Conspiracy Theories by Sam White

One of my best friends is into conspiracy theories so, of course, he forwards them all on to me. Actually, he only forwards a small percentage of them to me. I'm assuming there are far more conspiracies out there than he sends to me because, in the past, if I ever made the mistake of commenting in any way on the conspiracies he sent me, he soon sent me WAY more conspiracies. I've kept my comments under wraps lately, so I only receive the minimum number of conspiracies lately.

It doesn't seem to matter that today's forwarded conspiracy flatly contradicts yesterday's conspiracy, or that it is based on a pile of assumptions a mile high—none of which have ever been proved but are treated as proof merely on the basis of having previously been printed—it was information “you couldn't find in the main stream media” and, therefore, “must be true.” And, of course, to deny any of them just meant I was either part of the conspiracy or one of the dupes.

Speaking of conspiracies (sort of) I have a new word processor on my computer. I won't go into the name, but it's supposed to be this ultra-helpful word processor in that it will sometimes finish your words for you after you have only typed three letters. Not only does this feel like a computer version of one of those people who who finish my sentences for me (and, thus, make me want to whack their feet with a shovel), it's also moronic. For instance, every time I type the letters “t-h-e”, it assumes the word I was going to write was “themselves”!

How many times does the average person use the word “the” in a document (or even a single paragraph)? Just “the” by itself. Why would whoever wrote this word processing program assume that every time time someone types in “the” they're beginning the word “themselves”? Except then. Every time in the document that I have typed in a “t” followed by a “he”, it has tried to complete the word “themselves” for me. Except for the times when I'm actually writing “themselves”, then it lets me take it all on by myself.

My point here (if there is one, I'm never really sure until I'm through writing) is that there are so many conspiracy theories out there—many of which are so obviously and patently false—that even if one out of a hundred of them is actually true, who's going to believe it? For all their love and skill at passing on stories, conspiracy theorists seem to have never read—or, at least, understood—the story of the boy who cried wolf. Maybe the Freemasons HAVE rigged the last three seasons of American Idol in an effort to get more Buddhists elected to the Federal Reserve Board but (ahh! Here's my point! I knew it was in here somewhere!) who cares?