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Nonfiction
David Aaronovitch, Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History: Sadly, this was not the book I wanted to read, which would be a book about the seductive appeal of the conspiracy theory and how to distinguish plausible from implausible conspiracies. Instead, it’s a series of Western conspiracy theories that are wrong. Often they involve Jews. Aaronovitch is more detailed with respect to the more recent ones (Princess Diana, some incidents probably familiar to British readers but not to me, 9/11 conspiracy theorists, etc.) than the earlier ones, though I did learn the full history of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (they were not just made up, they were recycled made-up—plagiarized from accounts of another conspiracy). The most interesting thing I learned was probably that the current historical consensus is that the Reichstag Fire was not itself a Nazi plot, though it was exploited by the Nazis for advantage.
But the book wasn’t satisfying because it wasn’t the book I wanted to read, the one that acknowledged that conspiracies do exist, but that they’re generally (1) small, (2) short-lived through betrayal, disagreement or other causes (though occasionally long-enough-lived to do their dirty work: Watergate; Iran/Contra; etc.), (3) often nongovernmental (Enron), and (4) protected by the difficulty of wading through available information and the interests that others have in not taking action (Madoff and the SEC). Aaronovitch makes the nice point that the “vast right-wing conspiracy” Hillary Clinton identified was in fact vast and right-wing, but that its major funder Scaife was quite open about what he wanted done to the Clintons. Is it a conspiracy if they tell you what they intend to do, like Republicans deciding to rebrand healthcare and adopt the same talking points in unison? Occam’s Razor inclines to incompetence over conspiracy, yes, but I would have liked more on how to deal with pervasive distrust in government without acceding to ridiculous conspiracy theories or ignoring bad things government has actually done.
Michael Lewis, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine: For an example of something that didn’t need to be a conspiracy, see the recent economic collapse due to the securitization of obviously bad debt. Lewis follows several men who saw that the house of cards was nothing but bad paper and ultimately made billions of dollars from betting on the collapse. What’s striking is how public they were: they didn’t hide their insights, or the facts underlying their reasoning, in the slightest. They were yelling and screaming! Other people were making too much money to care, though, and plenty of people simply didn’t understand the alchemy that appeared to turn crappy debt into rock-solid securities. It’s a frustrating story, especially when the government appears near the end only to prop up the people who made all the mistakes in the first place.
Larry Lessig, Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy: Lessig’s a good writer, and he likes remix and doesn’t like making our kids into criminals. Thus he supports (1) taking amateur (noncommercial) remix out of the coverage of copyright entirely and (2) creating some sort of digital levy allowing filesharing that’s going to happen anyway. The book goes down easily, but unless it’s your first serious exposure to the culture and economy of remix there’s very little new in it. You can download the pdf from the publisher:
Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks: Henrietta Lacks died of cervical cancer in 1951. Her cancer cells, however, proved to have a surprising durability. They could be cultured and replicated indefinitely, marking a huge breakthrough in the study of human cells. Skloot tells the story of Lacks—a poor African-American woman from Maryland who did what the doctors at Johns Hopkins told her—her family, and the ways in which her cells (known as HeLa) were used for great medical benefits and profits even as her family couldn’t afford health insurance. It’s a good, well-told story, and among the things that I noticed was how physically, how geographically, poverty and discrimination worked on the Lacks family. Henrietta had to make a long and difficult journey to Johns Hopkins for treatment (in the colored ward); they lived (and in some cases still live) in places without access to basic services; they lived right next to white areas that were much better-off; and so on. Medical professionals had no concept of informed consent in the 1950s, and even when they sought out the family decades later they didn’t explain in ways the Lacks could understand why they wanted more cells from the family (it was to test various ways in which HeLa might have changed and/or contaminated other cell lines). Skloot makes the point that the researchers who condemn attempts to get patients a share of the wealth developed from their cells have generally been willing to commercialize those cells after extraction—though two wrongs don’t make a right, it’s very hard to resist the conclusion that lack of informed consent wasn’t the only problem.
But the book wasn’t satisfying because it wasn’t the book I wanted to read, the one that acknowledged that conspiracies do exist, but that they’re generally (1) small, (2) short-lived through betrayal, disagreement or other causes (though occasionally long-enough-lived to do their dirty work: Watergate; Iran/Contra; etc.), (3) often nongovernmental (Enron), and (4) protected by the difficulty of wading through available information and the interests that others have in not taking action (Madoff and the SEC). Aaronovitch makes the nice point that the “vast right-wing conspiracy” Hillary Clinton identified was in fact vast and right-wing, but that its major funder Scaife was quite open about what he wanted done to the Clintons. Is it a conspiracy if they tell you what they intend to do, like Republicans deciding to rebrand healthcare and adopt the same talking points in unison? Occam’s Razor inclines to incompetence over conspiracy, yes, but I would have liked more on how to deal with pervasive distrust in government without acceding to ridiculous conspiracy theories or ignoring bad things government has actually done.
Michael Lewis, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine: For an example of something that didn’t need to be a conspiracy, see the recent economic collapse due to the securitization of obviously bad debt. Lewis follows several men who saw that the house of cards was nothing but bad paper and ultimately made billions of dollars from betting on the collapse. What’s striking is how public they were: they didn’t hide their insights, or the facts underlying their reasoning, in the slightest. They were yelling and screaming! Other people were making too much money to care, though, and plenty of people simply didn’t understand the alchemy that appeared to turn crappy debt into rock-solid securities. It’s a frustrating story, especially when the government appears near the end only to prop up the people who made all the mistakes in the first place.
Larry Lessig, Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy: Lessig’s a good writer, and he likes remix and doesn’t like making our kids into criminals. Thus he supports (1) taking amateur (noncommercial) remix out of the coverage of copyright entirely and (2) creating some sort of digital levy allowing filesharing that’s going to happen anyway. The book goes down easily, but unless it’s your first serious exposure to the culture and economy of remix there’s very little new in it. You can download the pdf from the publisher:
Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks: Henrietta Lacks died of cervical cancer in 1951. Her cancer cells, however, proved to have a surprising durability. They could be cultured and replicated indefinitely, marking a huge breakthrough in the study of human cells. Skloot tells the story of Lacks—a poor African-American woman from Maryland who did what the doctors at Johns Hopkins told her—her family, and the ways in which her cells (known as HeLa) were used for great medical benefits and profits even as her family couldn’t afford health insurance. It’s a good, well-told story, and among the things that I noticed was how physically, how geographically, poverty and discrimination worked on the Lacks family. Henrietta had to make a long and difficult journey to Johns Hopkins for treatment (in the colored ward); they lived (and in some cases still live) in places without access to basic services; they lived right next to white areas that were much better-off; and so on. Medical professionals had no concept of informed consent in the 1950s, and even when they sought out the family decades later they didn’t explain in ways the Lacks could understand why they wanted more cells from the family (it was to test various ways in which HeLa might have changed and/or contaminated other cell lines). Skloot makes the point that the researchers who condemn attempts to get patients a share of the wealth developed from their cells have generally been willing to commercialize those cells after extraction—though two wrongs don’t make a right, it’s very hard to resist the conclusion that lack of informed consent wasn’t the only problem.
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It's actually not all that striking, when you think about it. Shorts can only make money if the rest of the world comes around to their way of thinking. You can lose a ton of money going short at the wrong point even if you are ultimately completely correct about the asset being shorted. Thus shorts are often blamed for inducing price declines; you might remember that there was, ludicrously, a short-term *ban* on shorting certain financial stocks right at the height of the crisis.
None of this justifies any of the shenanigans, but it does help explain, to a certain point, why people didn't necessarily believe the shorts: their self-interest would induce the shorts to talk the end of the world regardless.
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...Is that sentence convoluted enough???
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