Friday 15 September 2006

A conspiracy rant

The world is a confusing place, particularly if you only ever turn on half your brain. That describes your average conspiracy nut, doesn't it, a person who has never worked out what actually moves the world, who has never tried to think in abstractions (something for which the fully-functioning brain is so well suited) so who grabs on to any threadbare explanation to explain what he sees around him, no matter how many facts that explanation has to ignore.

To paraphrase Jack Wheeler, the world headquarters of this subset of humanity is a grassy knoll in downtown Dallas. (And we all know where the local home for these nuts is, don't we customers?)

Now, Robert Bidinotto occasionally loses his head-- but never as much as your moonbat conspiracy theorist -- and on this week of remembrace he's explaining why he has no time for either conspiracy theorists or their latest and newly topical conspiracy theory about 9/11. You know the one:
Surely, you have heard the 9/11 conspiracy theories by now. The U.S. government, not Osama bin Laden and radical Muslims, brought down the World Trade Center. Attacked the Pentagon. Tried to hit Congress, even. Why? To justify launching the War on Terror.

And why do that?

If you are a Muslim conspiratorialist, it's because the Great Satan wishes to destroy the Muslim world.

If you are a libertarian conspiratorialist, it's because a War on Terror would allow excuses for the diabolical neocons to violate our liberties, vastly increase government spending, and consolidate power.

If you are a leftist conspiratorialist, it's because that gives the imperialistic U.S. an excuse to colonize the Middle East.

If you are a conservative conspiratorialist, it's because it gives the communist Insiders and international bankers a greater stranglehold on our finances.

The wonderful thing about that 9/11 conspiracy theory is that it can be cited to explain damned near anything, for damned near anyone. Like the Blob from the 1950s horror movie, an ambitious conspiracy theory like this one can expand amorphously in any direction, allowing it to encompass -- and account for -- any conceivable fact, thus allowing its proponent to imagine himself unassailable to any challenge.
Read more ranting here. It's good.

LINK: A rant against conspiracy theories - Robert Bidinotto's blog


TAGS: History, History-Modern, Nonsense, Politics-US

3 comments:

Matthew R. X. Dentith said...

It's nice to see that someone pointing out that the 911 conspiracies aren't (as popularly and erroneously noted) solely the domain of the Left.

Anonymous said...

My fave is the comment about the amish .. that one cracked me up.

Sir Arthur Streeb-Greebling said...

They certainly aren't Horansome. I've been trapped on a bus with an American libertarian telling me about the "WTC was blown up because of the little puffs of smoke theory" and I started losing the will to live. I mean what's the bloody point, if you don't like George Bush, which is perfectly admirable, why don't you get him on the fact that he is incompetent, authoritarian and unconstitutional, there's more than enough ammunition there, you don't need to make stuff up.

I said