There's starting to be diaries on this blog spotting a lot of ridiculous conspiracy theories about what happened in New Orleans. I think it's important to remember that while the Bushies were clearly criminally negligant in their management of the disaster (and there's enough blame to spread around if you want to rope in the local and state authorities), it is a huge, and unsupportable stretch to go from that to saying the administration somehow CAUSED the disaster.
Not every disaster that hurts people is caused by human agency. Some people have trouble accepting this basic point, however.
After the Asian tsunami there were people (thankfully not many on this blog) who insisted that the seafloor earthquake had been caused by some sort of U.S. magnetic wave machine. This nicely wedded what was essentially magical thinking with a vaguely science fictiony explanation for the scientifically half-educated.
The problem with conspiracy theories is that they divert the content of debate from what actually DID happen (in this case the Bushies being negligent and callous), the deeper causes (in this case poverty and the breakdown of public life and what can be done in favor of arguments about the minutiae of the event and a sort of helpless rage at people who are "secretly" responsible, and the suggestion of often irrelevant "solutions."
So yes, conspiracy theories are harmful to discourse, particularly in a case like this where the facts of the matter are awful enough and begged to addressed.
A few additional points:
- A few scattered anomolous "facts" don't add up to proof of anything, even if they are in themselves true. And they aren't always true (often the "facts" that become common currency of conspiracy theorists are either made up or so distorted from their original form as to beare little resemblence to what actually happened.
- True Fact A. True Fact B. Jump to crazy unsupported solution C. Not proof, not convincing. Often alarming.
- Just because your theory is internally consistent doesn't mean it's valid: i.e. that it conforms to what actually happened.
- Motivation matters. If the explanation you give as to why someone would want to do something that appears to be clearly against their interests takes you half a page of unsuppoted suppositions, it's probably wrong. If you're going to trot out the old American warhorse (used by both left and right) of "they're looking for an excuse to impose a dictatorship" then you'd better have some damn convincing proof, other than your assertion, and the assertions of other bloggers.
- Other crazy blog posts don't count as proof of anything, just a sign of the kind of self-referential circle beloved of fringed scholars who lack evidence. Sorry.
- One can't prove a negative. And saying "prove my crazy theory wrong" and then expecting to be refuted on every single point isn't actually a real argument, it's a kind of obstructionism. There's no point in debating every point when the theory in totum doesn't make much sense in the first place. And it's exteremely time consuming and takes away from argument on legitimate topics.
- Your theory is on the face of it untrue if it requires magical thinking and/or science fiction technology that doesn't really exist yet outside of secret government labs that exist only in the imagination of you and your friends.
- Why are you bothering to egg the pudding, anyway? What the Bush administration has done that's provable and more or less in public is bad enough: why diminish the power of a legitimate critique by harnassing it to crazy ideas and theories?
{UPDATE}
I think I'm going to have to make one point to clear things up: I'm referring in this instance to theories that the Bush administration deliberately fudged its response to the hurricane or that it blew up the levees. Ghastly incompetence and crass callousness toward the poor and a sense the public life is unnecessary are bad enough sins -- it's not necessary to invent loony theories to egg the pudding.