some of them, sure...
and frankly, I believe a lot of conspiracy theories...
alot of them are pieces of your grander conspiracies...
I have no doubt of the military-industrial complex, or the prison-industrial complex, or imperialism,
or tearing down of the American Bill of Rights, or the CIA selling crack in the 1960s,
or the rush to war, or the collaboration of Ford, and GM and Exxon Mobil,
corporate media suppression of many stories,
gluttonous consumerism, or the school of the americas, or the rigging of elections near and far,
or that the Bush family made it big on selling weapons and other things to our WWII Germany, and screwing us over in a multitude of other ways,
all of these things are relatively mainstream ideas and beliefs... so many of us know this stuff,
we just haven't gotten the individual and collective willpower together yet to do much about it...
it's the ones where Bin Laden and George Bush are both intentionally working together to blow the twin towers that has me banging my head on the wall...
or the ones where environmentalists and oil companies are both intentionally working together to screw us over...
or where the hippie Green Party, which rarely wins an election to dogcatcher, let alone school board, is also trying to screw us over...
or the ones where global warming and man-made climate change are being *promoted* by American Neo-Conservative Republicans...
despite the Neo-Cons long-standing attempts to decry, discredit, and dismantle anything that promotes clean air, clean water, children who know that the earth is round, etc...
these are the kinds of things that I see as distracting...
for starters, because if true, we're totally screwed, and you have said as much...
and we might as well continue to hide under the covers like little kids...
it's not just the stories you cite...
or the usual lack of evidence generally considered to be of a credible nature...
but the way they seem to convince you...
have you ever written a college paper?
Your professor almost certainly would tell you that wikipedia, (for example),
is not a credible source, in large because it can be edited by anyone...
more so in it's earlier stages... but the stigma and some of it's faults, remain.
That wikipedia agrees with the rest of us that 1 + 1 = 2,
or that George Washington was the first president of the United States of America,
is really beside the point.
People pull strange and complex hoaxes all the time, sometimes for profit, or fame,
or to prove that the media and the rest of us can be made to believe just about anything...
and sometimes people do it because they themselves really believe in the conclusions of their government / cult / myth / bigfoot / superstition,
that the ends justify the means, and any lies or fabrications told are therefore justified...
IF you are truly trying to convince us that the status quo is not true,
your evidence generally has to be at least as compelling as their evidence.
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