The trouble – as you may remember me saying on numerous occasions – with any half-decent conspiracy theory is that it’s impossible to use facts to counter it because any fact that contradicts it has clearly been contaminated by those people who are behind the conspiracy.
So in the aftermath of the bullet that whistled past the ear of Donald Trump, we had various people reacting with complete certainty about what had happened with all the confidence of an economist predicting the direction of the next interest rate move. Some of them even make Andrew Bolt’s take this morning look like the voice of reason if one accepts that reason don’t have to stick to the truth and is allowed to write things that are completely inaccurate because one is an opinion writer and one’s opinion can’t be held down by things like what actually happened on January 6th!
Let me be quite clear: I have no idea of the truth about what happened on the weekend. I have found all the conspiracy theories equally compelling and I’m left totally sure that it was both a staged attempt to enable a great photo as well as being an attempt by Deep State to take out the one threat to the WEF and the Washington Swamp and I’m pretty sure that Netanyahu was behind it as well as suspecting that Biden ordered it. This is before I’ve even stopped to consider the possibility that this is why Elvis has been hiding all these years, or even whether this may have been a warning to Trump not to continue with his speech because he was about to reveal that the moon landing was… completely real. I don’t want any trouble!
Anyway, in among all the lunacy there are some really good questions about how a shooter could get so close. Of course, using Occam’s Razor and the old saying that if it’s a choice between a well-organised, hidden conspiracy and a fuck-up, go for the latter most times because there are almost no organisations capable of a well-organised anything whether it’s in a brewery or a brothel… (I am referring to the idea that some people couldn’t organise a piss-up in a brothel or however the saying goes!)
Now don’t go arguing with me here! In all likelihood, you’re right. If you believe that it was organised by Joe Biden, you’ll have to admit that it’s a damn fine reason for re-electing him on the grounds that he’s still more capable than we’ve been led to believe. And if you’re concerned about him using the Secret Service to take out an opponent, well, doesn’t that make it “an official act” as President, giving him impunity according the 6-3 ruling of the Supreme Court?
And while I understand that the reasons for shooting the guy on the rooftop, is taking his gun off him still an infringement of his 2nd Amendment Rights even though he’s dead?
Whatever, the fact that Trump could stand in spite of those troublesome bone spurs should make us look at him in a whole new light!
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Someone who can dodge bullets will make a damn fine president in a nation with at least 5 guns per household.
And its distincly possible that this is Jesus re-incarnated, which will keep the god botherers happy.
Genocide Joe is not going to get even a look in, here.
Go, Donald, Go ………………….
Not only that, but the Pope probably shits in the woods.
‘Genocide Joe’?
During the recent prez debates debacle, dictator-aspirant Trump accused Biden of being a “very bad Palestinian”, on the basis that the current POTUS didn’t want to “give Israel the means to finish the job in Gaza” (which, coincidentally, echoes accusations being levelled against ‘sleepy Joe’ by ‘Bibi’ Netanyahu).
But sure, DP, “go Donald, go……..”.
You just can’t let go of the fixation that conspiracy theories are by definition ridiculous. Yet as I keep telling you, it only takes two people to make a conspiracy. Judge the theory on its merits, don’t dismiss it simply because you have labelled it a conspiracy theory. Contrary to what you argue, a theory that doesn’t stand up to reason is easily dismissed. Does it matter if some irrational people in denial refuse to see reason? They are discredited and thus their assertions are nullified. Trust in reason not irrational belief.
Occam’s razor does not determine that a stuff up is more likely than a conspiracy. If it is simpler to recognise that at least two people must be involved instead of complicating a theory to explain how just one person managed to achieve the result, then Occam’s razor would support the conspiracy.
And yes, we know that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone because he possessed a magic bullet that allowed him to do it all by himself. And why would you acknowledge a conspiracy to cover up Watergate, if it is more likely that it was just a stuff up by Nixon acting alone with no assistance from anyone else. And as for the Manhattan Project, was that a conspiracy or a stuff up?
Fools rush in where angels fear to tread. Too many Republicans, their media and grifters were quick to develop their narratives blaming Biden and the Dems…. now we know the shooter was a registered Republican gun enthusiast (not a very good one) and had never donated to a Dem PAC (mistaken identity), while Secret Service security with local police was very suboptimal and lax.
Well, we know the Orange One is promising a vengeful, bitter authoritarian administration. A certain Austrian ex-corporal had his Reichstag fire to justify his actions. Now Donny has his assassination attempt to excuse his. Taint gonna be purty folks.
DB,
‘Purdy’ is spelt wit a D!
1) Shooter was a registered Republican.
2a) There are reports that a number of rally attendees tried to alert the security detail to a person having been seen climbing to that rooftop.
2b) Security weren’t interested.
3a) Initial report (by SS agent) was that the Coppertone Caligula’s injury was due to a shard of glass from a teleprompter that took a bullet; this was later changed.
3b) Images of injured side of head (from the live video) show a relatively minor amount of blood (head wounds bleed like buggery) and minimal damage to the ear (even a slight graze from an AR-15 round is going to take some flesh with it).
4) The fist pump.
5) The time it took to get the Manchurian Canteloupe out of there – compare it to how long it was before Reagan was in the car and being zoomed off.
I have no doubt that Trump’s team set it up and he was in on it; suddenly Project 2025 has dropped off the radar.
Bill Hicks on the shooting of Kennedy…
I have read in the last few days about a cult operating in Toowoomba that denied a child access to insulin to treat her diabetes : she died.
That the Republican Party in the US has metamorphosed into a cult openly worshipping Donald Trump as the Messiah.
That John F Kennedy and Elvis Presley are living in a cave on the moon : part of a CIA conspiracy.
‘Stop the World’ I want to get off !
You can’t believe everything you hear on Radio Gleiwitz, is all I’m saying!
I am slowly beginning to understand why some people are disengaged with politics.
With all the bullshit piling up, it is difficult to know what truth is, or even if such a concept as truth exists.
Aghhh… the irony, catch 22 all around every which way you look!
It is a Kremlin delight, Putin’s stinker, Netanyahu’s get out of jail free card (Trump too) and it really doesn’t matter what the motive was or the truth unsocial, if it is a conspiracy theory, a false flag because – because now it is a gift horse, the ultimate lie, an immaculate deception, a cash cow for the MAGA Republican and Trump campaign, it is world centre stage courtesy of mainstream media, even creepy News Corp and tosser Sky News are redundant and could not have asked for more, out shone by rampant populism – a magic bullet which one US judge has just today cashed in, as if the Supreme Court ruling hadn’t already bagged it.
The Political Beast is Raised – Hypocrisy of MAGA Trump Campaign: Mission Accomplished.
Absolutely appalling moment for Republicans, MAGA and US to raise, milk and mimic this iconic image – populism knows no boundaries. Their lie becomes both iconic and symbolic, not just delusional rhetoric and psychobabble, and the irony of this lie will defend the rise of a dictator, death nell of constitutional democracy for the USA.
…and I couldn’t help notice that flag was upside down, funny that but just not funny, no really it’s ludicrously funny!
Bert:
That’s easy: it’s all bullshit!
And I’m not even kidding!
Look at it like that: when I did my dangerous goods endorsement for my truck license, the instructor told us that one litre of oil can contaminate 10,000 litres of water.
Were talking 100ppm. A minuscule dilution, but any water so contaminated is still unfit for human consumption. If you keep drinking it anyway, for any length of time, it’ll make you very sick.
It’s the same for our political discourse: skilled and committed political strategists gaming it, carefully parsing information, deliberately over-emphasizing some aspects, down-plating others, and therewith “infusing” the truth with a few dozen ppm of – well, not even outright lies, but “conveniences” … – how is the average mug punter, with a job to hold down, a business to run, and a family to look after, ever going to stay on top of it all.
Answer: no chance.
And so our political discourse has been distorted, gradually, month after month, year after year, decade after decade, to bend ever more towards bullshit in its formal academic C definition.
Truth does exist!
But (so I found myself forced to conclude some three decades ago) none of us can determine it – can “see” it – from where we are, either individually or collectively.
George Soros elaborated on the problem of “reflexivity” in his 1997 article The Capitalist Threat: Because we are an intrinsic part of the world we are trying to understand, our interactions with reality, based as they are on our existing perception of reality, we invariably end up creating distortions of this reality (self-fulfilling prophesies).
Of course, Soros wasn’t the first to come to this realisation. Marx postulated his ideas about “False Consciousness” in the 1800s. Before him, René Descartes asked, what, if anything, we could know with absolute certainty, and came up with “Cogito, ergo sum”. Everything else is speculation and conjecture. And don’t forget Socrates’ immortal “I know that I know nothing”, from two and a half millennia ago.
Therefore, what, ideally speaking, we need to develop, is a set of political – that is: legislative, executive and jurisprudential (remember: separation of powers) – processes that openly acknowledge our patent inability to perceive truth, and incorporate that insight.
But that’s unlikely to happen. Imagine, for a moment, fronting up in a court of law, and telling the magistrate point-blank that: “You have no idea what you are talking about, and therefore no basis on which to pass judgement!” That’d go up like the proverbial lead balloon!
Excellent piece Rossleigh. Pity that somebody didn’t try to do the same to that other disgusting excuse for a human in the photo!
Thanks Rossleigh
It’s all true – some of it.
Because everyone knows something some of the time.
One can’t deny it, because one accepts some of it some of the time.
It’s seems a blip in time, just like the blip on the blob.
Thank you Arnd.
Yes, you have explained that well.
Another genius piece from our own Rossleigh. I particularly liked;
”using Occam’s Razor and the old saying that if it’s a choice between a well-organised, hidden conspiracy and a fuck-up, go for the latter most times because there are almost no organisations capable of a well-organised anything whether it’s in a brewery or a brothel… (I am referring to the idea that some people couldn’t organise a piss-up in a brothel or however the saying goes!)”.
One only has to look at the mess generated in state DoEds to see the truth of this observation.
Arnd, re. Descarte’s ‘Cogito, ergo sum”. Everything else is speculation and conjecture.’… there’s a very serious flaw in that postulation, which I hope you’ve recognised. Speculation & conjecture are also within the domain of the thinking function.
I think, therefore I am, he maintained.
But who’s to say that the thinking itself is not flawed? The evidence for the existence of flaky thinking is strong.
Gurdieff’s third book in his series was entitled Life is only real then, when “I Am.” It refers to the embodiment of the subject’s consciousness and awareness, and the maintenance of that state for the individual’s concretising of an accurate sense of reality; and as such is opposed to the argument that ideation alone is the proof of one’s existence.
Just saying…
Canguro:
No, I haven’t!
My understanding is that Descartes concedes that whilst we may well be mistaken about every single aspect of our existence – c.f. Plato’s Simile of the cave, or later thought experiments about brains in vats, the whole universe being a hologram, etc. – we cannot be mistaken about our own existence, simply because I could not ask whether or not I exist, if I didn’t actually exist in the first place (even if only as a brain in a vat, The Matrix style).
I think that that argument is watertight!
You seem to think that it isn’t. Can you elaborate?
Arnd, hilarious! The twisted semantics of the lanes in which we travel and exercise our interrogations of reality are never ending. Any discussion regarding whether I exist or not is, in my humble opinion, a fool’s errand. Perhaps, on that, we agree. Plato’s simile of the cave is all well and good, and not in dispute in regard to the allegorical conclusions, but to question whether we actually exist or not seems to indicate a functional misunderstanding of how I perceive my facticity, my organic wholeness, my ‘is-ness’ as Satre might have put it, or for that matter, Gurdjieff, to reference a person for whom matters of philosophical conjecture regarding existence were manifestations of something beyond insanity, of the level of ‘ Hasnamuss‘, below that of Normal Man, Tramp and Lunatic.
Descartes’ willingness to question every aspect of his existence – since he can only expatiate from his own experience, given the impossibility of speaking from another person’s perspective – seems to be in contradiction to your assertion that we cannot be mistaken about our own existence. Perhaps you could unpack that aspect of your response, if you so choose. The brain in vat proposition is fanciful rubbish, to be honest.
We exist, that’s it. Why is it that only the human animal has concerns about the veracity of this? Blessed and cursed by the emergence of the frontal cortext and its capacity to dwell on matters far outside the raw realities of existence.
Arnd,
Personally, I don’t think that Descartes’ quip has any immediate logical flaw, but not do I reckon it a particularly satisfactory answer regarding certainty, especially in greater contextual terms.
My answer to the question of certainty of knowledge be;
“It is, because i be part of It.”
PS looking inward, between 1-3% of the weight of the average Homo sapien is comprised of other organisms existent within our biome, many of which we are existentially dependant upon for essential functions.
Canguro, we are about to open a can of worms. Or perhaps even a whole vat of worms?
Quite! 🙂
I don’t think Descartes worried about being mistaken about his (non-)existence. Certainly I am not!
Though I am fascinated about the possibility of being mistaken about everything else – and that is a very relevant, basic, and long-established realm of philosophical enquiry with its own name: epistemology.
It’s a set of basic questions about how exactly do we know what we claim to know, the nature and definition of the terms “knowledge” and “proof”, how to reliably tell falsehood from truth, and how to check ourselves against prejudice and cognitive complacency.
For me, the whole subject matter received particular immediacy some thirty years ago, when, after some twenty years of intermittent and hitherto inconclusive questioning, over a few days I extended and replaced my whole understanding of the human condition, from a bourgeois conceptualisation to an anarchist one.
Wittgenstein illustrated this process: “Why did people believe in a geo-centric mode of planetary motion for most of human history?”, he asked. “Because that’s what planetary motion looks like to an observer on Earth!”, came back the nonplussed answer. “So what should we wish planetary motion to look like to an observer on Earth so as immediately to lead that observer to the heliocentric conclusion?”
Indeed!
In that sense, I had to ask myself why it took me twenty years to develop my anarchist understanding of the human condition. And why it is so difficult to get others to drop their “There is no alternative” rusted-on bourgeois assumptions about the human condition.
corvus,
It sounds like we’re on the same wavelength here.
The Socratic definition of “knowledge” is “justified true opinion” – meaning that (1) you must believe “X”; (2) you must be able to explain why you believe”X”; and (3) “X” must be factually true.
Point (2) is of particular interest: you explain why you believe “X” by showing how it fits in with a goodly number of other established facts and/or solid assumptions. Or in other words, you put it in context.
Of course, there are circumstances when new information comes to light which requires a wholesale review and re-ordering of all existing knowledge – a so-called “paradigm change”. Also known as “revolution”.
Descartes? Did someone mention Descartes?
Fascinating fellow. I had a half a semester of him at uni, in the subject ‘Knowledge, Ideology and Social Science’.
I have a theory that he inspired the name of the iPhone.
He had a famous saying; “I think, therefore I am.” In the late 90s Apple brought out a new computer (the iMac) which they promoted with “I think, therefore iMac.”
Fast forward to the iPhone.
Well, that’s my theory and I’m sticking to it. 😀
Michael, did you ever read Tom Robbins’s “Jitterbug Perfume”. There, the Cartesian dictum was edited to “I stink, therefore I am!”
Hmmmm …
Haven’t had the pleasure, Arnd.
After a year of Descartes, Voltaire, Rousseau and Foucault I was afraid to pick up another book.
Personally I think that Rene Descartes’ theoretical tendency to differentially compartmentalise mental activity from physical process is not only informationally erroneous but contextually detrimental.
Witness the generations of university students who have discarded basic dictums of ‘healthy body = healthy mind” and subsisted their studies solely on a diet of cigarettes, coffee & 2min noodles.
Voltaire?
Although Mr Arouet is most commonly cited as having said “I weary of irksome fools misquoting me on the internet”, my favourite Voltaire quip is his attributed response to a Comte de Bussy-Rabutin observation.
“God is usually on the side of the big squadrons against the small”
“God is on the side not of the heavier battalions but of the best shots”.
I always thought that M. Voltaire was on the ball, when on his death bed he was urged by a Priest to renounce Satan and all his works ; he is reported to have very sensibly said “Now is not the time for making new enemies.”
But, I think my favourite philosopher was Basil Fawlty :
Guest: “When I pay for a view, I expect something more interesting than that.”
Basil: “But that is Torquay, madam.”
Guest: “Well it’s not good enough.”
Basil: “Well may I ask what you expected to see out of a Torquay hotel bedroom window? Sydney Opera House perhaps? The Hanging Gardens of Babylon? Herds of wildebeest sweeping majestically across the plain…”
Meanwhile, we have been enjoying the peace and quiet of White Mountain National Park in North Queensland, where we thought it would be warmer: two mornings below Zero proved us wrong. Still there wasn’t any internet connection…..such tranquility……….Did anything happen????
Damn, I missed a fascinating conversation while dog-stitting. All I can add is my favourite bit from Ambrose Bierce’s Devil’s Dictionary; from the definition of Cartesian:
The dictum might be improved, however, thus: Cogitio cogito ergo cogito sum – “I think that I think, therefore I think that I am”; as close an approach to certainty as any philosopher has yet made.