Who Were the Sea Peoples?

Stephen M. Walt gives us a good example here : Here's the basic structure of the situation. If you're a politically ambitious commander like Petraeus, you want good advice. But you also want to make sure that you and your decisions are portrayed in a positive light. So you invite some well-connected civilians to visit your operation, and you make sure you select people who aren't known for being critical of the war and who will be easy to co-opt if need be. And when the consultants come to visit for a few days or weeks, you make sure they receive briefings that give the impression things are going well even if they are not. Next, consider how this looks from the consultants' perspective. If you're an inside-the-Beltway think-tanker (and especially if you're someone who depends on soft money), it's a big deal to be invited to go to Afghanistan or Iraq and advise the commander. It makes you look more important to your colleagues, your boss, and your boa...

Ryan Murphy is skeptical about the paleo diet . And with good reason: there is little evidence supporting it in the peer-reviewed literature, and its most cogent defender is a journalist. One response from the paleo advocates is: It's a conspiracy! All of the peer-reviewed journals have been bought off by big agriculture (although it is a mystery why in the world big agriculture wants us to eat less meat ). Bob Higgs once conveyed to me a very nice way to think about this sort of contention. (I quote him here from memory, so I will not have gotten his argument precisely!) "People ask me," he said, "if I believe that conspiracies exist. 'Of course I do,' I tell them. 'Just go down and eat breakfast in a cafe near K Street in Washington any morning, and there will be a conspiracy being hatched at almost every table around you." "But the people asking the question usually believe in one big conspiracy [the Bilderburgs, the Illuminati, agribu...

Conspiracy theories are usually impervious to evidence. Two I see all the time on sports talk boards are: 1) The NBA tries to guarantee that all series go to seven games, because that yields more revenue; and 2) The NBA tries to guarantee that large-market teams get to the finals, for the same reason. All one has to do to debunk these theories is to glance at a list of NBA final series . Since 1989, only three finals have gone to seven games. There have been more sweeps (four) than seven game series. And San Antonio, Orlando, Detroit, Cleveland, Indiana, New Jersey, Portland, Seattle and Utah make up 20 out of the 46 finals teams. This year, the western team is guaranteed to be San Antonio or Oklahoma City. These theories are usually psychological crutches, explaining why the conspiracy theorist's own team just lost a game, or has never won the finals. So the one about "The NBA only lets the large-market teams win" will be forwarded by someone from, say, Charlot...

Outlined here .

I have had many good things to say about Wood, so it's time for some criticism, directed at Wood's notion of historical causation. This is expounded upon in the chapter on conspiracy theories. Wood quotes with approval Adam Ferguson noting that "in striving to remove inconveniences, or to gain apparent and contiguous advantages, arrive at ends which even their imagination could not anticipate... and nations stumble upon establishments, which are indeed the result of human action, but not the execution of any human design." Wood rightly criticizes conspiracy theorizing for ignoring the fact that the emergence of a social outcome certainly does not mean anyone, let alone a whole group of people, designed that outcome. But he oddly ignores the first part of the famous dictum: "As... ideas [such as Ferguson's] evolved, laying the basis for the emergence of modern social science, attributing events to the conscious design of particular individuals became mo...

"More than any other period of English history, the century or so following the Restoration was the great era of conspiratorial fears and imagined intrigues... Pretense and hypocrisy were everywhere, and nothing seemed as it really was. Politics, especially in the decades from the Restoration to the Hanoverian accession, appeared to be little more than one intrigue and deception after another. It had to be a "horrid plot," said Scrub in George Farquhar's The Beaux Stratagem of 1707. "First, it must be a plot because there's a woman in't. Secondly, it must be a plot because there's a priest in't. Thirdly, it must be a plot because there's French gold in't. And fourthly, it must be a plot because I don't know what to make on't." With so many like Scrub wanting to know but with so little revealed, inferences if hidden designs and conspiracies flourished... Everywhere people senses designs within designs, cabals within cabals; ...

See this . (Hat tip Dreher.) This guy is suggesting both that: 1) The US government has built top-secret bunkers under the Denver Airport; and 2) The US government is doing everything it can to tip us off to the existence of these "top-secret" bunkers by advertising their presence in all of the art it chose for the airport. If I had built top-secret bunkers that I wanted to keep top-secret, my inclination would be to STFU.

Tyler Cowen notes research showing that belief in completely contradictory conspiracy theories is positively correlated. Grist for this mill: how about a web site that holds both that: 1) The theory of evolution is a bunch of rubbish being pawned off on us by our statist masters? and 2) The paleo diet is a vital breakthrough, based on the theory of evolution, being hidden from us by our statist masters? I bet you can find one if you google for a minute or two.