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Sunday Acoustic: Calum Graham, "Burning Up"

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Wile E. Wonka2/16/2015 8:10:25 am PST

re: #295 Alyosha

If Umberto Eco was put into a 9/11 Truther thing, he must have been heavily edited indeed:

livemint.com

Eco is a semioticist who writes extensively about conspiracy theories, how they form, and why they form. His article on 9/11 Trutherism name-drops Hofstadter’s famous “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” and expounds on the reasons that people fall for such conspiracy hoaxes.

Also, Eco is very much anti-fascist. His political leanings are kind of academic and philosophical, but for the most part he spends his time expanding on Orwell’s themes of media and language manipulation, how they can be used to seize and hold power by fascists, and how to fight that. I recommend actually reading his “Ur-Fascism” article, which is fascinating.

(I’m probably doing my dead-thread trick again by now, but I like Eco and was kind of wondering how he got into a conversation about the pseudo-philosophical mumbo-jumbo of fascists.)