Conspiracy Theorism on Facebook

Like the rest of the Wild Web Facebook is the stamping ground for a lunatic fringe who promote all sorts of off-the-wall ideas, in particular, need I say it, conspiracy theorism. They are exploiting a general malaise of counter-culture disaffection and distrust of the establishment, political and academic. In fact I have two Facebook friends who, although far from being originators of this claptrap, have nevertheless been attracted by and toyed with these ideas in their posts. So, let me introduce my two FB friends Frank Saucepan and Fred Shed (not real names of course) whose posts, with my comments, I reproduce below. It may be that their posts are no more than trollish mischief, hence some of my comments are themselves a little tongue-in-cheek. In response I used the simplest and most straightforward argument against conspiracy theorism; Viz: that it has a self-referencing instability; i.e.: If you accept the world view of conspiracy theorism then it becomes possible to continue multiplying entities to the point where any particular conspiracy theory itself is believed to be a false idea put about by another covert conspiracy for purposes of their own! What you might call a conspiracy of conspiracy theorism! See here for more on conspiracy theorism.

1^st May 2017

Frank posts on Flat Earth, an idea he is getting into!

The following is a partial repeat of the discussion on Frank's FB page I blogged on here

Frank Saucepan: All I did was say this flat earth business has caught my interest!

Timothy V Reeves It caught mine too, but it only works if you add huge dollops of conspiracy theorism. But conspiracy theorism has inner contradictions: Once you believe conspiracy theory A you can always find conspiracy theory B which explains conspiracy theory A as a product of a conspiracy of deception. In short conspiracy theorism completely phux-up any attempt to arrive at the truth. Any so called "truth" arrived at via conspiracy theory A is easily undermined by conspiracy theory B. Here's a video showing how easy it is to invent fanciful but plausible conspiracy theories : 

https://vimeo.com/61930750

5 July 2017

Frank posts a "Loose Change" video on the 9/11 conspiracy theory and adds the comment

Frank Saucepan: And people think others are mad for questioning things (My Comment: That's exactly what conspiracy theorism doesn't ask you to do - question things!)

Timothy V Reeves: "Luke's Change":  https://vimeo.com/61930750

Timothy V Reeves Just because you can construct theory which joins the known data dots by multiplying entities doesn't make it true.

Timothy V Reeves I'm not against conspiracy theorism for the sake of it but because it's a crap epistemic and can be evoked to explain away absolutely anything even itself: Its problems are: a) it arbitrarily multiplies entities and players as the pattern of data dots gets more complex to join. b) It doesn't take cognizance of randomness c) It requires a very water-tight cooperation between its imagined players - very unlikely with human beings d) It is motivated by human tribal and identification factors - "I don't identify with those guys, they are not in my tribe, therefore they are lying" e) Conspiracy theorism can be evoked in so many ways that it's possible to invent completely conflicting theories which "explain" the same facts.

Timothy V Reeves See "Luke's Change" for a very plausible sounding conspiracy theory, which of course in this case we know must be a piece of imagination. Just shows what the imagination can do! i.e. concoct crapola!

Jul 18^th 2018

Frank posts the "matrix" meme: 

Frank Saucepan: What if!?!

Timothy V Reeves WHAT IF I TOLD YOU: There are covert web agents putting these thoughts into people's heads in order to sow despair, disillusionment, disaffection and defection, thus promoting social breakdown and Apocalypse, from which point they will grab the opportunity to take control! 🤔🤔😁😁

Timothy V Reeves .....be careful: nothing in this world operates as you think it does:🤣

Timothy V Reeves Can't you see Frank that the kind of critique that this thesis is offering can be called upon itself? It is self-undermining! That is, it is liable to disappear up its own a*se!

June 10th 2018

Fred Shed posted on the moon landings. In this case I opted to "play the game"!

Fred Shed: Moon landing is fake:

Timothy V Reeves Must have been! We all expected them to bring back cheese: What did we get? Just a bit of dirt! I can get that from my back yard!

Fred Shed: Also in a vacuum there would be no way to stear.

Timothy V Reeves Rockets work in vacuum so that argument doesn't work; it's all to do with Newtons 3rd law. But the absence of quality Moon cheese is sufficient to clinch it as far as I'm concerned.

Fred Shed: Timothy V Reeves how do the rockets work though coz there's zero friction in space so surely rockets would not work.

Fred Shed: I get you could launch a rocket and generally aim it at the moon but that would be about all.

Timothy V Reeves Have you designed an experiment to show that rockets need friction in space? If rockets didn't work, neither would your motor bike.

Fred Shed Timothy V Reeves my motorbike is attached to the ground by gravity though.

Timothy V Reeves ....but your internal combustion engine pistons aren't attached to the ground!

Fred Shed Timothy V Reeves true but They are in a different type off vacuum

Timothy V Reeves ...what do you mean?

Fred Shed In space there is nothing in engine pistons there is everything.

Timothy V Reeves OK, so you're in space and you light up a barrel of gunpowder right in front of your space helmeted face (gun powder doesn't need oxygen, since it's got its own supply of oxygen). What do you think is going to happen to your space helmet?

Timothy V Reeves PS: Don't try this at home!!

Fred Shed Timothy V Reeves not a lot really

Timothy V Reeves .....OK, so now try lighting up a stick of dynamite that is INSIDE your helmet! What's going to happen?

Fred Shed: Head would get blown up

Timothy V Reeves ...right! So one bit of your head will travel toward the earth, another bit will travel toward the moon, another toward alpha centauri etc..... and so voila! We have succeeded in spreading the contents of your head to the four corners of the galaxy and it's all done in a vacuum!

Fred Shed Timothy V Reeves spose.

Timothy V Reeves There's a rumour going about that the Illuminati are creating youTube videos to make us believe that the moon landings were a faked: After all , they want us to believe that the Earth is flat and screw up our understanding of science so that they alone have access to valid science.

Fred Shed That I can believe  (Woops! I didn't mean him to respond like that!)

Timothy V Reeves As I always say: Kill a conspiracy theory with another conspiracy theory and so on ad infinitum!

June 15 2018

Fred Shed mischievously posted the following  picture from "Flat Earth Research": 

This picture can be found on FB "Flat Earth Research" here:
https://www.facebook.com/flatearthresearch/photos/a.1628044087506793/1953022505008948/?type=3&theater. In a response to a query as to why the dinosaurs appeared on this picture two Young Earthers left these comments on Flat Earth's FB page:

Michael McCarrey Leviathan and Behemoth. We called them "dinosaurs" There are more. They were on the Ark, probably as eggs. Some called them Dragons. Most died from being hunted or because the climate was different after the Flood. But, when half the FE proponents can't even figure out how to use a camera, this is not unexpected.

Reuel Zaire In ancient times they were called dragons and they are also mentioned in the holy scriptures. The term dinosaur was only created in the mid 19th century and its from the greek deinos(terrible)+sauros(lizard). Dinosaur theory was also used to support the fossil fuel term. And now they control the oil, whoever they are...

Reuel Zaire In ancient times they were called dragons and they are also mentioned in the holy scriptures. The term dinosaur was only created in the mid 19th century and its from the greek deinos(terrible)+sauros(lizard). Dinosaur theory was also used to support the fossil fuel term. And now they control the oil, whoever they are... Sam Clark Dinosaurs existed, they just didn’t go extinct MILLIONS of years ago like mainstream “science” says. They only died out thousands of years ago, which goes hand in hand with the biblical creation account. https://answersingenesis.org/dinosaurs/

However back on Fred Shed's FB page I responded as follows:

Timothy V Reeves ...ahh Fred me ole son! Those Flat Earth web sites are just part of a fake news conspiracy perpetrated by the Illuminati in order to befuddle your thinking and prevent you from grasping science. After all if you don't grasp science it means that you become less of a threat to their rule!

Timothy V Reeves ...What you've got to wrap you head around Fred is that there is big conspiracy to get us to believe in conspiracies. This is called "meta-conspiracy theory". That makes me a meta-conspiracy conspiracy theorist!

Timothy V Reeves ....but some hold the theory that meta-conspiracy theory is itself a conspiracy to stop us believing in conspiracies. But others point out that this can't be true because a meta-conspiracy theorist believes in a conspiracy theory, namely the big meta-conspiracy!

Timothy V Reeves ...hope you got all that Fred .....because I've totally confused myself!

POSTCRIPT

Interestingly, the QAnon conspiracy theorists in the following YouTube video used their conspiracy theory to dismiss the  Flat Earth conspiracy in a way similar to the way I sketched out above!

Intelligent Design and God of the Gaps

The following appeared on the Intelligent Design website "Uncommon Descent" in a post entitled: "Frequently raised but weak arguments against Intelligent Design" (See here: https://uncommondescent.com/faq/#gaps_god)

39] ID is Nothing More Than a “God of the Gaps” Hypothesis

Famously, when his calculations did not quite work, Newton proposed that God or angels nudged the orbiting planets every now and then to get them back into proper alignment. Later scientists were able to show that the perturbations of one planet acting on another are calculable and do not in aggregate skew the calculations.  Newton’s error is an example of the “God of the gaps” fallacy – if we do not understand it, God must have done it.

ID is not proposing “God” to paper over a gap in current scientific explanation. Instead ID theorists start from empirically observed, reliable, known facts and generally accepted principles of scientific reasoning:

(a) Intelligent designers exist and act in the world.

(b) When they do so, as a rule, they leave reliable signs of such intelligent action behind.

(c) Indeed, for many of the signs in question such as CSI and IC, intelligent agents are the only observed cause of such effects, and chance + necessity (the alternative) is not a plausible source, because the islands of function are far too sparse in the space of possible relevant configurations.

(d) On the general principle of science, that “like causes like,” we are therefore entitled to infer from sign to the signified: intelligent action.

(e) This conclusion is, of course, subject to falsification if it can be shown that undirected chance + mechanical forces do give rise to CSI or IC.  Thus, ID is falsifiable in principle but well supported in fact.

In sum, ID is indeed a legitimate scientific endeavor: the science that studies signs of intelligence

The foregoing is just a rehash of the "explanatory filter" epistemic used by IDists. I have criticized this rather simplistic epistemic before:

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.com/2015/06/idists-heres-another-fine-mess-theyve.html

It's not that I particularly disagree with any of the above; the problem lies in where it stops: Once we identify the presence of intelligence, explanation doesn't stop there. For example, we find an object buried in the earth and identify it as of archaeological interest. But then some effort is made to take the matter further: Viz: What kind of minds created it and why? What was the social milieu in which the object was made? What was its purpose? How was it made? Taking the questions even deeper, we may ask ourselves what is it about an entity that classifies it as intelligent? Above all, what processes are entailed by intelligence?

It is questions like this that lead me on to the subject of "intelligent creation", an endeavor which involves at least making an attempt to take the question of intelligence and the nature of the processes behind it a little further. In contrast the IDists have explicitly stated that their task ends once intelligence has been detected, thus leaving a hiatus or "gap"; hence their work very comfortably fits a "natural forces vs divine agency" dualist philosophy (See links below).

The irony is that even atheist evolutionists will tell us that evolution is far from a random process thus implicitly admitting to an information gap an: See here,  here and here:  This is, in fact, consistent with William Dembski's work. See here. Thus, so-called "natural forces" as conceived by standard evolutionary theory can hardly be classified as "undirected chance and mechanical forces" (sic) if they are sufficiently resourced to do the job of life creation.

As I have said before information can be created, provided we allow exponentially expanding parallelism and teleology to occur "naturally".  For example, the human mind is a "natural object" (sic) which generates such information on a routine basis. See here. I also touch on the subject of "Complex Specified Information" (CSI) in the same link.


Links on De Facto ID
De facto ID's God-of-the-Gaps (Small sample)

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2015/12/2001-space-idyssey.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2015/11/intelligent-designs-2001-space-odyssey.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/deistical-god-of-gaps-thinking.html

http://quantumnonlinearity.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/western-dualism-in-north-america.html

Infamy! Infamy! They've all got it in for me!

Please free us from the drivel of
Alex Jones filthy mouth!

In a concerted move by Facebook, YouTube, iTunes and Pinterest. crackpot conspiracy theorist Alex Jones has been banished from the domains of these service providers. Predictably this is portrayed on Jones website as vindication of his theories, theories which assign him the role of hero in an apocalyptic struggle against covert anti-Christian and Satanic forces. (See here for the reaction on Jones website)

I feel ambivalent about the ban: Jones has had it coming for a long while; he's a vile disseminator of delusion and must rank as one of the most vicious and merciless slanderers of innocent people: For example, the parents of the child-victims of the Sandy Hook massacre had to endue insult as well as injury when Jones accused them of lying about an event he claimed never took place. Such a nasty paranoid fantasist well deserves to be shut-up. And yet as with all such fantasists no matter what one does or says it is assimilated into an increasingly ramifying delusional narrative; so you are damned if you do and damned if you don't. The best policy may be just to ignore him. Trouble is, like a badly behaved child some restrictions have to be placed on their anti-social activities, at least for the benefit of those around them who have to endue their obnoxious behavior.

I some ways I see Jones and his retinue of fundamentalist followers as a kind of anti-Christ, an anti-Christ whose job it is to make a mockery of the Christian faith. Therefore anything that restrains this debauched group can be applauded, but in my case I only applaud half-heartedly: For it is clear that this censuring move is only dealing with the symptoms and not the underlying diseases of disaffection, disillusion and alienation coupled to the breath-taking gullibility and misunderstanding among his following about the way the world actually works (See here).

As an illustration of how the world really works let's take this group of people:

Donald Trump, Alex Jones, Kent Hovind, Steve Anderson, Eric Hovind, William Tapley, Ken Ham, Glen Beck, John Mackay. 

These right-wingers have a lot in common and are linked into a close nexus of associations. Viz: Trump and Jones have engaged in mutual support. Ken Ham is a Trump supporter. Kent Hovind is a "sovereign citizen" and conspiracy theorist. William Tapley believes himself to be an authoritative Biblical prophet and supports Trump. Eric Hovind and Ken Ham are mutually supporting young earth fundamentalists. Glen Beck is a Christian conspiracy theorist. Steve Anderson is an uncompromising angry fundamentalist who supports Kent Hovind's young earthism. Fanatical fundamentalist John Mackay is Ken Ham's friend and ex-business partner.  But in spite of these links there is no coherent background conspiracy behind this clutch of like-minded partisans; they come together because they share interests and a common mental malady which imagines "liberal-left" depravity lurking in the shades. They see themselves as clean & clear minded heroes sent to bring revelation as they fight the good fight against the evil enemy of contemporary mores. And yet there is diversity and disparate division here as well: Anderson and Eric Hovind are at loggerheads. Ham and Tapley would fall out over who has the greater authority. John MacKay's extreme fundamentalist antics were even a stretch for Ken Ham.  Ken Ham (I hope) wouldn't go along with many of Jones theories, although I have never known Ham to disown him, as he has disowned Kent Hovind. Jones and Tapley, although perhaps the most crackpot of the group, nevertheless in some ways capture the flavour of the group by caricaturing it.

Pence is symbolic of Trump's
fundamentalist following.

Presiding over all these bizarre personalities is the figure of Donald Trump, a man who has succeeded in mobilizing them and their followings for his own purposes through their shared discontent with  the conspiratorial "establishment swamp" which Trump claims he is going to drain. They all reflect a malaise of dissent from established culture and this holds them together, although an all too human tendency toward epistemic arrogance causes sharp divisions between them. This is the way of world, a kind of pathological unity in chaos. You don't need conspiracy theorism to explain it; they all contribute in their own inimitable ways to poisoning the atmosphere of discourse, causing mass defection from science and reason.

A sample of Alex Jones' "infoWars":

A sample of William Tapley: He supports Trump & Pence

ADDENDUM 12/08/18

See this BBC article for the harm Jones and his following are doing to people's lives

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-45142881

Brennan Gilmore witnessed and filmed the vehicle attack by a white supremacist on a crowd protesting against the fascist rally in Charlottesville. The article makes it clear that the people who attacked Gilmore (and the protesting crowd for that matter) intend to do harm. These are kind who, if they get into power, will come knocking on your door ready to take you away. Let's make no bones about it: They are fascists. And they support Trump and Pence.

 Here are some quotes form the article:

The conspiracy theorists falsely alleged that Gilmore was an agent of the so-called "deep state", who had planned the crash as a way of discrediting President Trump and his supporters. They claimed, again falsely, that he was in the pay of liberal financier George Soros.

The first sign that something was wrong was when Gilmore's sister called him on Sunday 13 August, to let him know that their parents had been 'doxxed' - their address was posted on far-right message boards, and threats were made against them.

[Gilmore] is taking action against 11 people or companies for "defamation and intentional infliction of emotional distress", saying articles and videos were posted online "with reckless disregard of the truth".

Among those he is suing are Jim Hoft, the founder of the far-right website Gateway Pundit, and Alex Jones, who set up Infowars. Jones' lawyer did not respond to requests for comment.

This is not the only case of defamation Jones is facing. Infowars has published stories falsely claiming that the Sandy Hook massacre in Connecticut in 2012 - when gunman Adam Lanza killed 20 children and six adults - was staged.

The relatives of nine victims are now taking action against Jones, saying they have been harassed by people who believe his conspiracy theory.

The Infowars host has sought to get the lawsuit dismissed. This week, a number of tech giants, including YouTube and Facebook, deleted his content, citing hate speech