I'd like to see you try and stop me

Early last year, I became aware of the death of a young artist and environmentalist, Isla Bell. The circumstances were pretty awful, and it quickly became obvious that I had a few friends close to family who, with what I consider to be a passionate and inspiring response, had established a charity to support young women artists. I made contact with the family to seek permission to engage in a fundraising campaign through the sale of some tabletop RPGs, as I have done in the past (Medicines sans Frontiers, UNHCR, Effective Altruism) and, over a couple of months and helped by the Conquest games convention and co-contributors (especially Simon Stroud), over $15000 was raised.

However, two days ago, Isla's accused killer, Marat Ganiev, had the manslaughter (originally murder) charges dropped by the public prosecutor , as were charges against his alleged co-offender Eyal Yaffe. Using the grim calculus, I understand the OPP's reasoning; there was no reasonable chance of conviction, because it was not possible to determine the cause of death, "beyond a reasonable doubt", even though everyone is quite aware of what happened.

This Saturday, friends and family have organised an "Isla Bell Justice Rally" in front of the State Library. Isla is remembered, and one day there will be justice for her and others.

In the middle of last week, I went out with my old friend Des to see Dr Strangelove at RMIT's Capitol Theatre. It was inevitably going to be a good night because Des is one of my best friends, Dr Stangelove is one of my favourite films, and the Capitol is one of my favourite theatres. The movie was introducted by a film studies academic who gave a delightfully funny exposition on the broken masculinist themes throughout the gallows-humour farce, and a few pieces of movie trivia I that I had forgotten, such as the fact that the war room table was in green casino felt to emphasise the idea of those assembled were gambling the fate of the planet, even though the film was in black-and-white. As a superb work of satire, and as it should be (albeit terrifyingly so), almost everything about Dr Strangelove was actually based on reality.

One character in the film that particularly stands out is General Jack D. Ripper and his obsessive paranoid delusions of how there was an "international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids" through fluoridation. Ripper, in a position of great power, cunning, and madness, is the driving plot device of the film. It has been several years since I've seen the film, and one thing that struck me is how similar his reasoning is to that of others, more contemporary conspiracy theorists, especially those of the anti-vaccination or AGW denial bodies of opinion. The selective use of facts, the invention of alternative facts, the suppression or deflection of inconvenient facts, and, of course, the suggestion that somehow nefarious communists are responsible, whether it's fluoridation, vaccines, COVID, or their remarkable control of all the world's meteorological stations over the past one hundred and fifty years. Fun fact, ironically, when it was released, Dr Strangelove, some argued that it was a Soviet propaganda plot.

In recent years, there has been some good research into the nature of conspiracy theories. One study indicates that "even if it's bonkers" a substantial section of the population will believe a conspiracy (an important metric for those who benefit). Conspiracy theorists tend to be angry individuals, and believe the perceived conspirators are "evil". And one particularly good study identified that "regression model indicated odd beliefs/magical thinking, trait Machiavellianism, and primary psychopathy were significant, positive predictors of belief in conspiracy theories.. the individual more likely to believe in conspiracy theories may have unusual patterns of thinking and cognitions, be strategic and manipulative, and display interpersonal and affective deficits". I especially like how this one used regression analysis to determine the accuracy of those traits (e.g., corroborating previous research on Machiavellianism) and to remove spurious correlations identified in previous research (e.g., trait narcissism). Recently, we have also discovered that conspiracy theorists are unable to handle complexity; they see the world as fundamentally unfair and want simple, unambiguous explanations.

"Jurgen Habermas is the most influential thinker in Germany today". Thus begins Thomas McCarthy's 1975 translator's introduction to "Legitimation Crisis" ("Legitimationsprobleme in Spatkapitalismus", 1973), and he wasn't wrong. Whilst he may have fallen a little off the radar a bit in the last decades (especially after his attempted "post-secular" rapproachment with religion), fifty years as Europe's most important and serious philosopher is a fairly good innings. Habermas dies last month, aged 96, and I was fortunate enough to be offered to give a presentation to the Existentialist Society this weekend on his philosophy of universal pragmatics and communicative action, which was both well-attended and had many excellent questions. The video, alas, missed the first couple of minutes, but everything is available in the transcript.

The weekend was not only an afternoon of deep and complex emancipatory German social philosophy in the idealistic tradition, however. Marc C., joined me for dinner on Friday before we ventured to The Old Bar to see some music; opening act "Trappist Afterland" was a subtle one-man band with Indian sub-continent backing tracks and songs about dogs, Star/Time provided quasi-improvised space-funk, and headline act The Gruntled accurately describe themselves as "avant-medieval psychedelic noise combo"; it all helps when you know several of the band members. The following night, I caught up with Liza D., and we made our way to "Impossiblistic: A Night of Surreal Performances, which was poetry, theatre, music, costume, puppetry, clown shows, and more. It was less surreal than enjoyable nonsense and was just fine.

Between all this, I also managed to visit the "Creative Antarctica" exhibition at RMIT on its last day, on Australian artists and writers who visited that grand continent. Of course, my own emotional and intellectual attachment to said continent is very strong; not too many people can say that they've spent New Year's Eve there. The exhibition was quite delightful. I really like Janet Laurence's "Ice Remembers" and Sally Robertson's "Atlas Cove". But the standout image for me was Frank Hurley's photograph of 1916 of Shackleton and Worsley leaving Elephant Island on a tiny lifeboat that would somehow make it to South Georgia Island over a thousand kilometres away and would lead to the rescue of the crew of the Endurance. It is one the greatest stories of survival against all odds and, for what it's worth, Elephant Island was the last location of my own trip to Antarctica this year. As Sir Raymond Priestley, Antarctic explorer and geologist, poetically put it: "For scientific discovery give me Scott; for speed and efficiency of travel give me Amundsen; but when disaster strikes and all hope is gone, get down on your knees and pray for Shackleton."