Not every conspiracy is a theory

By -
I rented a copy of Money Monster. On the box, it proclaims that "Not every consipracy is a theory."

Well, no, conspiracies aren't theories: they are consipracies. Some people have theories that event X or Y came about due to as conspiracy. Some of those theories are false, but some are true! (There was a conspiracy to kill Hitler, a conspiracy to blow up Parliament, etc.) But somehow "conspiracy theory" has come to mean "false consipracy theory" in many people's minds. I saw this recently with the charges of Russian election interference, where people on Twitter were saying, "It's not a conspiracy theory: the CIA is saying it!"

Oh, and the movie: it's in the running for one of the worst films I have ever seen. Pretty much every single thing in the movie is bogus. The characters have completely unbelievable personality transformations, they unravel a conspiracy based on the most ridiculous "clues," the financial market talk is nonsense, the tech talk is nonsense, the mystery is hardly a mystery at all (surprise: the rich guy did it!), and as "social commentary" it is on the level of a sixth-grade civics paper.

There was no "The Making of Money Monster" extra on the DVD, but if they had interviewed director Jodi Foster and asked how she had made the film, an honest answer would have been, "Well, I just toook a big crap onto some celluloid... and then I released it to theaters!"

Comments

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