Monday, March 26, 2007

Guido Fawkes

My piece on pol blogger Guido Fawkes is in my wife's stupendous, brilliant new magazine SoLondon.

19 comments:

  1. Oh and I meant to say: buy it or we shoot the dog on the cover.

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  2. Guido's brand of libertarianism is like Marxism. And indeed, like conspiracy theories. If you haven't grown out of them by at least your mid-twenties then an important part of your brain is not functioning properly.

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  3. Political allegiance definitely has a closed topology, either that of a circle or sphere: if you go far enough round in, say, a right-wing direction, you eventually meet your left-wing cousins, round the back somewhere, both sets of people complaining that they don't like government. The right-wing libertarians want capitalism without any top-down government, while the left-wing libertarians want to revert to pre-industrial medievalism without any top-down government. This is one of the reasons Tony Benn and Norman Tebbit were united in their opposition to Europe.

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  4. Yes, Tony Benn is the prime example. He's like a reverse idiot savant. Whereas savants have one absurdly overdeveloped brain faculty and are otherwise dunces, Benn has everything working brilliantly except the essential bit that regulates common sense and empirical evidence.

    He is a sharp, witty, insightful, eloquent, indefatigable, admirable, charming and brilliant man who just happens to have been completely wrong about everything.

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  5. Did you listen to 'The Benn Tapes' a few years back? Tony used to record an audio diary of his daily-adventures (and perhaps still does). Very entertaining. Particularly the bit where one Labour government, of which Benn was a member, is close to crisis or something, and Benn records that day's tape in the bathroom, and describes it as a "hugely exciting" day.

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  6. The phrase Conspiracy Theory is surely amongst the most vacuous phrases known to man. Its field of usage involves an event of human causation such as a terrorist attack. Explaining this event there then follows an official conspiracy theory and possibly one or many unofficial conspiracy theories- the difference between the two being the identity of the conspirators, not the question of there being a conspiracy. I would say not to believe in conspiracy theories is amongst the greatest abdications of reason imaginable; though perhaps events such as bombings can be explained by random fluctuations of impersonal matter.

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  7. Andrew: Well, yes, if you want to define 'conspiracy theory' to refer to any act involving human causation you are right. But in normal discourse, and especially in blogging discourse, 'conspiracy theory' refers to things like the 'loose change' 9/11 theories.

    It stems from the difficulty humans have in processing complexity - there is a fundamental urge to see evidence of a single, all-powerful agency behind events - and I'm afraid it manifests itself in instant speculations such as that the capture of the British sailors by Iranians was staged by the US.

    George W Bush is suspected of infinite dastardly conspiracies - it is amazing how many Bush-haters are able to do the doublethink trick of viewing him both as a naive dunce who can't point to Iraq on a map, and an evil genius capable of manipulating fiendishly complicated world events.

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  8. Buy it? How? Will it make it north of Watford?

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  9. Maybe 'SoLondon' is just the beginning of a franchise. Has your wife, Bryan, got the rights for 'SoLiverpool', 'SoSouthampton','SoReading' etc? I could even set up the 'SoDorset' version, although nothing happens down here. Apart from supertankers running aground. And Madonna. And Prince William at Bovingdon. And Martin Clunes shops at the Waitrose in Dorchester.

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  10. You have a wife?! Is she pretty?

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  11. Great comments today. In relation to the conspiracy theory debate, I think both sides have overstated things somewhat. The truth is somewhere in between. There is a fine line between healthy scepticism and paranoid craziness. I agree that we have a problem when it comes to processing complexity. We like unity, clarity and order. We don't like plurality, accidents, and chaos. As Iris Murdoch has pointed out: we see parts of things, we intuit whole things.

    And I think that goes for everything.

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  12. Wrong, wrong and wrong

    http://www.samizdata.net/blog/archives/2007/03/bryan_appleyard_1.html

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  13. I don't think anyone of any real intelligence imagines George W to be the real head of anything. And conspiracy theories in relation to 911 depend on very thorough analysis of evidence of things like the buildings' collapses. It seems the 'anti-conspiracy theory' stance usually depends on avoiding particulars and instead making general comments about why such conspiracies couldn't happen.
    A good site that concentrates on the particulars is this one, Physics 911:
    http://physics911.net/

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  14. You've hit the nail squarely on the head, Andrew. The conspiracy theorists depend on selective over-analysis of particular events, or strings of events, and introduce a causal narrative to 'explain' them in isolation.

    In its way, this is quite clever. But despite a narrow form of cleverness, what these people lack is that important part of the brain that sounds an alarm whenever a theory contradicts bleedin' obvious common sense.

    For example, the first question the loose-changers should ask themselves is: if this devious and evil Government is prepared to go to extraordinarily costly, elaborate and murderous lengths to fake a mass terrorist act, why would it be happy to sit back and allow a few emininently-silenceable geeks to expose the whole thing?

    If it wasn't so sick and offensive, 9/11 conspiracy theorising would be highly comical.

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  15. Again, Brit, you choose to concentrate on the general and fundamentally irrelevant question as to why if this was an inside-job, do the conspirators not go the whole hog and kill everyone who finds out about it, as opposed to open-mindedly examining evidence. It may be a surprise to some but most people, such as myself, until acting in this manner, wholeheartedly believed in the official government approved conspiracy theory. You may recall the words of Lord Denning back in 1979 regarding the Birmingham 6:
    "If the six men win, it will mean that the police are guilty of perjury, that they are guilty of violence and threats, that the confessions were invented and improperly admitted in evidence and the convictions were erroneous... This is such an appalling vista that every sensible person in the land would say that it cannot be right that these actions should go any further".
    Such appalling vistas arguments are another of these abdications of reason mentioned earlier.

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  16. I've seen the Loose Change 'evidence' about the collapse of the WTC, the Pentagon and the Flight 93 crash. I've also perused the many thorough debunkings of these theories.

    My mind is open, Andrew. Just not so open that any old rubbish can crawl in there. Or rather, it is open to anything so long as it passes the filter. The filter is called reason.

    What disturbs me most about these theories is that they have to posit an unseen, malevolent cabal behind the scenes. You've already ruled out George Bush (taking the 'dunce who can't point to Iraq on a map' approach, presumably). So who is it? Who are the baddies, if not Al-Qaeda?

    I assume you've seen all the conspiracy theories about how the Jewish workers were tipped off and didn't turn up the WTC on 9/11. And I also assume that even your filter blocks that one out.

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  17. "Guido's brand of libertarianism is like Marxism. And indeed, like conspiracy theories. If you haven't grown out of them by at least your mid-twenties then an important part of your brain is not functioning properly".

    I'm sorry, (not much though), but such statements say far more about the person who made it, than it does about Marxism or conspiracy theories. One wonders if this person has even bothered to read Das Kapital? I think not.

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  18. Nothing to say, except enjoyed your piece very much.

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