Naomi Wolf Loses Her Mind

I don't know what happened.
I've read her books on feminism and followed her when she did political work back in the 90s.
But somewhere something must have caused some major damage.
She posted on Facebook that we weren't really sending soldiers to be medical support in Africa but gather Ebola so it could be used for a military takeover here in America.
She also said the people beheaded by Daesh weren't really innocent journalists.

I'd prefer not to even call attention to this kind of craziness in hopes that nobody considers it but she has done valuable work in the past so there will be people pointing to it and saying "look, look, why isn't anything?"
Really nobody wants to say anything because she's crazy and embarrassing.
But I'll say it.

The insane conspiracy theories of Naomi Wolf - Vox

 

I opened this thread to find out who this woman was. Did a google search and it sounds like she has been active for a good number of years.

 

That's the sad part.
I had huge respect for her.
Her book The Beauty Myth is great.
So now this crazy shit is going to make anything she did suspect.

 

She's been crazy for some time, writing about how a fascist coup is imminent, the banks and corporations are in on it, snowden is a double agent and so on. Conspiracy theories are like the delusions of the mentally ill, if you already have the broken thought process necessary to believe in one there's really no reason not to just keep adding more. If a fascist coup is imminent clearly Snowden's just a double agent putting us off the scent. If Snowden's a double agent clearly ISIS is a false flag operation. If ISIS is a false flag operation the real reason to send troops somewhere is to bring Ebola back as part of the Coup.

 

She might have been getting crazy for some time and I just don't follow her so I didn't realize how bad.
I guess this thread is less about her per se than it is about finding out that someone you respected had gone bat shit insane.
How do you incorporate that?
I still think what she had to say 20 years ago was valid but I do worry that now everything is going to be dumped together.

 

That's when you need to ask: Was her earlier work really legitimate, or was it just as crazy but you agreed with it so it seemed legitimate to you? When Orson Scott Card went bonkers I had to seriously reconsider his earlier books to see if I'd missed the signs.

 

I have to say, while I am surprised at the extreme lunacy of the conspiracy theories she's embracing, I am not entirely shocked that she is unstable. I thought her books were very poorly written, even The Beauty Myth, which makes some good points. She is not great with factual analysis, and has a pronounced tendency to universalize based on insufficient facts.

 

The problem is that we're living in a society extremely close to the one GitS predicted a while back. Digital imaging has reached a point where quality forgeries are effectively impossible to detect without special tools, there's no meaningful requirement for truthfulness or factuality in media anymore, people are extraordinarily connected to information and each other in ways we never evolved to handle.

While there are absolutely collusive actions going on, some of which can fairly be called (legitimate) conspiracies, I think a lot of what we think of as conspiracies these days are a form of Stand Alone Complex. Many actors independently motivated by powerful structural factors to pursue similar goals and carry out similar actions, having all of the hallmarks of a conspiracy without one having ever existed. Copycats without an original, collusion because of sameness and not communication.