conspiracies to be uncovered anywhere. (Tim Weiner’s “Legacy Of Ashes:The History Of The CIA” sits beside “Voodoo Histories” on my bookshelf, and there’s enough evidence of conspiracy in the Pulitzer- winning Mr Weiner’s book to make anyone weep.)