Neil Oliver's intellectual dishonesty
A friend (who happens to be a Buddhist, hence the admittedly weak link to the themes of this blog) sent me a link to #neiloliver talking about conspiracy theories, where he asks, "How many so-called conspiracy theories must be proven true before that label is finally abandoned?" Shocked by the mendacity, I started thinking about all the conspiracy and other crackpot theories. I suppose "conspiracy theories" are a subset of crackpot theories, specifically those holding that there is a conspiracy by big oil, a cabal of jews, a bunch of interplanetary baby-blood-drinking lizards, or some other imaginary bunch keeping "the truth" from being revealed. So I was planning to write something about this, and started to look into all the past conspiracy theories that have been revealed to be, in reality, as stupid as they looked in the first place. However, I became overwhelmed and even a bit depressed, and couldn't bring myself to wade through that intellectu