Humoring questions (4th in a series of sovereign citizens)

This post is part of a series beginning with The conspiracy theory that revolves around wordplay about the so-called “sovereign citizen” movement. As a reminder, they don’t usually call themselves sovereign citizens, but I will use that label because it is the one generally accepted among outsiders like myself. In the previous post in this…

One man’s 25-year opus (3rd in a series on sovereign citizens)

Prologue In first my post on sovereign citizens, The conspiracy theory that revolves around wordplay, my goal was to illustrate what the sovereign citizen movement is and highlight the particularly strange language they use, which often stands out immediately. Having limited myself to that, I next set out to write a second post covering several…

What does “include” mean? (2nd in a series on sovereign citizens)

They say nothing is certain but death and taxes, but some people think they can avoid at least one of these. This post is about the people who call themselves sovereignty advocates, state nationals, private men and women, etc., and whom others may call sovereign citizens, tax protestors, tax scammers, etc. In my post The…

The conspiracy theory that revolves around wordplay

So-called “sovereign citizens” make up a collection of people with vaguely similar beliefs about government and the law. I say so-called not to deride people for calling themselves that, but rather because they often do not call themselves that. Instead, it has become a label that people in the mainstream use to describe individuals with…

Rabbit hole: New Concepts in Global Tectonics

The New Concepts in Global Tectonics (NCGT) Journal is a pseudoscience publication imitating an academic journal since 1996. Their motto is “accept nothing on authority,” referring of course to the authority of peer reviewed scientific consensus. They publish work largely from “independent researchers,” in other words individuals with no institutional affiliation and potentially no relevant…

More evidence against flat earth: star trails

This is a follow-up to my post How we can know the earth is a ball without relying on modern science or traveling long distances?. It is well-known and easily observable by the naked eye (even by a single individual if they use modern travel) that the stars appear to rotate counterclockwise in the Northern…

Creationism and conspiracy

YEC is a massive conspiracy theory Young earth creationism (YEC) seems at first like a straightforward denial of science. One might say that young earth creationists believe scientists are wrong about the age of the universe, the age of the earth, biological evolution, and so on. Here’s the thing: if they are so wrong, what…

Organic almonds and climate change denial: the modern conspiracy crowd

NaturalNews.com is one of the strangest sites I’ve come across. Thinking about it more, however, it’s not very strange at all. This is the state of the modern conspiracy crowd. I used to think that, when it came to people like antivaxxers, there was a tenuous alliance between left-wing New Age types and right-wing traditionalist…

The decline and fall of young earth creationism

For most of human history, the age of the earth was unknown. Many believed it was created at some point in the past by supernatural forces, and others hypothesized that the earth always existed. Within the Abrahamic tradition, genealogical lists have been used to trace back to Adam and the date of creation as described…

The failure of manosphere terminology

The “manosphere” is a loose collection of movements, groups, and ideologies that are connected by certain views on masculinity, femininity, and relationships. It includes the Red Pill, the Black Pill (a more extreme version of the Red Pill), MGTOW (“Men Going Their Own Way”), incel subculture, pick-up artists (PUA), men’s rights activists (MRA), GamerGate, and…