Wednesday, May 8, 2013

Epstein on conspiracies


No one denies that conspiracies exist.  They occur every time two thugs decide to rob a liquor store together.  When people dismiss “conspiracy theories,” what they are dismissing is not the idea that bad people conspire, or that they do so in secret, or that these bad people are sometimes government officials.  Typically, what they are critical of is the sort of theory that postulates a conspiracy so overarching that the theory tends implicitly to undermine its own epistemological foundations, precisely by undermining the possibility of any sociopolitical knowledge at all -- something analogous to Cartesian skepticism in the sociopolitical context.
 
That proponents of such theories are often (not always, but often) given to paranoia and shrillness, and that they often (not always, but often) seem motivated less by empirical evidence than by some higher-order theory they regard as the Master Key to history (to the effect that the world is “really” run by Zionists, or Jesuits, or bankers, or the CIA) only reinforces the natural tendency to regard their position as irrational.  I have discussed this issue -- and the difference between what I call “local conspiracies” (which happen all the time) and “global conspiracies” (which are a priori highly implausible) -- at greater length in an earlier post.  (The “local” versus “global” distinction, by the way, is not geographic but epistemic -- read the post to see what I mean.  See also this article.)

Edward Jay Epstein is one of the best writers on the Kennedy assassination (and, for that matter, one of the best writers on pretty much anything he turns his attention to).  I’ve been reading his terrific new book The Annals of Unsolved Crime, and while it is not a book about conspiracy theories per se, among the many cases he discusses are several around which conspiracy theories have been woven.  One of the lessons of the book is how crimes sometimes go unsolved, or seem to be more mysterious than they really are, because of false preconceptions police and other investigators get locked into early on, which end up seriously distorting their perceptions of the evidence.

For instance, Jack the Ripper and the Zodiac are among the best-known serial killers whose identities have never been determined.  Except that there almost certainly was no such person as Jack the Ripper -- he was probably just an invention of the newspapers, whose sensationalistic stories tied together murders at least some of which were unconnected -- and probably no one person responsible for all the crimes attributed to the Zodiac either.  Police knew this in the first case, but in the second possibly exonerated someone who was guilty of at least some of the crimes (or so Epstein thinks) because his fingerprints didn’t match those of whoever committed one of the others.  (If you’ve seen the movie Zodiac -- which is a great flick, by the way -- you know who the person in question is.) 

Police, prosecutors, and government authorities can also hinder investigations for reasons that have nothing to do with motives of the sort postulated by “global” conspiracy theories.  For example, Epstein argues that there is good reason to think that there was at least one other, unidentified conspirator involved in the Oklahoma City bombing -- but that there was pressure on the FBI not to follow the leads because of the way this might be used by the defense to undermine the prosecution of McVeigh and Nichols, who were known to be guilty.  With the 2001 anthrax attacks -- which, Epstein argues, are still unsolved, the government’s claims about Dr. Bruce Ivins notwithstanding -- the FBI was in Epstein’s view fixated on the idea that the attacks must have been carried out by a lone domestic scientist, based less on the evidence than on their behavioral profile of the suspect. 

These two cases, by the way (and here I go beyond anything Epstein says), point up one of the many problems with revisionist 9/11 conspiracy theories.  If 9/11 was really just an “inside job” perpetrated in order to justify an attack on Iraq and the War on Terror in general, why on earth would the government not play up the anthrax attacks?  They were, after all, perpetrated by someone who presented himself as a jihadist -- recall the notes with all the “Death to Israel” and “Allah is great” stuff -- and involved a WMD of precisely the sort the Iraqis were claimed to possess.  And there is evidence that one of the 9/11 hijackers was exposed to anthrax.  The case was tailor-made, as it were, for use in ginning up war on false pretenses -- if that was what the Bush administration was trying to do.  And yet the government did the reverse, downplaying the anthrax attacks from the get-go and ruling out any foreign or terrorist involvement early on.

With the Oklahoma City bombing, too, there is at least an argument to be made for jihadist involvement (though Epstein thinks, rightly for all I know, that such involvement is ultimately unlikely).  If “neo-con” conspirators were looking to manufacture or exaggerate the jihadist threat to the U.S., the evidence is certainly there to be played up -- and yet it has gone almost entirely down the memory hole.

In a chapter on the Kennedy assassination, Epstein argues quite plausibly that Oswald’s actions were at least “influenced, if not directed” by Cuban intelligence, in retaliation for U.S. attempts to kill Castro.  Here too -- and once again I now go beyond anything Epstein discusses -- the actual facts simply don’t fit with what conspiracy theorists tell us.  If Oliver Stone were correct, and JFK’s assassination was motivated in part by right-wing anger over Kennedy’s failure to be sufficiently aggressive with Cuba, the conspirators would have had all the justification for an invasion they wanted after the assassination.  For the evidence (even if the conspiracy theorist wants to claim it was manufactured evidence) of Oswald’s links to Cuba (not to mention the Soviet Union) is undeniable.  The conspirators could have used the assassination as just the casus belli they were presumably looking for.  And yet that is precisely what did not happen; in fact the government seems to have been reluctant to pursue the question of foreign involvement.

The truth is that Kennedy administration policy toward Cuba was aggressive -- for there were attempts to kill Castro -- and government reluctance to look too hard into possible collaborators was probably motivated by a desire to cover up, not a CIA plot against JFK, but rather the CIA plots against Castro, plots which may have boomeranged and the exposure of which would therefore be a grave embarrassment to the government.  This sort of ass-covering -- rather than the government-as-malin génie postulated by “global” conspiracy theories -- is, together with bureaucratic incompetence, more than adequate to account for dubious government actions vis-à-vis events like the Kennedy assassination and 9/11.

Anyway, on the subject of conspiracy theories we may yet hear more from Epstein, who has for some time been working on a book on the 9/11 commission.

209 comments:

  1. Scott writes:

    "And for some reason we're still treating Feser's suggestion specifically about argumentative strategy for Truthers as though it was intended as a fundamental requirement of all reasoning whatsoever."

    This is interesting. I think you're saying that persuading a person is a different exercise than justifying a given proposition. For example, we may say the role of a prosecuting attorney is to convince a jury that a person is guilty and vice versa for a defending attorney; however, to convince a jury one way or the other is not necessarily the same thing as proving the person objectively guilty or innocent. To best accomplish their respective goals, the attorneys ought to willfully suppress information damaging to their cases and amplify information helpful to their cases. Although the true guilt of a defendant may in the end be reached by the jury, this process is not designed to ensure this. Instead, the verdict of the accused reflects the rhetorical skills of the attorneys and dispositions of the jury members; any congruence between verdict and actual guilt is coincidental--it's just a matter of the right lawyer getting assigned to the right side and jury members with the right dispositions getting selected for the trial.

    In the same manner, you (and, if you're right, Feser) are saying that (c) is a rhetorical standard, not a reasoning standard. For individuals with dispositions such as yours and Feser's, (c) is a standard that happens to apply to you with respect to your beliefs about 9/11. Should a "Truther" wish to revise your beliefs about 9/11, he or she must meet a standard that may or may not apply to reasoning in general. That is, standard (c) need not apply to my epistemic justifications for inferring the falsehood of the official story. As such, (c) is not a standard I need meet in order to deem my dissent from the official story objectively warranted.

    If this is right, then the obvious response from me will be, so what? Why should I care to meet a rhetorical standard that is independent of standards of warranted belief? My position is not analogous to those of the lawyers; instead, my position is analogous to that of a judge. I wish to discern what most likely happened on 9/11, not how best to persuade others to believe it was some conspiracy. So far, standard (c) is in need of justification if it is to affect the warrant of my dissent from the official story.

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  2. @Ryan Ashton:

    "I think you're saying that persuading a person is a different exercise than justifying a given proposition."

    No, I'm not; although that's no doubt true as well, I don't know why you think it's what I'm saying. I'm saying that Feser is proposing (c) as a strategy specifically in this instance because of special circumstances that don't extend to all reasoning generally.

    Specifically, he's saying that in this instance we're being offered (and here I'm quoting what I said in my previous reply to you) "an alternative hypothesis that appears on the face of it to require more, and less plausible, explanation than the original hypothesis to which it's being offered as an alternative." Under those circumstances, he says, interlocutors are justified in demanding that condition (c) be met, for if it were not met, it would be unreasonable to prefer the second explanation to the first.

    In general, I'd say (and I have said) that it seems senseless to me to doubt a proposition unless we at least have in mind that some alternative to it is possible or conceivable. But that doesn't mean that every time we want to doubt a proposition, we have to know what the real truth is; nor does Feser say we do, and I really don't see why some participants in this discussion have taken him to mean that.

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  3. @Ryan Ashton:

    "That is, standard (c) need not apply to my epistemic justifications for inferring the falsehood of the official story. As such, (c) is not a standard I need meet in order to deem my dissent from the official story objectively warranted."

    That depends whether you're taking rejection of the "official story" to include rejection of the claim that 9/11 was not an inside job.

    If so, then yes, you need to meet standard (c) in order to be epistemically justified in inferring that the "official story" is wrong (i.e. that 9/11 was an inside job).

    If not, then of course you can reasonably doubt this or that detail of the "official story" without meeting standard (c).

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  4. Very interesting--Zbigniew Brzezinski:


    "The nation state as a fundamental unit of man's organized life has ceased to be the principal creative force: International banks and multinational corporations are acting and planning in terms that are far in advance of the political concepts of the nation-state."

    Brzezinski, Zbigniew, Between Two Ages: America’s Role in the Technetronic Era (New York: Viking Press, 1973), p. 246.

    ============

    “We have a large public that is very ignorant about public affairs and very susceptible to simplistic slogans by candidates who appear out of nowhere, have no track record, but mouth appealing slogans”

    “Most Americans are close to total ignorance about the world. They are ignorant. That is an unhealthy condition in a country in which foreign policy has to be endorsed by the people if it is to be pursued. And it makes it much more difficult for any president to pursue an intelligent policy that does justice to the complexity of the world.”

    “[American exceptionalism] is a reaction to the inability of people to understand global complexity or important issues like American energy dependency. Therefore, they search for simplistic sources of comfort and clarity. And the people that they are now selecting to be, so to speak, the spokespersons of their anxieties are, in most cases, stunningly ignorant.”

    “The technotronic era involves the gradual appearance of a more controlled society. Such a society would be dominated by an elite, unrestrained by traditional values. Soon it will be possible to assert almost continuous surveillance over every citizen and maintain up-to-date complete files containing even the most personal information about the citizen. These files will be subject to instantaneous retrieval by the authorities. ”

    “In the technotronic society the trend would seem to be towards the aggregation of the individual support of millions of uncoordinated citizens, easily within the reach of magnetic and attractive personalities exploiting the latest communications techniques to manipulate emotions and control reason.”

    “This regionalization is in keeping with the Tri-Lateral Plan which calls for a gradual convergence of East and West, ultimately leading toward the goal of one world government. National sovereignty is no longer a viable concept.”

    … Persisting social crisis, the emergence of a charismatic personality, and the exploitation of mass media to obtain public confidence would be the steppingstones in the piecemeal transformation of the United States into a highly controlled society.”

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  5. Everything Is Rigged: European Commission Raids Oil Companies in Price-Fixing Probe

    By Matt Taibbi

    May 16, 2013 -"Rolling Stone"- We're going to get into this more at a later date, but there was some interesting late-breaking news yesterday.

    According to numerous reports, the European Commission regulators yesterday raided the offices of oil companies in London, the Netherlands and Norway as part of an investigation into possible price-rigging in the oil markets. The targeted companies include BP, Shell and the Norweigan company Statoil. The Guardian explains that officials believe that oil companies colluded to manipulate pricing data:

    The commission said the alleged price collusion, which may have been going on since 2002, could have had a "huge impact" on the price of petrol at the pumps "potentially harming final consumers".

    Lord Oakeshott, former Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman, said the alleged rigging of oil prices was "as serious as rigging Libor" – which led to banks being fined hundreds of millions of pounds.

    The rest:
    http://goo.gl/M9qy6

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  6. Operations Northwoods Documents
    On the Website of the
    US National Archives and Records Administration

    According to ABC News and government documents on Operation Northwoods, America's top military leaders drafted plans to kill innocent people and commit acts of terrorism in US cities to trick the public into supporting a war against Cuba in the early 1960s. Approved in writing by the Pentagon Joint Chiefs, Operation Northwoods even proposed blowing up a US ship and hijacking planes as a false pretext for war.

    http://www.wanttoknow.info/operationnorthwoods

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  7. Just to mix things up a bit, here's my take on conspiracy theories:

    I think some of them are definitely more plausible than others, and sometimes the theories themselves are way more compelling than the official statements released about the incidents.

    As for 9/11, I tend more towards the traditional side, namely that jihadists were involved and it wasn't an inside job. That being said, given the nature of human beings, if we were to discover that it was in fact an inside job, it wouldn't surprise me in any way, shape or form.

    Why? Because when we look back throughout history, humanity is chock-full of power-hungry, selfish assholes. When Hitler came to power, if someone were to write a conspiracy theory claiming that "6 million Jews would be murdered in camps," people would have seen him as a lunatic. "No, no, that can't be true. Come on! You, an otherwise intelligent and altogether brilliant person, can't actually believe that!"

    Or in North Korea today. The people legitimately think they are one of the world's superpowers. George Orwell's 1984 comes to mind. And given that throughout history the powerful have always manipulated the powerless, it simply wouldn't surprise me if we were to find out that some clowns have been conspiring all along in their quest for world domination.

    Think about it:

    When the entire known world was essentially Mesopotamia, certain people groups, (like the Babylonians) weren't just trying to expand their influence, but take over the entire world. To them, the 'entire world' was Mesopotamia. Or with the Roman Empire. They weren't going for merely expanding their influence. If they had gotten it their way, they would have taken over then entire world. And they basically did, save Asia and parts of Africa. But they did control almost the entire known world.

    Thus, knowing what we human beings are like, I think it would be naïve to think that we are "done" with the quest for world domination. BS. Every society is "modern," and I'll bet you they say the same exact things. Those under Roman rule in the 1st century AD were probably thinking what we think today: "No, come on. We're modern. We won't have any more wars. We know better than that."

    If there's one lesson to be learned from history, it's this:

    HUMAN BEINGS ARE F****** ASSHOLES.

    And we're no different now than 10, 100, 1000, or even 5000 years ago. The only difference, I suppose, is that world domination is in fact EASIER given developments in technology and weaponry.

    But was 9/11 an inside job? I don't know. I tend to think that, no, it wasn't.

    But it really, REALLY wouldn't surprise me if it were.

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  8. Lisa:

    Thanks for linking Paul Craig Roberts, the best living political commentator, truth teller extraordinaire:

    Not that I should need to do this, but because of certain slanderous attacks on my person on this website's combox, I would like to make a public statement.

    I, of course, and again, this should go without saying based upon my life, family, writings, and good reputation with those who know me, my life, and my work, reject all forms of antisemitism as a grave sin, especially the willful and malicious denial of the evident historical record of premeditated, systematic violence against Jews on account of their race. It is only because of a certain person's slanderous and unprovoked attack on me that I have to state the obvious.

    Let me also say that I wholeheartedly reject "conspiracy theories," if this means those theories that are the result of imposing one's psychological problems and delusions and unexamined prejudices onto reality and calling what such a superimposition looks like to you and other likeminded nuts, the truth. These are the real "holocaust deniers," and I repudiate this as a betrayal of Truth and as the gravest of intellectual sins. I have spent my whole professional career as a philosopher attacking such theories.

    I do not, however, reject any honest inquiry into the details and overall truth of any official, publicly authorized narrative, no mater how "sacred" to governments, mainstream media, and the "beast" (Plato's term) of uninformed public opinion, and the sheepleish "academic community"--inquiries that are good-willed, use well vetted evidence and logic, and are motivated by the desire for truth, love of the good and of neighbor, and the exposing of propaganda.

    Those who reject such inquiry and slander those who defend or participate in it are themselves betrayers of Truth and offensive to God. Disparaging truth-tellers like Paul Craig Roberts and James Corbett as "truthers" is nothing but hatred of truth and, hence, of God.

    This should also go without saying, but defending manifestly immoral behaviors and justifications of those behaviors, such as NAMBLA and neo-Nazi groups, is disgusting and not worthy of rational debate. Censorship, condemnation, ridicule, and perhaps prison are alone worthy of such subverters of the common good and enemies of truth.

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  9. Here's a summary of the entire article and comments. Sorry you didn't get to read this first.

    "Conspiracies are BS. Someone would have said something."

    "This person, those people and these guys all said something and provided evidence."

    "Those people are crazy and believe in conspiracy theories."

    Are you not now smarter having read that? Yeah me neither.

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