A little contrarianism goes a long way
Healthy skepticism is good. But it can turn unhealthy really quickly.
When Haley announced she was running they said she'd face racist attacks from Trump, and they were right:
At least the “Barack Hussein Obama” crowd never tried to pretend it was an “anti-racism” thing.
Further to a point I made in this post, Howard Anglin in The Hub says some degree of "contrarianism" is healthy and arguably necessary, but warns that it can be a gateway drug to full-blown conspiricism and crankery:
The internet encourages extreme cases, but contrarian inflation is nothing new. There seems to be a temptation inherent in contrarianism that, if indulged, can produce a mental inversion that leaves you at odds not just with your society but with reality itself. Anyone whose job involves attracting attention can fall prey to this weakness, which is the only way of explaining a certain genre of opinion piece, which sets out to disprove common sense and ends up proving the author’s foolishness. Perhaps it also accounts for curious cases like Michael Coren, Canada’s Vicar of Bray, who can effect a complete reversal of creed with any discernable diminution in confidence or zeal.
We all know where this kind of thought inevitably leads. (Hint: rhymes with "moos.")
One of the most remarkable examples of the contrarian temptation in my lifetime is the squandered career of Joseph Sobran. Sobran began as a prodigy of conservative journalism. A protégé of Bill Buckley, he was an undeniable polemical—and, indeed, literary—talent. Buckley once devoted an entire edition of National Review to one of his long-form essays called “Pensées” (a title Sobran reportedly hated). Ferociously orthodox in an age of experimentation, Sobran delighted in savaging the vacuities of his Boomer contemporaries, from the New Age philosophies of the 1970s to the neoliberal conformity of the 1980s and 1990s.
A virtuoso contrarian at a time when America badly needed to be slapped out of its trippy revolutionary reverie, the signs of his eventual crack up were clear by the time he offered his pen to the Oxfordian cause. (The denial of Shakespeare’s authorship against overwhelming evidence is often a good sign that a contrarian has slipped the leash of sense.) After his relatively benign foray into the authorship question, Sobran began dipping his toe in hotter water.
In 1992, his boss and whilom friend felt compelled to address his increasingly lurid obsession with Zionism. In In Search of Antisemitism, Buckley concluded, unconvincingly, that Sobran’s columns in a small Catholic journal were at least “contextually anti-Semitic.” If there were any doubt, Sobran soon shrugged off his contextual cover. Within a few years he was addressing Holocaust denialist conferences, the ultimate perversion of the contrarian impulse.
Anglin mentions a "libertarian to fascist pipeline," which is an absolutely ridic-
If the “what’s next, a license to make toast in your own damn toaster?!?” guy is on board with this, it will feel just like when I realized Santa Claus was actually your parents.
But I think the Nord Stream pipeline toward fascism comes from the other direction, too. Take Ken O'Keefe (please) who went from extreme left antiwar activist in the GWB years to full-blown Holocaust denier under Obama.1 And, of course, there's this fellow, whom I initially mistook for the guy bugging me for change outside the downtown Tim Hortons but who turns out to be an alleged rock music legend:
I didn’t think the Russians could find a more embarrassing celebrity shill than Steven Seagal, but here we are. With Waters now re-recording Dark Side of the Moon to remove his former bandmates’ contributions (who needs David Gilmour guitar solos when you can have Waters reciting poems that came to him in a gin-soaked nightmare?) I suppose a new version of The Wall is next, only with the marching hammers as the good guys this time.
I will say this much: you know what might stop people from falling down a rabbit hole of conspiracy theories? If respected institutions stopped acting like they really, really want people to fall down a rabbit hole of conspiracy theories:
The World Health Organization (WHO) has quietly shelved the second phase of its much-anticipated scientific investigation into the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic, citing ongoing challenges over attempts to conduct crucial studies in China, Nature has learned.
Researchers say they are disappointed that the investigation isn’t going ahead, because understanding how the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 first infected people is important for preventing future outbreaks. But without access to China, there is little that the WHO can do to advance the studies, says Angela Rasmussen, a virologist at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, Canada. “Their hands are really tied.”
In January 2021, an international team of experts convened by the WHO travelled to Wuhan, China, where the virus that causes COVID-19 was first detected. Together with Chinese researchers, the team reviewed evidence on when and how the virus might have emerged, as part of phase one. The team released a report in March that year outlining four possible scenarios, the most likely being that SARS-CoV-2 spread from bats to people, possibly through an intermediate species. Phase one was designed to lay the groundwork for a second phase of in-depth studies to pin down exactly what happened in China and elsewhere.
[…]
Many researchers aren’t surprised the WHO’s plans have been thwarted. In early 2020, members of then US president Donald Trump’s administration made unsubstantiated claims that the virus had originated in a Chinese laboratory, and US intelligence officials later said they had begun investigations. The city of Wuhan is home to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a high-security lab that works on coronaviruses. Chinese officials questioned whether the virus originated inside the country’s borders.
In the midst of simmering hostility between the two superpowers, WHO member states requested in May 2020 that the agency put together a science-led effort to identify how the pandemic started. Although China agreed to the mission, tensions were high by the time the WHO group left for Wuhan, and engagement with China quickly unravelled after the group returned.
In its March 2021 report, the team concluded that it was “extremely unlikely” that the virus accidentally escaped from a laboratory. But the inclusion of the lab-incident scenario in the final report was a key point of contention for Chinese researchers and officials, says Dominic Dwyer, a virologist at New South Wales Health Pathology in Sydney, who was a member of the WHO team.
That July, the WHO sent a circular to member states outlining how it planned to advance origins studies. Proposed steps included assessing wild-animal markets in and around Wuhan and the farms that supplied those markets, as well as audits of labs in the area where the first cases were identified.
But Chinese officials rejected the WHO’s plans, taking particular issue with the proposal to investigate lab breaches. Zhao Lijian, the spokesperson for China’s foreign ministry, said the WHO proposal was not agreed by all member states, and that the second phase should not focus on pathways the mission report had already deemed extremely unlikely.
If COVID-19 had emerged not far from an American infectious-diseases laboratory, I suspect there would have already been a half dozen big-budget streaming miniseries about how it escaped from that lab.
But Wuhan? We don’t know if the lab-leak theory is true, but an awful lot of people seem to have a very strong vested interest in making sure we never find out.
Seen at James Lileks’ Bleat:
O’Keefe was somehow able to give a speech at the University of Toronto without a mob of “anti-fascists” trying to shut him down. How very curious.
I actually would not oppose him speaking at a campus near me, partly on principle and partly because I want to see who’d show up to listen to him.