Add Homonym Attacks! #35
Ad Hominem: Appealing to personal considerations rather than to logic or reason.
Ad Hominem Attack: An argument that focuses on a personal attack as opposed to the subject in question.
Add Homonym Attacks!: The process by which one inserts a homophone and it bites you.
(It also serves as the title to Inside Pulse Beyond the Threshold’s representative column in the world of Critical Thinking, Science and Skepticism.)
Intro
We’re going to keep it fairly short this week. It is fairly heavy on the hyperlinks, and I’d rather point people to multiple viewpoints than rehash the arguments of others. I might do an extra column to make up for today’s brevity, but that remains to be seen.
Conspiring minds want to know.
I know this guy, Jon. He comes from money. He speaks several languages. He can write poetry in Russian. He’s also a dirt poor grifter, who spends a good chunk of his energies trying to figure out the Kennedy Assassination.
Conspiracies, I’m not going to say that they don’t exist. That would be a rather fatuous thing to claim. Whenever two or more people plan a crime, they are conspiring. It is therefore a conspiracy. I’m not even going to claim that government conspiracies don’t exist. We have Watergate, Iran Contra, the whole Foley thing (Masturgate), and so on. (The U.S. did a great job covering those scandals up, eh?)
But then there are the nuts. The people that believe in a government cover-up of the JFK assassination, wacky ideas about 9/11, the moon landing, and aliens. (I might add that I always found it odd to have people believe both that our government is constantly haggling with aliens, yet we never landed on the moon.) Sometimes, you just got to wonder about people.
If you didn’t click, the above hyperlinks portray a wide variety of skeptics taking on various conspiracy nuts. I highly recommend each one.
I understand that people enjoy patterns, and finding patterns. I also understand (to paraphrase Shermer) that evolution rewards proper pattern recognition, but doesn’t necessarily punish improper pattern recognition. Sure, it’s fun to connect the dots. When I was a kid, I was intrigued by the Kennedy/Lincoln comparisons. That is, to say, Kennedy was elected in 1960, and Lincoln was elected in 1860; both Kennedy and Lincoln were assassinated by guys who went by three names; Kennedy had a secretary named Lincoln and Lincoln had a secretary named Kennedy, and so on.
The thing is, you can study these connections without thinking that they mean anything. Studying weird connection and esoteric historical data is great if you are using it to write steam-punk. The problems begin when you start to perceive some deeper meaning in these things. Mark Twain knew Tesla, true; it doesn’t mean that they used their respective wits and scientific expertise to solve crimes on the mean streets of New York City. It might make a nifty series on the A&E network, but it still won’t make it reality.
One needn’t be stupid to believe these conspiracies. Oftentimes, the opposite is true. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle believed in the Cottingley Fairies. Basically, he was duped by a couple of schoolgirls, and some photos of cardboard cutouts. His desire to believe in the supernatural was quite strong, twisting his powers of logic to always reaffirm his beliefs.
While belief is fairies might be more far-fetched than belief in a Kennedy Conspiracy, the question is by how much? Our government can’t properly deliver my Netflix; how the hell could they keep a convoluted presidential murder conspiracy secret for 43 years?
