Ok, so I get frustrated by the tinfoil crowd. I should note that by tinfoiler I don’t mean everybody who asks questions, I mean those to whom no evidence against their theory is ever accepted, but for whom any piece of “evidence”, no matter how flimsy or faked, that confirms their ideas becomes gospel. Recent examples include the “is Gannon-Guckert that missing kid from a couple decades ago?” threads. When it turned out that there was over a decade difference in their ages , reasonable people said “ok, guess not.” Tinfoilers started wondering if the CIA had artificially aged him. When Wellstone died we all wondered what happened. When his family came out and said they accepted the results of the investigation and that it was an accident that killed him, reasonable people said “ok, damn, he was a good man.” Tinfoilers started wondering if Wellstone's widow had been “paid off” or threatened. And then there is the “no plane hit the Pentagon” crap. It doesn’t matter how many eyewitnesses saw the plane hit, including at least one DUer, it’s gospel to many tin foilers that it was a missile or a bomb.

On the other side, the “Did Bush steal the election” questions led to reports of real abuses which was useful and showed what the DU can accomplish.

This kind of irrationality is personally and professionally frustrating to me. As a professional historian I’m trained to weigh evidence. Seeing people toss the rules of logic and evidence out the window is as aggravating to me as I sure it is for a biologist to read creationist crap.

I have found that whenever I try to get a liberal or moderate friend or coworker to join us here at the DU, I inevitably get a “that site is too far out for me” response, and when I ask why, it’s always the tinfoil threads that they cite. It’s not the anti-Iraq war threads, or threads about the latest outrage by the RW in Washington; it’s the “there is no Osama Bin Laden” crowd that is responsible. I could care less if Little Green Snotballs or the Freakers don't like us. I'd worry if they did. It's gaining a reputation on the left as being irrational that bothers me, because that reduces this board’s effectiveness.

I think this is a shame, because the DU is unique. I read a lot of blogs regularly (I’m especially attached to Pandagon, Sadly No, Orcinus and World O’Crap). Their threaded discussions are nice, but there’s no place like the DU where we can come and have nothing but discussion about what we want to talk about. If I want to discuss the Nuclear Option Deal, I don’t have to wait for some blog to start it. Moreover, there are no trolls to deal with (at least not regular trolls on every thread.) We can talk amongst ourselves.

Finally, I am concerned about how the far RW pushes its ideas into the mainstream. From the right they use people like Coulter and Savage, who parrot stuff from the far racist right that then gets picked up in the mainstream. Another transmission belt, I believe, is the LW tinfoilers. If you check the sites that the tinfoilers quote most frequently you’ll find a very large majority are far RW. One of the most popular is the American Free Press, which stops just shy of being a Klan newspaper. Its reports on 9-11 are taken as gospel by many of the 9-11 CTers here.

You could see this "Transmission belt" directly when General Clark entered the Democratic race in 2004. There were a lot of folks who spouted tinfoil stuff about Clark and Waco taken directly from RW hate sites. The same thing happened on a smaller scale when Kerry started winning primaries and the “Skull & Bones” crowd started attacking him. We can disagree amongst ourselves, but I think that using wackjob RW ideas to attack others on the left is beyond the pale.

Moreover, it's a distraction. All the effort spent on worrying about Chemtrails or some other such boogeyman is effort not being spent on fighting real threats such as Bush's "Save the Forests from All the Icky Trees" plan, or whatever latest outrage is coming out of Washington.

At any rate, what you call stuck up, I call discerning. If you think I’m a snob because I think a crapburger is a crapburger and I don’t like it being on the DU’s menu, that’s your problem. I also get called names by the Scientologist wackjobs on Dupont Circle when I call them wackjobs,and I’m still not going to fork over my life savings to read L. Ron Hubbard.