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Category: Conspiracy theories

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Autobiography Conspiracy theories Parapsychology Pseudoscience

Ron Unz and JFK

or

Leaving the courtroom

My comment in the previous post, about Ron Unz’s credulity about conspiracy theories (CTs) of the assassination of John F. Kennedy has made me think, once again, about what we might call the pathology of extraordinary beliefs. As the sceptics of CTs have said, which not only includes JFK but also 9/11, this is a topic that, like religion and politics, should not be touched in after-dinner conversations. People feel very hurt and it is impossible to argue on good terms.

Let’s use the analogy of the lawyer and the prosecutor who bring the experts to court to try to convince the jury; say, the mock trial of Lee Harvey Oswald staged by British television between Gerry Spence and Vincent Bugliosi. A good litmus test to know who has a closed mind is simply to point out who, when watching the TV show at home, leaves the room when the speaker is either Spence or Bugliosi.

The fact is that it is those who believe in the CT who usually leave the room, so to speak, in the sense that they never read sceptical books. Their attitude is as surreal as Alice’s Queen of Hearts in Wonderland: first comes to the sentence and then the trial. First we ‘know’ that 9/11 was an inside job, or, in the case of JFK, we ‘know’ that Oswald didn’t act alone. The long trial process that culminates in the sentence is of no importance or consequence for those who ‘know’ the truth.

Ron Unz is reputed to be a voracious devourer of books and articles. But when the issue of the trial between Spence and Bugliosi arrives, he leaves the courtroom every time the prosecutor speaks. Last year, in this discussion thread of his webzine, Unz said he had not read the thick Bugliosi treatise. When a supporter of Bugliosi pointed out that there was a much shorter book of another ‘prosecutor’ (pic above)—a book that with his amazing reading capabilities he could read it in a couple of days—Unz didn’t respond.

That is the all too common attitude among those who believe in CTs. True Believers can read a dozen books promoting the conspiracy but not a single article from the other side (listen how Bugliosi explains this bizarre behaviour: here)! That is why they ignore the most basic arguments of the prosecutor. For example, in the most recent discussion thread about the 9/11 attacks, some visitors got mad at me but none advanced an argument about a video I linked about Building 7 (for the believers in the 9/11 CTs, Building 7 is considered one of their strongest arguments of what they call ‘controlled demolition’).

It is relatively easy to find out who’s the one who leaves the courthouse every time the opposing lawyer speaks. They are those who believe not only in the CT about JFK or 9/11, but in the so-called Fake Moon Landing, Satanic Ritual Abuse, or the existence of UFOs in Hangar 14 of the US government.

Let’s illustrate this with my case. I used to believe in the pseudoscience of parapsychology. I spent many years of my life wanting to prove the existence of ‘psi’ (extrasensory perception and psychokinesis). I didn’t read the sceptics of the paranormal because they were ‘the bad guys in the movie’.

When I finally spoke with them, at a November 1989 conference they invited me to, I was surprised that those I considered closed were, in fact, quite open people. They even subscribed to the main journals of parapsychology. That happened also with UFO sceptics. They were avid readers of their opponents’ literature: those who promote the hypothesis that UFOs are manned extraterrestrial ships. It is the believers of the extraterrestrial hypothesis who never read the literature of the sceptics.

Before, I only read literature from parapsychologists. But after meeting the ‘prosecutors’ in the early 1990s I became familiar, little by little, with their literature. A few years after subscribing to the Skeptical Inquirer there came a time when I felt agnostic (just as there are people who are no longer a hundred percent sure that God exists). Concurrently I realised that my parapsychological colleagues did not read sceptical literature, nor did they respond to the main arguments of the sceptics (Occam’s razor, the falsifiability principle, etc.).

Only until May 1995, thinking outside a subway station, there was a time when I seriously doubted, for the first time in life, the existence of psi (something similar to a priest doubting for the first time in his life of the existence of God). However, it would take me a few more years to understand why had I got caught in such a self-sealing belief system in the first place: an issue I address in my autobiographical books (see sidebar at the bottom of this page).

I mention this just so that it is understood that there are times that we are so absolutely convinced that pseudoscience is real science that we do not realise that it is a cathedral built on clay bases.

When I lived in Marin County I once had the opportunity to realise that the foundations of the ‘science’ I was studying were shaky. In a bookstore I saw that they sold A Skeptic’s Handbook of Parapsychology. Thirty-four years have passed since that night and I still remember the image of James Randi on the dustcover. But I thought I couldn’t afford it. If I had listened to the prosecutor, a dozen (lost) years of my life would have been spared! But I didn’t listen to him and embarked on a quixotic project of wanting to develop psi.

You can’t learn from another’s mistakes. I know that what I say here won’t make any dent whatsoever in the True Believers’ worldview who, like Unz, flee from the courtroom every time Bugliosi speaks. They do this to avoid the most elemental cognitive dissonance, as I did when I was trapped in my self-sealing system. But if I could travel to the past and see Cesar in that California bookstore in 1985, I would tell him, I would beg him, to buy the book he had in his young hands…

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Conspiracy theories

Conspiracy idiots

I didn’t plan to say anything about the September 11 attacks in 2001. But this comment at Counter-Currents today—:

I don’t see how anyone can look at the evidence and determine anything other than the US government was involved in the attacks. I was very reluctant to come to this conclusion but Ryan Dawson and James Corbett have proven this beyond a reasonable doubt I believe.

—moves me to remind visitors that 9/11 conspiracy theories have been debunked beyond reasonable doubt (see e.g., some videos here and this year here).

Categories
Conspiracy theories Racial right Real men

On ‘Private Hudson’ commenters

Vig once asked me how I endured answering so patiently what the commenters were telling me. Indeed: since I modified the comments options, and now every comment has to be approved, I’ve been saving good time since I’m not approving every comment.

I must say that there are issues that have bothered me greatly about the character of even the most intelligent commenters. One of them who used to comment here, a ‘Stubbs’ (‘Vance Stubbs’ at VNN Forum) suddenly stopped doing so in 2015 without giving any explanation, and he did not even answer my personal message.

Other commenters are intelligent on many issues but cease to be so when it comes up, be it conspiracy theories (9/11 or JFK), or a psychotic admiration for Charles Mason: as can be seen in a loonie Unz Review article. In many respects, the racialists who post in the alt-right forums are still normies. They are clueless about the logical fallacies inherent in conspiracy theories because, unlike me, they have not studied magical thinking. (*)

But what I like most about the fact that all the comments are now on moderation is that I no longer let the pessimists pass so easily. I refer to those who claim, almost dogmatically, that everything is lost for the white race. They remind me of Private Hudson in the movie Aliens that I watched in a Marin County theatre in 1987:

The spirit of the true soldier is to fight even against all odds, as did those who survived in the movie. That is not the spirit of the defeatists who used to comment here, and I’m glad they can no longer do it.

________

(*) From November 1989 I began to familiarise myself with the CSI’s magazines and books: research that culminated in 1997 when I lived in Houston. I will never forget a JFK conference by CSI in Seattle, which I attended in 1994. Many years before Vincent Bugliosi published his 2007 book debunking the conspiracy theories about the murder of JFK it was already known that they were as crazy as Fake Moon Landing theories.

________

Update: On August 7 commenter Stubbs replied thus:

[…] Also I apologize for leaving so abruptly, that was rude of me. There wasn’t much to it, I just got busy and didn’t have nearly so much time to read or write. I think I just deleted your PM because it was old by the time I read it, but I still should have sent something back. I didn’t mean to come off as derisive or anything.

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Conspiracy theories

Intentional causality

‘In order to solve the Jewish Problem Aryan males have to overcome Xtian ethics. To defeat the outer, biological Jew it is necessary to defeat the inner, mental/psychological Jew (Jesus)’.

—Joseph Walsh

Yesterday I said: ‘But white nationalists are not doing that. They still obey the inner Jew. Just see how they have treated Brenton Tarrant in sharp contrast to how Jews love Benjamin Goldstein’.

I also wrote: ‘Just compare the zero comments in our latest post… with the hundreds of comments that sites such as The Unz Reviewget’. But yesterday I was taken aghast by the number of advocates of conspiracy theories precisely in The Unz Review threadcomparing the Tarrant reaction among whites with the Goldstein reaction among Jews. You can bet on it: I prefer zero comments in some of my threads than dozens of comments coming from conspiracy theorists!

But what really bothers me in that, unlike the Jews of Hebron who consider Goldstein a hero, quite a few people in the pro-white forums resort to paleologic thinking when confronted with the deeds of a Tarrant. This Monday I said: ‘It is fundamental to understand schizophrenia in general to comprehend why, during lone-wolf attacks similar to last week’s, the most bizarre conspiracy theories immediately crop up like fungi’. I also promised a future review of a treatise that explains the disorder, but I’d like to advance some of that explanation through a quote I also found yesterday:

Many conspiracy theories appeal to the basic ways we process information. We are, for example, hard-wired to believe in intentional causality. That means that when you’re camping and you hear a rustling bush, you probably assume there’s a dangerous animal lurking around. You know it’s probably just the wind, but still, it feels safer to assume the source is a threat. That same paranoia pops up all the time when you don’t quite understand the cause of something.

Indeed: our brains are built for the conditions of prehistory, when it was quite valuable to assign paranoid intentionality to patterns that, in reality, were not that threatening.

But as I said, what bothers me is the way many commenters reacted to Tarrant. The Jew does not spin webs around Goldstein but sees his actions as supportive to the Jews pure and simple. But the Aryan does not see the hero in Tarrant: a hero pure and simple. The asymmetry between the psyche of the degenerate Aryan of today, including nationalists, and the psyche of the Jew cannot be greater. Not only are there axiological errors in the Aryan psyche—Greg Johnson for one saying that Tarrant’s actions were ‘evil’. Those nationalists who, unlike Johnson, do not condemn Tarrant fall instead into the typical paranoia that pops up any time they don’t quite understand the (simple) cause of something.

And what we have to understand is very simple indeed: We have to transvalue the values of Americanism to the ethos of the Nazis so that, instead of condemning Tarrant as an evil man or elaborate conspiracy theories, consider him a hero as the Jews consider their Goldstein a hero.

But that won’t happen until white nationalists realise that the first priority to beat the Jew is to expel the inner Jesus from their hearts; even, in the form of Neo-Christian ethics, the secularised Jesus in the many Johnsons of the movement. That is the only way forward: to transvalue all values and be as psychically healthy as the Jews of Hebron.

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Conspiracy theories

Unz commenter, 3

As should be obvious to anyone except a complete buffoon such as yourself, if whites don’t believe the races differ—and in vast majority they quite obviously don’t, and aren’t shy about telling you so—then there’s no reason to be distressed about being replaced.

The truth is, your sort of conspiracy nonsense is nothing but phony opposition, taking up space that should be occupied by real opposition such as that of Brenton Tarrant.

It exists so that whatever revolutionary sentiment there is can be diverted into harmless channels.

It exists so that the real, cultural cause of the ongoing white racial suicide can never be understood and addressed.

That is the place of conspiracy nuts like you in the political ecology, and a large part of the reason why the white race seems likely to become extinct.

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Conspiracy theories

Paleologic modes of cognition

If there is something that bothers me in the forums of the racialist dissidents, it is the abundance of conspiracy theories right after attacks like the one in New Zealand the previous week. However, as I have decided not to read these forums anymore, but rather to convert this site into a platform for disseminating National Socialism, today I will present my conclusions without dwelling on the subject with due detail.

I believe that conspiracy theories, inside and outside of white nationalism, have to do with the immaturity of the human mind in the sense of archaic atavisms: what Silvano Arieti (1914-1981) called ‘paleologic thought’: a phenomenon that I explained in Day of Wrath.

In addition to a few more articles critical of psychiatry that I still have to translate, it occurs to me to start a new series, based on Arieti’s texts, explaining the paleological thought in greater detail than Day of Wrath. For the moment, suffice it to say that the paleologician reasons in a similar way to that of the schizophrenic although, unlike the latter, the former can function reasonably well in modern society.

It is fundamental to understand schizophrenia in general to comprehend why, during lone-wolf attacks similar to last week’s, the most bizarre conspiracy theories immediately crop up like fungi.

The university faculties do not understand schizophrenia insofar as they study it under the pseudo-scientific medical model of mental disorders. But the work of Arieti and others opens the door to the inner world of the schizophrenic, which sometimes seems indistinguishable from the most regressive aspects of the urban myths of today.

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Conspiracy theories Parapsychology Pseudoscience Science Turin Shroud

On the Turin Shroud, 1

‘A love letter from God’

From personal experience I know that, when one is immersed in the dogma of a pseudoscience, the believer swears that it is real science.
A typical believer in a classical pseudoscience, such as the study of UFOs or parapsychology, ignores that there is a litmus test to distinguish between false and true science: the principle of the falsifiability of a hypothesis that Karl Popper devised in The Logic of Scientific Discovery. In short, for a hypothesis to be scientific it has to be refutable. Pseudoscientists follow the opposite methodology: they present their central hypotheses in such a way that they cannot be refuted. A typical case of pseudoscience from the Popperian point of view is sindonology, the study of the Shroud of Turin (Sindonology, from the Greek sindon: the word used in the gospel of Mark to describe the type of the burial cloth of Jesus).
Geoffroi de Charny, a French knight who died in 1356 at the Battle of Poitiers, was the first recorded owner of what later became known as ‘the Turin Shroud’. When in the late 1980s I was immersed in sindonology, I not only read a huge amount of literature on the subject where I learnt about the de Charny story, but contacted the ‘experts’ by mail, some personally. The late Dr. Enrique Rivero-Borrell, the foremost ‘expert’ on the shroud in Mexico, told me something I should mention.
I met him at a meeting of a group of Catholic sindonologists who believe that the image of the shroud is nothing more and nothing less than a late ‘love letter’ that God left behind in the 1st century as proof of the Resurrection for our scientific age!
The meeting with Rivero-Borrell, presided by Faustino Cervantes Ibarrola, a pleasant priest, was held in the aftermath of the carbon-14-dating tests results performed on the shroud in 1988. Rivero-Borrell, president of a sindonological organisation, was very confused. The tests, endorsed by the cardinal of Turin himself, revealed that the fabric dated from 1260 to 1380 CE. Keep in mind that the shroud is exactly about the size of an altar cloth; in no way resembles the several burial cloths used by Jewry. Since the shroud made its first appearance in a town in France, precisely in the times of de Charny, it could not be more significant that science corroborated that the cloth was manufactured in the 13th or 14th centuries.
However, I continued my investigation of the shroud because, at that time, I believed that the image remained mysterious. That was how I learned, a couple of years later that Rivero-Borrell left behind all his previous confusion of 1988. Very enthusiastically, he told me that the latest research had revealed that the carbon 14 tests had come out medieval because a fungus had covered the cloth, changing the molecular chemistry and the results turned out aberrant!
In other parts of the world, other sindonologists said that Jesus’ energy in the resurrection, which they call flash photolysis—the very moment when Jesus was resurrected!—not only left the miraculous imprint on the sheet, but changed its molecular chemistry. That’s why the results had come out medieval instead of the 1st century (a rather clumsy deity was this one who intended to leave behind ‘a love letter’ for us)!
The least absurd excuse among the sindonologists that I heard is that the piece of cloth to which they applied the carbon 14 tests was attached to the shroud; not a part of the original fabric.
All these excuses have something in common: they present us their central hypothesis—that the image of the Turin shroud is the result of a miraculous imprint at the very moment of Jesus’ resurrection—as an irrefutable hypothesis. And it is precisely the irrefutability of the central hypothesis of a field of study the most common feature in pseudosciences.
For example, those who study UFOs say that there is a conspiracy that involves all governments since 1947: government officials who have hidden evidence from the American people of extraterrestrial visitors. This is an irrefutable hypothesis insofar as, when a sceptic requests evidence that an alien ship exists in a top-secret hangar, the believer responds that everything is jealously guarded by sinister instances of the federal government. A massive conspiracy involving all presidencies from Truman to Trump, including the CIA and the FBI, and which continues today, cannot be refuted. Every time the sceptic complains that a massive conspiracy stresses the claim to the breaking point, the believer responds that the sceptic himself is a paid CIA agent! I’m not kidding: some ufologists used to say that about Philip J. Klass, the CSICOP specialist in UFOs, whom I met at a conference.
The same happens in the field of parapsychology. Parapsychologists say that extra-sensory perception (ESP) and psychokinesis (PK) exist, but that they are such erratic phenomena that it is very difficult to demonstrate them methodically and repeatedly in the laboratory. That is, there is no way to adequately submit the paranormal hypothesis to the protocol of refutability devised by Popper. That does not mean that ESP and PK do not exist (personally I doubt they exist). It means that the parapsychologists, who claim that they have reliable, empirical evidence of the existence of the paranormal, violate the principle of falsifiability by calling their field of study strictly ‘scientific’.
Such a pseudoscientific methodology is what the sindonologists also follow. Take for example the least insane of the above-mentioned excuses about why, according to believers, the carbon 14 tests did not come out of the century they expected: that researchers could have cut a cloth attached to the shroud, not the fabric where the image is.
If the proponents of the authenticity of the shroud were true scientists they would not be lucubrating such things. They would simply ask the Cardinal of Turin to allow another carbon 14 test on the cloth, this time from the area they consider appropriate. Meanwhile, the wise thing would be to suspend judgement until the cardinal approves another series of tests. Instead, what sindonologists do—who after the radiometric 1988 tests continue to claim that image is proof of the Resurrection—is a battery of secondary tests. Most of such tests are unrelated to the dating of the cloth; tests that purportedly show that the image remains mysterious.
That the image is not so mysterious can be seen in the research that Joe Nickell, a sceptic I met in 1994, has made of the shroud. But there is more to Nickell’s research: as we will see in the following entries on the subject.
Before finishing this post I would like to say something else. A white nationalist visiting this site might think that my interest in unmasking the gospels and the shroud buffs is a secondary issue. It is not. A few minutes ago of my writing this paragraph the bell of my house rang. Some Jehovah’s Witnesses gave me propaganda. I wrinkled it in anger and was about to throw it away when I saw the image of these blacks. Then it occurred to me to use it because in the background these neo-Christians put whites in a bucolic world where the races converge.
Christian ethics, so well captured in the propaganda I was given today, is a bigger factor than Jewish subversion, as without such ethics there would be no Jews (or blacks) empowered in the West. Aryans embracing a moral grammar based on the belief of a resurrected Jew is unhealthy, to say the least.

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Conspiracy theories John Stuart Mill

Mill’s quote

Or:

Conspiracy theories in white nationalism

 
This is a postscript of what I said yesterday about Richard Spencer and friends on the subject of John F. Kennedy’s assassination by Oswald—and by Oswald alone.
My trouble with white nationalists is not only that they are inferior to the National Socialists on all counts. Many of them also commit the cardinal sin of haughtiness. I won’t elaborate much on this accusation except saying that, of the few works of the cannon in academic philosophy that I find readable, one of them is On Liberty by John Stuart Mill. Consider this statement from Mill’s book:

‘He who knows only his own side of the case,
knows little of that’.

Spencer et al who give some credence to the conspiracy theories about the JFK assassination know little of their subject, as they have not listened the other side by, say, reading Vincent Bugliosi’s book. And exactly the same can be said of what ‘truther’ nationalists believe about 9/11: they know only their own side.
Haughtiness.
I won’t even discuss these topics in this site with them unless they do their homework. If for example they have spent a hundred hours reading conspiratorial literature on JFK, they now have to spend a hundred more of the literature debunking the claims, etcetera.

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Conspiracy theories

Spencer on Las Vegas massacre

In the first section of today’s podcast (here), Richard Spencer and his friends talk about the Las Vegas massacre last Sunday. It’s not a bad segment but I would still like to take issue with some of the things they have said.
When Spencer talks about sterilizing people like Stephen Paddock, claiming that his father was a criminal wanted by the FBI, he falls into the bio-reductionist trap of biological psychiatry. If Paddock was mistreated as a boy the problem lied in the childrearing methods used against him, not in his genes. (I have written a lot about pseudoscientific psychiatry and translated a single essay, which appears in Day of Wrath.)
One of Spencer’s friends began listing conspiracy theories about the massacre and mistakenly said there was an absence of graphic photographs of the bodies in Las Vegas. There is no such absence (see a YouTube clip: here). Note of October 7: YouTube's thoughtpolice has deleted this clip.
Another failure of the podcast was to compare Paddock with Oswald. Oswald had a very definite and fanatical pro-Soviet, pro-Cuban ideology: something Paddock apparently lacked at all. On the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Spencer then commented ‘there is something’ and the others agreed.
I invested some of my time and money in going to Seattle in 1994 to a conference of sceptics who demystified conspiracy theories about the JFK assassination (see the Sunday program of the conference: here). A few years later, in Houston, I even obtained a book that also debunked those theories.
That was in the 1990s but I still remember the moment when, in my elementary school Arnold Gesell, a classmate gave me the news that the president of the United States had just been killed, which made me feel bad even though I was a small child. In the 1960s I listened no crazy theories. What later did the half-Jew Oliver Stone with JFK, and the Jewish publishers of books, was analogous to the recent episode of Charlottesville: blaming the Alt-Right when the real culprit was the Antifa.
The case of the murder of JFK had as an obvious motivation Oswald’s fascination for Castro: something that, had it not been for conspiracy theories, would have meant a very strong blow to the American left. That’s basically what Gregory Hood says in ‘The Kennedy Assassination & the Big Lie’.
(Anyone wishing to inquire why JFK conspiracy theories are retarded may begin with my excerpts of an interview with Vincent Bugliosi: here.)
Is it not a shame for Spencer and company that a non-American as I know more of the real history of their country? In the podcast Spencer insists about the assassination of JFK, ‘It’s a question of cui bono’ without taking into account that the Left would have lost had it not been because the media invented a conspiratorial narrative. Apparently Spencer and company are behaving like the masses regarding JFK, not as truly dissident intellectuals.
After the section on the Las Vegas massacre in today’s podcast, there was an interlude of degenerate music around minute 38. Then Spencer and company changed the subject to Catalonia and North Korea.

Categories
Conspiracy theories Degenerate art Pseudoscience Videos

On 9/11 “truth”

• part 1 of 7 – Free fall and how the towers collapsed

• part 2 of 7 – Nano-thermite found in the WTC dust

• part 3 of 7 – Thermate, thermite and glowing aluminium

• part 4 of 7 – How did World Trade Center 7 collapse

• part 5 of 7 – The BBC, Larry Silverstein and the Pentagon

• part 6 of 7 – The psychology behind a 9/11 truther

• part 7 of 7 – Flight 93 and my final thoughts.
 
young_sceptic

This young Briton is neither Jewish nor Jew-wise. He uses anti-music by the end of his clips, but his videos about September 11 conspiracy theories are worth watching. It’s pathetic that quite a few white nationalists swallow this utter nonsense as “truth.”