Joined in 2023 
82 
63 About this deal
Perhaps we have too few conspiracies, not too many. Too little scheming, rather than too much. What would happen if more people took up plotting, coordinating how to eliminate what they believe are negative forces and obstacles, and tried to wield power in an attempt to change the world? We could almost always use more boldness, and less complacency.” But when it was revealed that billionaire Peter Thiel was behind Hogan's lawsuit, essentially providing infinite funds in a deliberate effort to destroy Gawker, opinion turned. Thiel was not beloved by the media, and the fact that he was a libertarian, and later a Trump supporter, cast the case in a new light for many. Now it was a story about a vengeful billionaire crushing the freedom of the press for hurting his feelings. The author gets there in the end, but there was too much hand-wringing in my opinion about why people virulently reacted negatively once's Thiel's role in the Gawker takedown became revealed. Not that complicated... The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.” With all the context above... this story reads like a great case study of the strategic thinking Greene promotes and the moral philosophy Holiday popularizes. So it was much more engaging and insightful this time.
Propaganda by Edward Bernays is the oldest conspiracy book on the list, originally written in 1928. The book outlines the psychology of manipulating the masses through the technique of public communication. Bernays is viewed by many media historians as the father of public relations. Noam Chomsky stated that: What I wanted to do with this book is to lay out that this is almost like a playbook that gets run and that one step to defeating it is being aware that it’s used like this. When the next one comes along – because there will be a next one – maybe we’ll be able to get out ahead of it a little bit faster.” Research sugg A conspiracy theory is an explanation of an event or situation that invokes a conspiracy by sinister and powerful actors, often political in motivation, when other explanations are more probable. The term has a pejorative connotation, implying that the appeal to a conspiracy is based on prejudice or insufficient evidence. Conspiracy theories resist falsification and are reinforced by circular reasoning: both evidence against the conspiracy and an absence of evidence for it, are re-interpreted as evidence of its truth, and the conspiracy becomes a matter of faith rather than proof. From now on you need never await temporal attestation to your thought. You think the truth. You do not have the right to eliminate yourself. You do not belong to you. You belong to Universe. Your significance will remain forever obscure to you, but you may assume that you are fulfilling your role if you apply yourself to converting your experiences to the highest advantage of others.”
Don DeLillo, after extensive reading of the 26 supporting volumes to the Warren report, presented Oswald in his 1988 novel, Libra, as the stooge of a CIA attempt to promote war with Cuba. James Ellroy’s American Tabloid(1995) begins with Castro’s coup and ends with the Dallas assassination, which the novel attributes to a conspiracy involving the Cuban interests of the CIA and the mafia. The last time the GOP won the popular vote was in 2004, and before that 1988. Seeking to return to office, Trump has threatened the media with charges of treason and hankered for the execution of Gen Mark Milley, the former chair of the joint chiefs of staff. The prominence of Mexico and Cuba in the Kennedy books means that those countries are likely to be among the most frequently searched words in the latest archive release. And those of us who find The Tears of Autumn the most plausible explanation of the assassination will look with particular interest at any CIA documentation dealing with Diem’s death. There is no doubt that the internet is an important part of the story. Human rights groups blamed anti-Rohingya propaganda on Facebook for inciting a genocide in Myanmar. But the author resists any attempt to shift moral responsibility to social media. It exacerbates some of our latent tendencies, he argues, but those tendencies are there no matter what. Five years later, January 6 and its aftermath crystalized another reality: Trump found fair and free elections useless. He and his allies had grown weary of democracy. After all, they had lost.
But the most interesting of all the literary retorts to the Warren report is Norman Mailer’s Oswald’s Tale: An American Mystery (1995), which used KGB material released in post-Soviet Russia to illuminate the formative period that Kennedy’s presumed assassin spent in the USSR as a young man. However, despite this period deepening the mystery of Oswald’s motives, the generally anarchistic Mailer eventually concludes: “Every insight we have gained of him suggests the solitary nature of his act.” Mailer’s sly comparison of the assassination with masturbation underlines his theory that the killer was driven by narcissistic egotism, rather than an external commission. That's the short version, but the long version turns out to be detailed, fascinating, and a far-reaching epic story that touches on political biases, the culture wars, and meditations on the nature of conspiracy and revenge.I've enjoyed other books by Ryan Holiday. I enjoy his stoic approach to things. He's a fascinating young man with an interesting, if not worldly, misguided insight into how things work.
Most contributions to the JFK book depository have fingered at least some of the figures in the Garrison-Prouty conspiracy theory. The most recurrent prime suspect has been Cuba, which had been infuriated by the Bay of Pigs operation – Kennedy’s failed attempt to depose the Castro dictatorship through a CIA-run invasion by Cuban exiles. The communist island also features in Oswald’s still-mysterious trip, weeks before the Kennedy shooting, to Mexico City, where he apparently hoped to secure a visa to defect to Cuba. This argument is counterintuitive, but not obviously wrong. And it's a good heuristic that when an argument is easy to dismiss but turns out to be hard to argue with, you should default to strongly believing it. If nothing else, when you find out you're wrong you do so in a way that leaves you better-informed than the conformists. I listened to the audio version of this book, and I must say, in the future, Holiday should hires someone to read it for him. He reads in a constant sing-songy decrescendo that gets more and more noticeable by the end of the book. His sentences are very short, which makes for an easy read, but makes for a difficult listen. It’s basically very structurally similar to the contemporary conspiracy theory around Pizzagate or the movie that just came out, Sound of Freedom [popular with QAnon followers]. This idea of the cabal of sexual abusers, which was being used against Catholics in the 1830s, with just a few of the key details changed but more or less the same narrative.” The phrase “conspiracy theory” was coined by philosopher Karl Popper. In his 1945 book The Open Society and Its Enemies, he discusses the “conspiracy theory of society”: the idea that major events are the “result of direct design by some powerful individuals and groups”.He quotes Mitch McConnell, the living embodiment of the Republican establishment, the Senate majority leader when Trump won the White House. With hindsight, McConnell sounds clueless, oblivious to the approaching storm.
Great Deal 
New Comment