Article: Confessions of a Conspiracy Theorist - by Author, Oliver Harris

This one popped up in my Crime Read's feed today and it's an excellent, fact-based introspection, and history of the CT,and real-world espionage:

https://crimereads.com/confessions-o...racy-theorist/

Quote:

I loved conspiracy theories long before I wrote them. I thought of myself as a connoisseur, chasing a revelatory rush as new possibilities emerged and the world became surprising again. They needed to walk the line between plausibility and astonishment, piling up enough arguments that you found yourself involuntarily steered into the realms of just maybe. But I also loved them in the way I loved big airport thrillers—stories expanding to consume all, interweaving what had been disconnected. Both seemed to be attempts to do justice to the complexity of events, and to expose hidden worlds barely touched by the news. That was the kind of justification I used. Isn’t it our duty as citizens to question the narratives that underpin power?

And this:

Quote:

Conspiracy theories were now seen to degrade politics, muddying true and false, allowing toxic arguments to gain prominence while undermining genuine issues. Most of all, they divide people—you disagreed not just on what was right but what was real. The Red Pill grants you access to a higher truth (Amazon places books about conspiracy in the category of religion and spirituality). Everyone else is dumb or complicit. 9/11 Truthers (a phenomenon that originally seemed, in part, a reaction to the news media’s own over-simplifications) slid into the grotesque spectacle of people claiming high school massacres as false flags. Politics became the assertion of your right to believe whatever you wanted, to stand firm against the oppression of reality. Suddenly a genre that I saw challenging the edifice of establishment power became very clearly a tool for maintaining it.

The rest of the essay is a mix of real MI6, CIA, and Russian skulduggery, and it's a solid read.:thumbsup:

via International Skeptics Forum https://ift.tt/2K3NQnd