There are kooks everywhere. Some people believe they have been abducted by UFOs and others believe that the moon landings never happened. There are many who believe that the 9/11 tragedy was a conspiracy of the United states government.
One thing that all kooks have in common is their ability to completely detach themselves from reality. Wanna see a good example?
David Klinghoffer posts on the Intelligent Design Creationist website Evolution News & Views. His latest display of kookdom is to try and link evolutionary biology with 9/11 truthers [Darwinism and 9/11 Conspiracy Theories: The Parallels].
I hope the Discovery Institute has a full-time psychologist on their staff.
With the approaching 9/11 anniversary, Slate has been running a series tracing the rise and ongoing evolution of 9/11 Truth theories that try to show how the attacks 10 years ago were really an inside job. According to this thinking, 9/11 was no attack by Islamic terrorists. Rather, the towers were detonated by an expertly covered-up collusion among Zionists and U.S. government operatives. You might have expected these notions would, if entertained at all, be dispelled by the exhaustive debunking job that Popular Mechanics did with its 5,500-word article on the subject back in 2005. Not so, as those who take an interest in conspiracy culture know well.
What I found striking about the first installment in the Slate series, by Jeremy Stahl, is the parallels with what we know about the thought and writings of Evolution Truth activists: our ever-loving friends in the Darwin Lobby. You may recall the news of a few months back that Glenn Branch, deputy director of the Darwin-lobbying National Center for Science Education, had collaborated with 9/11 Truth conspiracist James H. Fetzer in editing a special number of the journal Synthese on "Evolution and Its Rivals." That issue of the journal became so notorious for the incivility of its contributions that a whole fracas broke out and made the pages of the New York Times.
It may have seemed just a delicious coincidence at the time to find Branch and Fetzer teaming up so comfortably. Yet consider the features of 9/11-style paranoid thinking and some similarities to its evolutionary counterpart ...
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