Commentary

What is a “conspiracy theory”?

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A conspiracy theory, according to Merriam-Webster, is “a theory that explains an event or set of circumstances as the result of a secret plot by usually powerful conspirators.” Alternatively, it’s “a theory asserting that a secret of great importance is being kept from the public”; the idea presumably is that insiders have conspired to keep the truth hidden.

Dictionary.com takes a similar approach: “a theory that rejects the standard explanation for an event and instead credits a covert group or organization with carrying out a secret plot” or “a belief that a particular unexplained event was caused by such a covert group.” In all these cases, a conspiracy theory requires a conspiracy to make something happen or to keep something hidden. The cabal has to be hidden and the conspirators powerful; an accusation that some people got together to plan a crime doesn’t count as a conspiracy theory unless the perpetrators are extremely rich or powerful.
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A word that will live in infamy

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Today’s post on word misuse is a tricky one to write. The word is “infamous,” and the difficulty is that I can’t tell what people even mean when they misuse it. Merriam-Webster’s main definition is “having a reputation of the worst kind : notoriously evil.” The additional definitions are closely related: “causing or bringing infamy” and “convicted of an offense bringing infamy.” If you call a person infamous, you’re saying that person is rotten, vile, and contemptible. If you call an act infamous, you’re condemning it.

People seem to toss the word around just to add emphasis, with no specific meaning. I just saw a link on YouTube to a short referring to a statement attributed to J. Robert Oppenheimer, “I am become death, the destroyer of worlds” as “infamous.” I suppose someone might condemn Oppenheimer for saying that, though I don’t know why, but the video doesn’t do that.
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Kafka’s Mastodon

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I run the Filk News account on Mastodon, providing information about concerts, filksings, and other items of interest for the filk music community. Normally I don’t write much about filk here, but the story has relevance to anyone who uses Mastodon to distribute or gather information or just to connect with friends.

The first part of the story is in my earlier post, “The petty tyrants of Mastodon.” You may want to read it first if you haven’t already. Since then I’ve gotten no satisfaction from indieweb.social and found it necessary to move Filk News to liberal.city, which I think will be a better home for it. (Another post which I made, “The impending strangulation of Mastodon,” reflected a user error on my part, so I’ve removed it from public view.)

As I said in “Petty Tyrants,” my personal account is on Liberdon, which is included on a “Tier 0 Blocklist”. It simply lists domains to block without giving reasons. When I noticed trouble interacting with Indieweb from Liberdon, I reported the issue to Indieweb’s admin, Tim Chambers. He said he had changed Liberdon’s status from “blocked” to the less restrictive “silenced” while looking into the issue.
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Another confusing term: “Critical Race Theory” 1

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Since I’ve done several pieces on terms that get misused or should be avoided, I’d like to look at one of the most controversial of all: “Critical Race Theory” or CRT. Its meaning in political activism is different from what it means in academic circles, and I’m not convinced either one is very self-consistent. I did a Web search for a piece that discussed the theory without the popular controversies, but search engines don’t make them easy to find. Many of the articles I found didn’t look trustworthy. I wrote a whole post on an article that I didn’t find very satisfactory and scheduled it for posting; then I found an entry in dictionary.com which is far better. So I’m dumping most of what I wrote before and starting over.

The article notes: “Critical Race Theory is a complex body of thought that encompasses multiple disciplines, and its concepts and conclusions are interpreted in different ways. Even the words in its name are subject to debate as to what they mean or imply in the term itself or in general.” That says you won’t find one characterization everyone agrees on, even outside the fierce political controversies.
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The petty tyrants of Mastodon

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Having a federated system like Mastodon guarantees that no voices can be completely suppressed. Intolerant people can still try to silence others within their sphere, though, and some have wider influence than others. There are blocklists that many Mastodon sites use, and certainly some sites deserve to be blocked. They spew intentional falsehoods, advocate violence, or dump pornography on those who don’t want it. But once the lists get acceptance, their managers can start adding sites which they simply don’t like.

My personal Mastodon account is on Liberdon, a libertarian-oriented server. Its policy says:

Liberdon’s community adopts a “good neighbor” policy, as one of our goals is outreach to the other communities. As such, “ostracizable” (non-tolerated) behavior includes spamming, scamming, nudity* / pornographic / sexual / graphic / NSFW content, advocacy of the initiation of violence, ethnic/racial/homophobic slurs, harassment, or other content/activity that could get this site shut down by state agents with guns. Offending content will need to be removed by the user, and repeat offenders will be banned from the community.

Even with these limits, much of what is posted on Liberdon (including my own posts) will outrage many on both the right and the left. That’s why I like it. However, some people express their outrage in blocklists. At some point, Liberdon got put on a “Tier 0 blocklist” which seems to be widely used. As I’m typing this, it includes 417 servers. There’s no explanation of why they’re listed, only a claim that the list is “a combined blocklist of only the worst actors, and it exists to provide one blocklist to which surely no one can object as a baseline for others.”
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One more word to avoid: “Woke”

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Let me start by admitting I had tried to use the word “woke” in a meaningful way. To me it meant the bullying aspect of the left: shouting down speakers, kicking people out of conventions for expressing unpopular views, calling people who disagree “fascists” or “racists,” mobbing people on Twitter (sorry, “X”) for writing on topics not permitted to their skin color, calling for the firing of lawyers who take on disliked defendants, etc. The ones who declare “silence is violence” or “saying all lives matter makes you a Nazi.” In retrospect, I’m not so sure that was ever the predominant meaning of the term. Since authoritarian Republicans have started using the term, it’s become useless even if it had any value before.

This puts me in the weird position of agreeing with Donald Trump: “And I don’t like the term woke because I hear woke, woke, woke. You know, it’s like just a term they use. Half the people can’t even define it. They don’t know what it is.” He’s used the term a great deal himself, but for a passing moment he was right.
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The EU Media Freedom Act and a two-tiered Internet

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A language gripe which I haven’t mentioned lately is the treatment of “media” as a singular. I’ve given it up as a lost cause, but it damages discourse. People often think of “the media” as one thing. Obviously there are many media. This blog is a medium for information, no less than CNN is. But in common use, you don’t qualify as a medium unless either you’re a big corporation or a fortune-teller. Similarly, there’s a tendency to count people as “journalists” only if they work for a “medium” (or is it “a media”)? This leads to the idea that freedom of the press applies only to properly credentialed and accredited journalists and media.

This trend appears in Article 17 of the EU’s proposed Media Freedom Act, which the Electronic Frontier Foundation has strongly criticized.
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Chinese censorship in America

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The other day I found a report by PEN America called “Made in Hollywood, Censored by Beijing.” There’s no visible date on it, but there are references to 2023, so it’s either recent or recently revised. It goes into detail about how American movie makers bend to the Chinese government’s will. It’s not the threat of arrest or property seizure that impels them, but economic and social pressure. “The Chinese Communist Party, in fact, holds major sway over whether a Hollywood movie will be profitable or not — and studio executives know it.”

Well-known actors can be affected even by what they say and do outside movies.
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Banning book bans in Illinois

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Illinois has enacted a law which many articles have characterized as “outlawing book bans.” More precisely:

Illinois public libraries that restrict or ban materials because of “partisan or doctrinal” disapproval will be ineligible for state funding as of Jan. 1, 2024, when the new law goes into effect.

Here’s the full text. It encourages libraries to adopt the American Library Association’s “Library Bill of Rights.” This sounds like a good idea on the face of it, but it may accomplish less than expected and have unintended consequences.
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(Un)banning the Bible in Utah

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The Davis school district in Utah has reversed an earlier decision removing the Bible from middle and elementary schools. Few people thought it should be banned; the challenge to it was supposed to be a reductio ad absurdum of the policies that led to the removal of other books. Unfortunately, the appeal committee and the district officials missed the point. They said that “the Bible has significant, serious value for minors which outweighs the violent or vulgar content it contains.” Of course it does. The point is, so do many other books. Violence and vulgarity, even outright immorality, aren’t a sufficient reason to exclude books from school libraries.

The Bible is a horrible book. The Old Testament presents a sadistic, murderous God who drowns nearly the entire world population, firebombs cities, orders the extermination of every man, woman, and child in other cities, and decrees death penalties for many kinds of actions. In the New Testament, this sadist comes to us, not to beg for forgiveness for his crimes, but to say that he’ll forgive us, on the condition that we believe he turned himself into a human in order to be executed. People who don’t believe that claim will be tortured forever.
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