A person inclined to question or doubt all accepted opinions.

I don’t understand people who call themselves skeptics, and yet are loathe to question the status quo – instead, seeking out the majority opinion, claiming it as the common-sense version, and defending it with “science” and “reason”

I surely don’t know about the “lone shooter” story, but the JFK assassination was definitely a conspiracy. It was plotted by mafia and kept secret by the mafia’s knowledge of JFK’s plan for a coup in Cuba.

read:
http://www.amazon.com/Ultimate-Sacrifice-Robert-Kennedy-Murder/dp/B00119R64C/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top

and if those 900+ pages are too much for you, just read the free “Look Inside!” first pages of the book to explain the basics of the conspiracy

definitely fit for your must-read list!

I also took a very nuanced position on tone. “Tone trolls” are at one end of the spectrum, who will harp about tone instead of more substantive point, and who often confuse sharp but legitimate criticism with the ad hominem logical fallacy.

But at the other end are those who think that tone does not matter at all, or that a maximally harsh tone is always warranted and appropriate.

My position is that tone is less important than substance – but it is not unimportant. Depending on your goals, it is worthwhile to adjust your tone to the audience and context. Further, not everyone with whom you disagree deserves the same level of criticism – again, context matters.

“vast, insidious, preternaturally effective international conspiratorial network designed to perpetrate acts of the most fiendish character”

Eh, I don’t know if that necessarily describes the JFK conspiracy theory, which is why it can remain attractive to people who aren’t prone to believe in the Illuminati or whatever. That’s why refuting it requires such a detailed discussion.

In any case, I see the concept abused a lot, mainly in discussions of politics, and I believe I’ve seen it applied in comments here to the idea of Big Pharma, even though it seems pretty obvious to me that they have a very powerful political lobby and can be quite effective at pushing there products on doctors (including my own, I’m afraid, although I still see him for prescription renewals and whatnot because he’s a pleasant guy who’s in my neighborhood). But I digress.

“I still think the bottom line is that he was employing a flawed method for his online articles resulting in inadvertant plagiarism. ”

Randi did the same thing a couple of years ago when he mixed up his own contribution to an article his was writing with a response contributed by a forum member. The forum member called him on it an accused him of plagiarism. Randi’s defence was much like you decribe for Posner.

(It didn’t actually go down well with other forum members at the time which may have had something to do with his ill-considered and unfair outbursts against a few forumites who dared to express a different view on things whilst at the same time blundering on with his own unscientific views on AGW and evolution. But that’s another story.)

People plot in secret to achieve political ends and sometimes they succeed. But no group of humans can be so unified, effective, powerful etc. to pull something like 9/11 off.

The Lobster Magazine article I cite above, by the way, is a powerful call for more social scientific research into (ordinary) conspiracies.

*Of course, 9/11 WAS a conspiracy – between 19 men, bin Laden and some other cronies to hijack four planes and fly them into four buildings across the US. It manifestly was not a conspiracy implemented by the Bush administration.