>It's a waste of valuable time, and makes you look
>like a loon. Pretty much everything you need to
>know about how things work is right in the open.
Yeah. What he said.
My pet theory is that conspiracists are under the "petty bourgeois umbrella of realities." They are able to believe that things happen in secret cabals and manipulations because they are isolated. I wrote about this once on PEN-L.
The petty bourgeois (like the Canadian Federation of Independent Business) is "meshugeneh-crazy" because they are totally isolated:
1. They have to beg bureaucrats at banks for help
2. They hate big business, which is always crushing
them without concern
3. They love big business, because they dream of
being bought by big business
4. They can't create a unified body of lobbying to
save their lives because they are always desperately
trying to rip customers off each other
I believe psychiatrists should invent a new entry in the DSM-IV: "Small Business Personality Disorder." Kind of a cross between Paranoia and Narcissism with strong Borderline tendencies (I love you! I hate you! I love you! I hate you!)
A sub-category of that would be conspiracies.
Back in 1995 or something, Doug wrote a small comment that has never left my thinking: He noted that one doesn't often in life get an "enemy" who articulates their plans every day, and clearly -- he meant the business pages. The WSJ is a great newspaper (ignore the editorial section) because it details, with precision, what is happening.
You don't need conspiracies to explain anything. It's all there.
Ken.
-- Chess is as elaborate a waste of human intelligence as you can find outside an advertising agency.
-- Raymond Chandler