Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
David Coady‘s Conspiracy Theories and Conspiracy Theorists (Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre)
78 Plays3 years ago
Josh and M review a chapter from David Coady's "What to believe now?"
—
Josh is @monkeyfluids and M is @conspiracism on Twitter
You can also contact us at: podcastconspiracy@gmail.com
Why not support The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy by donating to our Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/podcastersguidetotheconspiracy
or Podbean crowdfunding? http://www.podbean.com/patron/crowdfund/profile/id/muv5b-79
Recommended
Transcript
Busy Schedules & Technical Challenges
00:00:00
Speaker
This week we have no intro because I've been busy working on a keynote presentation and a spot of teacher training got in the way of my preparation time yesterday. So our intro is no intro? Meta? Well it's more of an announcement than it is an intro. Yeah but it's in the intro section of the Google Doc we use and it's probably going to be marked offers the intro on the metadata of the podcast. Well it's kind of intro adjacent? Intro-esque. Intro-ish.
00:00:29
Speaker
Proto intro. Sounds like an intro to me, just not a very good one. And that differs from our usual intros in what way? Good point and well made, but that also means that this is an intro. You got me. This is in fact an intro. And you know what follows the intro? The theme? The theme.
00:00:59
Speaker
Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Addison and Dr. Imdentith. Hello and welcome to the Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy. My name is Josh Addison here in Auckland, New Zealand. They are Dr. Imdentith in Zhuhai, China, trying a different locale this week in hopes of maybe getting slightly better reception than we have been in previous weeks using
00:01:26
Speaker
our preferred podcasting tool. Yes, I am broadcasting from my apartment, which up until about 10 minutes ago was the perfect location to broadcast for a podcast. And then someone in, well, work people in the apartment upstairs appear to be installing something in the wall using drills. So at some point, if we're unlucky, there's going to be a lot of drill noise going on in this podcast, which is going to be an absolute pain to edit out.
00:01:53
Speaker
possibly. Or maybe we could have just stuck something in at the start about you recording this from the dentists and just had to throw in an occasional, ooh, me molars or something. And then of course, I could have done my Steve Martin impression, you'll be a dentist, a dentist, you have a talent for causing pain.
00:02:13
Speaker
I still say the line, um, I thrill when I drill a bicuspid, even though people say I'm mel-a-justed is the best rhyme anyone has written in any piece of music ever, adjusted, mel-a-justed with bicuspid.
Show Review: 'Only Murders in the Building'
00:02:28
Speaker
Have you been watching Only Murders in the building? I have not.
00:02:31
Speaker
Great Steve Martin on that, and also great Selena Gomez and great Martin Short. And it's all about podcasting, so frankly I think you're obliged to watch it. Okay, I guess I better get on to it, but how about we record our podcast first though? Or we could pause, you could watch all 10 episodes of Only Murders in the Building, and then we could resume the podcast.
00:02:58
Speaker
and talk about only murders in the building. Yeah, I think we could just do this one now. Or we could just pretend that we've just paused, you've watched them, and then you've come back. Although that would be a problem because I haven't watched episode 10 yet. So actually, let's say you've watched all 10, but you're going to talk about it with me next week because I'm not up to date like you are. Sure, let's say that. But can we also then just record this week's episode? Oh, fine. We'll record a podcast.
Introduction to David Coady's Paper
00:03:26
Speaker
Yes, and what a podcast it is. A cast of velnents, which a cast of basically two. Well, three, if you count the author of the paper, who we're going to be talking about today, we're looking at another David Coady in this edition of conspiracy theory, Masterpiece Theatre. And I think we better just play a sting and get on with it right now. Indeed. It's time to erect that fortress around our hearts.
00:03:53
Speaker
It's time to play What the Conspiracy. The only kind of erection I'm down for. So, this week we are looking at conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorists, which is a chapter from the book What to Believe Now, applying epistemologically
00:04:17
Speaker
Let's try that again. What to believe now, applying epistemology, not epistemology, even though I quite frankly prefer the sound of that, applying it to contemporary issues. That's what it's been applied to. This is a book, but the whole book is David Cote, right? It's not a...
00:04:33
Speaker
So, the philosophically interesting aspect of this chapter is that initially this chapter was going to be a co-written paper with child spectrum. But due to circumstances the authors don't go into, that never occurred. David then says, look,
00:04:49
Speaker
The ideas are from Charles and myself, but all the errors in the chapter are of course my own. So this started off as a different piece and became a book chapter. The thing which is interesting from my perspective is that this book is the reason why my first book, The Philosophy of Conspiracy Theories, was not published by Rutledge.
00:05:10
Speaker
Because they already had a conspiracy theory book. Basically, I had submitted a proposal to Rutledge, which publishes Wiley Blackwell, which is the actual publication house that released David's book. And they went, yeah, this is a really, really, really good proposal. We would love to publish it. But
00:05:31
Speaker
We published David Coady's book recently, and that deals with conspiracy theories, and we don't really want another volume competing with an existing volume in our lineup. So we wish you good luck submitting it elsewhere. Well, fair enough.
00:05:46
Speaker
So yes, this this particular chapter is all about conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorists, although I gather the rest of the book deals with a bunch of other ones.
Rumor vs Gossip: A Truth-Seeking Perspective
00:05:54
Speaker
And indeed, it comes directly after a chapter on rumors, rumors and rumor mongers, as it's called, which is rumor. We've talked about rumor a little bit in the past.
00:06:05
Speaker
Is that something you've looked into more? My first published paste was on rumors, which was in fact a reply to David Cody and his father, Tony Cody, where I argue that we need to make a demarcation between gossip and rumor, because I take it that gossiping is a kind of malicious activity whereby people spread
00:06:32
Speaker
misinformation or disinformation. Whilst rumour is a situation where we're engaging in a kind of truth seeking activity. So people tend to when they're engaging in rumour, trying to work out whether something they've heard is true or false or warranted or unwarranted to believe by testing it out on others. So when you gossip,
00:06:52
Speaker
You're basically spreading information that you're fairly sure is malicious. It might not actually be false, but it is malicious. And you're, you know, you're relaying salacious information to other people. But when you're engaging in rumour mongering, you're often trying to search for the truth of some situation. I really think every time the noise stops, you just need to say, oh, pardon me. I mean, I'm like, what's this splice of flatulence?
00:07:23
Speaker
I was thinking about making flatulence jokes. And this is a weird sentence. I decided that that was something that was beyond our podcast. That we were too good for flatulence jokes. Was it Mitchell and Webb that had the sketch with a couple who had bought a house not knowing it was right next to a foghorn factory?
00:07:45
Speaker
And the entire sketch, the gag is somebody starts talking and then a foghorn goes off. That rings a bell. I just have the feeling that if we actually try to wait for it to stop, we're just going to get in that situation where every time somebody talks, it's going to start up again.
00:08:03
Speaker
and then we'll pause and then it'll be a comedy tour de force, but probably make this episode four times longer than it needs to be. Well, see, the great thing is when you talk, I can, of course, edit the sound out because it's not on your end. It's when I talk and it's going on the background, I worry that it's actually just going to completely flood my dialogue.
Defending Conspiracy Theories: A Balanced Look
00:08:25
Speaker
So, frankly, it'd be great you'd be doing a lot of talking this episode, or else I'll be editing out my massive flatulence.
00:08:33
Speaker
All the time. Well, then I'll begin. So yes, I mentioned the fact that it comes after a chapter on rumors simply because this chapter starts. I defended rumors and rumor mongers against their distractors in the last chapter. In this chapter, I will defend conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorists against theirs.
00:08:52
Speaker
And so he starts by, as we've sort of come to suspect, doing a bit of an overview, a bit of a summary of what's gone on before. He talks about how certain people such as Brian Elkely have said that conspiracism or conspiracy thinking is on the rise and that that's a bad thing.
00:09:15
Speaker
Whereas Cody's says, if anything, there are fewer conspiracy theories and theorists now in the past, less conspiracism and conspiracy thinking, and it is this situation that should be deplored. Furthermore, this deplorable situation has at least partly been brought about by the contemporary fashion for castigating certain people as conspiracy theorists and distancing their beliefs as conspiracy theories, a fashion which appears to have started by fellow philosopher Sir Karl Popper.
00:09:40
Speaker
These expressions were not widely used before Popper. Popper used them pejoratively, and they've retained these pejorative connotations to this day. So there you go. Right off the bat, Cody reckons that if there's a problem with conspiracy theories, it's that there's not enough of them these days. And actually, I think this is kind of fascinating because there is good reason to think that there are fewer conspiracy theories now than there have been in the past. All the polling data basically indicates the peak of
00:10:07
Speaker
conspiracy talk and public discourse at least in the west was sometime in the 1960s and it's kind of been on a downward I must say spiral a slight incline ever since although I suspect maybe there's been a slight bump in talk as of the Trump presidency and particularly around the January 6th insurrection at the beginning of this year and
00:10:34
Speaker
people kind of have debates as to what's going on there. Are we just becoming newed to conspiracy theories? Are people less inclined to talk about them? If we take David's argument seriously here, and I think it's worth considering, he's going, look, this is a consequence of the castigation of conspiracy theorists probably back in the 1960s at the height of, and I put in quotes here, the conspiracy theory craze.
00:11:01
Speaker
And this has then led to people not willing to engage in theorizing about conspiracies, which, as he's going to argue, has deleterious social consequences in the same way that people claim that belief in conspiracy theories has bad social consequences as well. Yes, indeed. Later on, I think we'll see him say words to the effect that
00:11:25
Speaker
a prevalence of conspiracy theories is a good thing and shows that we're living in a particularly open society. But anyway, so he compares the treatment of conspiracy theories to a witch hunt. Not literally, of course, but the same sort of attitudes. And he says,
00:11:43
Speaker
He says, of course, some of them, talking about conspiracy theories, may deserve to be criticized or ignored, maybe even condescended to or sneered at, but there is no more justification for criticizing, ignoring, condescending to, or sneering at people because they are conspiracy theorists than there was for punishing people because they were witches. One can denounce a witch hunt without defending everyone who has been accused of being a witch. So obviously he's not trying to say all conspiracy theories are awesome,
00:12:09
Speaker
But he's saying, if a conspiracy theory is bad, it's not bad just because it's a conspiracy theory, which is a theme that should not be unfamiliar to anyone who's listened to this podcast for any period of time. Now, Josh, what is your attitude about witches? I have no strong feelings about witches, to be honest.
00:12:31
Speaker
The the the fury story ones I suppose I'm opposed to on account of the the child murder and all of that but People who call themselves witches or at least wicker at worst. I find a bit annoying What about bad jetbed jelly the witch fan or not a fan? Oh
00:12:47
Speaker
of the classic Spike Milligan audio play fan, Bad Jelly the Witch herself. Well, I mean, she had a bit of a potty mouth on her, that one. I don't know that I can approve. Now, for listeners overseas who are going, what on earth are you talking about? Bad Jelly the Witch was a short story written by Spike Milligan, the British comedian for his children, that was then turned into a short radio play, which I believe played initially back on the BBC in the UK.
00:13:15
Speaker
where it sunk without trace, but for some reason, and this is one of those really, really big questions about New Zealand society, it became enormously popular in Aotearoa, New Zealand, to the point where the book has always been in print back home. And you can basically go into any CD store, if they still exist, in Aotearoa, and find a copy of Bad Jelly, the witch on CD there.
00:13:41
Speaker
For some reason, it was really, really huge in one small section down under. Anyway, back to the paper. So, as you'd expect, we start to look at definition and Cody sort of says there are different ways of looking at a conspiracy theory.
00:14:01
Speaker
He says, on some definitions, there is something wrong with being a conspiracy theorist, but no one or hardly anyone is a conspiracy theorist. On other definitions, there really are conspiracy theories, perhaps lots of them, but there's nothing wrong with being one. So for that second kind, he sort of refers to the likes of Charles Pigdon, who says, yeah, conspiracy theories, they're everywhere. They're all over the place. They're all through history. They happen all the time.
00:14:23
Speaker
And that's fine. There isn't actually anything wrong with them. And if you want to say that conspiracy, there is something wrong with conspiracy theories, you do so by restricting your definition of them so much that you end up hardly being able to refer to anything. So in this introductory part of it, he sort of puts out his goal of what he wants to achieve in this chapter. He says,
00:14:50
Speaker
So far, we have considered two conceptions of what it is to be a conspiracy theorist. On one of them, the property of being a conspiracy theorist is an unobjectionable one, which applies to almost everyone. On the other, it is an objectionable property, which applies to almost no one. In what follows, I will consider attempts to find a middle way.
00:15:07
Speaker
That is, a conception of what it is to be a conspiracy theorist, which makes it an objectionable thing to be, and which applies to some people and not to others. In particular, I will look for a conception of what it is to be a conspiracy theorist, which makes it objectionable to be a conspiracy theorist, and which applies to the people who are pilloried as such, but not to those who pillory them. As we shall see, such conceptions are hard to come by.
00:15:31
Speaker
So he's trying to come up with a conception of conspiracy theory that does allow you to say these conspiracy theories are bad in and of themselves for reasons that are specific to them and which don't apply to the people who are
00:15:52
Speaker
making these accusations of them. Spoiler, it's going to turn out you can't.
Conspiracy Theories: Definitions and Misconceptions
00:15:58
Speaker
This is all sort of a rhetorical thing there. But it's quite a clever trick philosophically to do this, to go, look, you have an intuition. Let's see whether your intuition is correct by seeing if we can manipulate our definitions to obtain the thing that we already believe.
00:16:15
Speaker
Turns out, no matter what we try to do, we can't obtain that thing, so give up on that intuition. What's kind of interesting about this, and we'll get into this probably in a year or so's time, there's now a whole suite of new literature in philosophy which is trying to basically resurrect the generalist project in the philosophy of conspiracy theory by saying there is something inherently wrong.
00:16:40
Speaker
with believing in conspiracy theories and being a conspiracy theorist. But we've got a long way to go to get there. So at this point, Cody says that more or less everyone agrees that conspiracies occur, because even the people like Popper, who don't have good things to say about them, will agree that, well, yes, they have actually had, you know, there have been some of them in the past. We can point to things like the assassination of Caesar and what have you and say those really were conspiracies that happened.
00:17:11
Speaker
But many of these people may still want to say that conspiracy theories are irrational. And we'll respond with something like, of course there are conspiracies, but, and then Cody goes to look at various disclaimers that might follow that but. And so the next section of his paper is full of buts.
00:17:34
Speaker
Now Josh has a note here that he was trying really hard to find a way to bring in some kind of reference like David Cody's like big butts and I cannot lie, but unfortunately he was unable to find some way to make that joke.
00:17:50
Speaker
and thus we're going to skip over it. But it's in the notes and frankly I feel that people need to peer behind the curtain and see how your scatological brain works. Yes and of course the problem with that is that just saying David Coady likes big butts and he cannot lie is just frankly not true because as we shall see he doesn't like any of these butts he thinks they are objectionable butts. And the first such but you're an objectionable but
00:18:18
Speaker
Very well. The first but that he considers is that people say, of course, you're conspiracies, but conspiracies don't happen often. Now, this is a fairly common refrain. And as he points out, it's just not true. I mean, as you mentioned earlier, Popper, for example, admits that conspiracies occur. In fact, he actually even describes them as a typical social phenomena. So it is the case that
00:18:47
Speaker
Conspiracies happen probably more often than people think. So if you're reliant on saying, look, conspiracy theories are bad because conspiracies don't happen particularly often, history is going to be a pretty big shock to you if you ever sit down and read, say, a history book of the 20th century.
00:19:06
Speaker
Yes, so if we want to say that the problem, the reason why conspiracy theorists are irrational is because they assume that conspiracies happen all the time when in fact they don't, well that just doesn't matter because conspiracies quite frankly do happen all the time.
00:19:22
Speaker
Cody looks at various ways you might try to restrict the definition of a conspiracy to say, you know, it only counts as a conspiracy if it's morally suspect. It only counts as a conspiracy of people going out of their way to actively deceive. It only counts as a conspiracy if it involves something that's actually illegal.
00:19:39
Speaker
And apart from being fairly arbitrary, they still end up not being that rare, even if you try to add a few provisos onto them. And he goes on to say, of course, terms like common, rare, and typical are relative. Conspiracies are rare compared to some things and common compared to others. Presumably, some people think conspiracies are more common than in fact they are, but they don't seem to be the people most likely to be castigated as conspiracy theorists.
00:20:06
Speaker
someone who believed in very few conspiracies but believed that they are of great importance would be much more likely to attract the pejorative label conspiracy theorists than one who believed in more conspiracies but considered them to be of little moment. This suggests another way of understanding what is supposed to be wrong with being a conspiracy theorist, which reminds me, did you ever watch the old Justice League Unlimited cartoons? I did not. Any of that being made either were a bit of fun, but they had the character of the question
00:20:32
Speaker
who's the sort of detective character, basically, who got turned into Raw Shark in the Watchmen comics, same sort of thing. But in the jail view, he's the conspiracy and he's voiced by Jeffrey Combs of Reanimator and Herbert West himself. But there's just one, this just reminded me of the fact that there's one point where one of the characters
00:20:53
Speaker
says if I don't listen to this guy, everything is conspiracies with him to which he replies, not conspiracies, conspiracy singular. And the whole point is the character, the character is such a conspiracy nut that he thinks there's literally only one conspiracy in the world. And it's this giant, all encompassing thing that draws in every single other conspiracy in the world. So yeah, you can believe you can believe that conspiracy theories don't aren't particularly common.
00:21:21
Speaker
and still be a massive conspiracy theorist. But anyways, this suggests another thing that perhaps someone might want to say, of course there are conspiracies, but conspiracies tend to be insignificant.
00:21:35
Speaker
So Cody says, several authors have suggested that conspiracy theorists go wrong, not by overstating the frequency with which conspiracies occur, but by overstating their significance when they do occur. And once again, I mean, that's just plain wrong. I mean, again, even going back to Popper again, he talks about the likes of Lenin and Hitler, the conspiracies that they enacted to get their way, which resulted in millions of deaths and what have you. There's nothing insignificant about those.
00:22:04
Speaker
So there really isn't much more to say to that point than it's it's just plain false. Another objection might be, of course, conspiracy, of course, there are conspiracies, but conspiracies tend to fail. And so there have been various people going all the way back to Machiavelli, but Papa himself and refers to a paper by Daniel Pipes, who I'm not familiar with from 1997, all being people who suggest that conspiracies really succeed.
00:22:32
Speaker
And so Cody says this suggests that the problem with conspiracy theorists is that they are people who postulate mainly successful conspiracies and that this is what's irrational. So, okay, you're allowed to believe that there are conspiracies and you're allowed to believe that they can be significant. But by and large, they don't, most of the time they don't fail. They don't, they get found out.
00:22:56
Speaker
And especially, it starts referring to the old conspiracy versus cock up thing, which he actually attributes in the footnotes to supposedly it was Bernard Ingham, Chief Press Secretary to Margaret Thatcher, is the one who supposedly said many journalists have fallen for the conspiracy theory of government. I do assure you that they would produce more accurate work if they had heard to the cock up theory.
00:23:22
Speaker
Although that's from 1999, and I'm pretty sure the expression has been very longer than that. But I don't know, maybe he was just a good example of someone saying... And of course, the problem there is, of course, a member of a government is of course going to say, oh, you know, it's mostly cock-ups, mostly cock-ups. Definitely isn't conspiracies by Her Majesty's government to do bad things. No, no, no. No, no, no, dear boy, dear boy, dear boy.
00:23:44
Speaker
You might think that we're deliberately trying to cause issues, but it's just a series of cock-ups. I mean, we're not that clever. That's precisely what a clever conspirator would say. Oh, no, no, no, no, no. It's all accident, my dear chat. All accident. There's also another interesting point here that Cody makes, which is there's a sampling error here. Yes, we know about a lot of unsuccessful conspiracies.
00:24:09
Speaker
because they've been revealed, because they were unsuccessful. That issue doesn't tell us anything about successful conspiracies. I mean, if there are conspiracies out there which have successfully kept themselves from public view for long periods of time,
00:24:26
Speaker
There could be a few, there could be none, there could be a lot. But you can't just take it that because we know of some conspiracy theories which have failed, that that tells us that conspiracy theories by and large are prone to failure. So yes, on the conspiracy versus cock-up angle, Cody says, conspiracy theories are often contrasted with cock-up theories with the suggestion that the latter are always or at least typically preferable to the former.
00:24:55
Speaker
But popular, though it is, this idea is wrong in two respects. First, conspiracies and cock-ups are not incompatible. A cock-up is a plan or endeavour which fails through incompetence. If I'm not trying to do something, I can't cock it up. And since conspiracies are plans of a certain kind, it is perfectly possible to cock them up.
00:25:11
Speaker
Second, although conspiracies have been known to fail, there's no reason to think they're more prone to failure than other kinds of human endeavor. And then points out that we know once again you can appeal to history and say there have been plenty of successful assassinations and coups and revolutions. History books are full of them, all of which were brought about, at least involved in some way, conspiracies.
00:25:34
Speaker
in conspiracy theories. Now this this is a problem which goes all the way back to Popper because Popper makes this rather weird claim that a conspiracy is only successful if the conspirators maintain secrecy about it. So basically any example of a conspiratorial activity which gets revealed to the general populace is by Popper's definition a failed conspiracy because the conspirators must keep things secret for the conspiracy to be successful.
00:26:04
Speaker
And as Charles points out, and as David is pointing out here, actually there are lots of examples of conspiracies which you only need to keep secret for a very limited amount of time. And I mean the example that I talked about a lot in the PhD is the assassination of Julius Caesar. You of course have to keep.
00:26:27
Speaker
your assassination plot against the dictator's secret, because if you don't, then the dictator's going to know you're going to try to assassinate him, or his followers are going to know you're trying to assassinate him, and so they're going to stop the assassination. So you need to keep it secret up until the point that Caesar is dead.
00:26:44
Speaker
But once Caesar is dead, because you're trying to make a political statement by assassinating the dictator, you of course want to reveal all. You want to say, look, we are the people who assassinated Julius Caesar, and here are the reasons as to why we thought it was necessary. We succeeded in our conspiracy, the dictator is dead, now we're going to tell you why we did it.
00:27:09
Speaker
So there are lots of cases where you go, look, the conspiracy was successful, and then we found out about it, because that was actually part of the plan. Yeah, so Cody basically brings up both of these issues that you've mentioned, the sampling-era type thing, the idea that we can't say that most conspiracy theories
00:27:30
Speaker
fail if we don't, if we're not capable of knowing about the ones that succeed, if you take success as being we never ever find out about them. But then also, it's not actually a condition of many conspiracies that they remain secret for everyone. The other one, of course, is sort of terrorist type attacks. They will be planned and planned and secret. But once they've been executed, pretty much immediately after they've been executed, the terrorists want everyone to know that they were the ones behind it.
00:28:00
Speaker
So it's not just that the secrecy isn't necessary, it's not even desirable by the conspirators, by the time you get to the end of it. And of course we've talked about this, we've talked about the notion of secrecy and it being a part of conspiracies plenty in the past, so none of this is particularly
00:28:22
Speaker
particularly foreign, so that kind of falls down. So he has one more potential objection.
Government Conspiracies in Open Societies: Reality Check?
00:28:27
Speaker
You might say, of course conspiracies occur, but governments and government agencies of Western countries don't conspire often, successfully or significantly. So as he puts it, so just believing in lots of significant and or successful conspiracies is not usually on its own enough to get you accused of being a conspiracy theorist. A great deal depends on whom you attribute the conspiracies to.
00:28:52
Speaker
So he's gonna say, okay, well, if you're talking about bringing up conspiracy theories about the likes of North Korea, people probably aren't gonna object to that, but maybe the problem is that people are postulating conspiracy theories about Western governments, and that's why they're irrational, because Western governments don't conspire particularly much. And once again, you can hear the laughter of pretty much every historian in the world.
00:29:21
Speaker
I mean, first of all, as he points out, not even the idea that Western countries don't conspire often isn't even a thing that most people believe. He cites a study which showed that 74% of people believe in the sentence the US government regularly engages in conspiratorial and clandestine operations. And Cody goes further and suggests that the other 26%, if they don't believe that, it just means they're not paying attention.
00:29:50
Speaker
He brings up examples such as the Gulf of Tonkin Affair, Watergate, Iran-Contra, those illegal renditions. He mentions the menu bombings. Operation Menu isn't one that we've looked at before, as far as I'm aware, but that was America bombing Cambodia, I think, during or before or after the Vietnam War, and covering up the fact that they were engaging in such extensive sort of carpet bombing
00:30:20
Speaker
long before they actually admitted to that's what was going on. So, I mean, again, yeah, basically, you just need to look at the world around you, really, and most of these objections just fall away. They don't really stand up at all. So, we are two from here. So, the next section of this chapter is called Conspiracy Theory in the Open Society.
00:30:47
Speaker
Cody starts this section by saying it is true, as I've argued elsewhere, that in open societies, government conspiracies are likely to be both less common and less significant. And there's no question that the US and other Western countries are much more open than some other countries such as North Korea.
00:31:02
Speaker
but this should not lead us to conclude that governments and government agencies of Western countries don't conspire often successfully or significantly for three reasons. First, openness is a matter of degree. There's no such thing as a completely or even highly open society. Second, openness such as it is is not the exclusive province of the United States and other Western societies. Some non-Western societies seem to be more open than some Western societies.
00:31:27
Speaker
Third, even in the most open of actually existing societies, conspiracy, including conspiracy by government, is important and often successful. So this bit, this bit kind of then turns into a reaction against the got old Sunstein and Vermeule paper, which really did seem to
00:31:46
Speaker
seem to turn to a prodder hornet's nest of a sort. Was it just because you had these Harvard Law professors coming in and sort of making pronouncements in an area that wasn't really their discipline, or was it specifically the whole, we should fight conspiracy theories by conspiring against them?
00:32:04
Speaker
It's mostly because Cass Sunstein had been that information czar in the Obama administration, which made people go, look, this guy is actually in a position of power and has the president's heir.
00:32:20
Speaker
And he's espousing these views. This seems like the kind of thing that we should look at. Let's just go back to those three claims that David makes though, because I think it's actually quite interesting to think about these. So the first one, openness is a matter of degree. There's no such thing as a completely or even highly open society.
00:32:39
Speaker
Now, I think we can all agree there's no such thing as a completely open society. I'm actually not entirely sure whether we can say there isn't a highly open society out there. That's a...
00:32:56
Speaker
that's a judgment call which is probably going to be something which is contentious. So arguably, at least according to most metrics, our own government, that of Aotearoa and New Zealand, is taken to be one of, if not the most transparent governments in the world. So you might argue that actually
00:33:17
Speaker
Our government is a highly open society. I'm not entirely sure that David's right there to say that there aren't relatively highly open societies out there.
00:33:30
Speaker
Now, the second point that maybe there are societies which are more open outside of the West than in the West. I think that that might well be true, although it is interesting he doesn't actually give an example there. I'd like to know what he thinks. And the third point, even in the most open of actually existing societies, conspiracy, including conspiracy by government, is common, important and often successful.
00:33:58
Speaker
the careful reader is going to point out that David's already said common is a relative term here. So it might be the case that, yes, conspiracies are more common than other kinds of events, even in open societies, but they still might not be so common to say that they are so common to treat them seriously. So I think there's
00:34:23
Speaker
Whilst I agree with him in principle with the kind of general thrust of his argument here, I do think that at least 0.1 and 0.3 are just ever so slightly contentious, and he kind of just skips past them. Okay, so here's three uncontroversial things for me to say, of which actually two are controversial even according to the things I've said in this chapter.
00:34:49
Speaker
Yes, so he does, as you say, skip over fairly quickly and move straight on to his reaction to some student, Vermeule. He takes issue with the fact that they say that in open societies like the US, government actions don't stay secret for long. He says they only give a couple of examples, and they're not great examples. He talks about things, dodgy things, the bush.
00:35:10
Speaker
administration got up to their, what were they, extralegal renditions and enhanced interrogations and what have you. It all turned out to be legal. He points out that the Obama administration continued as well, an administration that Cass Sunstein advised. But he points out that they kept them under wraps for years. That's certainly long enough, certainly for the people who were actually involved in them.
00:35:37
Speaker
So he says that they don't really back up that point particularly well. And again, that also runs into the problem that we just mentioned in the previous, but that we don't know what we don't know. We can't know that the government conspiracies always get found out because we don't know about the ones that we haven't found out about yet. That's how knowing things works.
00:36:04
Speaker
So yeah, that just doesn't really work as far as Cody is concerned. He goes on after this to say, we have seen that at least on some readings of what it is to be a conspiracy theorist, the more open one society is, the less one will be justified in being a conspiracy theorist. But how can one tell how open one's society is?
00:36:26
Speaker
And so he looks at a few factors that would suggest we're living in an open society, freedom of speech, a diverse media, access to things like internet communication channels, whatever have you, a freedom of internet usage.
00:36:45
Speaker
also mentions society is more likely to be open if it is really in a state of war, since war is commonly used to justify closing a society's channels of communication, possibly a little bit of side-eye to his own country there.
00:37:02
Speaker
But he does, he then he brings up an interesting point that he says, all else being equal, a society will be more open to the extent that conspiracy theorists and cognates such as conspiracists are not used as terms of abuse.
Pejorative Views and the Term 'Conspiracy Theory'
00:37:16
Speaker
So he basically this one wants to say that that having having a pejorative gloss on conspiracies and conspiracy theorists
00:37:24
Speaker
is a hallmark of a less open society, I think basically because conspiracy theories are often contrasted to the official theory put forward by the powers that be. So if it's a tendency of a society to scorn any attempt to question the powers that be, that would suggest
00:37:44
Speaker
that such a society is less open. How did curiosity, because you said giving a side eye to his country there, which country do you think they would come from? Oh, to see an Aussie. He is an Aussie, yeah. Sorry, I'm getting my people mixed up, they're fine. Then a side eye to the good old US of Asia. Yes, I forget how many of the philosophers in the Syria are in Tibetans, I just assume they're all Americans.
00:38:09
Speaker
except for you and... Pat Stokes and Charles Pecton and Charles Plagg and David Covey and Neil Levy. Anyway, so he moves on to the next section called Conspiracy Baiting as Propaganda, which is this is where he's really going into the way that people use the pejorative definition, the pejorative
00:38:35
Speaker
sense of conspiracy theory. So he says the propagandistic nature of campaigns against conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorists is at least as evident as the propagandistic nature of campaigns against rumors and rumor mongers. Both forms of propaganda serve to herd opinion or at least respectable opinion within limits set by governments and other powerful institutions. Which I mean it's something that we've talked about forever, the idea that you can
00:39:03
Speaker
label something as a conspiracy theory or label someone as a conspiracy theorist and then just brush things aside. But the example you always like to use was John Key writing off, what's it, Nicky Hager, completely forgot the guys, Nicky Hager. Why did that just escape my memory all of a sudden? Writing off Nicky Hager is just a conspiracy theorist and saying no more.
00:39:27
Speaker
He gives an example during, I can't remember which election it was now, where someone basically, a Democrat, suggested that the Bush government had been sort of using terror alert levels to manipulate the public a bit. And this just got immediately called, oh, that's a conspiracy theory. This guy is a conspiracy theorist.
00:39:53
Speaker
And that was it. And even when it turned out some years later that actually the Bush government had been fudging terrorist levels for their own sort of propagandistic purposes, at no point did anyone go back and say, oh, so the fact that you just called something a conspiracy theory and therefore ignored it, what's up with that?
00:40:19
Speaker
Um, but yeah, so he talks about, he goes back to Sunstein and Vignol. Um, Sunstein and Vignol like Poho before them admit that some conspiracy theories are true and some are justified, but still claim that all conspiracy theories are bad theories. And he, as various other people that we've looked at, says that simply the idea of conspiring to combat conspiracy theories
00:40:46
Speaker
just sounds like a dumb idea. He says, you know, you might have thought that the solution to the possible harms that can result from conspiracy theories lies in greater openness, honesty, and accountability on the part of the government. And yet then, as he observes, they basically go in the opposite direction. The suggestions they make would result in a more closed society with more government action going on in secret against other people.
00:41:13
Speaker
so he's um yeah certainly not fond of Sunstein and from you all uh which i i'm yet to find anyone who is in this field i assume they had other people who agreed with them elsewhere which there will be a few papers
00:41:28
Speaker
in the far future, which at least so is not as condemning as the Sunstein piece or the Sunstein and the Muriel piece. But yes, most people think it was a bad paper espousing bad ideas, which are in themselves self-contradictory.
00:41:46
Speaker
So that brings us to the next chapter, which is entitled, So What Should Be Done? Because obviously some students from you all, that was the outcome of their paper, they were actually proposing things, what can we do about this? And Cody doesn't like their conclusions, so he proposes his own.
00:42:06
Speaker
He starts the section by saying, in looking at different ways of understanding what people are getting at when they accuse others of being conspiracy theorists, we see that the expression conspiracy theorists, like its close relative conspiracy theory, is multiply ambiguous. What is more, reflection on each of the standard ways of understanding what it is to be a conspiracy theorist shows that there's nothing wrong with being one. In fact, in each case, it is those who accuse others of being conspiracy theorists who are guilty of irrationality or at least error.
00:42:34
Speaker
what should someone who recognises this do about it? And he goes for a kind of a linguistic solution really. His first thing he says is that we should probably just stop using the words conspiracy theory and conspiracy theorist altogether. And I know you've mentioned in the past that
00:42:54
Speaker
David Cody thinks we should not be using using this is the point where he starts to his turn. So the first paper we looked at, he was going to look the terms problematic. This chapter, he's going, well, maybe we could just stop using the term.
00:43:12
Speaker
But as he notes, it's probably not going to happen. In a few years time, he's just going to stand his ground on this and go, look, I advocate just eliminating the term from our lexicon. It functions as propaganda and it's got to go. And the thing is, I think his argument here as to why that project is not going to be successful is as true now as it was back then.
00:43:39
Speaker
So yes, so first he suggests we don't use the word, somebody don't use the words, but says it's probably not likely to happen. So he thinks, well, then we probably need, maybe we should reclaim the words using the word, using the analogy with the words, which and queer, which have both sort of been reclaimed by the people that they're originally targeted as when they were a pejorative.
00:44:03
Speaker
So he says, you know, maybe we just keep using the words and make sure we're using them in a positive way and take them back. But then furthermore, he's just made that possibly we need to introduce new terms to not combat, I suppose, but to oppose the terms conspiracy theorists and conspiracy theories. So he says,
00:44:30
Speaker
Those who resist either of the strategies I've suggested so far, getting rid of the expression conspiracy theorist or retaining it without the negative connotations,
00:44:37
Speaker
point out quite rightly that some theories which are criticized as conspiracy theories and some people who are criticized as conspiracy theorists deserve to be criticized. We've seen that conspiracies are common but some people presumably think they're more common than in fact they are.
Coincidence Theorists: A New Perspective
00:44:51
Speaker
We've seen that conspiracies often succeed but some people probably think they succeed more often than in fact they do. We've seen that conspiracies are important but some people may think they're more important than in fact they are.
00:45:02
Speaker
Finally, we've seen that conspiracies by governments and government agencies of Western countries such as the United States are common, often successful and often important, but some people most certainly think they are more common, successful and or important than in fact they are, referring back to his big butts of the previous sections.
00:45:21
Speaker
So he says, in these cases, if you're talking about these people who overestimate the frequency or impact or success rate of conspiracies, they're making errors. But first of all, they're all making a bunch of different errors.
00:45:42
Speaker
Whether you think conspiracy theories are more common than they are, more successful than they are, those are different things. And lumping them all, all these different range of errors together under the label of conspiracy theorist doesn't seem to make a lot of sense. But he also points out that each of these errors has an opposite. So it's equally wrong, it would be equally wrong to think that conspiracy theories are less common than they actually are. It would be wrong to think that they succeed less often than they really do. And so on with the other ones.
00:46:12
Speaker
So he suggests that if we're going to lump all of those previous eras under the labels conspiracy theorist, we need a label for people who commit these other areas, the areas of underestimating. And he suggests the term a coincidence theorist, which he says, coincidence theorists are people who fail, as it were, to connect to the dots, who fail to see any significance in even the most striking correlations.
00:46:40
Speaker
And so I suggest that we popularise this use of the phrase coincidence theorists to push back against pejorative uses of conspiracy theorists, especially pointing out when a conspiracy theory turned out to be true. And actually, this is the point where he mentions the
00:46:55
Speaker
It was the 2004 presidential election and Howard Dean, wasn't he the one who made a weird shriek which killed his nomination chances dead on the spot? See, I thought you meant to say made a weird shriek which killed someone in case of, I don't remember that story about Howard Dean.
00:47:11
Speaker
Yes, I think he killed his future career. I'm not aware of him killing someone in the same respect in the Patron episode last week. I am not aware of Alex Jones killing a dog, but I'm not going to rule this out. There is no evidence of that to hand.
00:47:31
Speaker
Yes, so it was Howard Dean suggested that terror alerts were manipulated for domestic political advantage by the Bush administration. And Bush's campaign spokesman Terry Holt just immediately called him a bizarre conspiracy theorist, and that was it. And numerous people had a go at Dean for being a conspiracy theorist. Journalists called on John Kerry, who if you recall, ended up being the nominee that time.
00:47:59
Speaker
to denounce Dean's conspiracy theory, which eventually he did. But it turned out it was true. So I think what he's sort of suggesting is that you could turn around and say, well, it turns out all you coincidence theorists were wrong. The conspiracy theorists were right. You thought that it was just coincidence that these levels would fluctuate.
00:48:22
Speaker
in a way that would advantage the politics the Bush administration was putting forwards, but in fact it was actually the conspiracy theorists who were right all along.
00:48:34
Speaker
But he also contrasts conspiracy theorists not just with coincidence theorists, but also he brings up the idea of institutional theorists, a people who rather than appeal to conspiracies to explain certain things, will just sort of rely on impersonal institutional things like market forces as being behind certain things.
00:48:58
Speaker
Yes, this is a broad side against Noam Chomsky. Right. As Chomsky does this whole institutional analysis thing, because Chomsky kind of goes out of his way to avoid being labeled as a conspiracy theorist about some of the structural issues, particularly in the US. And so it's just the way institutions are set out. We get these malign or adverse outcomes because of the way institutions work.
00:49:25
Speaker
And of course people have responded to that, which is that's a really convenient way to let people get away with their conspiracies. In case of, oh no no, they're not deliberately or intentionally trying to achieve these ends, it's just an accidental byproduct of the way that institutions are set up. Well done Chomsky for letting these people get away with their conspiracies by blaming the structure, and not the people within the structure who are directing the activities.
00:49:55
Speaker
Yeah, so Cody says the main problem with this line of thought is that impersonal explanations in terms of institutions and market forces are not inconsistent with conspiratorial explanations. Many institutions owe their existence, at least in part, to conspiracies. Think of the United States government's debt to the conspiratorial activities of the founding fathers.
00:50:15
Speaker
And many institutions themselves regularly conspire. Indeed, many institutions do little but conspire. Think of the CIA or the KGB. What's more, market forces are not inconsistent with conspiracy.
00:50:27
Speaker
And then he says, at the root of the institutional theorist critique of conspiracy theorists is a concern not to offer excessively easy solutions to social problems. The worry is that conspiracy theorists encourage the idea that the road to societal improvement consists of the removal of bad people from positions of power, while ignoring the underlying structures that are the real cause of most of our problems, problems which may well include the presence of bad people in positions of power.
00:50:51
Speaker
While there is certainly something to this concern, the alternative strategy of concentrating on systematic or institutional change comes with its own dangers. First, it can be unrealistic, at least in the short term, where most of us live our lives. Second, as history has often demonstrated, the new institutions may be worse than the ones they replaced.
00:51:13
Speaker
brings up the idea that we could talk about coincidence theorists to contrast with conspiracy theorists. This was from 2012, so it's not caught on yet.
00:51:24
Speaker
who knows. And then bidding contrast them also against institutional theorists who he doesn't appear to have much time for, which brings us all to his conclusion, which as far as conclusions go is quite a long one. He still sort of brings it brings. Yeah, because it's a conclusion with a and also. So here's my conclusion. Now I'm also going to show you how my conclusion is different from other people's conclusions.
00:51:48
Speaker
That doesn't belong in the conclusion. That belongs in the section before the conclusion. You deal with the objections and then you conclude. This bit to the conclusion feel like they're very much tacked on. As if someone said, oh, you haven't accounted for this thing. Fine. I'll just add a little bit at the end. And what about this thing? I'll add another section there as well.
00:52:11
Speaker
Yes, so he does, he just sort of rattles off a bunch of different kinds of points he really first of all he, he starts his conclusion by talking about the fact that some people think we should dismiss conspiracy theories because they're quote unquote, just theories. But
00:52:27
Speaker
that rests on an assumption or that rests on a definition of theory as being just sort of a speculative hypothesis, just a thing that I reckon, which is how people use the word theory sometimes, but it's not how they use it a lot of the time. And certainly people don't, well, most people don't dismiss the likes of scientific theories because they're just theories, although of course that was always the intelligent design
00:52:55
Speaker
argument against the theory of evolution. And yet even those people don't really seem to have a problem with theories of gravity or a totally atomic theory of matter and what have you. He then points out that some people will point to a false conspiracy theory and then argue that all conspiracy theories are similarly false, which is obviously just a bad argumentative move. He talks about Jill Long, sorry, Jill LeBlanc,
00:53:23
Speaker
talking about Roswell theories and trying to generalise from them to say that conspiracy theories are bad. He talks about Steve Clark and some of the papers that we've looked at where he talks about 9 or 11 truth theories and saying they're wrong, therefore conspiracy theories are wrong. And that's just a bad move.
00:53:40
Speaker
And then he goes on, as you say, to differentiate his views from the views of other people, because he's spent most of this chapter saying, you know, here are people who I disagree with, here are people who think conspiracy theories are inherently bad, whereas I think they're worth defending.
00:53:56
Speaker
Now I'm going to talk about some of the people who agree with me that conspiracy theories are worth defending, but whose views are not exactly the same as mine. He sort of goes to differentiate them. So the first person he talks about is Lee Basham, who's shown up plenty of times on this podcast before. He disagrees with Basham's concept of pragmatic rejection, that idea that we should reject conspiracy theories just because there's nothing we can do about them, not because there's anything epistemically wrong with them, just on on pragmatic grounds.
00:54:28
Speaker
But Cody says, well, I often there are things we can do about them. We can work to expose them or things that sort of what journalists do all the time, that sort of stuff. Unless.
00:54:39
Speaker
we're only talking about Basham's malevolent global conspiracies, which are all-encompassing and nigh omnipotent, and there's nothing we could possibly do anything about. But Cody seems to think that's more just a sort of a hypothetical exercise in talking about evil, when we talk about Kant's evil demons, or brains and jars, or trolley problems, or what have you. It's kind of in that realm, really. And in actuality,
00:55:09
Speaker
any conspiracy you think of is undertaken by human beings who are not omnipotent. So there's probably always going to be, you know, he doesn't find that compelling in practical terms.
Criticism and Rebuttals: The Debate on Conspiracy Theories
00:55:24
Speaker
The other thing to note, which we noted when we were looking at Basham's paper on pragmatic rejection, is it isn't necessarily Lee saying, there's nothing we can do. It's more Lee saying, look,
00:55:37
Speaker
this is one response you can take, which is the pragmatic response, which is, as an individual, there's nothing I can do about these things. So it's not really Basham's response. It's Basham going, look, here's a response you might be inclined to take. And I think David, like myself, when I wrote my PhD thesis and my book, kind of goes and gives Lee a much more
00:56:06
Speaker
strident view than actually Lee expresses in the paper itself. Yeah, I mean, it was in one of, I'm not sure if it was that paper or another one where he talks about the idea that look,
00:56:17
Speaker
I mean, nobody these days really cares whether the Kennedy was shot by Lee Harvey Oswald or if it was some sort of government conspiracy. And if it was, that was, what, 50, almost 60 years ago now. So what are you going to do? And in 50 years' time, whether or not
00:56:37
Speaker
the Bush administration was really behind 9-11 is basically just going to be an academic exercise at that point. If they really were behind it, you know, they got away with it. So what can you do? Well, what you can do is what they used to do with with Popes who broke the rules, you dig up there, put them on trial and then execute them, which is, you know, quite, quite cute them again.
00:57:02
Speaker
A point that one of, I mean, in these cases, those popes died of natural deaths. They were executed after death, which is a really neat trick. So then he goes on to talk about where he disagrees with Euhar Riker, who, when he wrote about his political conspiracy theories, a paper that we've also looked at. And while he again,
00:57:25
Speaker
is on board with the fact that Ryker is defending conspiracy theories. He doesn't like the fact that he's only defending what he calls these political conspiracy theories, especially because in the paper, political conspiracy theories are
00:57:40
Speaker
First of all, sort of contrasted with, I think, what Riker calls standard theories, by which he means sort of non-conspiratorial, especially official explanations. And Cody doesn't like the fact that especially the political conspiracy theories are still presented as basically being a weaker kind of explanation.
00:58:00
Speaker
than the new standard ones when we haven't really seen anything to support that. The whole point that Cody's been saying is that if a conspiracy theory is bad, it's not bad because it's a conspiracy theory. It's bad for other reasons. So finally, finally, he gets to the conclusion of the conclusion.
00:58:22
Speaker
where he says, the association between conspiracy theorising and irrationality is so deeply entrenched in our culture that when people hear that I defend conspiracy theorists and theories, they often assume that I must be defending irrationality. I am not. I'm defending conspiracy theorists and theories against accusations of irrationality, along with a variety of other accusations. Unfortunately, some would-be defenders of conspiracy theorising have embraced a form of irrationalism, and quotes another tract.
00:58:48
Speaker
doing such a thing that talks about how authors are wanting to level the epistemological playing field between conspiracy theories and other
00:58:56
Speaker
truth-asserting endeavors, but Cody says, I also want to level the epistemological playing field, but it is misguided to think that the way to do this is by adopting the relativist position and that conflicting social explanations are constructed truths equally valid for different communities of believers. If a conspiracy theory contradicts another theory, then at least one of the two theories is false. Nothing can be said a priori about which it is. The only way to find out is by listening to arguments and examining evidence.
00:59:26
Speaker
So quite a particularist note to end on there. It's nice to see you. It is, yes. Now what's interesting about this paper, as I said before, is it's kind of the last time that Cody's going to be happy to talk about conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorists. The future work we'll see coming out of him.
00:59:48
Speaker
is largely going, look, we shouldn't be using these terms at all. So he's still technically defending conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorizing and conspiracy theorists now, but he doesn't like using those terms to engage in that defense.
01:00:03
Speaker
So this is kind of the breaking point, the point where you say, I'm so happy to use these terms, although I would posit maybe changing our language would be a good idea. In future, it's going to be language change, language change, language change. And I don't like using these terms. I don't like using these terms. I don't like using these terms. Well, we'll have to see. But I mean, yes, as we said this particular chapter,
01:00:31
Speaker
is from the title of the book, is what to believe now, applying epistemology. Why can I not say it properly when it comes into, when it's, is it because it comes after the word applying? I've got too many lalala noises in there. Applying epistemology to contemporary issues. I think I'm starting to say applying epistemological issues or something. But anyway, the point is he's looking for practical, as he says, what should be done.
01:00:59
Speaker
So, whereas Sunstein and Vermeule did something similar and nobody likes what they had to say, I guess the whole point of this is to come up with some ideas of how we could actually make a difference and how people talk about conspiracy theories.
01:01:13
Speaker
Yeah, language change is one of those weird things. You can influence it a bit, but often it's very organic. I've heard some people say that language is the only true democracy that exists. Everybody gets a single vote and that's it. And certainly his suggestion does not appear to have gone viral in the sort of way that tends to
01:01:38
Speaker
influence in our language to actually change. Although, I mean, yeah, obviously there are concerted efforts by people to change the way we talk about things, but I don't think, I think this issue is probably a bit too niche to spawn one of those. Well, especially since
01:01:54
Speaker
As I have argued elsewhere, and we'll get onto this when we talk about the paper where he really just doubles down on don't use the terms, even if we could persuade academics to stop talking about conspiracy theories and conspiracy theorists and use new language, what's going to stop the politicians who know it's an existing pejorative in ordinary language from still using it themselves?
01:02:24
Speaker
Because, let's face it, academics don't have much sway when it comes to common discourse. Politicians have a lot more sway. As long as they continue to use the term, doesn't really matter what the rest of us say.
01:02:38
Speaker
Hmm, hmm, pretty nicely. So I found an interesting paper and a nicely sort of written one. Didn't get as polemical as some of the ones we've looked at more recently, which always puts me off a little. So points for that, I say. But that basically brings us to the end of this installment of Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre. So
01:03:03
Speaker
I guess next week we actually have to come up with an actual topic to talk about. We could do Operation Menu. We could do Operation Menu. Actually, I had a quick look at it to see what the heck he was talking about because I hadn't heard of that one before, so I don't know if there's actually an episode's worth of stuff in there, but certainly one worth investigating. But that's a problem for another time.
01:03:25
Speaker
And that time is not this time. This is the time when we finish things off, but not before we say that, of course, there is a bonus episode coming up. And quite frankly, I have no idea what we're going to talk about. No, because we're just going to have a good old chinwack. Yes, no, we've both been fairly busy this week and haven't come up with a secondary topic, but there's all sorts of nonsense we can decide, which is basically all we end up doing anyway. Aside from the death of Donald Rumsfeld, there really hasn't been much of note to talk about anyway.
01:03:55
Speaker
Tom Rumsfeld died. Didn't he? No, Colin Powell. Oh, no, that's right. Yes. People have been pointing out that, you know, so having a got my American politicians wrong, I think it was Mark Alfano who's a
01:04:15
Speaker
epistemologist, I know, either tweeting or retweeting someone saying, look, someone is someone keeps trying to kill Henry Kissinger. And Henry Kissinger has some kind of force field that means that lower level war criminals die in his stead. Right. And your thoughts naturally went to Rumsfeld. Yeah. Yeah.
01:04:37
Speaker
Anyway, so I think we're already, this is killer content we could be putting in the Patreon episode for our special patrons. We don't want to give too much away. Nevertheless, if you want to be a patron and listen to the two of us just talk bollocks for the next 20 odd minutes, you're quite welcome to. And you can do that by going to betrayon.com and searching for the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy. But if you
01:05:03
Speaker
Not without cause, uninterested in becoming a patron this week. That's fine because you listen to the end of this entire episode, which going by the timer has reached over an hour, as the Conspiracy Theory Masterpiece Theatre episodes tend to do, and good for you for listening this long.
01:05:19
Speaker
Quick update on the Twitter account. We've got more than two new followers. I think we've got nearly seven. I mean, it's been such a bump a week that I now feel there's so much pressure now to tweet with that account. I may have to actually just take the account down. I mean, 11 followers. It's too much. Yeah. The Twitter account again, at Pod Guide Con. Yeah. Get to it whilst it's still there.
01:05:46
Speaker
Anyway, that'll do for now, I think. I better just bring things to a close while I still can, and I will do it in the traditional way of simply saying the goodbye. And I'll say the goodbye. You've been listening to a podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy, hosted by Josh Addison and Em Denter. If you'd like to help support us, please find details of our pledge drive at either Patreon or PodBen. If you'd like to get in contact with us,
01:06:12
Speaker
email us at podcastconspiracy at gmail.com