Conspiracies continued

I attended a community dinner about a week ago, sharing the table with strangers. Trying to make some conversation I brought up conspiracy theories with respect to 9-11. That was a bad decision because of the intense reaction of a man, who said talk like this would spoil his dinner. And he did become very agitated.

It was on my mind because I had just finished writing a post about it for a chatboard. The opening post was very time consuming to put together and I linked to "conspiracist" sites as well as sites claiming to refute them.

It was always meant to be primarily for my blog and a modified, but partial, version is here. "Partial" because after I had published the modified version here the arguments started flairing up again on Bread & Roses. In that context I posted more links and, above all, I realised that webpages dealing with this are so numerous that it is impossible, or at least not very useful, to link to them all. So I shall just leave it at that. People who are interested to investigate this further will find plenty of links on the sites I linked to.

However, what puzzles me is the inability to explain the strong reactions I got at the dinner as well as on Bread & Roses especially since my opening lines were:

I am *not* some conspiracy theory nut but they do exist at times. (We wouldn't have laws against conspiracies if they had never happened.) The term itself is a loaded one, often used by right wingers to dismiss claims by lefties.

I'm also *not* saying that 9-11 was an American conspiracy not an attack by Al-Quaeda.

My first link relating to the tragedy is to the Nova episode Why The Towers Fell. It does not explain the collpase as a conspiracy but structural failure of the towers. (It does not treat the collapse of WTC no7.)

I was quickly branded as somebody who believes in a conspiracy, my opening statement notwithstanding. I was even called a liar when I wrote that all I wanted was a discussion.

Nevertheless, it is hard to believe the official explanation, hard not to have one's suspicion aroused by so many inexplicable things. Yet, it is also hard to believe that there was a conspiracy of Americans. But why do Canadians get so upset about the mere mention of the possibility of a conspiracy?

As I said in the first sentence of my post, they do exist at times and anybody who has looked at JFK's assassination in a very superficial way knows the Warren Commission did not come up with the truth. (Single assassin, single bullet theory implies that physical laws were not in effect when he was killed.)

So why the emotional distress for speaking about the possibility of a conspiracy?