Just to be clear about this, leprechaun, I've taken a fair amount of philosophy in school, including a couple of courses in logic. The formal study of logic equips one with a wonderful bullshit detector: the list of logical fallacies, bearing impressive sounding Latin names given them by the scholars of yesteryear who identified and codified them. I've noted that one of the favorite ones of the right wing is the argumentum ad hominem. The way this fallacy attempts to work is as follows: no matter how cogent a statement or argument is, the attempt is to attack and discredit the person making the statement or argument. Such things as slapping on a label ("Well, naturally you'd say that. You're a liberal!") or implying mental incompetence ("Didn't you take your meds today?") or any of a number of other attempts to divert attention from the argument itself. A particularly popular one these days is to accuse someone of being "un-American" or "unpatriotic" if they are, in any way, critical of the Bush Administration. To the naïve, this may seem to be a refutation, but it is not. It has no bearing on the truth or falsity of the argument, and it leaves the argument unanswered. In short, it attacks the person and ducks the issue.

I have always been suspicious of conspiracy theories. When I was a teenager, my father somehow managed to get himself on some kook's mailing list. Every month or so, he would receive circulars and newsletters in the mail, warning us that the Rockefeller family was plotting to take over the world, or that the Freemasons were plotting to take over the world, or that aliens were plotting to take over the world, or the Catholics were plotting to take over the world, or the Jews were plotting to take over the world, or—just name some individual or group that you hate, for whatever reason—were plotting to take over the world. These rags included such things as warnings of deep-laid plots about how fluoridating our drinking water was a plot, hatched up by any number of plotters (they never seemed to be able to agree on exactly who it was) to soften our brains and make us docile slaves, and so on, and so on, and blah blah blah. All of these newsletters wound up in the round file along with the other junk mail, but once in a while Dad and I read through the stuff and tried to figure out just who these yo-yoes were and why they were spewing out this tripe. The best we could come up with was that they were poor, paranoid, hate-filled souls with too much time on their hands who were trying to find some meaning in their otherwise pathetic lives. In short, real sickos. So any time a conspiracy theory comes along, my skepticism (admittedly, approaching closed-mindedness regarding anything that smacks of conspiracy) comes partly as the result of my being inoculated early on. So whenever I hear of—or see evidence of—something that could be construed as a conspiracy, it has to pass a number of pretty rigid tests before I'll give it any credence.

One thing that makes it pretty hard to deny that a conspiracy is in progress is when those who are allegedly involved are plainly visible and they come right out on their own web site and say that this is what they are doing—and you can see the evidence of it in the daily news. It's right there for anyone to verify for themselves. Go look!

A distinct difference between me and Dreaded Guest is that I put links to my sources so that people can read them for themselves and make up their own minds. And, unlike Dreaded Guest, I don't insult and vilify those with divergent viewpoints and insist that if they don't agree with me, they are "brainwashed." Nor, for that matter, do I suggest that they need to renew their prescription to Prozac.

As I said above: cheap shot.

Don Firth