Watchin' The Internet Detectives

It's so cute.

Okay... here's the difference between liberal and conservative bloggers in a nutshell: we're don't arrogantly believe we're some sorts of internet Sherlock Holmes able to get to the "real truth" about America and our political opponents through Google searches.

Well... let me refine that: We do do Google searches, as Scott Burgess at the Daily Ablution did, digging up the fact that Jihadi Journalist Dilpazier Aslam was a member in good standing of a radical, universal-caliphate-championing, anti-semitic Islamist hate group and had penned hateful articles for a terrorist-sympathizing website.

And of course we did some research on stuff like the Burkett/Rather forgeries. But almost all of that stuff panned out.

I guess the difference is we restrict our net-based research to finding out stuff about a particular someone, finding out stuff that can be directly attributed to that someone, whereas the left... well, much of it looks for "deep connections" between apparently unrelated incidents.

Conspiracy-mongering is alive and well in the sinistrosphere. It's regarded as pure crank by the right side of the blogosphere.

Anyway, over at the Daily Kos, a "diarist" (i.e., some idiot not named Kos who posts there) has "discovered" the hidden connections between the Plame Affair and the Burkett forgeries and, the Holiest of Holy Grails, Jeff Gannon!

It is of course all ludicrous, and the product of a deeply troubled mind.

I have a friend who is fond of this sort of "deeper truth" conspiracy-theorizing. I keep warning him: You are succumbing to an intellectual vanity, and a very foolish one at that. You wish to believe you "know more" than the average citizen. You're better informed, more enlightened, more clever, and more open-minded about the "real truths" of the events of the world.

And you demonstrate this supposed intellectual superiority by postulating "secret knowledge" the public is either too stupid or too cowardly to see with their own eyes.

That's what drives these sorts of krazy konspiratorial konfabulations. For every behavior there is a psychological need or drive. In this case, it's the desire to differentiate oneself from the "sheep" that make up the vast majority of the American population, through the demonstrated possession of hidden, secret, or, dare I say, occult knowledge, known only by an elite few.

And this is what drives people, too, to create or join cults.

And I'm afraid what we have on our hands is basically a political cult, a cult of the perpetual enemy of many tentacles, Cthuluesque in shape and power.

Please, guys: Stop "researching." Stop "making connections." You sound freaking bananas. Rather than proving your intellectual superiority, you're proving only your intellectual insecurity. Your need to demonstrate yourself to be smart makes you lool like perfect fools.

Thanks to Jay Tea at Wizbang, by way of the Blogometer.

The Devil And The Democratic Party: People have a natural preference for unity. They like singulars. Physicists continue chasing the One Big Theory that will unite all the elementary forces of the universe into One Big Force.

They're stuck on misbehaving, antisocial gravity, which just can't be forced to join with the other three forces (or one force, depending on your preference), but they keep trying.

It's a natural human urge to simplify, simplify, simplify.

But mature thinkers also realize the limits of simplification and unification into One Big Thing.

The Krazy Konspiracy Kabballists don't respect these limits. They are driven to unify everything into One Great Big Theory of Evil, fronted, preferably, by 30th Level Evil Archmage Karl Rove.

Not to knock religion, or suggest that the devil isn't real, but let's say he isn't. Let's just assume, for the sake of this analogy, that he is a fictional construct created by the human imagination.

At one point there were lots of evil spirits and evil gods. There was also human evil in all its varieties.

Humanity's natural preference for One Big Narrative eventually collapsed these pesky multiplicitous evils into One Big Boss Villain, known as Satan/Lucifer/Elvis' manager "Colonel" Tom Parker.

What causes crops to fail? Satan. What causes lust and greed? Satan's whispering in the ears of the succeptible. What causes madness? Little demons in the mind of the lunatic, put there, of course, by Satan.

Not much different, really, than the various political crankeries one reads from the unhinged left.

The so-called reality-based community, for all its vitriol against the religious, sure does seem to be following the age-old pattern of classic religious/cultish thinking.

Got news for ya kids. Karl Rove is not Satan, the Prince of Darkness attempting to establish a tenth Province of Hell on Earth.

Satan wouldn't be so chubby. He'd look more like, I don't know, Iggy Pop or something.

posted by Ace at 01:14 PM

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