Multiplicities In Paradise

S usceptibility to disinformation is the illiteracy of the internet age. We have a tendency to view conspiracy theories as theories, statements about the world that can be either true or false. Since they are typically false, we treat them as flawed explanations, premised on logical inconsistencies or faulty evidence. The expression “conspiracy theory” was coined by a philosopher of science, Karl Popper, to designate the incapacity to understand social events as the outcome of a many interdependent processes. He saw them instead as the expression of a single and omnipotent will. The “conspiracy theory of society,” Popper wrote , was something akin to “a primitive kind of superstition.” This has remained the prevalent view ever since: in an influential article published ten years ago, two Harvard scholars—Cass Sunstein and Adrian Vermeule— called them “crippled epistemologies.” This is certainly how I've seen them. With increasing occurrences of people whom I would think would know...

"Denialism is an irrational action that withholds the validation of a historical experience or event when a person refuses to accept an empirically verifiable reality." That's how psychology defines it. Most of our modern problems are a result of clinging to a desperate denial of something. Reality and Science in particular.  D enialism is a sort of expansion of denial. We might say denial and denialism are simply a subset of the many ways humans have developed to use language to deceive others and themselves. Denial can be as simple as refusing to accept that someone else is speaking truthfully. Denial can be as unfathomable as the multiple ways we avoid acknowledgement of our own  weaknesses, fallibilities, or control scandalous desires. Some degree of denial may serve a function, in that it lets socialization occur more smoothly. Denialism however, is more than just another manifestation of the humdrum intricacies of our deceptions and self-deceptions that occur in the...

T he universe is deteriorating.  A mere 10 years ago, any decent search engine would reveal 100s of YouTube videos and thoughtful articles from people like Christopher Hitchens , Stephen Hawkins, Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris if you searched for Intelligent Design or Creationism. Today, most of those entries have disappeared or moved 100s of pages back in the queue and instead there is a plethora of pseudoscience nonsense much of which intentionally being passed off as science, much of which can be traced back to the Discovery Institute or Discovery Science - anything from these sources is propaganda masquerading as science. It's a con job. And like in the political realm, people are apparently easy marks. Don't be duped. The pressure is on. The invisible and the nonexistent look very much alike. I find this particular type of con job must disdainful.  Here's the deal. I don't believe, nor do I elevate the subject matter by disbelief,  There is NO evid...

  H istory repeats itself, often in a strikingly similar way. Democracy lasted 250 years in ancient Athens until privilege, corruption and mismanagement strangled it.  American democracy, is now approaching 250 years, and it is desperately ill. D emocracy is under assault. We may think that these clashes are an aberration, a Mar-A-Lago Mussolini thing. But they are actually part of a troubling dichotomy that seems to be intrinsic to democracy itself.  D emocracy is more than a bundle of laws, norms and institutions. It is an open culture of communication.  Democracy affords people the right to think, speak and act and it allows every possible means of persuasion. Going all the way back to Plato's Republic, it's understood that the seeds of democracy include the roadmap to destruction in it's very DNA.  It's understood that every democratic society  is inescapably vulnerable to the consequences of communication. We may not like it, but something li...