Much of the appeal of conspiracy theories is that they tend to be more complicated than the truth, thus allowing you to show off that you are the smartest guy in the room. For example, I would imagine that Oliver Stone felt pretty proud of himself after creating a state-of-the-art three-hour movie showing that JFK was assassinated by a conspiracy of both the entire military-industrial complex and a clique of eccentric French Quarter homosexuals, including Joe Pesci in an apricot-colored toupee as a defrocked monk upon whom the military-industrial complex's vast plot depends. (I probably shouldn't have to warn you about Joe Pesci clips by now, but Joe's language is NSFW).
They said it couldn't be done, but Ollie did it!
Similarly, consider today's popular conspiracy theories about American social realities. For example, what's the explanation for the high crime rate and low intellectual achievement rate seen among African-Americans?
The less than scintillating Occam's Razor answer is simply: Well, that seems to be kind of how blacks on average are.
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| Visible Invisible Knapsack |
But, what's the fun of that?
Instead, the rewards come for people who dream up Invisible Knapsacks * and Stereotype Threat and White Privilege, all controlled by the shadowy White Male Power Structure. Concocting the most baroquely implausible conspiracy theory proves you are the smartest guy in the room.
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By the way, I don't get the Invisible Knapsack metaphor. I assumed it was saying that blacks were weighted down by invisible knapsacks on their backs (just think of how high LeBron could jump without that invisible knapsack holding him down). But, my assumption appears to be backward -- the invisible knapsack instead lifts whites people up because it contains an anti-gravity device. Or something. To be honest, I'm not really clear on the concept. But, whatever it is, it seems to be popular.
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By the way, I don't get the Invisible Knapsack metaphor. I assumed it was saying that blacks were weighted down by invisible knapsacks on their backs (just think of how high LeBron could jump without that invisible knapsack holding him down). But, my assumption appears to be backward -- the invisible knapsack instead lifts whites people up because it contains an anti-gravity device. Or something. To be honest, I'm not really clear on the concept. But, whatever it is, it seems to be popular.
The overused term "conspiracy theory" ought to be studied by recording it in use and analyzing the contexts within which it is accorded meaning in actual day to day use. My own imperfect sense is that it boils down to a perjorative term directed at any notion that is at odds with what (most via media osmosis) most persons at least tacitly accept. An implicit assumption seems to be that reality is to be determined by a show of hands.
ReplyDeleteYep.
ReplyDeleteOne great one is that the 'CIA' deliberately (how?) spread crack cocaine into black ghettos in order to destroy blacks. Never mind the fact that at that time the US government was spending billions in law enforcement and prisons dealing with the crack epidemic.
Another classic was that the CIA or CDC or whoever 'engineered' the HIV virus in a laboratory to 'wipe out' blacks. Yup, anyone who can create a virus de novo out of thin air surely deserves a Nobel prize at the very least rather than obscurity in same fabled 'black ops' lab somewhere in Langley Va.
I think it's got more to do with the psychological phenomenom of 'denial' rather than 'proving how smart you are' by concocting ridiculous theories.
ReplyDelete'Denial' is a mechanism by which an individual copes with pain and unpleasantness by the simple expedient of refusing to accept its existence. Thus, not only does the denier let himself off the hook by inventing ridiculous theories he gets the psychological satisfaction of transferring the pain, the balme and the guilt onto someone or something else - the more abstract the better - and by creating this demon he gets the psychic satisfaction of unloading and disavowing hi pain.
Many, in regard to black dysfunction, for example MUST know deep down that they are lying, but are so wrapped up in the blame and shame game that they are psychologically dependent on the lies and hatreds. It's rather like smoking - smokers often turn into downright horrible people when the try to give up - a character flaw makes them dependent on tobacco for psychic peace. Conspiracer deniers often have that same type of deeply horrible character - they are almost at the stage where they believe their own lies - and the lies are necessary for their psychic health, they being so flawed and unpleasant, put simply they cannot stand up to themselves so compensate through lies and aggression to make a fake reality. It's self deception at the deepest subliminal level.
"Invisible Knapsack" is the lamest, whitest metaphor I've ever heard
ReplyDeleteI feel a band name coming on...visible knapsack...white knapsack...knapsack...napsac...
Deletewhitesac!
By sixties from American commandos, to mafia, to columnists, to clergy, to psychologists and other academics, to third-world labor unions, to Tibetan monks and all and sundry could come together whenever it was needed.
ReplyDeleteArches and domes look magical and awesome until one sees a scaffolding being used to build one.
CIA was the scaffolding for the global war on communism.
Therefore 'entire military-industrial complex and a clique of eccentric French Quarter homosexuals' is not implausible prima facie.
"Invisible Knapsack" is the lamest, whitest metaphor I've ever heard.
ReplyDelete---------
Especially for Libs who can't even persuade blacks to pull their pants up.
PS. Better invisible than packed with pressure cookers, no?
http://www.common-place.org/vol-14/no-01/cohen/
ReplyDeleteWhy so many blacks in sports but so few Mexicans?
ReplyDeleteMust be invisible jerseys.
ReplyDeleteMy dear Mr. Sailer, it would appear that you have committed a maximum microagression. By which you have earned my wholehearted approbation.
'Stereotype threat' is, according to a Coursera stats professor, a real thing; it works in lots of cases, not only against blacks. Personally I can see it - an attack on your status produces a bit of anxiety and that creates turbulence in your soul (so to speak) and takes energy to deal with. Status is the matrix that we social humans live in. Check out one or more David Rock videos on youtube (the one I have in mind is about the last half of his Google tech talk I think).
ReplyDeleteI'm not hinting that it accounts for black performance, just, that the idea of status threat isn't as laughable as it's taken around here.
Actually, the notion of white privilege isn't really a conspiracy theory. Consp theory implies a small group of men are secretly up to no good.
ReplyDeleteWhite privilege theory says that the problem is endemic and systemic. It's all over the place from rich whites to poor whites to liberal whites to conservative whites to old whites to white children.
It's as if there is an consensus among all whites that perpetuate this 'problem'.
Of course, such a view is actually good for rich whites. If indeed ALL whites are to blame for 'systemic' white privilege, then the rich ones can lay most of the blame on poorer whites while guarding their own white privilege as haute-progressive, i.e. in the service of working for 'equality'.
So, rich white/Jewish/homo Libs in the north and big cities blame it all on southern 'white trash' for all the problems with blacks.
What is funny in the ironic sense is all the idiots convinced its a Jewish plot. To control the world? How's that working out (Iran nukes?) again?
ReplyDeleteHbdchick and others posit an outgroup selection process to min inbreeding. There is likely something to that, but also the sucessor religion to Christianity -- pc and multiculturalism. A religion with profession of faith and dogma. MLK? A proven plagiarist and noted philanderer who was Jessie Jackson before Jessie.
"the invisible knapsack instead lifts whites people up because it contains an anti-gravity device"
ReplyDeleteStop revealing our secrets.
"the invisible knapsack instead lifts whites people up because it contains an anti-gravity device"
ReplyDeleteStop revealing our secrets.
Yeah, Steve, weren't you on that worldwide Honky teleconference when we decided to deploy the invisible knapsack? Well, now you know so shut up!
"Invisible Knapsack" is the lamest, whitest metaphor I've ever heard
ReplyDelete----------------------------
Who has ever heard anyone say "knapsack"? Rucksack is about 6x more frequent on google than knapsack, though rucksack is an ordinary german word. Knapsack is also german, though nobody knows the etymology. It may refer to knappen - to bite, as in to snap shut. (Rucksack means literally back sack, so backpack was invented in 1916, probably by analogy with rucksack).
A 50,000 year evolutionary conspiracy perhaps?
ReplyDeleteGC
Auntie Analogue said...
ReplyDelete"My dear Mr. Sailer, it would appear that you have committed a maximum microagression. By which you have earned my wholehearted approbation."
Hilarious. I'm going to commit a few macroaggressions today
Dan in DC
I wonder how the whitest people in the world, the Irish, seem to have missed out on these invisible backpacks?
ReplyDeleteWhat are the ethnic origins of "white trash?"
The epithet "white trash" seems to have fallen out of common usage. Is there a new epithet to take its place or is it just "dog whistles" now?
I cannot stand the invisible knapsack, and what's worse, I cannot stand, nor can I abide, the growing use of "unpack" to mean "discuss or analyze."
ReplyDeleteI unpack my bags, I do not unpack my arguments.
A man must be truly stupid to accept the Warren Commission and 911 Commission Report as veridical.
ReplyDelete"Invisible Knapsack" is the lamest, whitest metaphor I've ever heard
ReplyDeleteTry this metaphor. They actually used to had this out one the job a few years back. It doesn't get gayer.
Thomas Sowell calls the War on White Privilege the "War on (White) Achievement". He uses treatment of the Japanese in Canada during WW2 as an example.
ReplyDeleteThe guy is a national resource.
http://www.creators.com/opinion/thomas-sowell/the-war-against-achievement.html
Hmm, stereotype threat. Why aren't Howard, Morehouse and Spelman producing scads and scads of Rhodes Scholars?
ReplyDeleteIf the "knapsack" is worn by blacks, shouldn't it be one of those Teenage Mutent Ninja Turtles Backbacks I see the local youths wearing at the busstop? The very word "knapsack" is so SWPL, or at least like a Yankee New England term. "Mother always packed a fluffer-nutter sandwich in my knapsack".
ReplyDeleteWhence the invisible knapsack?
ReplyDeleteAmong the Fang of Gabon, witches get their evil power to feed on the misfortunes of others (which they may use unconsciously) from a special organ, which is the seat of an occult force called "evur." Autopsies of executed witches sometimes find this extra organ.
Of course, race is only skin deep, so white people can't have any special organs that black people lack. Instead, white people generate evur (often unknowingly) from the magical paraphenalia that they carry around in an invisible knapsack.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/12/the-next-housing-crash/354689/
ReplyDelete"the invisible knapsack instead lifts whites people up because it contains an anti-gravity device"
ReplyDeleteNah, it's just full of helium. It's an invisible dirigible.
Steve, I don't think that the notion that "white privilege" or "the invisible knapsack," or whatever keeps blacks down is, properly speaking a "conspiracy theory."
ReplyDeleteIn any case, I think that the reason people concoct elaborate and implausible explanations for black underperformance is pretty simple: if blacks really are, on average, less intelligent and more prone to violence, it means that we have a choice of permanent racial preferences or simply allowing blacks to occupy the lowest rungs of our society. More blacks will be in jail, more will be poor, and fewer will reach the top of any profession. Or even be represented in large numbers in good upper middle class professions, like engineering and dentistry.
And it's going to be that way, forever. Either that or we institute a permanent regime of racial preferences, constantly tilting the playing field in favor of blacks.
That truth is simply too unpleasant, too ugly for many to even contemplate.
What makes our current system so dysfunctional is that the higher up one goes into the elite, the more in denial people are. We could imagine a world where the smart kids get to Harvard; they're handed a copy of The Bell Curve, and told "this is the way it is, kid." They could then grow up to make policy on the basis of actual facts, even if those facts were officially ignored because they aren't particularly nice.
But no. We have a system in which one has to be more removed from reality as one moves up the scale.
I am going to work today to generate a livelihood for myself.
ReplyDeleteQuestion for libs: is this because of my male privilege or my white privilege?
So you believe in the Magic Bullet? Oh, my!
ReplyDeleteThat's a belief so massively illogical either one is not rational or is willfully employing doublethink. In your case, it's the latter.
(By the way I'm not a red, I'm Libertarian/Conservative)
http://brightlightsfilm.com/82/82-gravity-cuaron-motherhood-review.php#.Uo5AsdK-o2Q
ReplyDeleteSteve, one stylistic complaint. You frequently place a comma after a conjunction with which you start a sentence. Unless the conjunction is immediately followed by a parenthetical clause there is no need for that comma. It's a bad tic, and your writing would be more easily read without it.
ReplyDeleteThe white privilege that leftists imagine doesn't exist. But it should. Societies are incapable of actually being neutral. They will and must favor somebody. Why shouldn't it be me and mine, or we and ours? Get with the pogrom, who...whom.
ReplyDeleteNow the white privilege that DOES exist is something leftists don't like to talk about. Here's what it is:
When someone looks at you, they know what underlying distribution of intelligence, criminality, etc you come from. If you're white, that's the distribution they're mentally regressing their estimation of you towards the mean of.
You got it all wrong Steve, the invisible knapsack is filled with invisible tools that help whites overcome life's challenges -- grappling hooks, 15 points spare iq, underwater breathing devices, shit like that.
ReplyDeleteIt's really more of an invisible Batman utility belt.
By the way, I don't get the Invisible Knapsack metaphor. I assumed it was saying that blacks were weighted down by invisible knapsacks on their backs (just think of how high LeBron could jump without that invisible knapsack holding him down). But, my assumption appears to be backward -- the invisible knapsack instead lifts whites people up because it contains an anti-gravity device. Or something. To be honest, I'm not really clear on the concept. But, whatever it is, it seems to be popular.
ReplyDeleteThe funny thing is, it's unintentionally accurate: "white privilege" is a burden. Leave aside the only thing that could conceivably qualify as white privilege - Mother Nature's blessings, the inherent stuff - and all you're left with is the unnecessary baggage whites saddle each other with: legally subordinated via AA and a panoply of legal privileges afforded everyone else, being the bad guy of history, PC, not allowed to organize for racial interests as everyone else is encouraged to do, blacks are your collective responsibility, etc., etc., etc.
I think "white privilege" is an obvious sham.
ReplyDeleteJewish Privilege, now, there's something America should be discussing all the time. Just the fact that the vast majority of white Americans scoff or recoil in horror at the phrase is evidence of how profound Jewish Privilege really is.
Yep.
ReplyDeleteOne great one is that the 'CIA' deliberately (how?) spread crack cocaine into black ghettos in order to destroy blacks. Never mind the fact that at that time the US government was spending billions in law enforcement and prisons dealing with the crack epidemic.
This one is more urban myth or rumor than conspiracy theory, in my experience. It starts with a grain of truth; American intel deals with the likes of narco traffickers and terrorists, mostly using them as confidential informants. Word gets out, suddenly "the CIA is dealing drugs in the 'hood."
Actually, the notion of white privilege isn't really a conspiracy theory. Consp theory implies a small group of men are secretly up to no good.
White privilege theory says that the problem is endemic and systemic. It's all over the place from rich whites to poor whites to liberal whites to conservative whites to old whites to white children.
Yeah, it's more like Jewish projection than a real conspiracy theory. Good call.
If the white privilege knapsacks weren't invisible blacks would have stolen them by now.
ReplyDeleteDuh! The invisible knapsack contains a pressure-cooker bomb.
ReplyDeleteWhiskey, I'm here to offer you a proposition. At the next alt-right confab, I'd like to promote a series of bare-knuckle cage matches. The headline bout would feature you and Svigor to settle the philo v. ansem debate conclusively. As Dana White is too preoccupied cultivating "Brown Pride" the UFC facilities will be unavailable. And I can afford only a six rather than eight sided ring. So we'll call it "The Holocaust in the Hexagon!"
ReplyDeletePlease have your manager contact Steve for terms and conditions.
P.S. You will have to make weight at 320lbs or less.
I think the psychology of conspiracy theories is a bit different. Explanation in terms of conspiracy appeals to people who, rightly or not, see themselves as marginalized because if the fix is in then your apparent failures/shortcomings don't reflect badly on you. It's also more appealing than accepting the role of sheer bad luck, which in its absurdity denies a person's suffering the meaning that he wants it to have.
ReplyDeleteThese days, for the aspiring smartest guy in the room, *denial* of conspiracy theories is really where it's at. See, unlike the rubes, you're sophisticated enough to understand that much of life is chaotic and random. You're not so credulous as to believe your own lying eyes.
Attempts to explain away group cognitive and behavioral differences strike me less as conspiracy theorizing and more as our own version of the desperate attempts to make the pre-Copernican theory of the solar system fit observation. In both cases you have an overeducated elite trying mightily to preserve a sclerotic ideology that the common people don't really care about one way or the other.
"Question for libs: is this because of my male privilege or my white privilege?" - Cis privilege, existential privilege,etc.
ReplyDeleteRight now the ideas are pretty much widely pilloried, but perhaps if they keep at it they'll convince everyone to be guilty once again. Then again times are quite tough and getting worse.
The truth is the truth no matter who says it. Olivier Stone is a socialist but his JFK movie is far closer to the truth than the government approved blather. Our beloved country suffered a coup d'etat and it's been downhill ever since. Consider refuting the facts presented herein.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2013/11/20/oliver-stone-jfk-conspiracy-assassination-oswald-column/3657321/
"the invisible knapsack instead lifts whites people up because it contains an anti-gravity device"
ReplyDeleteStop revealing our secrets.
Yeah, Steve, weren't you on that worldwide Honky teleconference when we decided to deploy the invisible knapsack? Well, now you know so shut up!"
Yeah keep it quiet Steve, IQ, HBD, and all this other nonsense is nothing more than a distraction to keep the NAMs and Jews preoccupied from realizing we have an all powerful invisible knapsack.
But, it seems like there catching on. We'll have to think of something new like a hat or satchel.
http://www.clickorlando.com/news/man-attacked-pregnant-sister-over-chicken-nuggets-orlando-police-say/-/1637132/23071818/-/5g9skgz/-/index.html
ReplyDeleteThe problem is the invisible bucket(of chicken).
The knapsack is perfectly visible. Black people don't camp.
ReplyDeleteIf the woman who coined the word wasn't such a bigot, she would know that. The audacity! To presume that all races love the colonialist pasttime of camping is clueless in the extreme.
"Our beloved country suffered a coup d'etat and it's been downhill ever since."
ReplyDeleteKennedy stealing the election from Nixon with the votes of dead Chicagoans? Yeah, that was pretty bad.
The thinking is that the knapsack has useful stuff in it. The original piece says it's "like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools, and blank checks".
ReplyDeleteTo give the idea a proper hearing, you'd have to ask how two otherwise identical individuals of different races would fare in our society. It should be obvious that the black would have advantages over the white, as well as disadvantages, mainly on account of others' (often statistically accurate) assumptions about his race. I don't know whether the advantages outweigh the disadvantages.
But as an explanation for inequality, I think it'd make more sense to say there's 15 IQ points in the knapsack, and a future orientation and lower aggression. Maybe these don't appear on Peggy's itemized list because they are painful, and unfair without there being a solution or anyone to blame. Unearned advantages indeed.
(But you guys all know that.)
http://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/2013/11/20/oliver-stone-jfk-conspiracy-assassination-oswald-column/3657321/
ReplyDeleteOK, let's say Kennedy was really taken out in a coup. But why pretend like he was some kind of a saint. He ordered the coup of Diem, leading to Diem's death.
I mean it's one thing for US to plot against commie Castro, but what the hell was the American president doing giving the go-ahead to topple and murder an ally?
So, why this Camelot myth? It seems Kennedy could be cold-blooded too. He was no saint.
And if he were fat, short, and ugly, would there be all this mania about his death?
And when will Oliver Stone ever make a movie on USS Liberty? Now, that I'd like to see.
"Living through the news media assault of the past few weeks leading up to this 50th year's commemoration marking the violent end of JFK's presidency, I'm amazed there is any single adult left in the USA who would not think that Lee Harvey Oswald was the one and only assassin."
ReplyDeleteBecause it doesn't matter that Oswald did it. The media chose to blame Dallas, Texas, and the Right ANYWAY. You see, they 'willed' it.
It's like it doesn't matter that the 'hate crimes' at Oberlin were hoaxes, like so many others at other campuses. What matters is they've all been used by the powers-that-be as 'teachable moments' about how evil and 'privileged' white males are.
So, Stone is really missing the point. It no longer matters who did the killing. It doesn't matter if Oswald was a communist or not.
The powers-that-be in the media have drawn up a narrative that Kennedy was killed less by the bullet from a communist than by the psychic power of 'hate' of American conservatives. I guess conservatives are like Carrie(in the movie; geez, I WISH I had such powers.)
So, what does it matter who killed Kennedy? What does it matter who pulled the 'hate hoaxes' at Oberlin? What does it matter that Zimmerman isn't some blonde Neo-Nazi? Just as some religious loonies blamed EVERYTHING on Jews in the Middle Ages even when Jews were innocent, the Jewish-controlled media and elite institutions will always finger White Male Conservatives over everything.
It's like it doesn't matter what blacks did to Detroit or New Orleans. As far as Liberals are concerned, they were destroyed by the psychic will of white 'racists' who did't like Louis Armstrong and Stevie Wonder(which is rather odd because even white conservatives like Armstrong and You are the Sunshine of My Life.)
PS. Liberals say Texans are extreme conspiracy theory nuts, but what can be nuttier than 'Detroit was destroyed by haters of Motown'? I mean even Onion would reject that as TOO farfetched.
Maybe it was a bald men's conspiracy. Kennedy had great hair, and so all the baldies got together to rub him out.
Speaking of Conspiracy Theories, it looks like Bill Ayers is finally coming clean:
ReplyDeleteSHOCK CONFESSION: Bill Ayers Reveals He Is Author Of "Dreams From My Father" in Latest Book
Jack Cashill should be canonized for his work on that conspiracy.
What about the Invisible wheelchair?
ReplyDelete>Why so many blacks in sports but so few Mexicans?
ReplyDeleteMust be invisible jerseys.<
There are many Mexicans in sports - in Mexico. Much excitement down here about this the other day, for example.
USA sports are just going to have many more whites and blacks in them than hispanics. Whites and blacks are sort of what the USA looks like. We do go back a long way together.
"Whiskey said...
ReplyDeleteWhat is funny in the ironic sense is all the idiots convinced its a Jewish plot. To control the world? How's that working out (Iran nukes?) again?"
What is funny is the unabashed way that noted Scots-Irishman "Whiskey" manages to insert The Tribe and it's interests into any and every thread, no matter how non-apropos the topic might be.