So as we’re all here, puzzling over the moment an apparent LaRouche activist used Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal to troll @AOC, it might be a good moment for me to list Lyndon LaRouche’s ten most insane conspiracy theories, just so it’s clear who they are.
1) The Queen controls the international drugs trade, to fund the British Empire, which still rules the world in secret.
2) The Queen, Obama and the Duke of Edinburgh plotted to reduce the world’s population to 1 billion by starting a nuclear war. (Obama very much the junior partner in this.)
3) The Beatles were part of the British Empire’s psychological war against the USA. (HMQ in on this, too...)
4) Vice President Nelson Rockefeller planned to use the CIA and its network of secret brainwashing clinics to turn America into a giant workcamp full of zombie labourers.
This plan involved the KGB, MI5, poet Stephen Spender, and a school in Camden where the children were just photographs. Covered in all its mind-boggling detail in my book Operation Chaos. amazon.co.uk/Operation-Chao…
5) Hitler was a British agent.
6) The redoubtable journalist @FrancisWheen was involved in a conspiracy with the Unabomber and Jacob Rees-Mogg’s father. This one goes on forever but Francis knows the details.
7) Noam Chomsky tried to blow up New York with an atomic bomb.
8) The Tavistock institute in London runs a network of secret agents who can be recognised by a special and distinct grin.
Now the not so funny ones.
9) Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme was also in league with the CIA to brainwash the citizens of Sweden. Swedish LaRoucheans were so extreme in their views several were questioned by detectives investigating Palme’s assassination in 1986.
That article, by the way, is by William Engdahl, a conspiracy theorist blogger who was successfully sued for libel by Melania Trump.
10) When the British student Jeremiah Duggan lost his life in mysterious circumstances after attending a LaRouche group in Germany, Tony Blair used his death as part of a black propaganda campaign.
A mad slur, of course. I attended the latest inquest on the case, at which a narrative verdict was recorded. google.co.uk/amp/s/amp.theg…
If you want to donate to the campaign in his name, the details are here. It would be some way of ameliorating all the awfulness that LaRouche’s ideas have brought into the world. justiceforjeremiah.yolasite.com
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The melancholy of Bagpuss, and its presentation of the past as something that is always being lost and recovered, has haunted me for decades. Those broken things were repaired, but nobody ever came to collect them, did they?
I can’t help feeling that Oliver Postgate’s father Raymond has a presence here. He was a Great War conscientious objector disowned by his father. Maybe this is the why Emily’s Edwardian world seems so sad and bereft.
And of course Raymond was a communist too - I’m sure he would have been amused by Bagpuss’s depiction of the intellectuals and the workers.
My thanks to @lionandunicornnews for altering me to this. This conversation with @ezraklein is a great example of how @johannhari101 gets his dodgy claims past his interlocutors. This was for the @nytimes. Not some gormless wellness podcast. nytimes.com/2022/02/11/pod…
First, he replies with a compliment to the interviewee. He does this all the time, no matter the quality of their points. (He even did it with Bill Maher.) Like saying your name over and over again, this is a technique of persuasion.
But it moves him on to making a point that supports the Stolen Focus thesis, but is deeply dubious. And @ezraklein knows it’s wrong, because he’s recently heard it debunked. So quite rightly, he challenges him on it.
Fascinated to read in @Londoners_Diary that someone has put my criticisms of Stolen Focus to @johannhari101 and that he replied by saying that the "attention crisis" is real because "we sleep less than we did in the past". standard.co.uk/news/londoners…
Sorry to sound like a stuck record, but this is another issue on which Stolen Focus cherry-picks and exaggerates. Sleep deprivation is bad for you, that's obvious. But is there really a historic decline in the number of hours we spend asleep?
In this melange of stats (some plucked from Gallup polls), Johann acknowledges that there is "a scientific debate about the extent our sleep loss" - but he doesn't tell you about evidence that points in the opposite direction - that we're actually sleeping more than we once did.
Well, I was booked to go on @BBCRadio4 PM to challenge @johannhari101 about assertions made in his new book. He has pulled out for "personal reasons", so I'll just leave a thread about my concerns about his use of sources. I hope someone else will raise these questions with him.
Stolen Focus book is full of stats, full of references to scientific research. Can its author be trusted to handle this research – not to cherry-pick to help his case? I'll let you judge.
Let’s look at two examples. This is from a chapter about multitasking, but it also reaches towards Hari’s main point – that the seductions of digital culture are reducing our powers of concentration.
It was easy to find the url for the study because anti-vax and conspiracy theory Twitter has gone wild for it.
It’s by someone called Baruch Vainshelboim. He seems to be a sports physiologist with some link to Stanford. But the publication in which his work appears is not peer-reviewed, and it has weird spelling mistakes and footnotes with no page refs.
The Carry Ons will be rightly prominent in the obits today, but I want to think of Barbara Windsor like this today, as key member of Joan Littlewood’s revolution in theatre. In 2014 I met with her at Stratford East to discuss her part in Oh What a Lovely War!
We talked about taking the play to New York, how she gave free tickets to the Quakers holding a vigil in Times Square for the victims of the war in Vietnam. Here she is with Littlewood arriving at the airport.
We also talked about Michael Gove, who had written about the play in the Daily Mail as a “prime source of left wing myths” that reflected “the unhappy compulsion ... to denigrate virtues such as patriotism, honour and courage.”