I stumbled across this Bertrand Russell story while farnarcling around on Mastodon (which is like Twitter but without the Murdoch halfwits and the racists). It was a response from the brilliant Russell to a 1962 enquiry from Sir Oswald Mosley, who had founded the British Union of Fascists thirty years earlier. Mosley was inviting Russell to engage in a debate, in which he hoped to persuade the moral philosopher of the merits of fascism. Russell responded with:
There are two world wars currently under way: one between democracy and totalitarianism; and one between people and money. This is about the first. The one that everyone knows about started in earnest, for the second time, about a year ago when Russia invaded the remaining parts of Ukraine, that it hadn’t already taken over in 2014. While I suspect most people think this is a war mostly between Ukraine and Russia, this is only the tip of a rather large iceberg.
Almost 5 years ago, I wrote about the takeover of the Victorian branch of the Liberal Party by religious nutters. At the time the Victorian branch was dragging its feet in preselecting candidates for the next federal election. This foot-dragging was due to a power struggle between the moderates and religious nutters.
Everyone knows how dangerous to a democracy conspiracy theorists are. This was demonstrated, in spades, by the January 6th insurrection in the USA. This is not so much because of the conspiracy theorists’ ability to organise insurrections (most are idiots), but by their patently obvious gullibility, which allows them to be manipulated by charlatans like Donald Trump and assorted fascists (Proud Boys, Oath Keepers etc.)1.
In the USA (where else?), there was a mass shooting at Michigan State University (MSU), in East Lansing, in which three students were killed and another five injured. The suspected perpetrator was later found with a fatal self-inflicted gunshot wound; he had no apparent connection to the university1.
With all the kerfuffle surrounding the unidentified flying objects (UFOs) shot down by assorted US aircraft in recent days, the tinfoil hat brigade have gone off the deep end again, perhaps aided and abetted by the US Airforce spokesman who said he could not deny the possibility that thy were aliens (as in extra-terrestrials)1. Not only have the cookers gone off the deep end regarding these shot-down UFOs but UFO sightings have skyrocketed across the US2.