Monthly Archives: March 2015

Why do some people believe conspiracy theories?

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Meet Oliver. Like many of his friends, Oliver thinks he is an expert on 9/11. He spends much of his spare time looking at conspiracist websites and his research has convinced him that the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, DC, of 11 September 2001 were an inside job. The aircraft impacts and resulting fires couldn’t have caused the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center to collapse. The only viable explanation, he maintains, is that government agents planted explosives in advance. He realises, of course, that the government blames Al-Qaeda for 9/11 but his predictable response is pure Mandy Rice-Davies: they would say that, wouldn’t they?

Polling evidence suggests that Oliver’s views about 9/11 are by no means unusual. Indeed, peculiar theories about all manner of things are now widespread. There are conspiracy theories about the spread of AIDS, the 1969 Moon landings, UFOs, and the assassination of JFK. Sometimes, conspiracy theories turn out to be right – Watergate really was a conspiracy – but mostly they are bunkum. They are in fact vivid illustrations of a striking truth about human beings: however intelligent and knowledgeable we might be in other ways, many of us still believe the strangest things. You can find people who believe they were abducted by aliens, that the Holocaust never happened, and that cancer can be cured by positive thinking. A 2009 Harris Poll found that between one‑fifth and one‑quarter of Americans believe in reincarnation, astrology and the existence of witches. You name it, and there is probably someone out there who believes it.

You realise, of course, that Oliver’s theory about 9/11 has little going for it, and this might make you wonder why he believes it. The question ‘Why does Oliver believe that 9/11 was an inside job?’ is just a version of a more general question posed by the US skeptic Michael Shermer: why do people believe weird things? The weirder the belief, the stranger it seems that someone can have it. Asking why people believe weird things isn’t like asking why they believe it’s raining as they look out of the window and see the rain pouring down. It’s obvious why people believe it’s raining when they have compelling evidence, but it’s far from obvious why Oliver believes that 9/11 was an inside job when he has access to compelling evidence that it wasn’t an inside job.

I want to argue for something which is controversial, although I believe that it is also intuitive and commonsensical. My claim is this: Oliver believes what he does because that is the kind of thinker he is or, to put it more bluntly, because there is something wrong with how he thinks. The problem with conspiracy theorists is not, as the US legal scholar Cass Sunstein argues, that they have little relevant information. The key to what they end up believing is how theyinterpret and respond to the vast quantities of relevant information at their disposal. I want to suggest that this is fundamentally a question of the way they are. Oliver isn’t mad (or at least, he needn’t be). Nevertheless, his beliefs about 9/11 are the result of the peculiarities of his intellectual constitution – in a word, of his intellectual character. click link below for full article

http://aeon.co/magazine/philosophy/intellectual-character-of-conspiracy-theorists/

Posted by F. Sheikh

In Sold Out One-Woman Show, Arafat Protégée Offers Personal Take on Conflict

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Worth reading article about the sold out show in Beirut which is both light hearted and ironic.( F. Sheikh)

BEIRUT, Lebanon — In a measured voice, the middle-aged woman in the blue dress recalled how a colleague had come to her hotel room during a work trip years before and tried to rape her, retreating only after she had screamed to alert the neighbors.

In tears, she hid in the bathroom to ponder her dilemma: Should she tell her boss? Would that make matters better or worse?

Complicating her decision was the fact that her boss had been a father figure to her since she was a child. He was also, as it turned out, the iconic and controversial father of the Palestinian nationalist movement, Yasir Arafat.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/23/world/middleeast/protegee-of-arafat-offers-in-show-ironic-take-on-a-conflict.html?rref=homepage&module=Ribbon&version=origin&region=Header&action=click&contentCollection=Home%20Page&pgtype=article

 

 

‘ God’s Bankers’ by Gerald Posner

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Book review by Damon Linker

“Popes of this period — Pius IX, Leo XIII, Pius X, Benedict XV, Pius XI — publicly denounced lending money at interest (usury) while at the same time accepting massive loans from the Rothschilds and making their own interest-bearing loans to Italian Catholics. Beginning with ­Bernardino Nogara, appointed by Pius XI in 1929, the church also empowered a series of often shady financial advisers to engage in financial wheeling and dealing around the globe. “So long as the balance sheets showed surpluses,” Posner writes, “Pius and his chief advisers were pleased.” That pattern would continue through the rest of the 20th century.”

Ask a devout, theologically literate ­Roman Catholic to describe the institution of the church, and you’re likely to be told that it was founded by Jesus Christ at the moment he gave his disciple ­Peter the “keys to the kingdom of heaven” and vowed that “whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven.” This made ­Peter the head of the universal church, ­empowered to administer the sacraments, spread the Gospel, save souls and forgive sins until Christ’s return, as well as to pronounce with infallible authority on ­matters of Christian faith and morals. Christ also promised Peter that “the gates of hell shall not prevail” against the church — meaning that no matter how corrupt the institution might appear at any given moment of history, it will never be so consumed by evil that it ceases to be capable of fulfilling its God-appointed tasks.

Ask an informed historian or journalist about the history of the church — especially the Vatican and the papacy — and you are likely to hear a different story. On this telling, the church from the beginning has been an all-too-human institution that ­often follows a logic of self-interest, placing the good of its members ahead of those outside it, and the good of those in positions of ecclesiastical power ahead of the good of everyone else. To a greater or lesser extent, this has been true of most institutions throughout history, though it has been a particular problem in the 2,000-year history of the church, with its lack of democratic accountability and deep roots in the corruption-prone political culture of the Italian peninsula. The result has been a tension — and sometimes a blatant contradiction — between the church’s exalted claims for itself and its behavior. Click link below for full article;

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/22/books/review/gods-bankers-by-gerald-posner.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=c-column-middle-span-region&region=c-column-middle-span-region&WT.nav=c-column-middle-span-region

 posted by f.sheikh

 

‘Fierce Pressures Facing Pakistan’ By Ahmad Rashid

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( Various views on Pakistan) No one should be surprised to read that in Pakistan the army has taken charge, established military courts, derailed democracy, brought television and other media under military control. Nor should one be surprised to learn that foreign policy and national security were being directly run by the army. Many similar situations have occurred in Pakistan since 1958, when the army first came to power in a gradual coup, declared martial law, and ruled for a decade. The country has for years been under partial military rule, outright martial law, or military authority disguised as presidential rule.

But the arrangement that has evolved over the last six months is the strangest so far: the elected government remains in place but has few powers, and no longer rules the country. The media, opposition political parties, Parliament, and the intelligentsia are trying to resist the gradual military takeover but they are weak and ineffectual.

The single worst legacy of military rule since the 1970s, the time of the loss of East Pakistan—now Bangladesh—has been a ruinous foreign policy that has made enemies out of most of Pakistan’s neighbors owing to the safe havens that Islamic extremists from these countries have carved out in Pakistan. It is well known that such havens exist in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Province and Balochistan, but they are also located in many other parts of the country, from Lahore near the Indian border to the Khyber Pass into Afghanistan.

Because of its fear of India, Pakistan has been turned into a garrison state with a persisting paranoia about being surrounded by hostile countries and dominated by a demanding, belligerent United States. Yet the Pakistani army is the seventh-largest in the world with some 642,000 soldiers, 500,000 reserves, and an arsenal of 120 nuclear weapons.

Still, since September 11, 2001, the army has often been ineffectual. Pakistani extremists have killed up to 30,000 Pakistani civilians and 15,000 members of the Pakistan military. Pakistan is living in the midst of a partially self-created bloodbath of terrorism that is more comparable to Iraq and Nigeria than to India or Bangladesh.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2015/apr/02/fierce-pressures-facing-pakistan/