BBC: Down 'the rabbit hole of conspiracism' (Jonathan Kay)

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Re: BBC: Down 'the rabbit hole of conspiracism' (Jonathan Ka

Postby hanshan » Thu Jun 09, 2011 3:28 pm

...

Stephen Morgan:

I never receive such calls. It was only yesterday that I got my first Jehovah's Witness at the door. I did consider trying to talk them into my brand of Christianity, as they had so obligingly wandered into my web, but then I realised I don't know what they believe so couldn't argue against it. But I digress.



:rofl:


...
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Re: BBC: Down 'the rabbit hole of conspiracism' (Jonathan Ka

Postby Stephen Morgan » Thu Jun 09, 2011 4:02 pm

hanshan wrote:...

Stephen Morgan:

I never receive such calls. It was only yesterday that I got my first Jehovah's Witness at the door. I did consider trying to talk them into my brand of Christianity, as they had so obligingly wandered into my web, but then I realised I don't know what they believe so couldn't argue against it. But I digress.



:rofl:


...


Lost my composure when I realised I didn't know what I was meant to say. Ended up agreeing to go to some sort of event they're having.
Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that all was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, and make it possible. -- Lawrence of Arabia
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Re: BBC: Down 'the rabbit hole of conspiracism' (Jonathan Ka

Postby hanshan » Thu Jun 09, 2011 4:09 pm

Stephen Morgan wrote:
hanshan wrote:...

Stephen Morgan:

I never receive such calls. It was only yesterday that I got my first Jehovah's Witness at the door. I did consider trying to talk them into my brand of Christianity, as they had so obligingly wandered into my web, but then I realised I don't know what they believe so couldn't argue against it. But I digress.



:rofl:


...


Lost my composure when I realised I didn't know what I was meant to say. Ended up agreeing to go to some sort of event they're having.


Even funnier; something similar once happened to me w/ the Hare Krishnas. A very bizzarre scene ensued over Krishnas' repast....( as I actually went)...phew


edited for spatial integrity

...
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Re: BBC: Down 'the rabbit hole of conspiracism' (Jonathan Ka

Postby blanc » Thu Jun 09, 2011 4:36 pm

By weird coincidence I was aborded by 2 JWs today as I prepared a salad, door left open, no chance to pretend I wasn't in. They deal in certainties - opening gambit was the sure bet that all suffering sickness and evil would be removed from the world. :angelwings: Back to topic, and the world as we find it.

They're mostly just lazy and incompetent,


This description doesn't fit the journalist referred to above, the work was done, the story was pulled. Same procedure in the case of another writer commissioned by the Guardian to do a report on a different case (different victims and perps), a great deal of work went into this one and some stepping into the way of danger, a third working for one of our Sunday solids on a third organised abuse story, also worked hard to have the story pulled.

I don't think its the writers. Well, ok, they have to live, so if the real deal is disallowed, they'll produce a filler. Its the reason I almost never buy newspapers now, and rarely, if ever, watch tv.
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Re: BBC: Down 'the rabbit hole of conspiracism' (Jonathan Ka

Postby hanshan » Thu Jun 09, 2011 4:45 pm

...


blanc:

By weird coincidence I was aborded by 2 JWs today as I prepared a salad, door left open, no chance to pretend I wasn't in. They deal in certainties - opening gambit was the sure bet that all suffering sickness and evil would be removed from the world. Back to topic, and the world as we find it.



yeah - when you can't hide in plain sight, makes it tough to fake it
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Re: BBC: Down 'the rabbit hole of conspiracism' (Jonathan Ka

Postby slimmouse » Thu Jun 09, 2011 5:17 pm

Anyone who seriously believes that the BBC doesnt have the deep- state and establishment organ grinders calling the tune whilst the appointed talking heads tell you their stories needs a check up from the neck up.

This is the kind of "impartial, respectable" journalism that the keeps the reptoids calling the shots.

What you dont know cant hurt them. Which is why they dont tell you in their balanced and fair reporting what you truly should know

Wholesale Bought and sold Liars by ommission.
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Re: BBC: Down 'the rabbit hole of conspiracism' (Jonathan Ka

Postby Byrne » Thu Jun 09, 2011 6:45 pm

Here's freedom to them that wad read,
Here's freedom to them that wad write,
There's nane ever fear'd that the truth should be heard,
But they whom the truth would indite.

Robert Burns, 1792

(here's a good collection of media hacks & spooks)
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Re: BBC: Down 'the rabbit hole of conspiracism' (Jonathan Ka

Postby Canadian_watcher » Thu Jun 09, 2011 8:35 pm

I think "conspiracy theorist" is modern day lingo for 'witch.'

If they could burn/drown anyone who thought outside of the box - and said so - I'm sure they would.
Unless they could capitalize on them first, of course. Then they'd light their matches a little later.
Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own.-- Jonathan Swift

When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him. -- Jonathan Swift
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Re: BBC: Down 'the rabbit hole of conspiracism' (Jonathan Ka

Postby Joe Hillshoist » Fri Jun 10, 2011 12:22 am

Stephen Morgan wrote:
Joe Hillshoist wrote:BBC been taken over by Murdoch too Steve?


Not quite, just been corrupted by the forces of evil. Murdoch still wants rid of them because they're competition. Been trying to steal their funding and so on.


the abc board in Australia has been stacked with once and future Murdoch staff for most of this century.
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Re: BBC: Down 'the rabbit hole of conspiracism' (Jonathan Ka

Postby bks » Fri Jun 10, 2011 1:11 am

A sharp send-up of Kay's book, by a former co-worker. Links at original:

http://backofthebook.ca/2011/05/13/among-the-credulous/5046/

The Protocols of Jonathan Kay

Posted by admin on May 13, 2011 · 5 Comments

among-the-truthersAMONG THE TRUTHERS
By Jonathan Kay
Harper Collins
368 pages, $32.99 hardcover, $25.99 ebook

Reviewed by Frank Moher

On the evening of Saturday, June 26, 2010, Jonathan Kay headed out on his bike into the streets of Toronto to see what was up with the G20. What he saw, he wrote early the next morning in the National Post, convinced him of “”the extraordinary professionalism of the police patrolling Toronto this week.” The city was intact: tourists thronged Yonge Street, a band played on the corner. He toodled west along Queen, where he found a line of police staring down protestors. But: “There wasn’t any violence — at least none that I saw.”

Er, not so much.

We know now, of course, that the police were engaged in widespread brutality and violations of civil liberties all over Toronto that day. But Jonathan Kay didn’t see any of it and, so, of course, the police acted with “extraordinary professionalism.” Or perhaps he would argue that a little head-bashing and snatch-and-grabbery is not really violence, as in, you know, violence, and the police and state agree with him, and so that is that.

We don’t really know what Kay was thinking in the wake of the G20, as he didn’t blog much about it after that, except to call Toronto a “city of wimps.”

And so we come to Mr. Kay’s latest item of “reporting,” a book titled Among the Truthers: A Journey into the Growing Conspiracist Underground of 9/11 Truthers, Birthers, Armageddonites, Vaccine Hysterics, Hollywood Know-Nothings and Internet Addicts. All the tropes evidenced in his G20 coverage are present here, too: perception peddled as reality, ad hominens, and a firm conviction that anyone who sees things differently than he does must be a nut. Kay, Managing Editor of Comment at the Post, bills himself on his twitter feed as an “Engineer-turned-lawyer-turned-journalist-turned-book-writing-guy.” But while he is indubitably a journalist and a book-writing-guy, he is not a reporter; he is an editorialist, and remains so here.

I should mention that I am referred to in passing in the book, which identifies me, bizarrely, as a “poet.” (I have worked in theatre and journalism for some 35 years, but the last poem I wrote, other than this piece of doggerel, was in high school.) It also lumps me in with the rest of its specimens as a “Truther,” which is more arguable, though I don’t identify myself as such, not only because the term is subject to the sort of mish-mashing Kay gives it here, but because it strikes me as pompous (kind of like calling oneself a “pro-lifer”). In any event, if I am a Truther, I’m a pretty bad one: I don’t think George Bush or Dick Cheney or anyone in the White House hatched the plot, I do think an airplane flew into the Pentagon, I’m agnostic about what brought down World Trade Centers 1 and 2 (though not so much 7), I regard Alex Jones as a highly unreliable (if entertaining) source of information, and I think Ron Paul would be a disaster as president. If the Truther movement issued membership cards, I’d probably be required to turn mine in.

I also wrote for the National Post for 11 years (including a piece with Jonathan Kay as editor). It was their itchy-trigger-finger syndrome when, in a book review, I alluded to the suspicious stock trading that preceded 9/11, that caused me to stop doing so.

What I certainly am is a sceptic — about the official version of 9/11 as well as much else I am told, whether by government or others who have a stake in a story. That, to me, is what is involved in being a journalist. But Jonathan Kay tells us that too much of that sort of thing can get out of hand. “Voltaire understood that man cannot survive on skepticism alone,” he writes, in the sermonly conclusion to his book — “that society requires some creed or overarching national project that transcends mere intellect.”

One thing that can be said for Among the Truthers — it certainly transcends “mere intellect.”

Kay’s tactic here is the same one used by Michael Shermer of the seriously missnamed Skeptics Society, which is, as the subtitle indicates, to mix up the 9/11 truth movement with The Protocols of Zion, holocaust denial, birtherism, moon hoaxism, etc., into one big wacky ball of racism and lunacy. And his method is as dishonest as Shermer’s as well. Thus, in his interviews, he emphasizes figures he can most easily characterize as charming but quaint, such as Ken Jenkins, a “Bay area flower child” who “embodies the sixties soul of the 9/11 truth movement’s older members.” Or, where he does speak with Truthers who are more immediately credible, he makes short work of their bona fides before reverting to the book’s default mode — a sort of bland superciliousness. Thus Barrie Zwicker, a journalist of longer standing and quite a bit more distinction than Kay, becomes “an amiable crank,” of interest mostly because he insisted on conducting his own counter-interview when they met, complete with “a chess clock to regulate our usage of time.” (Update in video below: Zwicker says it wasn’t a chess clock.) And David Ray Griffin, who has spent not two but eight years studying his subject and published 11 books about it, is also, simply, a “crank.”

Kay never addresses the arguments of his interlocutors, because, he tells us late in the book, a New York City editor warned him that “Debunking books don’t sell.” Instead, he refers the reader to various of those books, and sites. This is defensible on editorial grounds; were he to get into his own reasons for rejecting 9/11 Truth theories, the book would be even weightier than it is. But it is also a convenience; it means Kay never has to address what he calls the “anomalies” in the official story of that day. We never learn why his interviewees are so head-shakingly wrong — they just are.

He does, though, fall back on some of the easier explanations for why so-called conspiracism has thrived since the Kennedy assassination: the world is too complex, conspiracy believers can’t deal with its chaos, and so they develop over-arching narratives to make its unpredictability more palatable. All of which is nonsense; the notion that one could take comfort from the idea that Kennedy was killed by a cabal, still unidentified to this day, or that somebody blew up the World Trade Centre towers (and got away with it), is sillier even than the most exotic conspiracy theories. But there’s more where that came from. Kay is a proponent of the “If I Write It, Maybe It’ll Become True” school of prose. As I got deeper into his book, with its explanation that conspiracism is the result of “midlife ennui” (or that, as an alleged “poet,” my day job requires me to “weave a self-invented reality”; I wish), I began to find Among the Truthers as ludicrously entertaining as any Alex Jones broadcast.

Kay does offer an interesting history of conspiracy movements (though this leaves him in the uncomfortable position of having to acknowledge that some are legitimate; again, we never find out what makes one plot real and another not). And he is right that, for some adherents, 9/11 Truth evolves into a kind of religion. The comfort believers find in it, however, comes not from a simplifying explanation of the world, but from a group of shared verities, repeated over and over in incantatory fashion. Mind you, this could also describe the editorial pages of the National Post.

Less harmless than Kay’s pop-psychologizing is his zeal to eradicate ideas other than his own. Having concluded that “any effort to engage committed theorists in reasoned debate is a waste of time” — because, of course, they refuse to come around to his way of seeing things — he offers, in his final chapter, a proposal to jonathan-kayshame them out of their wrong-thinking, by “applying the same self-critical, self-aware mindset that has served to stigmatize racism, overt anti-Semitism, and related forms of bigotry in recent decades.” What he has in mind are first-year university courses using an “anticonspiracist curriculum” to teach students “to recognize the patterns of conspiracist thought.” In other words, if you can’t beat ‘em, kill their young.

Well, okay. Sounds like an interesting course. Of course, the problem is that if it were taught in any way other than Jonathan Kay, dreamer-upper, envisions — if, say, discussion as to the merits as well as the vagaries of the 9/11 Truth movement were allowed — then Jonathan Kay, National Post writer, would no doubt take off after it. Kay got his start on this beat when, as he reminds us, he discovered that a Liberal candidate in the 2008 federal election had six years earlier reported on some of the findings of various independent researchers into 9/11. He immediately employed the Post in a successful campaign to have her turfed as a candidate. More recently he’s been trying to work the same voodoo on a student at the University of Lethbridge. For all that Kay affects to be really, really interested in 9/11 Truth as a sociological movement, and to really, really want to understand its actors, Among the Truthers is of a piece with his daily journalism. He isn’t out to understand them; he’s out for their scalps.




Six months after the G20, Jonathan Kay had a bit of a rethink. “A few weeks ago,” he wrote in his Post blog, “I thought the police response to the G20 protests was yesterday’s news — and I never really reconsidered the opinion I formed at the time of the event, based on what I saw with my own eyes.” But then the Toronto Star got on the case of Adam Nobody, the G20 peaceful protestor tackled and beaten by cops, and lo-and-behold: “. . . it’s now clear that there was some thuggish police behavior that that went on.”

“Thuggish.” So it’s a start.

We can hope that someday some mainstream publication gets on the case of 9/11, thus allowing Jonathan Kay to reconsider that also. We can hope, as he approaches midlife ennui, that he decides it’s okay after all to have heretical thoughts — or, at least, to let others have them. We can hope that he learns to use YouTube. Meantime, we can be reasonably sure Among the Truthers will have little impact, except to buttress the beliefs of the orthodox in the same way he claims (quite rightly) that the outpourings of the Truth movement reinforce its gnosticism. It’s a Battle of the Bibles, whether Kay accepts their equivalency or not, and, Brother, it’s not going to be settled in my lifetime.

But while debunking books may not succeed, neither do books that aren’t better at peddling their hortatory wares than this one. I would have liked to read an insightful study of conspiracy movements. Among the Truthers, on the other hand, is a failed salvo, that might just as well have been titled The Protocols of All Those People Who Make Me Think Twice.
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Re: BBC: Down 'the rabbit hole of conspiracism' (Jonathan Ka

Postby Stephen Morgan » Fri Jun 10, 2011 1:39 am

Joe Hillshoist wrote:
Stephen Morgan wrote:
Joe Hillshoist wrote:BBC been taken over by Murdoch too Steve?


Not quite, just been corrupted by the forces of evil. Murdoch still wants rid of them because they're competition. Been trying to steal their funding and so on.


the abc board in Australia has been stacked with once and future Murdoch staff for most of this century.

No-one on the BBC board seems to have Murdoch links, just incompetence and greed.
Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that all was vanity; but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dream with open eyes, and make it possible. -- Lawrence of Arabia
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Re: BBC: Down 'the rabbit hole of conspiracism' (Jonathan Ka

Postby blanc » Fri Jun 10, 2011 2:20 am

yeah - when you can't hide in plain sight, makes it tough to fake it


I don't hide in plain sight hanshan that really wouldn't work, I just normally don't answer the door when 2 well dressed individuals with a kindly determined air walk to my house. I also don't answer it when someone steps out of a van from a house painting company. But what did you mean???
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Re: BBC: Down 'the rabbit hole of conspiracism' (Jonathan Ka

Postby hanshan » Fri Jun 10, 2011 11:50 am

blanc wrote:
yeah - when you can't hide in plain sight, makes it tough to fake it


I don't hide in plain sight hanshan that really wouldn't work, I just normally don't answer the door when 2 well dressed individuals with a kindly determined air walk to my house. I also don't answer it when someone steps out of a van from a house painting company. But what did you mean???


meant/meaning: some situations simply cannot be avoided:/ kismet
serendipitous/happenstance/coincidence/ synchronicity& then

making an elaborate joke about the nature of fate

...
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Re: BBC: Down 'the rabbit hole of conspiracism' (Jonathan Ka

Postby Hammer of Los » Wed Jun 22, 2011 5:13 am

It's very nice to see you still posting, blanc;

blanc wrote:I just normally don't answer the door when 2 well dressed individuals with a kindly determined air walk to my house.


Is that because you think they are Mormons, or something more sinister? That's if there is anything more sinister than Mormons. I mean, look at that Steve Jones. He's a Mormon, therefore he simply must be sinister.

But I'm getting sidetracked.

About that rabbit hole thing; I think it's getting bigger by the day. Everyday someone new falls down that rabbit hole. They have an epistemological crisis. Chapel Perilous, this way. That changes people you know, in all manner of different ways. It's getting bigger and bigger. Eventually, there will be more people inside the rabbit hole than outside. Perhaps one day, everyone will be in the rabbit hole. I wonder what will happen then?

Use your second sight; but remember, you have to deal with the rabbit;

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