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Conspiracy Theories and Stylized Facts (Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre)
63 Plays3 years ago
Josh and M review Kurtis Hagen's "Conspiracy Theories and Stylized Facts" from the Journal for Peace and Justice Studies, vol. 21 number 2, 2011.
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Josh is @monkeyfluids and M is @conspiracism on Twitter
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Transcript
Introduction and Host Locations
00:00:00
Speaker
So, a new patron and an interesting new problem. How so? Well, this is one of the patrons we don't usually speak about in the intro, given our strangely capitalist. Such cheap. System of charging more for a measly appearance in one intro. But we typically refer to the new patrons who don't get star billing by the first letter of their name and... And... Well, it starts with M.
00:00:27
Speaker
and you're in. So if we start going around congratulating EM for patronizing the podcast, it sounds very much like some weird. But shape. Yeah. Insider trading. Hmm. An interesting predicament. There's only one solution to this problem that I can think of. This will be good. What, pray tell, is that? Everyone is to henceforth be known solely as EM.
00:00:56
Speaker
Well, it's certainly a solution. And it's the one we're going for. Hello and welcome to the podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy. I'm Em, living the high life in Zuhai, and over in Auckland, Aotearoa, New Zealand, it's Em who is still stuck in lockdown. This week, it's another episode of Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre, one in which we review the paper, Conspiracy Theories and Stylos Facts by Em. And I know Em is going to have some very strident views on this one.
00:01:26
Speaker
Well, that doesn't sound confusing or self-aggrandising at all. The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Addison and Dr. M. Denton.
00:01:48
Speaker
Hello and welcome to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. I am Josh Addison in Auckland, Aotearoa, New Zealand. They are Dr. M. Denteth in Zhuhai, China. COVID update still in lockdown. Not much more to say, really.
00:02:02
Speaker
No,
COVID-19 Updates and Britney Spears
00:02:03
Speaker
no, you did have a bumper crop of new cases a few days ago, but now you seem to have gone back to normal case numbers, although I do see that Dr Bloomfield is predicting there will be somewhat of a surge of about 30 cases in the next few days because of the infectious nature of Delta and people basically being in households.
00:02:23
Speaker
Yes, yes, I think it's sort of a given that if one person gets it, then in a couple of days, you're going to see everyone else they live with getting it. So yes, spiking the numbers. But, you know, there was a funny thing. We got down to single digits for one day. There were eight cases a couple of days ago. And then the day after that, there were 45 cases. I don't know how much of that is maybe there was a bit of a delay one day. So we sort of got most of two days worth in one day. Anyway,
00:02:50
Speaker
Point is, we're still in lockdown, and who the hell knows what's going to happen? Quite frankly, it'll be next week before they make a decision about whether we stay at this level or move down. And there's all this talk about, oh, it's all about the mystery cases, not necessarily the numbers, and there's the epidemiological
00:03:09
Speaker
considerations and also the the basically human considerations of the fact that if we stay in lockdown too long people will start acting like dicks anyway so maybe if we can just persuade people to behave nicely by in the lower one it will work i don't know but josh people are already acting like dicks in lockdown because have you are you are avoiding
00:03:26
Speaker
the biggest bit of political news back home, the Act Party releasing a press release about the end of Britney Spears conservatorship in the US, which for some reason, a political party in Aotearoa, New Zealand, felt they needed to not only issue a written press release, but also a video of their leader congratulating Ms. Spears for getting out of a toxic relationship with her father.
00:03:54
Speaker
apparently the most pressing political news the Act party could comment on at this point in time. Right, well I'm happy to say I missed it completely. I assumed it was satire until I saw the press release and saw the video.
00:04:10
Speaker
Yeah, you'd think so.
Creating Conspiracy Theories: A Humorous Approach
00:04:13
Speaker
Anyway, we kind of have a lot to get through this week. We have a conspiracy theory masterpiece theater. And as is usual, I started writing this one, writing up notes, thinking, well, we want to be quick about it. And it's almost a repeat of a paper we've done before. So it'll probably be brief and then wrote, I think, eight pages of notes on it, although a lot of that is just quotes from the text. So who knows? We'll try to rocket through it a bit quicker, especially since we lost half an hour
00:04:40
Speaker
uh to dodgy internet services and having to change to zoom and all sorts of stuff so anyway uh but before we get into the main episode i understand you have a new segment for me about which i know very little indeed you see i've been thinking a lot recently about how i react to bits of information i find on the internet and the conspiracy theorizing hindbrain that i've developed and so we've got a new segment of which
00:05:07
Speaker
We don't have a proper name for it yet, and thus we don't have a proper sting for it yet, but I'm kind of calling it the wordy title, conspiracy theorizing by the conspiracy theory theorists. I feel there's going to be a much more succinct and sexy way to talk about this, but this is our new irregular segment. It won't be a, it won't be a every week occurrence, although actually given the way that my brain works would probably be more often than not. It's going to be a case of me explaining
00:05:34
Speaker
how I can generate conspiracy theories by simply reading things online. So we'll play a sting, which will go in a roundabout here.
00:05:49
Speaker
and at some point that sting is going to be appropriate for the stigma. So this is a new segment which is basically based upon a Facebook conversation I had the other day in which someone pointed out that there is a new paper that's been published called Oral Sex as Infidelity Detection.
00:06:08
Speaker
which is a paper in evolutionary psychology on how oral sex is a method that might have been used to learn about your partner's recent sexual behavior. And my immediate thought was, because my brain is filled with smut, is that this is a paper about how you can detect cheating by the process of eating out your partner. And it turns out that is precisely what the paper is about, the idea that oral sex was developed
00:06:38
Speaker
as a way for partners to work out whether their other beloved is being faithful or unfaithful, presumably because by eating out your partner you go, hmm, you taste a little cummy and it's not the usual seasoning that I'm used to. Surely that could go the other way. Well, please, please do expand. Well, I'm saying it need not
00:07:05
Speaker
Sorry, maybe I'm assuming too much. I assumed you were talking about the male on female variety, but perhaps I'm being too constrained in my thinking and you're merely talking about it. It's a general activity which would work for any configuration of gender as you chose. No, no, no, I'm going for an explicitly sexist view upon this because my second thought was,
00:07:33
Speaker
heterosexuals, there's a kind of a tendency in heterosexual relationships for men to not to want to eat out their partners. It is a stereotype, yes. It is. And I was going, why has that stereotype developed?
00:07:51
Speaker
If it turns out you can use kind of lingus as a method for detecting cheating in your partners and you were you belong to say a cabal of very unfaithful woman, then you would create a culture
00:08:06
Speaker
in which you would discourage men from eating you out because then they would detect just how unfaithful you've been. So this sounds like there's a very, very ancient conspiracy led by women to discourage men from performing kind of lingus on their partners in order to make it all the harder for men to prove out that their spouses are being unfaithful.
00:08:34
Speaker
an ancient conspiracy being run by women to control the world by denying men the pleasure of eating them out. Right. Well, aside from being unnecessarily pornographic, I think then my original point does stands where you could flip the genders and it would also work in going in the opposite direction, if you will.
00:08:57
Speaker
Ah, but Josh, what you're missing out here is that we could make a significant amount of coin if we pivot our podcast to be explicitly anti-feminist in nature, or posit a large-scale work conspiracy being led by a woman to stop heterosexuals like yourself from eating out your partners. And thus, because of that, we can coin it
00:09:24
Speaker
By getting the Sam Harris's and the Joe Rogan's to interview us on our novel hypothesis supported by papers in evolutionary psychology, I finally found a conspiracy theory backed by junk science, which I can then spread online. Right. I'm thinking our first episode should be called Lucy, Fur, or why all women are Satanists.
00:09:50
Speaker
I mean, it's a thing that could be done. I'm going to be honest, I have my doubts about this new segment of yours. If this is the tenor that it's going to be.
00:10:05
Speaker
So I very much doubt the segment is always going to be as explicitly pornographic or indeed feature the sentence you taste a little coming but at the same time it was my immediate time you carry on as you started you set the tone now it's now it's on your on on your fate on your
00:10:33
Speaker
immortal soul, quite frankly, be it that we continue. I see this stuff and I immediately go, what kind of conspiracy theory could you generate from a paper like this? And my first thought was I can see someone going, hmm, kind of lingers could be used as a way of detecting cheating amongst your partners. I'm actually not entirely sure how that would work. I think the biology of
00:10:59
Speaker
that bit down there. I'm saying that bit down there because of course it applies to a whole bunch of different genders and different genders have different bits and you know there's a it's a confusing mismatch of genitalia down there. I don't want to make any judgments about whose genitalia is interacting with whose other or orifices and the like
00:11:16
Speaker
But I really don't know that you can necessarily taste your partner's cheating.
Content Settings and Curtis Hagen's Paper Review
00:11:22
Speaker
I think you have to have a very developed sommelier approach towards genitalia to be able to then go, hmm, your genitals taste ever so slightly different. It's not due to the fact you washed recently.
00:11:36
Speaker
But it is the kind of thing that I end up going, yeah, I read this stuff and I just generate conspiracy theories. And now I feel the listeners should hear about them. Although I'm now keen to feel that you don't think listeners should hear about my pornographic conspiracy theories.
00:11:52
Speaker
When I upload these videos to YouTube, there's that option you can tick with, is this video for children? And I'm always like, well, I mean, it's not for children, so I'll tick the no, but this time I will very definitely be ticking the no, this is not for children.
00:12:08
Speaker
So frankly you've made my choice a bit easier so I guess bravo to you. Can we move on please? Yes we can although frankly I think I think we're going to go from one frying pan to another for you because we're about to move on to a paper that
00:12:24
Speaker
I kind of feel I've punished you with because you weren't the biggest fan of Curtis Huygens first paper we looked at a few months ago. And I think the kind of issues you had with that paper are much more evident in this one. And so I'm basically going to sit back and let you talk about a paper that I'm fairly sure you're going to get annoyed with.
00:12:50
Speaker
Let's find out, I'll say. Let's find out after the sting. Welcome to Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre. Right, so today we are going to be looking at the paper Conspiracy Theories and Stylized Facts by Curtis Hagen.
00:13:13
Speaker
This was published in the Journal for Peace and Justice Studies, Volume 21, Number 2, 2011, an issue which I see also contains papers such as terrorism, secularism, and the deaths of innocents, and one called Why is Torture Wrong? I kind of think I would have been interested to see that one, quite frankly.
00:13:32
Speaker
not because I have doubts over whether or not torture is wrong, but it'd be interesting to see the articles. Now, yes, as you suggested, you may remember that the last paper of Curtis' we looked at was a reaction to the paper by Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule, where they basically had not many kind words to say about conspiracy theories in general, and suggested that the way to combat
00:14:01
Speaker
sort of conspiracy theory generated misinformation was possibly to infiltrate conspiracy theory groups and sort of try to steer the narrative your own way by supplying your own alternative reality and
00:14:17
Speaker
Curtis Hagen's first paper was fairly unequivocal in his opposition to this. And I felt at the time on reading it that while I agreed with his conclusion, that Sunstein and Vermeule's conclusion is not really justified, a lot of it did seem to be him taking issue with the fact that they poo-poo 9-11 truth conspiracy theories
00:14:42
Speaker
And I was never entirely sure if this was a 9-11 truth of paper or just a really committed devil's advocate. You did strongly, it was made at the time that you did feel that it was 9-11 inside job apologetics. It did feel that way, but... No, sorry. Before we even get into the paper, do you feel this paper is more or less 9-11 apologetics than the previous paper?
00:15:11
Speaker
I have to say, honestly, more. But the thing, yeah, just giving away the ending a little bit of it. Once again, I am going to agree with the general thrust of this paper, the actual conclusions it reaches. But yeah, I feel that the way it gets there involves an awful lot of sidetracking into what certainly feels a lot like 9-11 trutherism. But anyway.
00:15:37
Speaker
Let's get started. So the article, the abstract rather of the article reads, in an article published in the Journal of Political Philosophy, Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vibuel argue that the government and its allies ought to actively undermine groups that espouse conspiracy theories deemed demonstrably false.
00:15:52
Speaker
They propose infiltrating such groups in order to cure, quote-unquote, conspiracy theorists by treating their, quote-unquote, crippled astemology with, quote-unquote, cognitive diversity. Their base proposal on a now sole of the, quote-unquote, causes of such conspiracy theories, which emphasizes informational and reputational cascades. Some may regard their proposals as outrageous and anti-democratic. I agree. However, in this article, I merely argue- And we have just lost Josh.
00:16:22
Speaker
But has Josh lost me? That is a good question. I am going to see what happens if I do this. He disagrees with the article. He disagrees with its conclusion. He thinks its conclusions are bad. Basically, I mean,
00:16:39
Speaker
When your conclusion is we should combat conspiracy theories by conspiring, it doesn't inspire confidence. But yes, he thinks that the way they talk about conspiracy theories is wrong, essentially, which is why he doubts their conclusions.
00:16:57
Speaker
So moving into the introduction then basically sort of restates the abstract and then sort of justifies his reaction. He basically, his justification I think for this paper as he states to begin with is that we're not talking about the random musings of some guy on the internet, some obscure academic somewhere,
00:17:21
Speaker
These people are Harvard law professors one of them was and at the time of this paper was written still was at that very time, working for Obama, and potentially you know might might even might even have his ear. And so he finishes out the introduction by saying so although some people may regard the proposal as too outrageous to merit rebuttal.
00:17:42
Speaker
I agree with Sunstein and Dumoulin on one thing, problematic views ought to be confronted, not ignored. And so, particularly given Sunstein's acclaim and position, it is worth explicitly detailing at least some of the falsities and felices on which their proposal is based.
Philosophical Views on Conspiracy Theories
00:17:55
Speaker
This is one of those interesting papers where, like you, I have a little bit of an issue with, say, the motivating example here, which is going to be the 9-11 inside job hypothesis, but large-scale agreement with the argument being put forward by Curtis here. And I think it's kind of interesting focusing here on Sunstein's role in the Obama administration, because Sunstein's role in the Obama administration is quite fascinating.
00:18:25
Speaker
it's also allowed him to have quite a lot of cache in the American political system post Obama. So it's kind of interesting to keep, keep looking at some stain, even if this proposal from 2009 or so is something which never really got acted upon. Although it will also say one of the examples that Curtis uses towards the end of this paper, which is Operation Northwoods is a similar example of a proposal that was never acted upon, but we might take
00:18:54
Speaker
to be kind of interesting its own respect for the sheer fact that it was suggested by people in power, even it was never enacted by people in power. But we'll get to that example towards the end of this discussion. Let's move on to the definition of, well, the definitions.
00:19:12
Speaker
definitions of definitions. That seems like a weird way to put it. Let us move on to the definitions. Definitions indeed, yes. So the first actual section of the article is something called conspiracy theories, and it starts with definitions as all good philosophy papers should. I think the only thing
00:19:29
Speaker
that's interesting to note there is that carrying on, I think, from the previous paper, Hagen is someone who thinks that the term conspiracy theory does not apply to the official story. He thinks that most people wouldn't call things like
00:19:55
Speaker
Saddam Hussein's supposed attempts to conceal weapons of mass destruction, a conspiracy theory because it was the official story, and so on. So he finishes off by saying, roughly following the philosopher Charles Pigdon, I think a more accurate description of what is generally called a conspiracy theory is an interpretation of an historical event that runs counter to an official story and suggests that elements within a Western government have behaved in ways that seem particularly egregious.
00:20:20
Speaker
In any case, my critique of sun stealing from your proposal does not depend on any particular or precise definition of the phrase, which strikes me as a slightly odd thing to say. And also, I want to point out, I don't think this is actually fair to Charles. So it is true that in one of Charles's paper, he talks about the way that most people, when they commonly talk about conspiracy theories,
00:20:43
Speaker
are actually talking about theories that suggest Western governments have misbehaved in some way, shape, or form. But Charles isn't trying to use that as this is how we should define the term conspiracy theory. He's simply going, look, one of the reasons why people are so against the idea of treating conspiracy theories seriously is that we've been trained from an early age to assume that conspiracy theories about our Western governments
00:21:09
Speaker
are mad, bad, and dangerous. So he's not talking here about definitions. He's talking here about common usage and the way that common usage has been inculcated by the powerful to make people want to resist even thinking about the possibility that conspiracy theories are warranted. So I don't think you can roughly follow Charles here because I don't think Charles is advocating for this definition.
00:21:36
Speaker
Charles is simply explaining, this is one of the rationales as to why people don't treat conspiracy theories. Seriously, we're told if they're about Western government, they can't be true. But yes, the Western government bits of it aside, which it does seem like an odd stipulation, the idea that conspiracy theories are by definition opposed to official stories and something we've seen come up and others, although it's something I don't think we've agreed with. But nevertheless,
00:22:02
Speaker
The paper refers to work where at the time recent work on conspiracy theories that the book conspiracy theories the philosophical debate that we've looked right through that issue of the episteme that we looked right through.
00:22:16
Speaker
And referring to the book, Conspiracy Theories, the Philosophical Debate, he says, the bottom line of this work as I read it is that all attempts to explain why conspiracy theories or a definable subset thereof ought to be dismissed have turned out to be failures. And that sounds about right to me, I think. That's sort of what we've been finding time and again, trying to write them off as a
00:22:38
Speaker
as a class, just doesn't seem to work out. And then there's a bit of scene setting, I think, talks about the sorts of dodgy stuff that the US government has done in the past, of which there are numerous examples. And yet these are things that were initially perhaps passed off as conspiracy theories, but are now accepted as fact, which is something I thought that always undermines the whole conspiracy theory, official story distinction when you can get
00:23:04
Speaker
them turning from one into the other just due to the passage of time. Yeah, I mean, I've always taken that to be a metaphysical issue with the official theory line, which is, yeah, but it turns out what's an official theory is very much dictated by a time slice. The official theory at one time is a conspiracy theory at another, which is why I think that distinction really doesn't do the work that people think it does. But I argue that at length elsewhere.
00:23:31
Speaker
Oh, yes. I think it was David Coady who talked about the idea of a cultural context, which kind of does get around that. But anyway, so having said things up, we go into the next section called Causes, Informational and Reputational Cascades. So this is where Curtis Hagen is looking at sun-student thermules, claims that conspiracy theories, even those wacky demonstrably false ones, are nevertheless sort of successful and propagate.
00:24:00
Speaker
And one of the reasons, or some of the reasons, they put forward as to why this happens were these informational and reputational cascades. So he says, some soon from you'll argue that informational cascades, in significant measure, explain the pervasiveness of demonstrably false conspiracy theories. I'll quote them at length to show how easily such cascades can be applied to explain the success of dubious official stories as well. It is not a phenomenon that has any particular relation to conspiracy theories.
00:24:29
Speaker
just as a refresh of the informational cascade to those ones where essentially you get sort of the flow of information where somebody says this and then other people hear it and other people hear it and it sort of gains some kind of momentum even from people further down the track when they were possibly aware of the more suspect origins of it. So what
00:24:53
Speaker
What Kagan does here is reprints a couple of paragraphs from the original paper where they talk about these informational caspades crossing out conspiracy and essentially replacing it with official story. And indeed, it does make perfect sense.
00:25:10
Speaker
Yeah, you can tell the same story regarding informational cascades for both conspiracies, theories, and official stories. But that's only really an issue if you think that conspiracies are necessarily not official stories, which all the people in this paper seem to. But that's not a point we'd agree with. And then again, it also goes on to quote David Cote talking about informational cascades and points out that Cote's
Reputational Cascades in Conspiracy Theories
00:25:38
Speaker
description of them is much less sort of biased, I guess, in terms of anyone being for or against conspiracy theories. And so Hagen says, the point is this, while the dynamic that Sunstein and Vermeule describe is undoubtedly real, it cuts both ways. And yet it works better as an explanation for the success of questionable official stories regarding September 11, some rather strong informational cascades, whether based on accurate information or not,
00:26:07
Speaker
affirming the official story began flowing within the first couple of days and continued unabated countercurrents on the other hand didn't start flowing with any strength for several years, which is something that we keep pointing out the fact that these 9-11 Truth-type stuff took several years after
00:26:26
Speaker
uh, 2001 before we actually started seeing him coming up. Yes, indeed. It's kind of an interesting example here because he's quite right to point out that if you're concerned about informational cascades and as we'll see, reputational cascades in the next section, then if you're going, oh, no, conspiracy theorists are the kind of people who are succumbing to a kind of pathology of this kind of cascading system, you end up going, but hold on, if the conspiracy, if the major conspiracy theory is about 9-11 that we're concerned about,
00:26:56
Speaker
actually start appearing four to five years after the event, then surely it's the official theory which suffers from the problem of the cascade here because the people who believe the official theory are the ones who are really, really, really downstream from the people who posited and argued for it in the first place was the new conspiracy theorists about 9-11
00:27:19
Speaker
who appear three to four years later, they're starting afresh. They don't have an informational cascade to rely upon. They're starting kind of from the basics here. So surely if there's a problem, it's the official theory when a new theory comes up, which is the result of an informational cascade in this kind of bad sense.
00:27:39
Speaker
And I think that is a really interesting point here when we start talking about kind of the development and origin of some conspiracy theories. The kind of examples that Sunstein and Vumil think apply in this case really don't if you've got just a little bit of historical literacy working with you.
00:28:00
Speaker
So then we turn to reputational cascades, which you could possibly call the, I want to say emperor's new clothes type effect, but maybe that's a little bit too cynical of a take on it, but the idea that an idea gains momentum because some people accept it and
00:28:21
Speaker
other people want to go along with them and don't don't want to seem ignorant or out of the loop or something like that. I mean we we do have a nice simple term for this, peer pressure. Peer pressure, yeah. I mean the number of times where people conform to group consensus about say whether a film was good or bad will often be okay so oh I want to be like that cool guy Josh and Josh really likes the film split set
00:28:50
Speaker
second. So I'm going to say I like Split Second as well. Now, of course, Josh is quite right to like Split Second. It is an incredibly good film. And if it turns out you only like it because of Josh's reputation in the community, then you just don't appreciate good films. So I say precisely, I think.
00:29:11
Speaker
What? Anyway, but yes, so talking about the reputation of cascades, Hagen points out that again, they work both ways. Reputational cascades can sort of spread pro and anti-conspiracy theory narratives. He gives the case of Professor William Woodward of the University of New Hampshire, who took a lot, copped a lot of flack when it came out that he was a member of Scholars for 9-11 Truth. He was criticized from many quarters.
00:29:43
Speaker
And then he says, further, I can personally attest as an untenured assistant professor that if I were basing my decision on enhancing or at least not tarnishing my reputation with my colleagues, advocating 9-11-truth would be just about the last thing I would do. Indeed, I have spoken my views on this matter with considerable hesitation and despite the negative effect on my reputation that doing so risks, which seems to be saying that he is a 9-11-truth, which
00:30:07
Speaker
isn't actually relevant to the substance of the argument, but it does seem to be making more explicit stuff that seemed more implicit in the previous paper. But yeah, regardless of this point, it still does say that reputational cascades can promote the anti-conspiratory theory side just as much
00:30:25
Speaker
as the pro side, and especially in the case of 9-11, which let's not forget that he's not bringing this up out for nothing, that it was Sunstein and Vermeule's main example. In the case of 9-11, the cascades in favour of the official story were in place well before the 9-11 truth theories became prominent, which, as we say, didn't happen until 2005-2006 after loose change.
00:30:49
Speaker
And I think if you want to look at the origin of 9 or even truth conspiracy theories and assuming that loose change was sort of the inciting incident, you know, the history of that might tell you a bit of quite a bit, but that's all we had to look at today. And it's something we have looked at before. We haven't changed in the past.
00:31:06
Speaker
Although one thing which I am fascinated by here is if this paper had been written more recently, then a much better example, both for Sunstein and Vermeule and also for Curtis, would be Russiagate because reputational cascade stuff on Russiagate
00:31:22
Speaker
is kind of fascinating. You had the right wing information, reputational cascade, which was, it was a nothing burger. We should pay no attention to it whatsoever. And then the left wing one, which is this just shows, you know, that Trump was basically subverted by the Russians, the Russians control our electoral system. And it did seem
00:31:44
Speaker
or at least does still seem that people's reaction to the claims in Russiagate are very much based upon adhering to a kind of group norm. If you're on the right, then there was nothing to it whatsoever. If you're on the left, there was a lot
00:32:00
Speaker
And that, of course, gets flipped with the election fraud stuff that we saw in the U.S. election last year continuing on now, where if you're on the right, there is widespread evidence of electoral fraud, which the left is ignoring. And if you're on the left, then actually the elections were very secure, and whilst there probably were a few
00:32:20
Speaker
small cases of electoral fraud, as you would expect, nothing to anywhere near the extent of what the people on the right are claiming. And a lot of that does seem to be based upon reputational cascades. Yeah, reputation seems an odd one because we especially, as you say, when you have sort of two sides of it, then you can get cases where people don't care if
00:32:48
Speaker
the reputation amongst their opponents. And in fact, it could be a point of pride that people on the other side dislike them because of their views. But the Cascades exist nevertheless. You can just have competing ones going on at the same time. And I guess the main point of it all is
00:33:05
Speaker
that there's nothing special about conspiracy theories that they, in particular, or that they alone are susceptible to being propagated by informational or reputational cascades and therefore that's a reason why we shouldn't believe them.
Cognitive Infiltration: Ethical Concerns
00:33:25
Speaker
Moving on, the next section is entitled, Cure Cognitive Infiltration. And so now we're looking at Sunstein-Vemuel's ideas for what should be done about the increasing spread of these conspiracy theories, demonstrably false or not. I keep bringing that. That was the phrase that the previous paper seemed to revolve around, that the idea that Sunstein-Vemuel had referred to saying it would be okay to go after these conspiracy theories if they are quote unquote demonstrably false.
00:33:54
Speaker
part of my issue with the previous paper was that Hagen seemed to be quite incensed with the idea that anyone would say 9-11 truth theories are demonstrably false. But anyway, it doesn't actually come up nearly as much in this one. There's another phrase, another phrase that becomes the keyword for this one, but we're not there yet. So Hagen says, as an example of a set of theories that are demonstrably false, some set of them you'll think about counter narratives regarding the events of September 11, 2001.
00:34:24
Speaker
However, they neither provide a comprehensive proof of this falsity, granted there would be an unreasonable to expect of them, nor do they point to such a comprehensive demonstration, a more reasonable expectation. They do provide a limited critique of their own, but not one that inspires confidence in their conclusion, or in their thoroughness or impartiality. And yes, certainly in the original paper, some students will kind of take it as read
00:34:48
Speaker
that 9-11 truth conspiracies are just nonsense and don't put a lot of effort towards arguing that case. And that seemed to be a large part of Curtis Hagen's problem with them. But looking at the issue itself, the idea that this is what they think we should do. We should covertly infiltrate conspiracy theory groups.
00:35:14
Speaker
and in order to try and bend them towards our way of thinking. He says, in addition to the problem of misdiagnosis, their proposed cure has potentially dangerous side effects. By suggesting that groups who promote views they deem to be demonstrably false ought to be infiltrated, they are implicitly suggesting that members of those groups or others who hold similar views, including me, are not fully persons in the Kantian sense of being autonomous rational agents who are thus ends in themselves.
00:35:43
Speaker
which seemed like a bit of a leap to saying that they think it's okay to infiltrate our groups means they think we're not fully human. But it does tie into his next point, which is more persuasive. He gives the analogy of the George W. Bush administration's policy towards the treatment of detainees. And we can think of all the Abu Ghraib, all the
00:36:06
Speaker
war crimes essentially that happened there. So the paper says by condoning harsh interrogations, stress positions and such, the Bush administration set the condition in which abuse was a predictable result. This is one of the many reasons that these policies were ill-advised and that the administration bears considerable responsibility for the abuses that occurred, even though the official policy did not of course explicitly authorise
00:36:29
Speaker
turning detainees into naked human pyramids, or torturing them to death, or sodomizing them with broomsticks, and so on. How do these outrages happen? Dehumanisation. Once someone is regarded as less than fully human, it is hard to avoid a feeling of contempt. And contempt plus power, or at least the sense that one is working in the service of authority, leads quickly to abuse, as the Stanford prison experiments so clearly showed.
00:36:52
Speaker
hasn't that been debunked these days? He's right about the slippery slope argument here. So the official Bush administration policy didn't explicitly state you can do these things, but
00:37:13
Speaker
people took the slight permissions they had and ran with them. And so the worry is, well, the kind of cognitive infiltration mechanism or policy as advanced by Sunstein and Vermeule might seem innocuous at first. All we're doing is trying to stop bad conspiracy theories from spreading through the community. But we can kind of see where that's going to go, which is, well, you know, this is a bad conspiracy theory, not because it's false, but because
00:37:43
Speaker
There's a loss of trust in our institutions. We should probably do something to try and prevent that as well. And then it's just Stalinistic speech everywhere, or at least a lack thereof. Or indeed the episode we did not too long ago about the podcast Bed of Lies, which talked about the police infiltration of left wing activist groups in England.
00:38:05
Speaker
in the not too distant past, where again these are officers infiltrating these groups and on paper they were there to gather and tell to maybe either find out about action that they were planning on taking so that the authorities could take steps against them or gather dirt on people so that there could be
00:38:30
Speaker
ammunition to arrest him or what have you. But what ended up actually happening was these guys, one of them entered into relationships with women, very serious ones, fathered children in some instances. And in one case, sort of formed this full out abusive relationship where the guy, the police officer, essentially withdrew this one from society and kept practically imprisoned.
00:38:59
Speaker
on the grounds that they were, you know, it was too dangerous for them to be out in public and what have you. And it was, yeah, a very, very clear illustration of the fact that once you give people some license to do things that are a little bit questionable, give them an inch and they'll take a mile in cases.
00:39:14
Speaker
I mean, this felt a little bit like sophistry to me, to be honest. The talk of dehumanization when it comes to those prisoners kind of makes sense, but then to say, ah, and look, by not treating us as fully rational agents, they're denying our essential humanity and therefore dehumanizing us as well. That seemed like a little bit of a leap to tie the two together, although once again, I agree with his basic point.
00:39:41
Speaker
Now, I also agree in that I think the analogy between, there's a slippery slope here of you have policy X, they could be unintended consequences Y. And I think the torture stuff under the Bush administration and the dehumanization of detainees makes sense in that respect. But I don't think the analogy is strict enough to then go, that means we're not going to treat conspiracy theorists as actual human beings. That seems,
00:40:11
Speaker
ever so slightly overwrought.
00:40:16
Speaker
Nevertheless, Hagen says that Sunstein and Vermule need to dehumanise these conspiracy theorists to treat them as irrational because, to quote, first, the supposition that they believe demonstrably false theories suggest contemptible ignorance or stupidity. And so this seems to be a bit of the paper. Hagen is of the opinion that Sunstein and Vermule are of the opinion that conspiracy theorists are stupid and beneath content, although
00:40:44
Speaker
that does seem to go in opposition to the whole informational reputational cascade stuff, because I thought the point of that was to say how otherwise rational, well-informed people could be drawn down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole by taking part in these cascades. So it didn't seem to me that they were saying that these people are by definition ignorant and stupid. I thought it was about how do we explain the fact that people who aren't ignorant and stupid can get drawn into this. But anyway,
00:41:13
Speaker
He continues, second positing irrationality justifies the notion that one must lie about one's identity since conspiracy theorists have viewed as incapable of evaluating evidence that does not come from their kind, which I mean that does seem more fair when you look at sort of the, if you're people who are distrustful of the government already then
00:41:32
Speaker
If you're running this line, then that justifies the idea. As Sunstein-Fermil did, they talked about the idea in the original paper. They talk about the decisions around should you be open about who you are or should you hide your identity? And I kind of thought it would be better to hide.
00:41:49
Speaker
And then finally, continuing the quote, in addition, implicit in the proposal to actively undermine selected groups based on the beliefs they hold and promote is the notion that these groups not really have a right to free speech and assembly, which again sounds like a bit of a leap. I mean, certainly some teams will never say that conspiracy theorists shouldn't have the right to do what they're doing. They just think that given that they are doing it, we should respond in a different way.
00:42:15
Speaker
So, yeah, I mean, again, the overall sort of conclusion of this section, that it's a bit, the Whatcom Center for Mural Proposes is a bad thing because there are dangers of abuse and slippery slopes and so on, I agree with, but I don't know that I'm on board with the rhetoric he uses in getting there.
Stylized Facts and Misrepresentations
00:42:35
Speaker
But anyway, now we come to the guts of the paper, the section entitled Stylized Facts. And I think stylized facts is this paper's demonstrably false. It's the term that Hagen picks up on and really sinks his teeth into. I don't remember stylized facts being particularly large part of Sunstein and Fermule's paper.
00:42:56
Speaker
This one quotes just one section of the original paper where they, where Sunstein and Vermeule are quoted as saying, they talk about planting doubts about the theories and stylised facts that circulate within such groups thereby inducing beneficial cognitive diversity. I don't know if that term stylised facts shows up a lot more in that paper but it sure as hell shows up a lot more in this one. What is a stylised fact? Dr Dentith, what is a stylised fact?
00:43:21
Speaker
You got me just as I alt-tabbed over to my database to actually check to see how often the stylized effect appears in the original pairs. So a stylized fact is not always negative in connotation as
00:43:36
Speaker
Curtis Wright's stylized fact can mean a general claim that is widely accepted as true as a result of its, in brackets, supposed instantiation in a wide variety of contexts. Its presumed truth then serves to limit interpretations of phenomena. For example, the idea that conspiracy theories are unwarranted is a stylized fact in this sense. So a stylized fact
00:44:02
Speaker
isn't necessarily a bad thing. It's contextualized, presumed to be true, and plays a role in your analysis of other facts within the context of
00:44:17
Speaker
of those claims. So yeah, it's the way in which Sunstein and Vermeule use stylized facts that Curtis has an issue with, because as he goes on to say, Sunstein and Vermeule often know explicit example of conspiracy theorists relying on specific stylized facts. So it's hard to know exactly what they are thinking of.
00:44:38
Speaker
Nevertheless, since circulating these, in brackets, unstated stylos facts, is apparently taken to be an epistemic sim sufficient to justify government infiltration, I take the phrase to be intended in a negative sense. I will rather loosely treat it as meaning simply a misleading characterisation of reality.
00:45:02
Speaker
And so now we get to the part of the paper that seems the most sort of polemical, the most really putting forward, I don't know, an agenda, is that the right word? I mean, it basically seems to be Curtis saying, you're saying my facts are stylized facts. No, no, no, you're the ones peddling stylized facts here, buddy.
00:45:23
Speaker
I'm paraphrasing. So he goes in to talk about, he lists off four stylized facts, which he believes Sunstein and Vermeule are actually appealing to, and if stylized facts are bad things, then that shows their reasoning must be suspect.
00:45:39
Speaker
Before he gets into the section though he says, in this part of my discussion I will not restrict myself to the version of Sunstein and Vermeule's article that was published in the Journal of Political Philosophy, but will include examples from an earlier version of their paper published online. I think this is fair because their issue is their own tendency to stylise facts, not whether the peer review process ferreted out all such significant misleading facts, which we will see it did not.
00:46:03
Speaker
Now there was a similar, in his previous paper there was at one point reference to not the actual text of their paper but an earlier draft. Is this is this kosher to be bringing up drafts? As we discussed last time, I don't think so. I don't think it's appropriate to bring up unpublished versions of papers. Now admittedly it's
00:46:26
Speaker
It's a bit of a gray area here because that paper was circulated online so you can go look. It wasn't published, but it was made publicly available and people read about it. At the same time, I do think if you're going to criticize someone's argument in the academic sense, you criticize what they've actually committed themselves to say in print.
00:46:48
Speaker
rather than what they might have put in a draft. Because we all know that in the drafting process, you might end up saying something that a reviewer goes, actually, that's a really, really stupid thing to say. And here's an explanation as to why. And you then change your view.
00:47:05
Speaker
And thus if you criticize an unpublished paper by saying, well, weren't they stupid to say this thing? You might go, well, yes, the authors are aware of that. That's why it's not in the published version of the paper. Also to answer your previous question, how often does the term stylized fact appear in the original published version of Sunstein and Vermeule? It occurs in the one quote which Curtis has provided. Right.
00:47:33
Speaker
So by that argument, it's not a particularly major part of their paper. I mean, the word stylized seems to occur, let me just check that, three times, of which one of those instances is the word stylized fact. You also get, the example is highly stylized, conspiracy cascades arise through more complex processes.
00:47:59
Speaker
Oh, actually, sorry. Stylized appears twice, in which one instance is stylized fact. The word style appears on its own 1960s style infiltration. So, no, it's not a major part of the original discussion.
00:48:18
Speaker
Anyway, so we come to the section where we enumerate the stylized facts that Sunstein and familiar are resting on.
Critique of Historical Plans and Evidence
00:48:27
Speaker
So first, as far as fact number one, conspiracy theories are the stuff of rumor. And this is where, as you mentioned before, we get into Operation Northwoods.
00:48:34
Speaker
So Huygens takes issue with the fact that Sunstein and Vermeule refer to Operation Northwoods as a rumoured plan by the Department of Defence to simulate acts of terrorism and blame them on Cuba. But as we've talked about in the past, it wasn't actually rumoured, like we have the documents these days, we know it was actual, this was stuff that people actually talked about and know they never did it, it all got nixed by Kennedy, wasn't it?
00:48:59
Speaker
Yep. Nevertheless, these plans were there and this paper goes further to say, not only were they not rumored, it wasn't about simulating acts of terrorism, it was about actually carrying out acts of terrorism. I thought it was all about false flags or large extent. All about false flags, yes. I mean, I don't know
00:49:19
Speaker
You could be charitable and say that when Sunstein and Vmule talk about simulating terrorist attacks, they mean they're not, they're real attacks, but they're simulated terror attacks because it's a false flag, it's not actual terrorism, but I don't know, maybe, but that's a fairly pedantic and general reading of it. I get the impression going back to the original paper by Sunstein and Vmule, is that they're going, well, this is
00:49:45
Speaker
This document is a little bit awkward because it does show that our government from time to time really does seriously think about doing bad things. Luckily, in this case, they didn't do the bad thing. So we're going to really underplay the bad intentions behind this document by going, well, you know,
00:50:06
Speaker
It's only rumoured because they didn't do it and will downplay the seriousness of the bad things they didn't do by talking about it being a simulated attack as opposed to know if they had actually done it, there'd be no simulation. It wouldn't be a case of a person going to the field and going, pew, pew, with their fingers pointing at Cubans. It would have been US soldiers with guns firing actual lead bullets into their targets.
00:50:36
Speaker
And then at this point, there's a fairly lengthy quote about the fact that Northwoods included a plan to actually fly a plane by remote control and blow it up, which is more detail that needed to be in this paper for the purposes of the point he's making, which is that Sunstein and Fabiola are perhaps unjustifiably dismissive of conspiracy theories.
00:50:57
Speaker
It does, it does start, it felt to me like leaning into 9-11 truth theory of sort of, you know, this is establishing precedent, but nevertheless, it does seem fair to say that Sunstein and Vermeule were not, were overly dismissive of the likes of Operation Northwoods.
00:51:16
Speaker
Then we need to stylise fact number two. This is the fact that Sunstein and Fermule are supposedly putting forward. Clear evidence proves conspiracy theories are false. And this is kind of where I lost it a little bit. This is because this one is entirely referring to a bit from the online draft that was taken out completely of the final version.
00:51:36
Speaker
But in that draft, Sunstein and Vermeule wrote, some theorists claimed that no plane hit the Pentagon even after the Department of Defense released video frames showing Flight 77 approaching the building.
00:51:48
Speaker
Now, I've seen those frames that the Department of Defense released. And they really don't. There's three frames. One shows the side of the building. One shows a blurry shape on the edge of the frame, which could be anything. And then one shows an explosion. So to say that those three video frames completely prove that theories that it wasn't a plane that hit the Pentagon are false isn't really true.
00:52:17
Speaker
he's not, he jumps on this particular line, comes back to it multiple times to basically say, look, look at these guys. Look, here they are saying that it's easily, it's been completely disproved, but there's this one bit of evidence is rubbish. And he goes on to it, he sort of goes on about this multiple times. And then after, in fact, after sort of saying this is the bit of evidence they brought up,
00:52:39
Speaker
And it's not true. He eventually talks about, eventually he says, it is positively chilling to think that if I sought to meet with like-minded individuals, our group could be targeted for infiltration if some student will get their way.
00:52:54
Speaker
Further, it adds insult to injury for them to use evidence quote unquote as useless as the supposed pictures of Flight 77 approaching the Pentagon to quote unquote demonstrate the falseness of alternative views and thereby justify their deceit, countenancing, anti-democratic and epistemically suspect proposal, which really sounds like he's taking it personally at this stage. He's sort of saying that if they had their way, they'd be infiltrating my people and they'd be doing it on the back of this of dodgy evidence.
00:53:21
Speaker
Now, I think even in the case of Flight 77, I think it would be fair to say there is a hell of a lot of evidence that disproves any theory that it wasn't a plane that hit the Pentagon. There was photos of wreckage all over the lawn. Even somewhere you could see the airline logo on the image. There is a wealth of eyewitness testimony that it was an airplane.
00:53:47
Speaker
Maybe you can say all of these independent, supposedly independent people paid off, but I don't know. But then they even found, as I understand it, they found the flight recorders of the airplane inside the Pentagon. I think the voice recorder was too damaged to be useful, but the other flight recorder one wasn't. But anyway.
00:54:02
Speaker
Although, I mean, M. Curtis's defense here, he does say in the paper, he does think that Flight 77 did hit the side of the Pentagon. So his argument is this bit of evidence that Sansin and V. Muriel says shows the theories demonstrably false isn't on its own particularly good because you point out it's three frames.
00:54:23
Speaker
It's very vague. It could be a beluga whale crashing into the side of the Pentagon, given the photographic evidence we have. It would be weird, though. I mean, it would be weird, but I mean, where do things have happened? Although they have it used as true entirely. But I mean, I think your broader point here is the one which is more salient, which is this example has been removed from the published paper.
00:54:49
Speaker
So I suspect that reviewers went, yeah, this is not a good example because it isn't clear evidence that that conspiracy theory is false. Look at the three frames and point to me exactly where you can show me there is a plane. So maybe don't use this example because people are going to react exactly the way Curtis has
00:55:14
Speaker
and say your evidence that shows the theory is false shows nothing of that sort and it really does make the argument a lot weaker if you use it, which is presumably the reason why it doesn't appear in the published paper.
00:55:29
Speaker
I mean, it does, it possibly doesn't speak well of some student from you all that they, it kind of makes it sound like they didn't really do, they're not possibly not doing their due diligence if they jumped at that one because presumably that heard that the Department of Defense had released this and that was case closed when it didn't really do anything. And also because had they bothered, I reckon they could have found much more convincing evidence that it was a plane, like I just mentioned. So, I mean, if you want to say that some student from you all are not,
00:55:58
Speaker
don't take enough care in coming up with their examples, given the reach of what and the possible implications of what they're proposing, then possibly that's a fair point. But once again, not too happy with the way he got there.
Ethics of Infiltration and Historical Parallels
00:56:11
Speaker
But moving on to stylised fact number three, which is that infiltration is benign.
00:56:17
Speaker
So he quotes Sunstein and Fervule as saying, by conflict infiltrative of extremist groups, he says, or they said rather, we do not mean 1960s style infiltration with a review to surveillance, with a view to surveillance and collecting information possibly for use in future prosecutions. Rather, we mean that government efforts might succeed in weakening or even breaking up the epistemological complexes that constitute these networks and groups.
00:56:45
Speaker
And Curtis says of that, this gives the impression that the co-intel operations of the 50s and 60s were benign and passive. It goes on to quote Catherine Olmsted, which is a name I recognize. Who is Catherine Olmsted? We interviewed her back in the day. There we go. That's why I recognize it.
00:57:02
Speaker
Yeah, University, so Davis, so I'm getting the university in California, so it's USC Davis, University of Southern California, Davis historian, author of the book Real Enemies, which is a history of physical shenanigans in the US over the 20th century.
00:57:25
Speaker
The book is fantastic for showing just how many conspiracies actually did occur in the background of American politics. And yeah, sexual and stuff that was going on in the 50s and 60s is kind of amazing for how did they get away with this stuff? And yes, he quotes her basically to all the really dodgy stuff they got up to in Co-Intel Pro, which we've also looked at in another episode.
00:57:51
Speaker
It seemed a little bit odd to take Sunstein and Vermeule saying, you know, we wouldn't want things to be as bad as they were in the sixties. We'd be more benign than that to then say, so you're saying things weren't bad in the sixties. I mean, it is true. They do gloss over it fairly quickly. You know, they don't, they don't certainly in any way go into the depths of what did happen in COINTELPRO, which was some deeply, deeply dodgy stuff.
00:58:17
Speaker
he, Curtis finishes a section by saying, had Sunstein and Vermeerle given a fuller and more accurate account of the true history of past practices, it would have aroused a sense that great caution is warranted. So instead, they stylized. And I mean, yeah, I agree. They do, they do gloss over that fairly quickly and move on, move past the poor history which could in another world, in another version of this paper, have led into more concern about the stuff we talked about before, the slippery, slightly abuse and so on and so forth.
00:58:47
Speaker
It did seem to be a little bit jarring to read those two quotes side by side. Anyway, last one, stylized fact number four, conspiracy theorists are ignorant extremists. So here Curtis again claims that Sunstein for Mule put forward a caricature of conspiracy theorists. He quotes them saying that conspiracy theorists have little relevant information. And then later they also said a conspiracy theorists that they have skewed information.
00:59:15
Speaker
And then basically argues against this by pointing out there's a whole lot of established scholars and engineers and architects who actually do believe in 911 truth. Thank you very much. I would not call them ignorant or foolish would you.
00:59:30
Speaker
which did seem, again, unnecessarily 9-11, truthy-ish, but comes the end of it saying, thus in order to make their proposal palatable, some students will need to stylise their depiction of those who question official stories. Indeed, they go to absurd lengths, worrying that their proposed infiltrators might be asked by conspiracy theorists to commit crimes, as suggested by the discussion of the previous stylised factors, more likely that the infiltrators will be the ones then proposing criminal activity,
01:00:00
Speaker
even if Sunstein and Fermil don't explicitly advocate this, which seems a fair point. I can't remember where I was reading about this, but I remember having people sort of saying in activist type circles, if there's a member of your group, if there's one person who's constantly agitating to escalate and to do sort of more semi-legal or illegal things, that person's probably the cop.
01:00:25
Speaker
Actually, that came out recently with a discussion of Damien Dement, who's one of the anti-lockdown protesters back home in Aotearoa, New Zealand, who was also encouraging people to meet up in Aotear Square and engage in a mass protest against the lockdown in Auckland, and people going, he seems to be really, really keen
01:00:50
Speaker
on people congregating and breaking the public health order around COVID-19 to the point where we know the police have visited him in the past and told him off for his activities. Has he been subversive? Is he now working for the cops?
01:01:09
Speaker
now to encourage people to incriminate themselves by coming to these meetings because he's short acting like those weird activists who end up being police informant. Maybe he's one as well.
Conclusion and Free Assembly Rights
01:01:23
Speaker
He does make the good point that
01:01:26
Speaker
Basically, you could say that OK, some conspiracy theorists are actually dangerous. I mean, we know they are. That sounds to me. We'll talk about the Oklahoma bombing and stuff like that. But the point is that you could probably point to any group of people and say, yes, some of them are actually going to be dangerous individuals who would count on doing these actual violent acts. It's not conspiracy theorists
01:01:49
Speaker
in particular, are a group that are not a group where you can say, well, they're dangerous. It's individual. The danger doesn't come from the mean conspiracy there. It comes from something else, which again, I agree with. So we come to the conclusion, which I think I'll just read the whole thing out in one go. And then we can put forward our concluding remarks. So the conclusion reads,
01:02:14
Speaker
The stylization of the above facts is important for the plausibility of Sunstein and Vermeule's argument. One, if they fully acknowledge the history of real conspiracies and of theories that remain plausible if unproven, that would undermine the efficacy of their dismissive rhetorical posture regarding the ill-defined subset of those theories that they believe should be undermined by COVID operations.
01:02:34
Speaker
Two, by whitewashing the history of infiltration, they make their proposals seem less obviously problematic. Three, by presenting a caricature of people who espouse so-called conspiracy theories, they treat them as other, something less than human beings not fully capable of reason, otherwise a more honest, straightforward and respectful response would seem more appropriate than infiltration.
01:02:52
Speaker
And finally four, the bogus claim that there are pictures clearly identifiable as Flight 77 approaching the Pentagon made it possible for them to ridicule conspiracy theorists who continue to believe otherwise. Without recourse to ridicule, Sunstein and Famille's responsibility to deal with the relevant evidence in a more sophisticated way would have been more evident.
01:03:10
Speaker
and addressing the evidence in this way would have made establishing the falsity of all theories that suggest insider complicity in 9-11 hopelessly complex, but without establishing the clear falsity of those theories they could not reasonably frame the members of the so-called 9-11 truth movement as irrational and thus appropriate targets for cognitive infiltration. In the final version of their papers, Sunstein and Vermeule dropped the reference to Flight 77, presumably because it is so easily exposed as false.
01:03:33
Speaker
In the end, they didn't really need to resort to ridicule based on false evidence. The strong bias against conspiracy theories, especially in the academy, evidently seems to make such ridicule unnecessary. It should have been obvious to these law professors that peaceful, law-abiding people ought to be allowed to freely assemble and pursue their inquiries without infiltration.
01:03:51
Speaker
and the suppliers, even to those who promote theories that posit state crimes against democracy, which is what the most dangerous so-called conspiracy theories typically allege. In the interest of peace and justice, all people ought to be allowed to freely assemble and pursue their inquiries without infiltration, even those or perhaps especially those who dare to question official narratives.
01:04:10
Speaker
Which sounds fair to me. It seems to be moving off the point a little bit that there are people who we want to be infiltrating. The fellow who the other week stabbed some people in the shopping mall here in New London in Auckland was under 24 hour surveillance from the police because they were worried he was going to do something like he ended up doing.
01:04:32
Speaker
But I think it seems like the point that you'd want to be emphasizing here is the one that he made earlier on, that it's not the main conspiracy theories that's the worrying thing that means prompts you to want to infiltrate and keep an eye on them. It's other things. And suggesting that it's OK to tag conspiracy theory groups just because they believe in conspiracies is wrong, which
01:04:58
Speaker
I certainly agree with it as a point that was made during the paper but it didn't sort of seem to be the thrust of the conclusion the thrust of the conclusion seemed to be more again more about what are these idiots doing suggesting that my life and truth conspiracy theories are wrong.
01:05:13
Speaker
I mean, there's another point to be made here, which is that line, it should have been obvious to these law professors that peaceful, law-abiding people ought to be allowed to freely assemble and pursue their inquiries without infiltration. Now, of course, when you're in a government, you're kind of doing risk analysis on a whole bunch of things, and the pandemic is a good example of this. You can assume that people are
01:05:35
Speaker
natural rule adherence. Actually, that sounds wrong. There are kind of people who walk around naked or about natural rule. You can assume that some people obey the rules and don't need much in the way of coaxing or coercion. And so you have a kind of light hand with your approach towards the pandemic. Or you might assume that actually most people will not obey the rules unless it's a kind of heavy hand. You want there to be some kind of policing, a fine system.
01:06:05
Speaker
police officers being able to give people spot finds, being able to dog people in through phone numbers and the like. Now, of course, if you're in the security services, you're going, well, it's a whole bunch of people out there with weird views. And most of them might turn out to be peaceful and law abiding people, but some of them
01:06:26
Speaker
may turn out to be war like rule breakers. And so we need to do a little bit of infiltration to all of these communities to work out who's good and who's bad. And then we keep an eye on the bad people. We don't worry so much about the good people.
01:06:42
Speaker
people. Sun scene in Vermeule, obviously from that camp that's going, we think the risks are too high and thus we need there to be at least some degree of infiltration to keep an eye on these people to see whether they're turning toxic.
01:06:59
Speaker
And that's not an argument then in epistemology. That's an argument then in, say, the ethics of care or the duty of care. How much infiltration or coercion are we going to allow in a system of this particular type? And so there's a kind of weird assumption that these people are peaceful, law abiding citizens who should be allowed to go about doing their business.
01:07:26
Speaker
from the perspective of someone in government, you might go, yeah, but we need to check that. We can't just assume that we need to do a little bit of vetting, because some of these weird views are associated with weird people who do weirdly violent things. And that's not my giving a defense of Sunstein and Vimy or there. This is simply me going,
01:07:49
Speaker
I can see the argument that goes, just because you appear to be peaceful and law abiding doesn't necessarily mean that all the members of your community are. And if I'm really risk averse, I need to make sure that if your community looks peaceful and law abiding, every single member of that community is peaceful and law abiding. Because otherwise, I'm going to be keeping an eye on you for quite some time.
01:08:18
Speaker
And certainly you could argue that some conspiracy theories have a history of being used to justify violence. So for instance, the Great Replacement type conspiracy theories were behind a mass murder here in New Zealand and numerous other acts of violence overseas. So maybe not the fact that they're conspiracy theories, but the fact that they're conspiracy theories, whichever history of promoting violence could justify
01:08:47
Speaker
these people are, you know, keeping a closer watch on these people, but some students of you all aren't saying that, they're sort of saying conspiracy theories in and of themselves are something that we need to look at, which is not a valid point, you know, which is something I don't agree with, which means I do agree with the ultimate conclusion of this paper. But I mean, yeah, again, I feel the same way as I did last time, basically. I agree with the conclusions, but a lot of it felt like
01:09:16
Speaker
Curtis being personally offended by Sunsted and Vermeule's arguments and annoyed at the fact that they're so dismissive of 9-11 truth theories, I thought that, especially the insistence on using their words against them, literally the two-word stylized facts, just kind of bogged things down.
01:09:36
Speaker
each of those four segments that talked about a stylized fact that Sunstein and Vermeule supposedly relied on did make an okay point, but often it wasn't exactly the point in the heading, for one thing.
01:09:53
Speaker
and was all just a little bit bogged down in the rhetoric. And I do start to feel like some sort of a black hole was about to form out of irony or something reading through this, given that you basically seem to have Sunstein and Vermeule sort of making unwarranted projecting their
01:10:13
Speaker
preconceptions onto conspiracy theorists to come up with their theories and then this kind of seems to be Curtis projecting his preconceptions onto Sunstein and Vermeule to write this paper and now here I am projecting my preconceptions onto Curtis and giving my opinion of it. I'm not sure whether we're all about to disappear into some sort of some sort of implosion vortex type dealie so maybe I should just stop talking.
01:10:38
Speaker
I'm just sitting here thinking, and I had a preconception as to how you were going to react to this paper given your reaction to the previous paper by Curtis. I mean, my impression of this is the Sunstein and Vermeule paper is, and this is to use the term that Sunstein and Vermeule use, which is the crippled epistemology term,
01:10:58
Speaker
What cripples their paper in their own terms is their choice of example. 9-11 is actually not a good example for the kind of thing that Sunstein and Vermeer appear to be concerned with. And I think if the paper had been about great replacement conspiracy theorists,
01:11:17
Speaker
then the paper might be taken more charitably. People who believe these great replacement or great reset conspiracy theories actually do go around engaging in acts of violence and mass murder.
01:11:34
Speaker
I mean, there's a lot of mass shootings in the US, which you can put down to people who have these weird white nationalist, white supremacist views. And you might go, well, these views actually seem to be both disturbing and also correlated with violence here.
01:11:52
Speaker
And we probably don't want that violence. And if we could find some way to change people's hearts and minds, maybe that might be a good infiltration to engage them. Now, I still don't know whether something in Vimeo's argument would actually work, but it would be a better motivating example for the kind of argument they want to present.
01:12:14
Speaker
So I do agree with Curtis, the 9-11 examples here are not good. They're not good for Sunstein and Vermeerls paper, although I can also see your reaction here, which is, yeah, but you're kind of laboring the point. And it's not working in your favor either. So there we go. And I did notice, was it in one of the footnotes?
01:12:41
Speaker
when he talks about, he basically mentions a Charles Pigdon paper that I didn't, his name I did not recognise, and I was going to ask if that is something that we'll be talking about soon. Oh have I managed to skip a Charles paper? It's not in the paper.
01:13:02
Speaker
Well surely if you look at the bibliography you should be able to look so picked and picked and picked and poppery visited. There was only the one paper. He talks about the very last footnote.
01:13:18
Speaker
He talks about, will to thou conceal this dark conspiracy from... Oh, I... Anyway, it's a footnote right at the end of the thing. Not relevant to the current discussion, but I was interested to see a name I recognized and a paper title that I did not. So maybe that's something we'll be looking at in the near future.
01:13:39
Speaker
I think from memory that was a, I think I've got a copy of it somewhere, but I don't think it's ever being published in a journal. I think it was a piece that was put up on in those, what would have been the equivalent of academia.edu or fill papers back in the day. I will need to verify that. Is the references just a link to a PDF on the Otago University website?
01:14:02
Speaker
Yes, so I think it was a piece that Charles wrote and was made available after a talk. I don't think it's published work, which is why it hasn't appeared in this series. I do have a copy of it somewhere. I'm just not finding it immediately. Oh well. Anyway, I think we're at the end of an episode.
01:14:22
Speaker
It was a little longer getting to the end of this one, given that you would not have heard, but we had to sit through half an hour of internet difficulties before we managed to get recording this one. So I think let's wrap things up and get on with our lines. I have found the piece. It's actually labeled in my database. It's called Falsehood and Fotly, although the actual title, the running title is Wilt Thou Wou Can See All This Dark Conspiracy. And you see some of those quasi Shakespearean ones.
01:14:52
Speaker
I think from memory this was actually a letter to the editor that he then published online because it I think it's a response to yes it's a it's a response to an article in the Otago Daily Times from 2006. Well there we go anyway so we're gonna we're gonna bring this episode to a close but then go off and record a bonus one for our patrons. What do we have to tell them about this week?
01:15:21
Speaker
Oh, we're going to talk about the six point plan to steal the 2019-2019? No, 2020 election. I've just lost all sense after this discussion of a paper of us all sense in time. I mean, maybe they wanted to steal an election back in 2019 as well.
01:15:39
Speaker
But we'll talk about the Six Point Plan to steal the last US presidential election, thus indexing it to a rise of time for the publication of this podcast. And then we're going to talk about why the Vinland map is a fake, which people kind of already knew, but now we know for sure.
01:15:58
Speaker
Exactly. So if you would like to become a patron, now I said this in the bonus episode last week, I don't think I said it in the main episode, if my voice sounds particularly clear and deep and sonorous to you, this episode and last episode, it's because I'm speaking into a brand new microphone
01:16:18
Speaker
which I needed to purchase on account of not having access to the old one and I purchased it with the money given to us by our own blessed patrons. So let me say publicly on the main episode, thank you very much patrons and let me also say if you would like to become one
01:16:33
Speaker
you can go to betrayan.com and look for the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. And you'll not only get the warm feeling in your heart of supplying me with this almost professional quality. It's the kind of microphone that the big boys use. I think Joe Rogan has more expensive ones, but I'm pretty sure it's fairly, it's what most of the podcasters use. It is the ubiquitous microphone of the podcaster. It is the Blue Yeti, which is not a dance by Suzanne Paul, but could be.
01:17:01
Speaker
So if you'd like that good feeling and also if you would like to get access to these bonus episodes that only our patrons get to listen to, then sign on up. But if you don't want to become a patron, that's fine. Also, you're part of our audience and we love and respect you equally. Actually, not equally. We do like the patrons better. Let's be honest. That's true. They are the most beautiful. They are the best.
01:17:24
Speaker
We still like you just fine though. So unless you have anything to add, I think we can call this episode done. Yes, I think after discussion of the sexist conspiracy theory and then a discussion of Curtis's paper, we can call this podcast to a close. In that case, all that remains is for me to say goodbye. And for me to say
01:17:51
Speaker
Goodbye! And remember, the truth is out there, but not quite where you think you left it.
01:18:16
Speaker
So, a new patron and an interesting new problem. How so? Well, this is one of the patrons we don't usually speak about in the intro, given our strangely capitalist... But sheep! The system of charging more for a measly appearance in one intro. But we typically refer to new patients who don't. Patience. Let's try that again.