Oh God, not this crap again. Why is it infecting the lounge?

Look, I used to believe in the conspiracy myself. I thought 9/11 was a big government cover-up. I thought there was a second gunman on the grassy knoll. There was a time I even believed the government was in cahoots with the aliens but didn't want to say anything out of fear of widespread panic.

I know how the ideas accumulate in your head to give you the illusion that there really is a conspiracy behind whatever you want to think there is a conspiracy behind. At first, you come across the idea because it sounds interesting. We're all attracted to scandals and corruption. You read a whole bunch of disparate facts, misunderstandings and mistaken analyses of various pieces of evidence. You read so many different facts which are all supposed to fit together to give a comprehensive story of some government cover-up that you can't refute them all. In most cases the conspiracy theorist will only give you half the story; the half that appears to support his particular theory, of course. You don't have immediate access to the full story, so you don't know how to refute what he's saying.

You mull over it in your head and after settling for a while it seems more believable. Especially if it blames a particular organization or politician that you dislike (for instance, I hate Bush, which made it so easy to swallow the 9/11 conspiracy story). You start to read only pro-conspiracy material, and the idea becomes more and more solidified in your head. You start to dismiss anything that doesn't support your story as "part of the conspiracy". When you start hearing the real evidence that's out there, you say "oh, whoever said that obviously has a vested interest in supporting the official story" or "that person is so stupid to have been duped by the government's lies", and that gives you an excuse to not think about it anymore.

Don't get me wrong. I hate the government. I am an anarchist. But that doesn't mean I need to pin the blame for every bad thing that happens on the government. Don't just believe everything that seems to support your political opinion. It's too easy to mindlessly swallow something if it agrees with your preconceived notions of who is an honest person fighting for the good of society and who is a corrupt power-hungry bastard looking out for their own good. When we do history, we need to look at the facts and try to evaluate them from a neutral perspective.