by NewKid » Thu Feb 09, 2006 12:29 pm
<!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>What I'm looking for in the data dump:<br>deconstruction of the "paranoid conspiracy theory" paradigm. A reversal of the usual assumptions re: conspiracy theory and redirection of them back onto the established world of official history<hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--><br><br><br><!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>While it is easy to distinguish a belief that aluminum foil wrapped around one's head filters out alien brain waves from rational but dissident ideas, some modern writers on conspiracy theory tend to conflate nonconformity with the most bizarre and cognitively defective extremes of it. So-called "consensus historians," following the lead of Richard Hofstadter's famous 1964 essay, "The Paranoid Style in American Politics," have effectively pathologized any suspicion of active conspiracies, however defined, into a synonym for "nut job" in public discourse. <hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--><br><br>snip<br><br><!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>There are two books for required reading:<br>- Culture of Conspiracy by Barkun<br>- 80 Greatest Conspiracies, which is out-of-print<hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--><br><br>snip<br><br><!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>Hofstadter's prescience is amply evidenced in Michael Barkun's A Culture of Conspiracy: Apocalyptic Visions in Contemporary America (2003). Barkun has ingested Hofstadter's imperious tome whole, and his book does little more than regurgitate its polemical eurekas.<hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--><br><br>snip<br><br><!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>Writers like Barkun are fond of inventing buzz concepts like "improvisational millennialism," "the cultic milieu," "agency panic," and "stigmatized knowledge claims." The latter, according to Barkun, are "claims to truth that the claimants regard as verified despite the marginalization of those claims by the institutions that conventionally distinguish between knowledge and error—universities, communities of scientific researchers, and the like." Few besides the amply tenured and remuneratively institutionalized would be likely to endorse Barkun's tweedy self-flattery as descriptive of American academia—as Jane Jacobs points out in her new book Dark Age Ahead, our colleges and universities have largely degenerated into mere credentialing factories—and what political scientists consider a science tends to be more a recruitment pool for think tanks, few of which trouble to separate knowledge from error, but simply bend data to suit the particular tank's ideological orientation. <hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--><br><br><!--EZCODE LINK START--><a href="http://villagevoice.com/issues/0421/indiana.php">villagevoice.com/issues/0421/indiana.php</a><!--EZCODE LINK END--><br><br>see also <br><br><!--EZCODE LINK START--><a href="http://villagevoice.com/issues/0422/indiana.php" target="top">villagevoice.com/issues/0422/indiana.php</a><!--EZCODE LINK END--><br><br><!--EZCODE LINK START--><a href="http://villagevoice.com/issues/0423/indiana.php" target="top">villagevoice.com/issues/0423/indiana.php</a><!--EZCODE LINK END--><br><br><!--EZCODE LINK START--><a href="http://mediamonitors.net/mosaddeq37.html" target="top">mediamonitors.net/mosaddeq37.html</a><!--EZCODE LINK END--><br><br><!--EZCODE LINK START--><a href="http://www.leftgatekeepers.com/articles/establishedleft.htm" target="top">www.leftgatekeepers.com/articles/establishedleft.htm</a><!--EZCODE LINK END--><br><br><!--EZCODE LINK START--><a href="http://www.leftgatekeepers.com/lea.htm" target="top">www.leftgatekeepers.com/lea.htm</a><!--EZCODE LINK END--><br><br><!--EZCODE LINK START--><a href="http://www.davesweb.cnchost.com/nwsltr27.html" target="top">www.davesweb.cnchost.com/nwsltr27.html</a><!--EZCODE LINK END--><br><br><!--EZCODE LINK START--><a href="http://www.davesweb.cnchost.com/nwsltr28.html" target="top">www.davesweb.cnchost.com/nwsltr28.html</a><!--EZCODE LINK END--><br><br><!--EZCODE LINK START--><a href="http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/KUP310A.html" target="top">www.globalresearch.ca/articles/KUP310A.html</a><!--EZCODE LINK END--><br><br><!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>He said a strong theory has "predictive value", so any instances where a conspiracy theory has had predictive value would be helpful.<hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--><br><br><!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>Expect also a stepped-up 'war on terrorism.'<br><br>This proved to be, I think it's safe to say, a bit of an understatement. So too did the passage that immediately followed those words: <br><br>What this really means, of course, is an increased attack on the human and civil rights of Americans. We will naturally be told that our lawmakers are striking a balance between the rights of American citizens, and the need to guard against the nonexistent threat of international and domestic terrorism. In the name of protecting us, a wholesale attack on our few remaining democratic rights will be launched.<br><br>Well ... let's see now ... so far Team Bush has given us the USA PATRIOT Act, the Department of Homeland Security, the TIPS program, the Information Awareness Office, 'Total Information Awareness,' indefinite detentions without charges or trials or access to legal counsel, and secret military tribunals. Not bad for two years. <br><br><hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--><br><br><!--EZCODE LINK START--><a href="http://www.davesweb.cnchost.com/nwsltr29.html" target="top">www.davesweb.cnchost.com/nwsltr29.html</a><!--EZCODE LINK END--><br><br>see also<br><br><br><!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>The Terrorists are Coming! The Terrorists are Coming!<br><br>David McGowan <br>August 2000 <hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--><br><br><!--EZCODE LINK START--><a href="http://www.davesweb.cnchost.com/terrorists.htm" target="top">www.davesweb.cnchost.com/terrorists.htm</a><!--EZCODE LINK END--><br><br><!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>Instances of perfectly rational, credible, and distinguished persons believing/supporting a conspiracy theory.<hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--><br><br><!--EZCODE LINK START--><a href="http://www.scholarsfor911truth.org/PressRelease30Jan2006.html" target="top">www.scholarsfor911truth.org/PressRelease30Jan2006.html</a><!--EZCODE LINK END--><br><br><br>Just a start FB. I think you're going to be underwhelmed by this guy. Doubtful he will engage any serious empirical conspiracy research. Most of it will be on mindset. <br><br> <br><br><!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr> The issues raised by Professor Jones are not breaking along standard political fissures. People’s relative amounts of skepticism and credulity, rather than their political affiliations, seem to determine their openness to giving the professor’s analysis a hearing. Jones himself claims to have been a lifelong Republican, but now affiliates with no political party. The audience Wednesday night was definitely not the usual suspects of progressive professors and pierced and tattooed activists and students who regularly gather to share criticism of the President, although there were a few of those, too. Mostly, they looked like a cross-section of average middle-Americans. But by the end of the evening, it is no exaggeration to say that most had become political radicals, not of the left and the right, but of the right and the wrong. <br><br>If Dr. Jones’s work ever breaks into the mainstream media, and the rest of the country reacts the way the Utah County audience reacted, traditional political divisions will evaporate like steel beams exploded with thermite, and the whole lot of them, the Democrats and the Republicans, will be swept away, along with the military-industrial complex that has apparently managed to subvert the constitution of these United States and to con the American public, mesmerized by the shock of 9/11 and hypnotized by spell-binding incantations of freedom and patriotism, into going along with their mad plans for world domination.<hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--><br><br><!--EZCODE LINK START--><a href="http://mujca.com/jonesphysics.htm" target="top">mujca.com/jonesphysics.htm</a><!--EZCODE LINK END--><br><br><br>My guess is the class is probably at least somewhat experimental.<br><br> <p></p><i></i>
