The popularity of the conspiracy theories listed above has real consequences forthe political system

The current standard academic account of conspiracy theories thus usually avoidsany pejorative connotation in their definition

.2

Thus, to offer an explanation of an eventby positing that it results from a conspiracy of several individuals isipso factotoadvance a conspiracy theory (see Basham, 2001; Coady, 2006, 2012; Dentith, 2014;Jane and Fleming, 2014; Pigden, 2007).

Studies have suggested

he basic elements of contemporary right-wing

eminent public figures

modern radical right finds conspiracy to be betrayal from onhigh.

The spokesmen of those earlier movements felt that they stood for causes and personal types that were still in possession of their country—that they were fending off threats to a still established way of life. But the modern right wing, as Daniel Bell has put it, feels dispossessed: America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion. The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals;

Maria had been somewhat addled ever since childhood after she had rammed a pencil into her head

Masonic oaths,[1

It is an ascertained fact,” wrote another Protestant militant,that Jesuits are prowling about all parts of the United States in every possible disguise, expressly to ascertain the advantageous situations and modes to disseminate Poper

Moreover, we need not dismiss out of hand as totally parochial or mean-spirited the desire of Yankee Americans to maintain an ethnically and religiously homogeneous society

the same frame of mind, but a different villain

Masonry was accused of constituting a separate system of loyalty, a separate imperiumwithin the framework of federal and state governments

promote the U.N. when we know that it is an instrument of the Soviet Communist conspiracy.”

a folk movement of considerable power, and the rural enthusiasts who provided its real impetus believed in it wholeheartedly.

But whereas the panic of the 1790s was confined mainly to New England and linked to an ultraconservative point of view, the later anti-Masonic movement affected many parts of the northern United States, and was intimately linked with popular democracy and rural egalitarianism

I begin

I do not propose to try to trace the variations of the paranoid style that can be found in all these movements, but will confine myself to a few leading episodes in our past history in which the style emerged in full and archetypal splendor.

These quotations give the keynote of the style

. But nothing really prevents a sound program or demand from being advocated in the paranoid style. Style has more to do with the way inwhich ideas are believed than with the truth or falsity of their content.

t is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant.

But behind this I believe there is a style of mind that is far from new and that is not necessarily right-wing. I call it the paranoid style simply because no other word adequately evokes the sense of heated exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy that I have in mind. In using the expression “paranoid style” Iam not speaking in a clinical sense

This essay was adapted from the Herbert Spencer Lecture, delivered at Oxford University in November 1963

The concepts of representation; the virtues of doubt, dissent, and humility; and the concept of a depersonalized constitutional order are all very abstract ideas

MODERN MAN

knows how to associate them all with accumulated background

We ask our stone-age brains to sort, categorize, parse, and prioritize torrential data streams it never evolved to juggle

.

CONCRETE THINKING

e rise of Protestantism

typical child

The rise of individual agency—one of the hallmarks of modernity

n order for deep reading to exist there also must be deep writing

Literacy as a cultural achievement changed society because it enabled humans to learn from predecessors long-since deceased and to teach those who come long after

This new thinking erases context.

adult reading habits

ABITS OF MIN

Our gadgets create exhaustion, isolation, loneliness, and depression, which track with the rise of suicide rates in younger age cohorts. In a few extreme cases, when isolation sharply diminishes the influence of peer standards of acceptable conduct, it can lead to violent anti-social behavior

hanks to roughly 200,000 years of evolution

A sadder and more troubling knock-on effect also reveals itself:

g

We know that prolonged and repetitive exposure to digital devices changes the way we think and behave in part because it changes us physically

suffer from an attenuated capability to comprehend and use abstract reasonin

doubt that so-called multitasking is merely the ability to get many things done quickly and poorly. And no one doubts that heavy screen use has destroyed attention spans

BRAIN REVOLUTION

capable of self-government.

nurturing our capacity for abstract thought,

According to Wolf, we are losing what she calls "deep literacy" or "deep reading." This does not include decoding written symbols, writing one's name, or making lists. Deep literacy is what happens when a reader engages with an extended piece of writing in such a way as to anticipate an author's direction and meaning, and engages what one already knows in a dialectical process with the text.

F

but two things, at least, are clear

Thoughtful Americans

is pointed out

e equates this to the possibility of experts hiding behind a façade of positivity and knowing to conceal facts for monetary gains

use

centralizes

This misapplication of critical thinking is exemplified in the tobacco industry and their manipulations of evidence

Due to the existence of logical fallacies, the guidelines Sagan provides includes concepts to learn about to avoid in the process of critical thinking.

are the means with which to be able to

For this reason

.

Sagan compares the idea of religion to the world by comparing how a child’s belief in fictional characters is detrimental to their prosperity in adulthood.

The character Ramtha

Through the image of a woman at her husband’s grave, Sagan explainsthat emotions are not laughable as they are what make people human

Sagan emphasizes the importance of disallowing emotional biases from influencing acquired information as the key theme in his argument

In “The Fine Art of Baloney Detection”, Carl Sagan

Sagan reflects back on his own personal experiences and uses this as a way to educate others and provides a guide to distinguish truth from distorted reality

Can you confirm the facts? Is the source reliable? Are the claims verifiable? Are there various hypothesis? Is it measurable? Does it make sense?

their

this statement

Finally

agan describes the connection between smokers and cancer patients, and the dangers of the substances within cigarettes, however, the Tobacco industry claims that the correlation between the statistics to simply be a “casual relationship”. In addition to this, Sagan also points out how some believe that by switching to a low tar cigarette, they have made the decision to switch to a “healthy” alternative. To explain the growth of customers in the Tobacco industry, Sagan reports that “part of the success of the tobacco industry in purveying this brew of addictive poisons can be attributed to widespread unfamiliarity with baloney detection, critical thinking, and the scientific method” (8). With this example, the author concludes that lack of knowledge and ignorance

advertisements simply do not provide the required knowledge to their customers for it to be considered reliable

he evidence and truth behind the unexplainable concept

self claimed

deception arise

he author begins the article by sharing a personal experience of loss and grief

defines

s

fundamentals of potential deception

bought a typewriter

It is clear that users are not reading online in the traditional sense; indeed there are signs that new forms of “reading” are emerging as users “power browse”

research habits, conducted by scholars from University College London,

Anecdotes alone don’t prove much.

I’m not the only one

For me, as for others, the Net is becoming a universal medium

"Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?” So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end ofStanley Kubrick’s2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial “ brain. “Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. I can feel it.”.I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.I think I know what’s going on. For more than a decade now, I’ve been spending a lot of time online, searching and surfing and sometimes adding to the great databases of the Internet. The Web has been a godsend to me as a writer. Research that once required days in the stacks or periodical rooms of libraries can now be done in minutes. A few Google searches, some quick clicks on hyperlinks, and I’ve got the telltale fact or pithy quote I was after. Even when I’m not working, I’m as likely as not to be foraging in the Web’s info-thickets—reading and writing e-mails, scanning headlines and blog posts, watching videos and listening to podcasts, or just tripping from link to link to link. (Unlike footnotes, to which they’re sometimes likened, hyperlinks don’t merely point to related works; they propel you toward them.)

He says this change is because of all the time he spends online. As a writer, he finds the Web a valuable tool, but he thinks it's having a bad effect on his concentration. He says "Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski." He refers to a 5-year study in the UK, which found that people visiting their sites "exhibited 'a form of skimming activity,' hopping from one source to another and rarely returning to any source they'd already visited."Carr admits that we, as a culture, read a lot more because of the Web, but laments that "our ability to interpret text, to make the rich mental connections that form when we read deeply and without distraction, remains largely disengaged." And he highlights a quote from an essay by the

This article is about one skill that he believes is being eroded, that of reading:

Nicholas Carr is an important voice today in pointing to the nervousness that many people have about technology. He recently publishedTheBigSwitch;RewiringtheWorld,fromEdisontoGoogle, which is in its seventh printing. His blog is well worth reading regularly:http://www.roughtype.com/.His views are carefully constructed and researched. He is a skilled writer and is widely read.

Like other critics, he sees change as loss and not as gain. But, his own criticism is superficial and misses the humanizing impact of Web 2.0

Mathinvites the development of an interpretivemodel more flexible than those currently afforded by theories of patriarchy

One would think that if the FourthBranch wished to condemn Gwydion and Gilfaethwy’s couplings it wouldhave them give birth to monsters, not champions.

As animals, Gwydion and Gilfaethwyare not visibly hybrid or monstrous, as is more usual in medieval instancesof hybridity and monstrosity; confusion thus stems from the fact that theyare “conceptual hybrid[s]” (Mills 2003, 30) representing a “mixture ofroles, genders and body parts unresponsive to any singular framework ofunderstanding” (31).

The text clearly regardsthe punishment as appropriate and satisfactory since its completion allowsthe brothers to resume their former role(s) at Math’s court

Shame is emphasized in Goewin’s andMath’s statements concerning the rape and its punishment: in her formalaccusation, Goewin herself draws attention to Math’s shame as a resultof her rape; as Math begins to punish his nephews, he tells them that hisshame cannot be compensated, later concluding they have suffered “greatshame” by bearing each other’s children

The wordmab, however,is ambiguous, since it can mean “boy” as well as “son.

Aranrhodcan be seen as deceptive, confused, or innocent, lacking knowledge of herown body.

“I do not know but that I am

hutlath.

Math’s irresolvable lin-guistic ambiguities are better addressed by allowing multiple meanings tocoexist, to hover together in one’s mind, even as they generate tension

ambiguous phrase in this passage describes the position of Math’s feet,which areymlyc croth morwyn(literally, in the fold of the womb of avirgin). The nouncroth, often translated as “lap,” has the base meaning“womb,” “uterus,” or “belly.”7Also, the word that tends to be translatedas “in the fold of,”ymlyc, is a compound ofyn(in) +plyc(fold, curve),which can mean either “in a fold or curve” or simply “within.” Further,the standard Welsh reference dictionaryGeiriadur Prifysgol Cymru, de-murring on the point of the ambiguity, cites this passage both in its entryforcrothand in a subentry forplyg, whereplycrothis defined as “groin,lap; (lower) abdomen, pubic hair.”8Since Middle Welsh had another, lessambiguous word for lap,arfet, and this word appears later in the sametext (Williams 1951, 90), the ambiguity may be intentional.9The phraseymlyc croth morwynconnotes varying degrees of intimate contact with themorwyn(virgin), from the more innocent “in the fold/curve of a virgin’sbelly” or “in the lap of a virgin” to the decidedly risque ́ “in the groin/pubic hair of a virgin” or even “within the womb of a virgin” whosehymen remains magically intact.

prevent his gaining a name, weapons, or ahuman wife,

Goewin, Gilfaethwy’s brother Gwydion provokesa war with a neighboring territory to help Gilfaethwy attain his love object.While Math is engaged in this war, Gwydion and Gilfaethwy travel backto his court and Gilfaethwy rapes Goewin in Math’s bed.

The normative nature of such critical tools as psychoanalysis (seeSilverman 1992, 33–37) and queer theory (see Gopinath 2005), however,poses difficulties for theoretical readings of medieval Welsh texts. As alinguistically and culturally distinct population within Britain, the medievalWelsh occupied a marginal position in relation to those who shaped thepolitical and intellectual climate of the period; in the later Middle Ages,the Anglo-Normans constructed the Welsh as colonial others partly byexploiting Welsh cultural difference.4This marginality complicates anyattempt to read medieval Welsh literature through critical theory or evenscholarship in other disciplines of medieval studies.

media commentators publically discussed“Birtherism”—thebelief that by virtue ofjus soli(birthright by soil) and/orjus sanguinis(birthright by parents’nationality), Obama is disqualified from Presidential office. For many, such questioningrepresents a color-blind approach to legal consistency and gate keeping. For others, it reeksof racial profiling in which people of color face persistent questioning of their social belonging.

Rather, racial inequality and“otherness”remain endemic to the very concept and practice of citizenship and national order (Goldberg1993;Mills1997).

Most scholars now agree that US citizenship was racialized from the onset (Du Bois 1935;Foner1988; Glenn2011 ). However, the capricious demand for, and subjective scrutiny of,citizenship documentation is a point less emphasized

we have yet to interrogate how dominant understandings of race andcivic belonging guide the public interpretation of this debate

Successful and victorious; and when

That you reveal this vision to mankind

ared

I trembled as the warrior embraced me

And decorated me with gold and silver.(OE 78) Now you may understand, dear warrior

And then I saw the Lord of all mankindHasten with eager zeal that He might mountUpon me.

Men carried me

humankind

came to me

.

t assuredly does not mean that “everyone’s opinion about anything is as good as anyone else’s.

I never thought those were particularly controversial statements. As it turns out, they’re plenty controversial.

I am (or at least think I am) an expert. Not on everything, but in a particular area of human knowledge, specifically social science and public policy.

Worse, it’s dangerous. The death of expertise is a rejection not only of knowledge, but of the ways in which we gain knowledge and learn about things.

do not mean the death of actual expertise

But democracy, asIwroteinanessayaboutC.S.LewisandtheSnowdenaffair, denotes a system of government, not an actual state of equality.

sure signs of dreadful “elitism,” and an obvious effort to use credentials to stifle the dialogue required by a “real” democracy

then the language inDreamof mounting anddismounting could refer to mounting a steed, and the commands thatChrist issues to the Cross would be like a rider whispering into the earof a horse (293–94). Whether or not North's reading is fully valid, it atleast suggests ways that the Cross could share some traits withanimals.

However, Haraway's“articulation”is an alternative to representation.

himself as not part of that same category; other humans, to the dreamer,as not aware of God’s knowledge in the waythat he is.

dreamer is asserting a privileged kind of divine knowledge that cannot be challenged.

suggests

The dreamer’s reference to “humankind sleeping in their beds”while a dream vision came to him(lines 2-3

Yes, I said “Western civilization”: that paternalistic, racist, ethnocentric approach to knowledge that created the nuclear bomb, the Edsel, and New Coke, but which also keeps diabetics alive, lands mammoth airliners in the dark, and writes documents like the Charter of the United Nations.