Conspiracy crackpots

Okay, y'all, can we agree to stop calling them conspiracy theories?  A theory is a scientific model backed up by experimentation and/or observation, which is consistent with everything we know about the topic in question.

These are not theories.  We need a new term.

Maybe conspiracy batshit lunacy.  I dunno, that's more accurate, but it's a little clunky.  I'll keep thinking on it.

The reason the topic comes up (again) is because of mega-pop-star Taylor Swift and her boyfriend Travis Kelce, tight end for the Kansas City Chiefs, who will be playing in the Superbowl on February 11.  Well, Swift and Kelce made two huge mistakes, at least if you're a MAGA type; Swift endorsed Joe Biden for president in the 2020 election and is expected to endorse him again in 2024, and Kelce has appeared in commercials promoting the idea that the Pfizer COVID-19 vaccine is safe and effective.

Well.  You'd think they... I dunno.  I was gonna say "stomped all over the Constitution," but Trump himself basically did that.  Then I was going to say "threatened to drown small children," but Texas Governor Greg Abbott did that.  Then I was going to say "wanted to restrict freedom of speech," but Florida Governor (and failed presidential candidate) Ron DeSantis did that.

So comparisons kind of fail me.  Let's just say "You'd think they were really really really bad" and leave it there.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons va Rinaldi creator QS:P170,Q37885816, Taylor Swift 2012, CC BY-SA 2.0]

In any case, the ultra-right-wing types couldn't just shrug and say, "Taylor Swift is an American citizen and can vote for whom she likes, and Travis Kelce is free to promote the vaccine if he thinks it's the right thing to do."  Oh, no.  There has to be more to it than that.  The firestorm started almost as soon as Swift and Kelce announced they were dating, and Swift started showing up to Kelce's games.  Then Swift was named Time magazine's 2023 Person of the Year, and things really started rolling.

Here are a few quotes, to give you the idea of what sort of things are being batted about on far-right media:

• "I 'wonder' who’s going to win the Super Bowl next month.  And I 'wonder' if there’s a major presidential endorsement coming from an artificially culturally propped-up couple this fall.  Just some wild speculation over here, let’s see how it ages over the next eight months." -- Vivek Ramaswamy
• "The Democratic Party and other powers are gearing up for an operation to use Taylor Swift in the election against Donald Trump." -- Jack Posobiec
• "Taylor Swift is an op.  It’s all fake.  You’re being played." -- Benny Johnson
• "The Democrats’ Taylor Swift election interference psyop is happening in the open.  It’s not a coincidence that current and former Biden admin officials are propping up Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce.  They are going to use Taylor Swift as the poster child for their pro-abortion GOTV Campaign." -- Laura Loomer
• "All the Swifties want is a swift abortion." -- Charlie Kirk
• The NFL is totally RIGGED for the Kansas City Chiefs, Taylor Swift, Mr. Pfizer (Travis Kelce).  All to spread DEMOCRAT PROPAGANDA.  Calling it now: KC wins, goes to Super Bowl, Swift comes out at the halftime show and ‘endorses’ Joe Biden with Kelce at midfield.  It’s all been an op since day one."  -- Mike Crispi
• We're declaring a Holy War on Taylor Swift if she publicly backs the Democrats." -- an "unnamed source" quoting Donald Trump
• "Who thinks this country needs a lot more women like Alina Habba, and a lot less like Taylor Swift?" -- unsurprisingly, Alina Habba
• "Taylor Swift is a Pentagon psyop and a front for a covert political agenda." -- Jesse Watters

I could go on, but I probably don't need to.

What is astonishing to me is that very few folks listen to this and then say, "Okay, have you people been doing sit-ups underneath parked cars?  Or what?"  Evidently a significant fraction of Americans hear this stuff -- and think that it makes perfect sense.

Look, it's not that I don't know politics can get nasty, and that people -- certainly on both sides -- can do some really underhanded stuff to get elected.  But when a celebrity endorses Your Guy, and that's all hunky-dory and an example of a True American Standing Tall, but when a celebrity endorses The Other Guy it's gotta be a covert Pentagon psyop worthy of launching a Holy War, you might just want to check your thought processes for bias.

At least some mainstream media outlets are branding this wingnuttery for what it is.  CNN, in its article on the issue (linked above), labeled this stuff "loony thinking bearing little resemblance to reality," and that's not bad considering that CNN doesn't exactly have a sterling track record of calling out lunacy when they see it.  In fact, there's a good case to be made that back in 2015 the mainstream media created Donald Trump as a viable candidate by treating him as if he were one, instead of labeling him what he is right from the get-go -- an incompetent compulsive liar, a serial philanderer, a sexual predator, and a "businessman" who has a list of failed businesses as long as my arm.  But because his incendiary theatrics got listeners and readers, they uncritically publicized everything he said and did in order to keep readers and viewers engaged -- and that's a large part of why we're in the situation we now are.

At least -- maybe -- some media sources have learned their lesson.

But to return to my original point, these are not theories.  They are one of two things:

1. deliberately crazy-sounding ideas thrown out by cynical individuals who don't actually believe what they're saying, but say it anyhow because they know it'll keep the public tuned in; or
2. wild ramblings from people who think this stuff actually makes sense, in which case -- to borrow a line from C. S. Lewis -- "they're on the level of a man who says he is a poached egg."

And in neither case should we give them the slightest bit of attention, short of laughing directly into their faces.  Which is, honestly, what I'm hoping to accomplish here.

How about the Conspiracy Comedy Channel?  That at least captures the spirit of it.

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Chain of hysteria

Because confirmation bias alone is apparently not enough, a team of psychologists at the University of Warwick (England) has just found that when bad news is passed from person to person, its capacity for inducing alarm and hysteria increases.

The study, released just this week in the journal Risk Analysis, was led by Thomas Hills, who summed up the research as "The more people share information, the more negative it becomes, the further it gets from the facts, and the more resistant it becomes to correction."  What they did was to take 154 test subjects, split them into fourteen groups of eight people each, and gave one person in each group a balanced, factual news article to read.  That person had to write a summary of the article in their own words, and pass that to another person in the group -- who read the summary, and had to summarize that, and pass that to the next person, and so on.

The sixth person was given not only the fifth person's summary, but the original article, to see if reading the original unbiased facts changed how they summarized the information.  And the scary thing is, it didn't.  The version passed on to the seventh person in the chain was just as inaccurate and alarmist as the previous ones had been.  So that points to a second, rather disturbing, conclusion from the Hills et al. research: once people have accepted a scary, emotionally-laden view of an issue, even presenting them with the facts doesn't change anything.

"Society is an amplifier for risk," Hills said.  "This research explains why our world looks increasingly threatening despite consistent reductions in real-world threats.  It also shows that the more people share information, the further that information gets from the facts and the more resilient it becomes to correction."

So it's kind of like an ugly, and potentially dangerous, game of Telephone.

1941 British advertisement [Image is in the Public Domain]

What interests me the most is this "resilience to correction" -- which I have to admit sounds way better than what I'd have called it, which is "ignorant, willful, pig-headed stupidity."  This tendency has been manipulated with what I can only interpret as cunning and malice aforethought by Fox News, which unhesitatingly broadcasts complete, outright lies, then (much more quietly) issues a "retraction" later -- knowing full well that the correction will not undo the outrage and misapprehension the original story created in the listeners.  It's what was going on this past week with the nonsense over Donald Trump's petulant and toddlerish withdrawal of the invitation to the Superbowl-winning Philadelphia Eagles over the controversy regarding players "taking the knee" during the National Anthem in protest of the unfair treatment of minorities.  Fox broadcast a story about Trump's cancellation of the visit (obviously siding with Trump, not that I probably had to mention that), and backed up the story with photographs of Eagles players kneeling.

The problem is that none of the photographs were of players "taking the knee" in protest during the National Anthem.  Every damn one of them was a photograph of a player kneeling to say a prayer prior to the start of the game, which (given their ongoing hysteria over the "War on Christianity" you'd think they'd have been in favor of).  When several players said, "Hey, wait a moment.  That picture of me wasn't what they implied it was," Fox finally (two days later) made a mealy-mouthed, and short, retraction statement.

Which one do you think got more views, and generated more attention and more emotion, the original story, or the retraction?

Don't answer that.  Rhetorical question.

So the scary part of the Hills et al. research is that knowing this, media agencies can knowingly manipulate this tendency -- start out with a sensationalized and hysteria-inducing story, which will then only amplify further in the retelling.  Then they can retract anything that was an obvious falsehood (or at least any of the falsehoods that enough people object to), and the retraction will have exactly zero effect.

What this does is make it even more imperative that we somehow fix the biased, slanted nightly shitshow that popular media has become.  How to do this, I have no idea.  But if we don't, we end up in a frightening positive-feedback loop -- where we believe the hysteria more strongly because the media insists that it's true, and they insist that it's true because it gets listeners who already believe it.

And the end result, I'm afraid, will be a nation filled with easily-led, emotion-driven dupes -- which, honestly, is probably precisely what the powers-that-be want.

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This week's featured book is the amazing Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, which looks at the fact that we have two modules in our brain for making decisions -- a fast one, that mostly works intuitively, and a slower one that is logical and rational.  Unfortunately, they frequently disagree on what's the best course of action.  Worse still, trouble ensues when we rely on the intuitive one to the exclusion of the logical one, calling it "common sense" when in fact it's far more likely to come from biases rather than evidence.

Kahneman's book will make you rethink how you come to conclusions -- and make you all too aware of how frail the human reasoning capacity is.

A glitch in the matrix

No matter what your views, on politics or other things, I think there's something we can all agree on:

The last few months have been pretty weird.

First, there was the Brexit vote, followed by the revelation afterwards that over a million people apparently voted to leave the EU because they thought "remain" would win, and after the votes were tallied said that they wished they'd voted the other way.  One person actually said, "I feel genuinely robbed of my vote," as if some supernatural power was controlling his hand when he voted.

Then, we had damn near every political poll predicting a landslide victory for Hillary Clinton, and election night resulted in an unequivocal win in the Electoral College for Donald Trump, something that left people on both sides of the aisle feeling more than a little stunned.

Then we had the Superbowl.  The Patriots were widely favored to win without any difficulty.  Sports writer Paul Kasabian, of Bleacher Report, wrote that the likeliest scenario was that the "Patriots jump out to an early lead and go to running back LeGarrette Blount consistently in the second half of the game to control the time of possession and keep Atlanta's high-powered offense off the field. It's certainly possible that will lead to success, as the Falcons finished 29th this year in run defense DVOA...  The Falcons' defense has improved over the last couple of months, but it's hard to see them slowing down the versatile Pats too much."

And of course, that's not what happened.  The Falcons hit an early and completely unexpected lead, only to have the Patriots stage one of the most stunning comebacks in football history to win 34-28.

Then there was the Oscars, with the bizarre and now-notorious flub wherein Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway announced La La Land as the winner of Best Film, causing a surge of horrified people onto the stage -- and the producer of La La Land, Jordan Horowitz, was the one to make the correction.

"I'm sorry, there's a mistake," Horowitz said, to gasps from the audience.  "Moonlight, you guys won best picture.  This is not a joke."

And that's not even considering the number of times that I and others have looked at what is happening in the U.S. government -- hell, in the whole world -- and said, "I keep thinking things can't get any weirder, and then it happens."

So apparently all of this loony stuff has left people searching for an explanation.  And they've found one.

There are now people who are using this as evidence that we're living inside a computer simulation gone haywire.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker wrote:

There may be not merely a glitch in the Matrix.  There may be a Loki, a prankster, suddenly running it. After all, the same kind of thing seemed to happen on Election Day: the program was all set, and then some mischievous overlord—whether alien or artificial intelligence doesn’t matter—said, “Well, what if he did win?  How would they react?”  “You can’t do that to them,” the wiser, older Architect said. “Oh, c’mon,” the kid said. “It’ll be funny. Let’s see what they do!”  And then it happened.  We seem to be living within a kind of adolescent rebellion on the part of the controllers of the video game we’re trapped in, who are doing this for their strange idea of fun.

Apparently this isn't just the idle speculation of a handful of woo-woos.  Clara Moskowitz, senior editor of space and physics at Scientific American, wrote about this very idea a year ago.  "A popular argument for the simulation hypothesis came from University of Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrum in 2003, when he suggested that members of an advanced civilization with enormous computing power might decide to run simulations of their ancestors," Moskowitz wrote.  "They would probably have the ability to run many, many such simulations, to the point where the vast majority of minds would actually be artificial ones within such simulations, rather than the original ancestral minds.  So simple statistics suggest it is much more likely that we are among the simulated minds."

But now, Gopnik says, the controllers of the simulation have either lost their grip, or else they're just fucking around with us.  And we shouldn't comfort ourselves with thinking that it's going to be over any time soon:

Until recently, our simulation, the Matrix within which we were unknowingly imprisoned, seemed in reasonably sound hands.  Terrible things did happen as the cold-blooded, unemotional machines that ran it experimented with the effects of traumatic events—wars, plagues, “Gilligan’s Island”—on hyper-emotionalized programs such as us.  And yet the basic logic of the enfolding program seemed sound.  Things pinned down did not suddenly drift toward the ceiling; cats did not go to Westminster; Donald Trump did not get elected President; the movie that won Best Picture was the movie that won Best Picture.  Now everything has gone haywire, and anything can happen. 

Whether we are at the mercy of an omniscient adolescent prankster or suddenly the subjects of a more harrowing experiment than any we have been subject to before (is our alien overlords’ funding threatened, thus forcing them to “show results” to the grant-giving institution that doubtless oversees all the simulations?), we can now expect nothing remotely normal to take place for a long time to come.  They’re fiddling with our knobs, and nobody knows the end.

I'm not sure how to think about this.  I've always been a hard-headed materialist; what you see in front of you is real, of course it's real; the Ockham's Razorish least-ad-hoc-assumptions model is that what you're experiencing is, at its essence, the real external universe.  But I've run into people who were idealists -- who believed that what we observe isn't real, that it's a construct of our minds, and that our sensory experience is the only reality.  (I actually knew one guy who was a solipsist -- he believed, apparently seriously, that his perceptions were the only reality, and the rest of us were figments of his imagination who ceased to exist when he wasn't directly observing us.  We used to piss him off by sneaking up behind him and whispering, "We're still heeeere.")

But apparently there are some honest-to-goodness scientific types who are seriously considering the idea that we might be part of a big computer simulation being run by an amazingly advanced race.  And I don't know about you, but this creeps me out.  I had a hard enough time, in the days when I was still attempting to be a practicing Catholic, thinking about a god who was watching me all the time.  Every moment of the day.  While I was showering, while I was taking a piss, and... other times.  You get the picture.  I often wondered how people could possibly find this thought comforting; for me, it was like presupposing that the entire universe was being run by a demented stalker.

So now we're back in the same predicament, but here the Perverted Master Stalker is some superpowerful alien race who not only created me as part of their simulation for some unknown reason, but is watching me to see what I'll do, and probably wondering why their creation picks his nose and plays air guitar when Tommy Shaw's "Girls With Guns" pops up on his iPod.  (Not simultaneously.)

On the other hand, if the being running the simulation really is some kind of Loki-like trickster who is just messing around with us, I suppose it serves him right that some of his creations behave in bizarre ways.

Turnabout's fair play, and all of that sort of stuff.

I guess the upshot is that we should all prepare ourselves for further weirdness.  I'm not sure whether to be apprehensive, or just to leap into the chaos with both feet.  Either way, my reaction probably isn't going to make much difference; however the simulation is being run, I highly doubt that the Alien Master Race is gearing their universe to conform to my desires.  So bring it on.  If the world is going to be crazy, may as well enjoy it.

Beyoncé of the Illuminati

Well, Superbowl XLVII is history, and the Baltimore Ravens have taken it despite a second-half rally by the 49ers that had Baltimore fans chewing their nails off.

The Superbowl attracts watchers for a variety of reasons.  Some root for particular teams, and if their favorite doesn't make it, they don't bother watching (I know one person who refuses to discuss the event if it doesn't involve the New Orleans Saints).  Others watch for the commercials, or the enjoyment of a wild, lavish spectacle, or the sheer love of football.

This year, of course, there was the added attraction of seeing how Beyoncé was going to use her magical powers and connections with the Illuminati to spread her evil message about the New World Order.

You think I'm making this up, but conspiracy theory websites have been hopping ever since the halftime show.  Take a look, for example, at this one, written by Sarah Wilson, who given the title must work for the Department of Redundancy Department: "What's the Verdict on Beyoncé's Illuminati Performance?  Illuminati-Fueled or Not?"

If you are understandably reluctant to read the original, let me sum it up as follows:

1)  Beyoncé has Illuminati connections.  Her husband Jay-Z's record company, Roc-a-Fella Records, has as its symbol a letter R with a circle and a triangle.  This obviously has nothing to do with the name of the company starting with "R," and circles and triangles being common geometrical shapes.
2)  During the performance, Beyoncé made a triangle with her hands. 
3)  The halftime show involved mirrors, which have secret symbolism.
4)  There was a red circular light used during part of the show.  Obviously the "Eye of Horus."
5)  At one point, her legs made a shape that has "black sun symbolism."

And if that's not enough to convince you doubters out there: during the second half, there was a 35-minute power outage that stopped the game dead in its tracks.  "Interestingly," writes Sarah Wilson, "following Beyoncé's performance, the Superdome suffered an outage that affected lights within the stadium, some cameras, and various pieces of audio equipment.  Power was lost for about 35 minutes before it was gradually restored to affected parts of the stadium.  The power company denied responsibility...  Social media outlets were alive with theories as to why part of the Superdome went dark, which ranged from 'doubting the power of Beyoncé' to her halftime show draining all of the power to her suspected Illuminati connections playing a role in creating darkness."

Oh, yeah, that's got to be it.  Because every time someone makes a special sign with their hands, it activates magical Illuminati Connections and causes a major power outage.  I have only one question to ask, to wit: did you learn logic from watching Mighty Morphin Power Rangers?  Or what?

It is a continual source of mystification for me how this kind of thinking can make sense to anyone.  That a performer might use edgy symbolism in his/her music, to deliberately up the hype, I can believe; if that's what Beyoncé was doing last night, it wouldn't be the first time.  Look at Madonna (not directly!  Use protective eyewear!).  She's worked so much arcane symbolism into her performances that she could be a walking illustration for the Malleus Maleficarum.  Nicki Minaj, Lady Gaga, Ke$ha, and Kanye West have also capitalized on the game of tweaking the fundamentalists and conspiracy theorists to get attention.

The thing is, does it mean anything?  Anything real?  There are those, of course, who would say yes; symbols have power, and that power can be invoked even if the people using them are doing so without awareness of what's really going on.  Predictably, I think the people who believe this are wingnuts.  Myself, I think the whole thing is just a publicity stunt, and any deliberate use of occult symbolism by pop music stars is just a callous attempt to get more attention.  As Brendan Behan once famously said, "There is no such thing as bad publicity."

So I doubt very much whether there was any connection between Beyoncé's use of the "Eye of Horus" -- deliberate or not -- and the power outage that followed.  If circular red lights caused power outages, then stoplights would be kind of problematic, you know?

In any case, if you watched the game, I hope you enjoyed it, and my condolences to any 49ers fans who are still weeping into their empty trays of chicken wings.  There's always next year.  That is, if Beyoncé doesn't wiggle her fingers at her next performance and somehow cause the collapse of major world governments.  You know how that goes.