A common feature of some kinds of conspiracy theory is a claim that the ostensible motives of states when they intervene in the affairs of others are in fact not the ‘real’ motives. Thus the assertion that the US and the UK went to war in Iraq not because of genuine fears that the Saddam […]
Helped by our friends at YouGov, we are in the process of conducting a poll in the UK, soon to be followed by a number of European countries. We hope the results will shed light on the factors associated with belief in conspiracy theories. What is more important: religion, party system, levels of education, political engagement, or distance from the locus of power?
‘I have no evidence’, wrote Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, ‘but no doubts either’. So the president of Argentina announced on Facebook and her website her conviction that Alberto Nisman, special prosecutor for the AMIA bomb attack of 1994, had not committed suicide on Sunday 19th January but had been the victim of a political murder plot.
This belongs in the “I’m-not-a-conspiracy-theorist-but..” department. I’ve been reading an interesting blog post by Simon Wren-Lewis, the Oxford economist, who is as puzzled by the apparent illogicality of the Coalition’s current economic policies as I am. He writes: I have searched hard to find a macroeconomic rationale for Osborne’s policy stance. A belief that QE […]
Two richly interesting pieces in the most recent New Yorker, both of them touching on conspiracy and democracy themes. ‘The Whole Haystack’ by Mattathias Schwartz tells the story of Basaaly Moalin, the only person successfully prosecuted for terrorism offences in the US using evidence collected by the meta-data trawls of phone and email records now […]