keep the tinfoil flying

[realthog]

Someone called mike4rest, posting on the history.com community pages, has an urgent question he wants to put to anyone else as batshit crazy as he himself is:

How much you wanna bet Obama blew up that oil righ?

He's been one of the biggest opponents of drilling there ever was in Congress and then he suddenly changed his mind supposedly!

Yet a week or so later a big oil rig just happens to blow up?

We've seen other examples of alleged coincidences from this Administration such as a Militia Group suddenly arrested just as the Democrats are spreading their hate speech for Talk Radio!

So how do we know Obama didn't arrange for a little accident to happen to scare people with?

That's the trouble with Kenyans. Always blowing up oil rigs. When they're not faking global temperatures, setting up death panels, and injecting autism into infants' veins.

Comments

[zhai.livejournal.com]

WTF.

That crazy spreads like a virus. Why is it okay to say things like this in public?

[realthog.livejournal.com]

Why is it okay to say things like this in public?

I would imagine, sadly, that it's because Obama is black. Possibly mike4rest is not himself racist and hasn't even thought of it this way (if he's capable of thought at all), but the conspiracy-theory climate in which he feels free to produce such utter mental swill was created by racists (the birthers) and is largely maintained by racists.

[zhai.livejournal.com]

I think ultimately you're probably right, but I wish that wasn't the end-point of the analysis, if that makes sense. It shouldn't be good enough. I understand it's possible people's brains are short circuiting because they can't find a rational reason to be pissed off, but why it has to jump into bizarre alternate reality conspiracy theory, and why it's okay to talk about these things in the mainstream (or maybe history.com isn't mainstream, maybe the whole internet isn't mainstream) just baffles me. The argument seems to boil down to "black president does not compute, therefore craziness", and it almost seems like making an excuse for the behavior on some level -- like "oh, they're racist" is an end-point conclusion rather than opening that up and saying hey, this is not socially acceptable (the behavior, with or without racism). But I ramble.

[realthog.livejournal.com]

it almost seems like making an excuse for the behavior on some level -- like "oh, they're racist" is an end-point conclusion

I know what you mean. The trouble is that, every time I do try to dig in deeper to find other motives (for research purposes I'm currently subscribed to lots of wingnut journals like WorldNutsDaily and Media Research Center and Accuracy in Media and Bob Livingston's Liberty Alert and NutsMax and the Hitlerian-seeming One Nut Now, so I'm kind of aswill with this stuff and have been mentally wrestling with it a lot), it really does seem to bubble back in to that racist motivation. We need merely consider the fact that during the last election there was exactly zero buzz (well, to about the tenth decimal place, anyway) over the fact that the (white) John McCain actually was born abroad.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

That's what you get when you don't check those birth certificates... Sometimes I wonder how the US survives, given how many idiots it seems to contain.

[realthog.livejournal.com]

On the other hand, the US doesn't have Viscount Monckton.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

No, but when you consider who it does have... And we can send him. Also Mr Icke.

[realthog.livejournal.com]

Did you see the report in t'Grauniad the other day where various types had interviewed Monckton concerning the UKIP's science policy?

I haven't laughed so much since Little Nell died.

[http://users.livejournal.com/la_marquise_de_/]

Indeed.

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

Nor the late Earl of Clancarty.

[realthog.livejournal.com]

Clancarty might have been bonkers, but he wasn't as offensive or as destructive as Monckton is.

I never met Clancarty, but by all accounts he was a delightful old buffer -- and perfectly rational save on his favourite topic. But Monckton's something other. Unlike Monckton, Clancarty was not lying when he claimed, as Monckton often does, to be a member of the House of Lords. Clancarty did not claim to have "the status of a Nobel Peace Prize winner", and nor did he claim to have discovered a cure for AIDS.

At the Copenhagen fiasco Monckton told the representative of a group of his younger critics that they were the Hitler Youth. The guy he was talking to, who astonishingly remained perfectly polite throughout all this, explained he wasn't quite sure how to take the remark since he himself was in fact Jewish. Did Monckton back off a bit, as any normal person would? Not a bit of it. He repeated the remark several times, more forcefully.

He's a nasty piece of work, and I can't wait for him to get his comeuppance.

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

Monckton is definitely a shit, no doubt about that. I was merely thinking of Brinsley le Poer Trench as a nutter.

[chalcedony.livejournal.com]

::headdesk::

Really, some of these people are just too stupid to live.

[realthog.livejournal.com]

It's how they manage to reproduce that puzzles me. I mean, I thought human/sheep hybrids were genetically impossible.

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

Human/hamster hybrids?

[txtriffidranch.livejournal.com]

Say it with me: "Iiiiiiiiiiiiiin-BREEDING!"

[realthog.livejournal.com]

You could be right.

A couple of the other commenters on the forum seemed at least half-inclined to believe him -- if it wasn't Obama it was Greenpeace.

Say, I wonder if all these guys are related?

Related more closely than you'd think.

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

I have to say that I spent four years teaching in Kentucky and met some perfectly delightful people there. Also some real morons.

[realthog.livejournal.com]

Oddly, every time Pam and I meet a Texan they start the conversation with: "We're from Texas but not all Texans are like you think."

(Great new icon photo, by the way! Who is it?)

[fledgist.livejournal.com]

You should meet my friend TexAnne, a lovely lady from Texas.

My icon? No idea.

[realthog.livejournal.com]

Hey! I know the author of that book!

[daisytells.livejournal.com]

They call us "moonbats". Well, say I, better a moonbat than a dingbat! And to turn Lady Sarah's own words back on them: "Stop makin' stuff up!"

[realthog.livejournal.com]

In fact, I've frequently heard the term "moonbats" applied to the rightists. I think it may well be a rightist myth that the word should be used only for sane, rational people.

[melindadansky.livejournal.com]

This isn't the only place I've seen this.

These people are nuts.

[realthog.livejournal.com]

Tell me about it. I'm "discussing" something on a climate blog at the moment with an AGW-denier who can't understand why the rest of us aren't bowled over by Monckton and the like. When we suggest to him he might read some straight science (New Scientist, perhaps?) rather than a nonstop diet of denialist crap, he primly tells us he has no time for "biased commentaries".