Good to hear it's not too bad.
I'm pissed off at present because I've discovered that a good friend of mine, who I've known since primary school, is an ardent conspiracy theorist.
Well, I've known for the past decade or so that he subscribes to multiple conspiracy theories - 9/11 was an inside job; the world is being manipulated by a cabal or thirty-or-so ultra-rich people who want to destroy our current society and then re-shape it; the swine flu was manufactured to kill us; the swine flu virus was manufactured to kill us; contrails in the sky are actually "chemtrails" that will poison us; and so on.
I knew all that, and found it both interesting and frustrating - interesting because I want to know how his mind works and why he thinks as he does; frustrating because when I'd investigate his theories, present him with information and ask him questions about the impact of the information I was showing him, he'd slip away to the side, never answering me head on, always segueing into other conspiracy theories. He'd always say that he was willing to "go back to the drawing board" and reconsider things but whenever he went back to the drawing board, it was always to come up with yet another conspiracy theory.
Anyway, I thought that I knew it all but I discovered a few days ago that not only does he believe in all of the above, but he also believes that various events - the Boston Marathon bombing, the Sandy Hook school shooting, various other events - were all staged. By whom, I'm not sure - the government? The shadowy "powers that be"? Anyway, not only does he believe that the events were deliberately staged, but he also believes that there were no victims. The apparent victims were, instead "crisis actors" or "vicsims" (victim simulators) in conspiracy-speak, and apparently it can all be proven through facial recognition technology as the same people have popped up in Boston, in Sandy Hook, in Paris, in Berlin and so on.
I know that most conspiracy theories demand considerable logical contortions - or an absolute refusal to even consider things logically - but this really takes the cake. A government, or Machiavellian cabal of ultra-rich people, which is actively planning to destroy our current society, plans *fake* events and uses the same actors at each of the events, even going so far as to fly them overseas so that they can appear in manufactured, staged crises in other countries. Really? If you're an evil overlord like
MFDoom
and you want to destroy society as it stands, with all the conflict and loss of life that would entail, why would you bother faking a bombing? Why not just get someone to plant actual bombs? It's much easier and simpler.