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sabotabbyWere I a very different sort of person, I would see a nefarious connection between the tenth anniversary of the September 11, 2001, attacks and the fact that my hold on Jonathan Kay's Among the Truthers: a journey into the growing conspiracist underground of 9/11 Truthers, Armageddonites, Vaccine Hysterics, Hollywood Know-Nothings and Internet Addicts came through at just the right time to allow me to finish it on September 9th. Of course, I'm not remotely that sort of person, but the pattern-recognition part of my brain still twigged a little when I realized the coincidence.
I confess that I am obsessed with conspiracy theories and the conspiratorial mindset. I blame X-Files in the 90s for both causing my interest in conspiracy theories and inoculating me from believing in them. Kay is similarly obsessed, though for different reasons—as he admits in the book, he actually shares many traits with people who believe in conspiracy theories. In fact, the book contains a conspiracy theory as elaborate and bizarre as any depicted in Loose Change or Zeitgeist, one that draws mindboggling links between Das Kapital, Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Orientalism, and modern conspiracy movements.
Yep, there's an agenda at work here. Kay is a writer and editor with the National Post, and he doesn't so much want to debunk Trutherism as use it as a tool to slam the typical bugbears: Marxism, social justice and anti-war movements, atheism, and Kant's supposed "moral relativism." (It's always Kant's fault.)
I'm not going to say you shouldn't read it or that it was a complete waste of time; there is certainly good information in the book, and he's correct in stating that there are more 9/11 conspiracy theories out there than there are books debunking them. It's important to understand the conspiratorial mindset and to critically examine the claims of Truthers, especially given what I've said repeatedly about their infiltration into legitimate social and political movements. It's not a harmless crank theory. He does interview actual Truthers and present case studies, and that stuff is valuable to know about. I just wish this book had been written by someone who wasn't as much of a crank as his subjects.
First off, the title is misleading. Kay spends about half the book talking about Truthers and very little of it talking about other modern conspiracies, like the anti-vaccine people or the Birthers. This is because he deliberately wants to associate Trutherism with the left. His main target is not the Truthers; he's almost affectionate towards them. He spends more time talking about Toronto Palestine solidarity activism at the end of the book than he does talking about anti-vaccine hysterics. This is unfortunate, not just because I don't agree with what a writer for a far-right publication thinks of a movement I belong to, but also because it means the book fails to answer some of my burning questions. For example, he talks a lot about how belief in one conspiracy makes a person more likely to believe other conspiracies. What does this mean when Truthers largely identify as left-wing and Birthers identify exclusively as right/libertarian? Is there overlap between these two groups? What about the 90s militia movement?
Then there's the preface and the conclusion, where Kay spends an inordinate amount of time talking about how Voltaire hated atheists and how Marxism is basically a conspiracy theory. Even if you're not an atheist or a Marxist, this is pushing it. So apparently the Enlightenment was a good thing for the most part, except that it did away with religion as a powerful, unifying social institution. Being pattern-recognizing creatures, we naturally floundered for something to explain why bad things happen, and in the absence of God, many of us see the invisible hand of intention where none exists. That's not a wrong theory, but it leads to a very wrong conclusion at the end, where Kay argues that what we need is for religion to return as a unifying force. Then there's the whole idea of Marxism being a conspiracy theory, which leads to Marxists becoming conspiracy theorists, though out of all of the conspiracy theorists he profiles, very few ever identified as Marxists. Nevertheless, "Marxism is, in its broad contours, itself a form of conspiracy theory that pits evil industrialists against the common workingman."
Kay posits a "flowchart" theory of conspiracism, where a conspiracy-minded individual draws linkages between different people and institutions, and reaches the conclusion that they're all in it together. Of course, this is exactly what Kay does in his book. Because some Truthers used to be anti-war activists and others still are, and anti-war activism is linked to Palestine solidarity activism, Palestine solidarity activists believe in conspiracy theories. And everyone is an anti-Semite. Obviously. Also, identity politics is a conspiracy theory. He talks about identity politics a lot.
The other grudge Kay has is against the internet. He argues that rather than democratizing information, it leads to intellectual Balkanization and promotes misinformation. I find this interesting because he writes for the National Post. Ahem. He actually points this out as well but claims that the internet is worse for whatever reason.
At some point I gave up being annoyed with the underlying problematic nature of Kay's focus and analysis, and I just started tearing up bits of paper and bookmarking the parts that I strongly objected to.
You can tell a lot about a writer's biases by his language. When talking about the history of American conspiracism, Kay correctly points out that the social changes of the 70s had a traumatizing influence on American conservatives and launched Reagan into power. But the terminology he chooses to use in an unqualified way is telling: He refers to "on-demand abortion" and "forced busing," without scare quotes that distance himself from the politics that use these terms to manipulate opinion. He puts "neoconservativism" in scare quotes, though, and refers to "Chomskyites," towards the end.
He loses any alert modern reader early on, in a discussion of the Bilderberg Group. Now, Bilderberg conspiracism is more understandable than most conspiracy theories, even if it's a little hysterical—no one disputes the fact that rich, powerful, nasty people meet annually to talk. Secretly. Kay doesn't dispute it either; he just doesn't think that they're planning the New World Order. That's fine. His source for disputing Bilderberg conspiracism, however? Is Conrad Black. Just a suggestion: If you are attempting to debunk a conspiracy about rich and powerful men doing illegal things, it is probably not the greatest idea to counter with information gleaned from a rich and powerful man who was convicted of doing illegal things. Who is also your friend and colleague. Oy.
Then there's the fact that when he does talk about Birtherism, he's much more sympathetic than he is to the much more evidence-based claims of, say, social justice movements. Kay points out that it's true that Obama "took cocaine and flirted with extreme leftist ideologies...[M]ade his bed with a menagerie that included a crook, a former terrorist, and a black-power preacher who spouted toxic anti-American conspiracy theories [...] was raised as a Muslim in Indonesia..." and so on. Kay acknowledges that these are not "damming" (sic) facts but that they are "unprecedented." Accordingly, Birtherism can be blamed, not on the fact that the Birthers are racist, but on Obama's supposed links to left conspiracies and on a "liberal" media that doesn't attack Obama enough. He refers to David Solway, a Birther, as "genuinely insightful," for passages like:
Kay has a bone to pick with identity politics and specifically with Black people. He claims that Afrocentrism isn't "a conspiracy theory per se" and then goes on to describe how it is, and is also anti-Semitic, and Black bookstores sell Protocols of the Elders of Zion (they do?! Not the ones I go to!) but white people avert their eyes because we feel guilty about America's treatment of Blacks. By the way, to Kay, actual racism is a thing of the past, with the exception of anti-Semitism among Arabs and Black people.
Like most on the right, Kay has a problem with academia (many of his subjects are liberal arts professors, whom he singles out as particularly vulnerable to conspiratorial thinking because their jobs require twisting reality in inventive ways) and postmodernism. He indirectly condemns Jaques Derrida as an anti-Semite because of his association with Paul de Man. This seems irrelevant to me unless one's goal is not so much understanding conspiracism as it is to attack postmodernism and postcolonial theory as sketchy and anti-Semitic. I'm a fair woman; I don't expect Kay to really understand what Derrida was writing about, since even postmodernists don't understand Derrida, but if you don't understand him, why bring him up?
Unless—and he does this almost immediately after bringing up Derrida—your flowchart conspiracy involves the crucial link of postmodernism and "identity politics." Among Kay's real targets, as I've said, are social justice movements. In one of the most bizarre attacks, after defining identity politics as "the reconstruction (and in some cases, the wholesale invention) of history according to the viewpoint of women, blacks, gays, and other minorities—a project that replaced the historian's once-unquestioned goal of objective truth with an explicitly political, Marxist-leaning agenda aimed at empowerment and solidarity building," he launches into the following truly bizarre claim:
Really? Really? This is what he thinks leftists think? Because I thought we believed that the technologically superior European colonists committed genocide against an ill-prepared indigenous population—because that's what actually happened. I don't even know where he's getting this crap.
And then there's the bit where he infiltrates a workshop at the Toronto Women's Bookstore, a place where I have spent a great deal of time. I won't quote it because there are almost more scare quotes than words, and he takes issue with the idea that there's such a thing as privilege or oppression, and generally whines that he's being oppressed as a straight white man by all of these grad student types.
You might also be surprised that there's a direct line drawn from Protocols to the National Post's favourite target in the whole wide world, Queers Against Israeli Apartheid. Did you know, for example, when peace activists march in anti-war rallies, they "chant for Jewish blood in Arabic"? Because I have been to said rallies and no, this is not a thing that happens. I am pretty sure that Kay doesn't speak Arabic anyway.
Ultimately, Kay claims that his issue with conspiracism is that it's anti-Enlightenment, it goes against rationalism, and so on. But his solution (after the obligatory "more education" proposal, which he himself admits is kind of useless) is a return to a different sort of pattern-forming: institutional religion. "It is important," Kay argues, "to remember that the Enlightenment did not spell the end of serious Christian theology—and most of its giants likely would have been appalled by the exercise of their legacy to promote a Godless society."
That's the book in a nutshell—we have abandoned traditional churches and hierarchies, and the result is Loose Change. It's crazy. It's bollocks.
Like the conspiracies Kay tries to debunk (and inadvertently bolsters in some cases), there's a grain of truth and some solid research in this book. But like Cynthia McKinney, whose very legitimate criticism of America's wars and Israel's policies towards the Palestinians was derailed by her association with the 9/11 Truther movement, one can't take anything Kay says in the book seriously because he says so many other things that are demonstrably false. It would have been much more valuable to strip out many of the chapters on "conspiracy theories" like identity politics, instead of writing a book, produce a series of case studies about Truthers, Birthers, and anti-vaccine fanatics. Those interviews are actually good and useful. I felt, reading this, that much of the supposed analysis and historical background was just padding, or perhaps notes for a book that Kay really wanted to write about how awful social justice activists are. When he sticks to interviewing Truthers, he's not so bad.
Accordingly, I'm still waiting for a good analysis of Truther conspiracies. Any recommendations?
I confess that I am obsessed with conspiracy theories and the conspiratorial mindset. I blame X-Files in the 90s for both causing my interest in conspiracy theories and inoculating me from believing in them. Kay is similarly obsessed, though for different reasons—as he admits in the book, he actually shares many traits with people who believe in conspiracy theories. In fact, the book contains a conspiracy theory as elaborate and bizarre as any depicted in Loose Change or Zeitgeist, one that draws mindboggling links between Das Kapital, Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Orientalism, and modern conspiracy movements.
Yep, there's an agenda at work here. Kay is a writer and editor with the National Post, and he doesn't so much want to debunk Trutherism as use it as a tool to slam the typical bugbears: Marxism, social justice and anti-war movements, atheism, and Kant's supposed "moral relativism." (It's always Kant's fault.)
I'm not going to say you shouldn't read it or that it was a complete waste of time; there is certainly good information in the book, and he's correct in stating that there are more 9/11 conspiracy theories out there than there are books debunking them. It's important to understand the conspiratorial mindset and to critically examine the claims of Truthers, especially given what I've said repeatedly about their infiltration into legitimate social and political movements. It's not a harmless crank theory. He does interview actual Truthers and present case studies, and that stuff is valuable to know about. I just wish this book had been written by someone who wasn't as much of a crank as his subjects.
First off, the title is misleading. Kay spends about half the book talking about Truthers and very little of it talking about other modern conspiracies, like the anti-vaccine people or the Birthers. This is because he deliberately wants to associate Trutherism with the left. His main target is not the Truthers; he's almost affectionate towards them. He spends more time talking about Toronto Palestine solidarity activism at the end of the book than he does talking about anti-vaccine hysterics. This is unfortunate, not just because I don't agree with what a writer for a far-right publication thinks of a movement I belong to, but also because it means the book fails to answer some of my burning questions. For example, he talks a lot about how belief in one conspiracy makes a person more likely to believe other conspiracies. What does this mean when Truthers largely identify as left-wing and Birthers identify exclusively as right/libertarian? Is there overlap between these two groups? What about the 90s militia movement?
Then there's the preface and the conclusion, where Kay spends an inordinate amount of time talking about how Voltaire hated atheists and how Marxism is basically a conspiracy theory. Even if you're not an atheist or a Marxist, this is pushing it. So apparently the Enlightenment was a good thing for the most part, except that it did away with religion as a powerful, unifying social institution. Being pattern-recognizing creatures, we naturally floundered for something to explain why bad things happen, and in the absence of God, many of us see the invisible hand of intention where none exists. That's not a wrong theory, but it leads to a very wrong conclusion at the end, where Kay argues that what we need is for religion to return as a unifying force. Then there's the whole idea of Marxism being a conspiracy theory, which leads to Marxists becoming conspiracy theorists, though out of all of the conspiracy theorists he profiles, very few ever identified as Marxists. Nevertheless, "Marxism is, in its broad contours, itself a form of conspiracy theory that pits evil industrialists against the common workingman."
Kay posits a "flowchart" theory of conspiracism, where a conspiracy-minded individual draws linkages between different people and institutions, and reaches the conclusion that they're all in it together. Of course, this is exactly what Kay does in his book. Because some Truthers used to be anti-war activists and others still are, and anti-war activism is linked to Palestine solidarity activism, Palestine solidarity activists believe in conspiracy theories. And everyone is an anti-Semite. Obviously. Also, identity politics is a conspiracy theory. He talks about identity politics a lot.
The other grudge Kay has is against the internet. He argues that rather than democratizing information, it leads to intellectual Balkanization and promotes misinformation. I find this interesting because he writes for the National Post. Ahem. He actually points this out as well but claims that the internet is worse for whatever reason.
At some point I gave up being annoyed with the underlying problematic nature of Kay's focus and analysis, and I just started tearing up bits of paper and bookmarking the parts that I strongly objected to.
You can tell a lot about a writer's biases by his language. When talking about the history of American conspiracism, Kay correctly points out that the social changes of the 70s had a traumatizing influence on American conservatives and launched Reagan into power. But the terminology he chooses to use in an unqualified way is telling: He refers to "on-demand abortion" and "forced busing," without scare quotes that distance himself from the politics that use these terms to manipulate opinion. He puts "neoconservativism" in scare quotes, though, and refers to "Chomskyites," towards the end.
He loses any alert modern reader early on, in a discussion of the Bilderberg Group. Now, Bilderberg conspiracism is more understandable than most conspiracy theories, even if it's a little hysterical—no one disputes the fact that rich, powerful, nasty people meet annually to talk. Secretly. Kay doesn't dispute it either; he just doesn't think that they're planning the New World Order. That's fine. His source for disputing Bilderberg conspiracism, however? Is Conrad Black. Just a suggestion: If you are attempting to debunk a conspiracy about rich and powerful men doing illegal things, it is probably not the greatest idea to counter with information gleaned from a rich and powerful man who was convicted of doing illegal things. Who is also your friend and colleague. Oy.
Then there's the fact that when he does talk about Birtherism, he's much more sympathetic than he is to the much more evidence-based claims of, say, social justice movements. Kay points out that it's true that Obama "took cocaine and flirted with extreme leftist ideologies...[M]ade his bed with a menagerie that included a crook, a former terrorist, and a black-power preacher who spouted toxic anti-American conspiracy theories [...] was raised as a Muslim in Indonesia..." and so on. Kay acknowledges that these are not "damming" (sic) facts but that they are "unprecedented." Accordingly, Birtherism can be blamed, not on the fact that the Birthers are racist, but on Obama's supposed links to left conspiracies and on a "liberal" media that doesn't attack Obama enough. He refers to David Solway, a Birther, as "genuinely insightful," for passages like:
The new aborigine [Muslims] as the contemporary embodiment of the Noble Savage invented by European exploration, thus acts as the counterfoil to our own repressed and guilt-ridden civilization. The enemy who commands our sympathies becomes the heroicizing projection of our own bad conscience. Because he possesses what we lack and desire, we are willing to live in a state of contradiction and hasten to pardon his atrocities. Thus feminists will wink at the monstrous usage of infibrilation."
Kay has a bone to pick with identity politics and specifically with Black people. He claims that Afrocentrism isn't "a conspiracy theory per se" and then goes on to describe how it is, and is also anti-Semitic, and Black bookstores sell Protocols of the Elders of Zion (they do?! Not the ones I go to!) but white people avert their eyes because we feel guilty about America's treatment of Blacks. By the way, to Kay, actual racism is a thing of the past, with the exception of anti-Semitism among Arabs and Black people.
Like most on the right, Kay has a problem with academia (many of his subjects are liberal arts professors, whom he singles out as particularly vulnerable to conspiratorial thinking because their jobs require twisting reality in inventive ways) and postmodernism. He indirectly condemns Jaques Derrida as an anti-Semite because of his association with Paul de Man. This seems irrelevant to me unless one's goal is not so much understanding conspiracism as it is to attack postmodernism and postcolonial theory as sketchy and anti-Semitic. I'm a fair woman; I don't expect Kay to really understand what Derrida was writing about, since even postmodernists don't understand Derrida, but if you don't understand him, why bring him up?
Unless—and he does this almost immediately after bringing up Derrida—your flowchart conspiracy involves the crucial link of postmodernism and "identity politics." Among Kay's real targets, as I've said, are social justice movements. In one of the most bizarre attacks, after defining identity politics as "the reconstruction (and in some cases, the wholesale invention) of history according to the viewpoint of women, blacks, gays, and other minorities—a project that replaced the historian's once-unquestioned goal of objective truth with an explicitly political, Marxist-leaning agenda aimed at empowerment and solidarity building," he launches into the following truly bizarre claim:
In my native Canada, for instance, it has become impossible to have any sort of intelligent debate about the relationship between the continent's white European settlers and the aboriginals whose ancestors first migrated from Asia at the end of the last glacial period. The historical truth about first contact between seafaring European explorers and North America's animist hunter-gatherers—that it was a meeting between two peoples at vastly different stages of technological development—was progressively phased out in favor of a narrative that suggests a meeting of two equal "nations." (Thus the rebranding of small, scattered aboriginal tribes as "First Nations" in the politically correct Canadian lexicon.) In the same vein, academic curricula were revised according to the fiction that our Western intellectual tradition had been built on the sayings and customs of wise old Indian chiefs.
Really? Really? This is what he thinks leftists think? Because I thought we believed that the technologically superior European colonists committed genocide against an ill-prepared indigenous population—because that's what actually happened. I don't even know where he's getting this crap.
And then there's the bit where he infiltrates a workshop at the Toronto Women's Bookstore, a place where I have spent a great deal of time. I won't quote it because there are almost more scare quotes than words, and he takes issue with the idea that there's such a thing as privilege or oppression, and generally whines that he's being oppressed as a straight white man by all of these grad student types.
You might also be surprised that there's a direct line drawn from Protocols to the National Post's favourite target in the whole wide world, Queers Against Israeli Apartheid. Did you know, for example, when peace activists march in anti-war rallies, they "chant for Jewish blood in Arabic"? Because I have been to said rallies and no, this is not a thing that happens. I am pretty sure that Kay doesn't speak Arabic anyway.
Ultimately, Kay claims that his issue with conspiracism is that it's anti-Enlightenment, it goes against rationalism, and so on. But his solution (after the obligatory "more education" proposal, which he himself admits is kind of useless) is a return to a different sort of pattern-forming: institutional religion. "It is important," Kay argues, "to remember that the Enlightenment did not spell the end of serious Christian theology—and most of its giants likely would have been appalled by the exercise of their legacy to promote a Godless society."
Unlike Hitchens, Dawkins, Harris, and their followers, Voltaire understood that man cannot survive on skepticism alone—that society requires some creed or overarching national project that transcends mere intellect. When the appeal of traditional religion becomes weak, darker faiths assert themselves: including not only communism, fascism, tribalism, and strident nationalism, but also more faddish intellectual pathologies such as radical identity politics, anti-Americanism, and obsessive anti-Zionism. As I've argued, all of these provide rich soil for the seeds of conspiracism.
That's the book in a nutshell—we have abandoned traditional churches and hierarchies, and the result is Loose Change. It's crazy. It's bollocks.
Like the conspiracies Kay tries to debunk (and inadvertently bolsters in some cases), there's a grain of truth and some solid research in this book. But like Cynthia McKinney, whose very legitimate criticism of America's wars and Israel's policies towards the Palestinians was derailed by her association with the 9/11 Truther movement, one can't take anything Kay says in the book seriously because he says so many other things that are demonstrably false. It would have been much more valuable to strip out many of the chapters on "conspiracy theories" like identity politics, instead of writing a book, produce a series of case studies about Truthers, Birthers, and anti-vaccine fanatics. Those interviews are actually good and useful. I felt, reading this, that much of the supposed analysis and historical background was just padding, or perhaps notes for a book that Kay really wanted to write about how awful social justice activists are. When he sticks to interviewing Truthers, he's not so bad.
Accordingly, I'm still waiting for a good analysis of Truther conspiracies. Any recommendations?
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no subject
Date: 2011-09-10 03:25 pm (UTC)Really? Really? This is what he thinks leftists think? Because I thought we believed that the technologically superior European colonists committed genocide against an ill-prepared indigenous population—because that's what actually happened. I don't even know where he's getting this crap.
Although he is a creep, I do know where he's getting this. I've taken a few First Nations Studies courses over the last 3 years and there is a sort of idea among them that indigenous "technologies" and "knowledges" are/were not inferior in any way, just different, and that Europeans were the primitive ones. I think on one hand that it's about restoring self-esteem to Indigenous people, which I totally understand. And also there is some element of truth to it. But there is sort of a "politically correct" contrarian side to it that I don't like, that doesn't fully engage with the extreme trauma and injustice of what happened back then.
no subject
Date: 2011-09-10 06:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-10 06:54 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-10 10:24 pm (UTC)Perhaps I give academics more credit than I should, but it seems intuitive to distinguish between a culture's value and agency and a culture's actual objective technological level.
no subject
Date: 2011-09-10 10:28 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-10 04:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-10 10:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-10 10:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-11 03:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-10 04:28 pm (UTC)And I hate people who think like him. So much.
Also the millions of ppl who think they're better than him but share the same fundamental errors in logic ... which pretty much coincide with a lens of overwhelming privilege. Oops was that identity politics???
no subject
Date: 2011-09-10 10:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-10 04:28 pm (UTC)Also, while there is certainly a lot of anti-Israel sentiment among the Truthers, I don't think it comes from any inherent antisemitism so much as it's just another example of the poor reasoning skills many of them demonstrate. According to typical Truther logic, because Israel benefited tremendously from 9/11 (TRUE), it must also be true that Israel was behind it (FALSE). They're mostly just confusing the antecedent with the consequent.
no subject
Date: 2011-09-10 10:27 pm (UTC)I think Truthers are, among other things, just very gullible. So all it takes is a few actual anti-Semites to promote an anti-Semitic conspiracy and they completely buy it.
no subject
Date: 2011-09-10 07:06 pm (UTC)If my impression is correct, that's kinda fascinating. Given his admission of sharing some conspiracist traits and of having an axe to grind, calling it "ironic" may be hard to justify, but still interesting.
no subject
Date: 2011-09-10 10:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-11 12:49 am (UTC)I've heard another radio interview, other than the one I believe I posted for you, where had bells and whistles going off for me, especially his rather obsessive fetish for "the center", or stuff that are basically in the interest of white guys who are editors at the National Post. I've got to hand it to him, he hides his biases well.
After reading a little more about him after reading your write-up here, I've found that he seems to be criticized in Canadian media for the same criticisms as you provided. But in America and in the (American) radio interviews that I listened too, the criticism came from his criticism of Tea Party types. Telling I guess.
One thing I do agree with him but reach a different conclusion on is the one about religion. I think the point about conspiracies theories acting just like religions is prescient in that as you noted, you can't argue with it just like you can't argue with religion, either the logic is functioning on different plane or the bar for evidence is constantly moved, or you'll be called a dupe of the conspiracy, just like you'll be labled an sinner or infidel in religious ones.
But the most telling trait is the role that they both fulfill, namely in explaining an unpredictable and unjust world where Bad Things happen. But just like you pointed out, unlike religion there is no call to action, no call to spiritual warfare, no call for charity. Just keep buying Alex Jones' DVDs, the truth is out there.
In that aspect it's impressive how even the True Believers who are profiting off of this nonsense are pulling off an impressive scam of epic proportions with the Truther cottage industry. But hey, people bought Indulgences from Bishops for a long time also. It offers the salvation of being on secret knowledge and having a messianic role as an evangelical for The Cause and having endless debates that allow you to be smug while venting emotional rage is much more appealing than actual political action that can seem pointless and unrewarding most of the time.
And I think that it's a shame that lefties are mostly falling for this, because we've been reactionary for the last thirty years and quite frankly, the left hasn't offered much for people within that time frame. I can see how people can cling to this out of desperation when the left, at least here the U.S., is in a pretty desperate position.
It's disappointing how Kay, a pretty intelligent guy, is basically promoting a Plantonic Noble Lie solution with the "national project" bullshit. He's not really serious about anything with rational thought or the enlightenment, he's interested in making a world that serves his interest and follows the social structures he thinks it should, and he's willing to promote a lie to endorse it. And isn't that a conspiracy in itself? Because he has has a whole social system to help him. Interesting how that comes full circle. :P
Are you planning to publish this review? Please tell me yes, because this effort deserves it.
no subject
Date: 2011-09-11 02:48 pm (UTC)Interesting about the religion thing. I agree.
I have no idea where I'd publish this review. Certainly, its tone is far from proper journalism. If you have a suggestion, let me know!
no subject
Date: 2011-09-11 01:25 am (UTC)Damn, I need a posse.
no subject
Date: 2011-09-11 02:49 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-11 01:36 am (UTC)Gee, this sounds suspiciously just like what Kant said in the Dialectic of Pure Reason. And he went on to say that the church had a social function, in terms of building a sense of community, even if god was out of the picture.
It sounds like he reads Voltaire the same way Rand reads Nietzsche, cherry picking and with a strong interpretive bias.
no subject
Date: 2011-09-11 02:51 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-11 06:44 pm (UTC)Conspiracy theories are one of the many things I don't miss about being a hippy. The circles I moved in weren't very intellectual in general, and people would spend hours concocting these fantasies based on what someone said one time.
I was talking to someone the other day about how when I left the commune and moved to the (smallish) city (in a mostly rural area), I would go to the university library some days and just sit there and read what were basically 101 level books, partly to prove to myself that I still could.
no subject
Date: 2011-09-11 11:35 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-11 02:03 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-11 02:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-11 04:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-11 03:08 am (UTC)I want to go to a meeting of historians that's about "solidarity building" rather than about whose university is paying them enough to handle grade inflation.
no subject
Date: 2011-09-11 02:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-11 11:09 pm (UTC)I should get an advanced degree in Hippy Science. My wife's friend apparently cured her kid's "allergy" by buying a homeopathic pendant which... resonances "energy" or something into the kid's aura? I mean, nothing is even ingested -- he wears a vial of water and herbs or some shit around his neck. And I'm like shit, does it protect against chem trails, too? What the fuck?
no subject
Date: 2011-09-11 11:12 pm (UTC)Chemtrails are my favourite conspiracy. It's all the hilarity of the fluoride thing but with an added dose of WTF?
no subject
Date: 2011-09-12 03:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-09-12 09:08 pm (UTC)