Conspiracy theory isn’t what it used to be. The term has taken on a pejorative quality of late, and those who subscribe are increasingly viewed as dangerous lunatics. It was once the case that a person who believed in shadowy government cover-ups was considered eccentric but harmless. Celebrity adherents were smilingly indulged. In 2003 the […]| Seceder
Nine miles from the Huanan seafood market in Wuhan, a cluster of nondescript buildings sits at the forested edge of the city. This is the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and it houses China’s only biosafety level 4 lab studying human infectious diseases. Since the beginning of the year a conspiracy theory has been quietly simmering […]| Seceder
The coronavirus crisis has frozen construction projects all along the Belt and Road, the century’s most ambitious geopolitical venture. Researcher Wade Shepard reports that “work has stopped along the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor, Cambodia’s Sihanoukville Special Economic Zone has come to a standstill, the Payra coal power plant in Bangladesh has been delayed, and projects across Indonesia, Malaysia, […]| Seceder
When Chief Executive Carrie Lam addressed the Hong Kong press on August 13, she chose an alarming turn of phrase. “Look at our city and our home,” she said, apparently fighting back tears. “Could we bear to push it into an abyss where everything will perish?” As a puppet of the regime in Beijing, Lam […]| Seceder
13-minute read 70 years have passed since George Orwell published Nineteen Eighty-Four: the book that was to be his final work, his magnum opus, and perhaps the defining novel of the twentieth century. Orwell realised during the Second World War that the world was heading into “an age of totalitarian dictatorships – an age […]| Seceder
11-minute read No one attracts criticism like Jordan Peterson. Since his emergence as a public intellectual in 2016, Peterson has been accused of racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, and right-wing conspiracy theorising. He stands apart from the other members of the so-called ‘Intellectual Dark Web’, his name a by-word for everything that is supposedly […]| Seceder
10-minute read A pleasing thing about growing older is that one’s experience and hopefully wisdom gently increase, not unlike a middle-aged waistline. It can be hard to know whether you’re becoming better and quicker at spotting patterns, discrepancies, and contradictions in the media, or maybe it’s just cynicism with a little confirmation bias sprinkled […]| Seceder
