Crackpottery
I was reading Pharyngula today when I came accross a link to these letters. The astounding amount of craziness oozing out of these missives really took me off balance. I’m 19 years old, and have essentially never lived without the internet, so I’m used to all of the crackpot wing-nuttery I’ve seen on it, and more-or-less associated the crazies with the internet. After all, the internet allows them to contact each other and feed each others’ wackiness. The 911 Truth movement and the right-wing screamers who claim that Obama is a secret Kenyan Crypto-Muslim all seemingly grew out of the internet and couldn’t survive in the world goverened by the laws of reason.
But it’s easy to forget that the internet isn’t just the collected thoughts of some Anonymous being. These are people’s thoughts, and there has always been a certain part of the human population that’s been out of touch with reality in some way or another. The JFK assassination, alien abductions, etc have had their conspiracy theorists for decades. Strange cults and even major religions all started with someone who wasn’t fully grounded in reality. And there’s always someone out to get you. These were ubiquitous in culture even before the advent of the internet, it’s just that the web has made it cheaper for those voices to speak: what was once limited to the scribblings of a schizophrenic are now available on the web as the typings of the schizophrenic.
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