You Better Believe It

It always fascinates me how people come to believe certain things. One would hope we sift through the evidence and come to rational conclusions, but 1) we don't have time to fully investigate most things so we let rules of thumb guide us and 2) that's not how the human brain works, anyway.

There are numerous sites (here's just one) that have built up elaborate conspiraces about 9/11. I'm almost impressed in spite of myself. As always with well-developed crackpot beliefs, they're an odd mix of truth, half-truth and nonsense. And, for most followers, it's a closed system. No matter how successfully they're refuted, they come up with reasons to continue believing (often by simply refusing to believe the refutation).

At first I laughed at all this, but has it gone too far? In American alone (if anything, these ideas are more popular elsewhere), there are tens of millions who believe this stuff. It's tough enough to fight a war against terrorists when you understand how dangerous they are.