How do we know when a writer on the internet is insane?
I mean this question seriously. This is a written medium in which the authors are largely hidden, so we can't very well look into the eyes of the writer and tell that he's crazy.
Here's what got me thinking about this.
I have been looking into what I am calling "the curious case of Army Field Manual 30-31B", which is a conspiracy theory making the rounds in left-wing circles.
FM 30-31B purports to be an Army field manual that instructs secret Army units on how to conduct terrorist operations in friendly countries. The goal? To create a climate of political uncertainty and fear that drives the populace into the arms of the allied government.
Naturally, a document such as this, if it existed, and if it were real, would be a scandal of enormous proportions.
A document exists, this much we know. The U.S. government has, apparently, through documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, maintained that the document is a Cold-War era Soviet forgery. My source for this, which certainly seems a plausible explanation, is a website to which I would not prefer to link, as they are routinely visited by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security for posting documents of a sensitive nature on their site such as aerial photographs of installations the U.S. government wouldn't want terrorists to know about. You can find the site easily enough if you know how to use Google; I'd just rather not point you there, out of concern that someone might construe the link as an endorsement of the site.
So -- a supposed Army Field Manual advocating terrorism is challenged by a website that is itself posting things on the web that are of a nature so sensitive that no reasonable person would want to advertise them.
Do you begin to get why I asked the metaphysical question above? To even begin to research the FM 30-31B conspiracy, I had to leave the realm of the well-traveled, the sane, the ordinary, and wander into the lairs of websites that I would prefer to not know even existed. I had to use a crazy person to debunk a crazier person.
So how do we know a persone is insane? Maybe when he starts to wander into spaces of the web where the crazies argue among themselves.
Consider this thread in Democratic Underground. I can smell in it, almost immediately, the unhealthy whiff of conspiracy, the shared assumptions of the participants, the willingness to post as irrefutable fact things that have not been established as actual events or proof, the assignment of motives and blame to people these commenters have never met. It has mushroomed into a 207 post welter of monstrous speculation. The crazies here are not so much arguing among themselves as they are cooperating to build their own private reality. One in which U.S. soldiers are routinely used to assassinate foreign civilians by nefarious "higher ups" in the U.S., and maybe also the Italian government. None of them has yet postulated a P2 Masonic Lodge connection (go research that conspiracy if you have a few months on your hands), and I haven't yet seen the Illuminati or the Vatican mentioned, so it's not a complete little conspiracy edifice yet. But give them time.
I guess the possibility "hey guys, it was an accident" never occurred to them.
So who can you trust? When do you know you're reading the words of the sane, and when have you wandered into the lunatic ward? How do you know you've not only wandered in to the lunatic ward, but have officially checked in to stay?
It's getting harder and harder to tell.
