please fit me now for my tin foil hat
25 September 2005, 1:49 pmHey, yeah, so, Granite Shadow.
Arkin sounds comparatively rational (in his inaugural entry, he says his “basic philosophy is that government is more incompetent than diabolical”), but many of the comments on Arkin’s post bear the hallmarks of paranoid schizophrenic delusions.
The bane of conspiracies is that people just aren’t very good at keeping secrets. (This is notoriously true even of professional secret-keepers.)
But there’s something very compelling about conspiracies. I think it’s genetically hard-wired. Our brains are fundamentally pattern-recognition machines. Even when we’re not looking for patterns we find them: animals in the clouds, faces in wood grain, canals on Mars, the kind but stern visage of Jesus in assorted foodstuffs. We find causalities and other links between events the same way, whether they’re “really” there or not.
Given all the things I believe to be “facts,” it’s impossible for me to conclude that the “War on Terror” is anything other than a tactic to divert attention from some other agenda. The agenda that seems most likely to me involves the goals of the (what I percieve to be) the true constituent of the Bush administration: Big Business, particularly the oil companies and certain DoD contractors.
It’s also very hard for me to accept that the neoconservatives will be able to retain their populist status as the consequences of their policies become more obvious to citizens. It’s hard for me to believe they don’t forsee serious near-future challenges to their power base.
But then again, in the sound bite in which he pleads with us not to turn away from his Iraq windmill tilt, his voice nearly cracking with petulance as he reavows his determination to end “terror,” our Chief Executive sounds to me as if he’s ready for his tin foil hat fitting.
The thing is, we’ve given him the power to actualize some of his delusions — so if he has paranoid fantasies, he can drag us into them along with him.
I can’t seriously entertain the notion of a vast Rebuplican conspiracy to circumvent the democratic process. It would have to be too big, and somebody would spill the beans. And I believe that — as much as I may disagree with them on many points — most of our elected representives, party politics aside, hold the funadmental freedoms of our Constitution and the Bill of Rights as dear as I do.
But it’s still troubling to see legislation enacted (and a simultaneous trend in judicial intepretation) that could enable a coup (by any other name) under the pretext of a national emergency, and that could silence dissidents and whistleblowers.
If you do exactly what the paranoids expect you to do, what the hell do you expect the paranoids to think? And what are those of us who like to consider ourselves sane to think of your following of the paranoiac blueprint?
I think arm-waving, shouting, and dragging-into-the-light is called for.
Let us be aware not only that overthrown and suborned governments are found in history books as well as in deluded minds, but also of the tactics that brought them about. Let us remember the findings of the Church Commission, and let us repeal the USA PATRIOT act.
Let us agree, foremost, that however very unlikely these possibilities are, we must not allow them to become any more probable than they already are.
Me, I’m curious about the whole “tin-foil hat” meme. Anyway - you wrut:
“Given all the things I believe to be “facts,” it’s impossible for me to conclude that the “War on Terror” is anything other than a tactic to divert attention from some other agenda. The agenda that seems most likely to me involves the goals of the (what I percieve to be) the true constituent of the Bush administration: Big Business, particularly the oil companies and certain DoD contractors.
“It’s also very hard for me to accept that the neoconservatives will be able to retain their populist status as the consequences of their policies become more obvious to citizens. It’s hard for me to believe they don’t forsee serious near-future challenges to their power base. ”
There’s also the prevalance, among several Bushies (of course including the Ass-Hat-in-Chief himself) of endtimes “Christianity,” which I think compels a weird messianism for these guys in terms of what they see as their (and America’s) mission. It’d be nice if the second paragraph I quote above turns out to be true - but damn, we seem to be incredible swallowers of bullshit. That even now Bush has defenders who don’t own oil companies…
The problem is there’s a real convergence among big-industry powermongering, belligerant patriotism, and a general self-interest and ignorance of anything that questions our comfortable worldview. Cloak it all in Jesus, and you’ve got a lot of folks who seem to think questioning Bushies’ imperatives is blasphemous treason - and indeed, grounds for tin-foil hat-fitting.
You wear a tin foil hat to reduce or prevent the effects of the CIA mind control rays, or, if you prefer, so you can receive broadcasts from the Cat Overlords. I’m not sure wjere I first encountered the concept, but I think it effectively encapsulates key aspects of paranoid delusional systems. Plus, you can sing it to the tune of an old english carol: “Christmas is coming, the goose is getting fat! Please fit me now for my tin foil hat.”
I’m using it here, in case it’s not obvious, to reflect my discomfort arrving at crackpot-y conclusions/concerns when I try to rigorously and logically extrapolate current [social, political, technologocial, and envionmental] trends as best I understand them.
I have previously run into the notion that people might deliberately act to bring about the “end times” as described in the Revelation of St. John. In the absence of hard evidence, I’m not inclined to give that any credence. For one thing, for the truly devout, it would be sacrilege to do so (or perhaps more accurately, it would be heresy to believe it was possible to hasten God’s plan). But I also don’t think it would play well with the stockholders.
Of course, that doesn’t mean I won’t make “Mark of the Beast” jokes if someone proposes that all good citizens should get RFID chip implants.
Tinfoil hat instructions. (I sanitize this link through Google for Summervillain’s safety. When I blogged about another of this guy’s sites, he sent me a note to my PHYSICAL ADDRESS telling me he’s not a fraud, and if I come over to his house, I can see hard evidence of the alien invasion).
When stories like this are well-covered in mainstream sources, I don’t think you need to feel like you’re being paranoid.
But I think you’re assuming too much rationality when you dismiss the “end times” motivation. Religious nuts rarely hesitate to commit blasphemy– why hold your tongue when you have a dedicated T3 to the divine? Plus, there are lots of examples where in the Stockholders vs. Jesus fight, Bush has chosen Jesus. Think biotechs are happy about the stem cell ban?
PS: Where the hell are the REAL tin-foil hatters in all this? In the Clinton years, it felt like half of Montana and Texas were arming to defend their liberties from the feds. Now, when the feds are publicly making plans to use the army domestically, where are the Freemen?
Re TFHs: I knew what they were supposedly for - I was just wondering where the idea came from, where it first started. As for the heresy bit: the thing is, these folks are neither scholarly nor (really) all that “religious,” if we mean that they worry through the logic of their belief. They seem motivated on the one hand by finding a convenient justification for what they were going to do anyway (God blesses wealth!), and on the other through a combination of fear and vindictiveness. So - I dunno. It’s not so much hastening the end-times, though, as believing that one has a role to play therein. And therefore, deviating from that role would be sinful: that, I think is one reason Bush is so vehement about staying in Iraq.
Bush claims God speaks to him.
Is that story at the Onion? No, it’s at the BBC.
It’s secondhand reportage, and you may or may not assign great credibility to the source (Palestinian Prime Minister Nabil Shaath). But still.