Complots of Mischief, Charles Pidgen, Well worth reading. Here is a reading. Complots of Conspiracy, Pidgen Conspiracy Theory Snobbery. SCADS
https://youtu.be/pdZuOfqkuLg
“Nature rejects the monarch, not the man; The subject, not the citizen; for kings And subjects, mutual foes, forever play A losing game into each other’s hands, Whose stakes are vice and misery. The man Of virtuous soul commands not, nor obeys. Power, like a desolating pestilence, Pollutes whate’er it touches; and obedience, Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth, Makes slaves of men, and of the human frame A mechanized automaton. Nature! -no! Kings, priests and statesmen blast the human flower Even in its tender bud; their influence darts Like subtle poison through the bloodless veins Of desolate society. The child, Ere he can lisp his mother’s sacred name, Swells with the unnatural pride of crime, and lifts His baby-sword even in a hero’s mood. This infant arm becomes the bloodiest scourge Of devastated earth; whilst specious names, Learnt in soft childhood’s unsuspecting hour, Serve as the sophisms with which manhood dims Bright reason’s ray and sanctifies the sword Upraised to shed a brother’s innocent blood. Let priest-led slaves cease to proclaim that man Inherits vice and misery, when force And falsehood hang even o’er the cradled babe, Stifling with rudest grasp all natural good. 44 1v ‘War is the statesman’s game, the priest’s delight, The lawyer’s jest, the hired assassin’s trade, And to those royal murderers whose mean thrones Are bought by crimes of treachery and gore, The bread they eat, the staff on which they lean. Guards, garbed in blood-red livery, surround Their palaces, participate the crimes That force defends and from a nation’s rage Secures the crown, which all the curses reach That famine, frenzy, woe and penury breathe. These are the hired bravos who defend The tyrant’s throne -the bullies of his fear; These are the sinks and channels of worst vice, The refuse of society, the dregs Of all that is most vile”;
Shelly, Queen Mab.
https://off-guardian.org/2020/03/08/keep-it-simple-and-question-propaganda-technology-and-coronavirus/#comment-1248189/11 in Academia Film.
This past week has seen some unedifying academic-on-academic hostility on Twitter, with a storm of haughty criticism being whipped up in response to publication in the journal Alternatives of a paper by Dr David A. Hughes. Perhaps because I know first hand what it feels like to be publicly smeared for touching on inconvenient questions, I have felt impelled to speak out against this intimidatory conduct.
Hughes’ paper tackles a taboo subject, one which has been at the centre of a great deal of conspiracy theorizing, much of it preposterous. What he nevertheless aims to show is that there are also reasonable questions to be asked about the subject; and he wants to understand why these have been lumped together with the foolish ones in a blanket dismissal by other scholars in the field of International Relations (IR).
The paper having undergone peer review and been published, it is now…
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