Man...

Like a lot of people, I'd imagine, on my regular perusing of Roger Ebert's website, I was alerted to the fact that there is a disturbingly sizable minority of people making a lot of noise on the Internet about 9/11. Specifically, they're making noises regarding what they view as a conspiracy: the moonbat notion that the government orchestrated the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. I've been active on the Internet for well over a decade and I have never had any experience with a more whacked-out group of nutjobs as these tinfoil-hat-wearing batshit-crazy morons. Wow. Just... wow.

These people live in a different world, where evidence just doesn't matter. Well, scratch that ... they don't even know what evidence is. What's most incredible about this phenomenon is the transparency of each and every one of the tinfoil hat crowd's arguments. The chain of logic goes something like the following:

1) Start with a conclusion
2) Mine anything and everything you can for "evidence" that can be twisted to support that conclusion
3) Ignore and/or attempt to discredit all other evidence

It's really quite extraordinary. To a certain degree it mimics the antievolution crowd, or anything built upon a fundamentalist mindset, really. Their argumentative techniques don't tend to vary much at all. Again, it's simple steps:

1) Make a claim that, while false, appears convincing to the ignorant viewer
2) When claim is refuted by more knowledgeable person, switch to another claim
3) Go to (1) until out of claims
4) Descend into ad hominems
5) Disengage

I don't want to give it any more advertisement than it's already gotten, but there's this video out there called "Loose Change" that has provided a catalyst for a lot of these batshit ideas (I refuse to call them "theories"), which has prompted a response amongst a lot of bloggers to refute their batshit claims. One of the better ones is a blog called Screw Loose Change. It does a good job of showing why these batshit claims are really batty, in case the general argument that "the conspiracy you are proposing is impossible" isn't good enough.

But what's really illuminating are the remarks made in the comments section by the tinfoil hat true believers. Such a pure distillation of the fanatic / fundamentalist mindset. You see this sort of crap from time to time over on the Panda's Thumb comments, but the creationists that troll there there have been at it for a longer time and (some of them) have developed more sophisticated rhetorical tools to support their denial of reality.

The tinfoil hat crowd, on the other hand, is just fucking nuts. A lot of people think that the biggest problem in the world is fundamentalist religion. They're close. It's actually the fundamentalist mindset. Whether secular or religious, the True Believers will never be swayed.