Conspiracy corner

Fun and games with feminist Naomi Wolf:

Author and former Democratic political consultant Naomi Wolf published a series of Facebook posts on Saturday in which she questioned the veracity of the ISIS videos showing the murders and beheadings of two Americans and two Britons, strongly implying that the videos had been staged by the US government and that the victims and their parents were actors.

Wolf published a separate Facebook post, also on Saturday, suggesting that the US was sending troops to West Africa not to assist with Ebola treatment but to bring Ebola back to the US to justify a military takeover of American society. She also suggested that the Scottish independence referendum, in which Scots voted to remain in the United Kingdom, had been faked.

She's been flaky for years. When confronted with Muslim women dressed in black tents she could only see a welcome escape from the objectification of women in the West. Indeed the poor Taliban "were demonised for denying cosmetics and hair colour to women". Well, schools too, but let that pass.

Then there was the time she met Jesus. And the warnings of the coming police state...

The Guardian, naturally, puts the best possible spin on this. Yes, she has crossed over into conpiracy theory here - "While it is difficult for western media to fully verify the authenticity of the videos, it seems beyond reasonable dispute that real people have died" - but who can blame her? She's right to think that governments lie to us all the time....and where does justified scepticism end and conspiracy theory begin? Who, in Guardian land, can really say?

Comments

[Bob-B]

I wonder if I could interest Ms Wolf in my theory that the three planes on 9/11 were flown by Elvis Presley, Princess Diana, and Lord Lucan. It would explain a lot, wouldn't it?

[sackcloth and ashes]

On Adam Brereton's CIF post:

A sceptic is someone who says 'I will not believe you until you show me the evidence'.

A conspiracy theorist is someone who says 'I will not believe you even if you show me the evidence'.

There is a clear dividing line between the two, not that a Guardianista idiot will recognise it.

[Bob-B]

Some people like to tell themselves that they are brighter than the masses because they can see things that the masses can't. Such people tend to end up seeing things which aren't there.

[AndrewZ]

Wolf represents a type of leftism that longer stands for anything beyond a reflexive loathing of the West. Their one fixed axiom is that Western governments, Western culture and Western society are the root of all evil. Everything else is negotiable as long as that fundamental article of faith is upheld. So it is impossible for Naomi Wolf to acknowledge the true brutality of the Taliban because that would imply that they were morally inferior to their Western enemies. It would mean considering the possibility that the United States was not the villain in this case. The only way to avoid such heretical thoughts is to wilfully ignore the evidence, so all this nonsense about "cosmetics and hair colour" is just an evasion. But the more stark the realities become the more elaborate the evasions have to be, so they gradually turn into bizarre conspiracy theories. Wolf is retreating into a fantasy world in order to avoid facing reality.