Talk:The Power of Unreason
Email exchange between Wikispooks and Demos
20 October 2010 Demos response to Wikispooks original email - per article
Dear Peter
Apologies for not replying sooner. Obviously I entirely disagree with the whole premise of your email. But am more than happy to discuss the paper, which I give you credit for having read; most of the abusive emails I have received were from people who had not bothered to read it.
As I say in the paper - some conspiracies have turned out to be true. But that does not mean all of them are.
Best wishes
Jamie
21 October 2010 Wikispooks reply:
Hi Jamie
Thanks for taking the trouble to reply but I fear there will be no meeting of minds on this one.
I recommend:
There's worthwhile stuff by all of them on Wikispooks.
Also I fear our respective uses of the word 'Conspiracy' do not coincide. Your paper places it firmly in the category of a pejorative (much like similar usages of 'holocaust denier', 'anti-semite', 'NAZI', 'pedophile' etc etc) confining it to theories of events which question the official narrative - as though official narratives were somehow sacrosanct.
Just how do you propose to distinguish those 'conspiracy theories' which merit the sort of covert attention by the SIS's that you propose? I ask because, from the perspective of an old salt with ample experience of how these things operate, I suspect any such distinction is likely to define those MOST worthy of very careful and sceptical scrutiny by those who can see clearly that the farmer and his dog are indeed working together - and NOT in the interests of the Sheep(le) either.
And do you seriously suppose that the SIS's are not already heavily engaged in such activities? - Surely you've seen the overt US efforts at http://www.america.gov/conspiracy_theories.html and Cass Sunstein's 2008 paper proposing similar covert action/infiltration - File:Cass_sunstein_conspiracies.pdf
To quote Upton Sinclair:
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" To which I would add "... his rank, position, and place in society' - not to mention a possible gong."
When you have reached a stage in life where none of those things matter a toss to you, maybe the scales will fall away.
Best
Peter Presland
PS if you want to carry on this discussion, please register on WS and use the discussion page attached to the article about your paper. This email exchange will be posted there in any event.
