Twisting the truth

Mark Honeychurch - 11 December 2023

It’s weird not having had a newsletter out last week. Hopefully you didn’t miss us too much! As our sole editor I’ll be keeping to a biweekly schedule for now - although if we get more content coming our way from readers and committee members, who knows, I may be able to return to producing the newsletter on a weekly basis. For now, you can expect to read something from myself, Bronwyn and Craig every fortnight, and then we’ll be recording our podcast in the days following the newsletter’s release, and chatting about either our articles or something else that tickles our fancy. If you feel moved to write an article for us, just send your article to news@skeptics.nz and we’ll let you know if we plan to publish it, which is very likely to be the case as we love reading all your thoughts on skeptical topics, and I’m sure our audience does too. And, once your article’s been published, we’ll probably want you to join us on the podcast to talk about it as well - but only if you’re comfortable with doing that.

Thanks to everyone who came to our conference a couple of weekends ago - the event was a great success, and Hamish, Simon, Lisa and all the other organisers did an amazing job. Our next conference will be at some point towards the end of next year in Auckland, and we’ve already started planning some of the details in the first of our regular committee meetings with our new committee. If anyone in Auckland would like to help organise next year’s conference, please let us know by emailing committee@skeptics.nz or just heading to the next Skeptics in the Pub event and letting Craig know that you’re keen.

In this week’s newsletter we have a couple of articles that involve people taking the truth and twisting it somehow. Craig’s article is about “Winston Smith” (or “Barry from the BNZ” as he’s correctly been identified on Twitter/X and elsewhere), who has taken private COVID data and managed to totally misrepresent it for Liz Gunn. I’ve looked into 15 Minute Cities, and how the conspiracy theorists have twisted a nice idea into a dystopian nightmare. Finally Bronwyn has written about someone who’s not twisting the truth, but instead just wholesale making up nonsense - Blair Styra, a channeler who is supposedly a conduit for a Sumerian merchant called Tabaash.