Ok, so I get frustrated by the tinfoil crowd. I should note that by tinfoiler I don’t mean everybody who asks questions, I mean those to whom no evidence against their theory is ever accepted, but for whom any piece of “evidence”, no matter how flimsy or faked, that confirms their ideas becomes gospel. Recent examples include the “is Gannon-Guckert that missing kid from a couple decades ago?” threads. When it turned out that there was over a decade difference in their ages , reasonable people said “ok, guess not.” Tinfoilers started wondering if the CIA had artificially aged him. When Wellstone died we all wondered what happened. When his family came out and said they accepted the results of the investigation and that it was an accident that killed him, reasonable people said “ok, damn, he was a good man.” Tinfoilers started wondering if Wellstone's widow had been “paid off” or threatened. And then there is the “no plane hit the Pentagon” crap. It doesn’t matter how many eyewitnesses saw the plane hit, it’s gospel to many tin foilers that it was a missile or a bomb.

On the other side, the “Did Bush steal the election” questions led to reports of real abuses which was useful and showed what a skeptical mind can accomplish.

This kind of irrationality is personally and professionally frustrating to me. As a professional historian I’m trained to weigh evidence. Seeing people toss the rules of logic and evidence out the window is as aggravating to me as I sure it is for a biologist to read creationist crap.

I have found that whenever I try to get a liberal or moderate friend or coworker to join a liberal discussion board, I inevitably get a “that site is too far out for me” response, and when I ask why, it’s always the tinfoil threads that they cite. It’s not the anti-Iraq war threads, or threads about the latest outrage by the RW in Washington; it’s the “there is no Osama Bin Laden” crowd that is responsible.

Finally, I am concerned about how the far RW pushes its ideas into the mainstream. From the right they use people like Coulter and Savage, who parrot stuff from the far racist right that then gets picked up in the mainstream. Another transmission belt, I believe, is the LW tinfoilers. If you check the sites that the tinfoilers quote most frequently you’ll find a very large majority are far RW. One of the most popular is the American Free Press, which stops just shy of being a Klan newspaper. Its reports on 9-11 are taken as gospel by many of the 9-11 CTers.   And then there is whatreallyhappened.com, which started off as a Clinton-Crazy site for those who felt Ken Starr was covering up President Clintons "many crimes."   Now it's a leading star in the 9-11 "Truth" movement.

You could see this "Transmission belt" directly when General Clark entered the Democratic race in 2004. There were a lot of folks who spouted tinfoil stuff about Clark and Waco taken directly from RW hate sites. The same thing happened on a smaller scale when Kerry started winning primaries and the “Skull & Bones” crowd started attacking him.

Moreover, it's a distraction. All the effort spent on worrying about Chemtrails or some other such boogeyman is effort not being spent on fighting real threats such as Bush's "Save the Forests from All the Icky Trees" plan, or whatever latest outrage is coming out of Washington.

At any rate, what the PCTs call stuck up, I call discerning. If they think I’m a snob because I think a crapburger is a crapburger and I don’t like it being on the left's menu, that’s their problem. I also get called names by the Scientologists on Dupont Circle when I call them wackjobs,and I’m still not going to be guilted into forking over my life savings to read L. Ron Hubbard.

Bookmark/Search this post with:

| | | | | | | | | |

woodrowfan's blog | printer friendly version