The Culture of Crazy

Roger Ebert describes the Loon Brigade, and offers other musings on the culture of the crazy.

The thing we must always keep in mind. They are not competing for our jobs.

Racism plays a role, but conspiracy theories themselves have an addictive quality. They appeal to a personality type. Many of those who take nourishment from them have, I suspect, a bitter resentment against authority. They don't want anyone telling them what to do. They're defiant. Anyone who is in power is lying to them for evil motives. Nothing they learn from the mainstream media can be trusted. Some people may think they're so smart -- but these conspiracy insiders know the real story. They learn it from each other, they embellish it, they pass it around, they "document" it with invented connections, they bond among themselves, and they live in a closed system that seems to validate them.

Sounds like somebody we know, eh?

It is true that there were some Liberals that had lost their mind over George Bush. It was not the main-stream Liberal thought at the time. The vast majority of Liberals had similar views (though not entirely) to my own. The issue was the policy.. with a few sprinkles of "I can't believe he's really that stupid" thrown in when he said something particularly dumb.

The Democratic party and 99% of the grass-roots Liberals out there weren't joining in with some of the extreme rhetoric, but there was that 1%.

I was not a fan of Code Pink.. not at all.

....

I watched most of Keith Olbermann's hour long "special comment" last night. He struck a few chords, but it wasn't his typical well reasoned and impassioned call to arms.

The rhetoric flotaing around lately is that a "good" bill is looking like it might make an appearance, but I highly doubt it. I'm still convinced there will be a bad bill, or possibly no bill at all if the Congressional Liberals oppose it.