Friday, January 11, 2008

This one's pretty good

Americans, it has been said, never met a conspiracy theory they didn't like. I've never been a big fan of that particular saying, but someone e-mailed the following clip from YouTube to me which makes me think that maybe I was wrong: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuBo4E77ZXo.

The internet is a wonderful thing, but if not used responsibly, it poses dangers as well. The clip to which I linked above was sent to me by two people, one of whom clearly saw this for the conspiracy lunacy which it is. The other, however, was a teenager who took it very seriously. Therein lies the problem. People see something on the internet and think that it MUST be true. That is why roughly 1/3 of all Americans now believe that 9/11 was an inside job. That is why about half of all the people in this country think that the invasion of Afghanistan was done to build an oil pipeline. It's why a vocal and growing minority of people question the occurrence of the Holocaust.

We can't ignore what is going on, and in fact, it would be dangerous in my mind to do so. There's an old adage that one should not debate a fool, because observers may not be able to tell the difference. Fighting these conspiracy theorists might be the one exception to that rule........

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I still think it would have made a good movie plot. Maybe a war against aliens could be motive behind the need to unite the world?