Stephen Masty Explains Why We Don't Need Conspiracy Theories...

By -
to understand the elite consensus.

It is class analysis that is the key: the elite attend the same cocktail parties, read the same editorials, send their kids to the same schools, and just naturally come to understand the world in the same way. Sure, conspiracies take place from time to time, but it is otiose to posit a conspiracy every time the elite agree on some issue: of course they agree, they are acting in their class interest!

Comments

  1. Bob Murphy12:37 AM

    You must choose your hero. There is no third way.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Unknown5:37 AM

    Between Alex Jones, Jesse Ventura, and David Icke, I choose none of those nutjobs, although I really enjoyed that interview that unlikable Piers Morgan gave with Jones. He honestly deserved the trashing that Alex Jones gave him, even though Jones made himself look like a lunatic.

    Conspiracy theories are just fearmongering tools.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Lorenzo9:37 AM

    I take Stephen Masty's point about social milieus (though tax-eater and tax-payer are not exclusive categories). But to think same-sex marriage matters that much is a form of moral panic.

    And could you not tell exactly the same story about elites going first on every single civil rights struggle? Starting with the (British) fight against slavery, then on to Catholic emancipation, Jewish emancipation, female emancipation, black civil rights ... With conservatives making the same "how can you think that?" and "it will ruin Western civilisation!" claims each time?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. gcallah11:21 AM

      "But to think same-sex marriage matters that much..."

      How much? I did not see anything in the article that said same-sex marriage matters "that much"! I think someone is having a moral panic attack, but it's not the author of that article.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose...
Read more