Themes, Disgusting Bloodthirsty Chickenhawks, Etc.

[EDIT: if you've followed a link promising neocon propaganda about torture, you may (it's hard to believe, but you just might) wish to skip my musings and go directly here.]

The recent spasm of interest in the Hutton/Kelly business (which I’ve been unobtrusively and undogmatically mentioning for years - links to follow, when I track them down) has brought a bit of traffic to what was previously not much more than an archive of my sporadic productions. I’m going to try and keep it going as a proper blog, and among other things to gather together various bits and bobs I’ve blurted into cyberspace over the last few years. That includes quite a few longish emails I’ve circulated to a select group of one or two hapless victims, and this post is one of those.

But first, a word on the theme of Themes, and specifically the prospect of this becoming a conspiracy-theory-themed blog.

The trouble with ‘conspiracy theories’ is that I don’t really consider it to be a theme at all. My interest in use of the term is twofold: first, as a form of abuse that has been very successfully disguised as an ordinary descriptive term and is thus a cause of much sophistical rhetoric and a great deal of self-censorship. The climate of self-censorship can be observed in the great lengths people go to to deny being ‘conspiracy theorists’ or propounding ‘conspiracy theories’.

The deceptive nature of the term as it is used lies in a peculiar feature: the term can be applied to any theory about a conspiracy (though this is done selectively), but once the label is applied, it is treated as indicating that the theory has certain defects, notably and most crudely, being untrue. Yet the basis for inferring such defects is shifty: sometimes it is treated as deriving directly from the definition of 'conspiracy theory' (but this would mean it can only be applied after a theory is shown to be defective), sometimes from a general empirical truth about all conspiracy theories (but there is clearly no such general fact, if the term applies to any theory of conspiracy). By shifting between these different positions sufficiently skilfully, polemicists can perform the conjuring trick of inferring the defects without having to justify the application of the discrediting term.

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