Life is a more-or-less constant source of learning, and if you hold your mouth right, amusement.  So's the LP Forum.  A person can learn about numbers, lotteries, about other people and their thoughts and motivations, and there's even an occasional surprise about ones self.

Last night or the night before a European gent was on one of the threads teetering on the brink of umbrage.  Seems the guy actually believes Americans put Hitler into power, that the 3rd Reich was somehow the product of efforts by the US.

Naturally the conversation didn't linger.  It was painfully clear this wasn't a subject that could be discussed without some angry words being exchanged.  That was obviously his state of mind, and I could feel my own gorge rising just reading his inane, almost unbelievable remarks.

Whew.  How in the name of anything anyone could conjure up as truth could a sane human being come to believe something along those lines?

I'll tell you how.  He wants to believe it.

That's mostly how we all come  to believe what we do.  We have an abundance of information sources.... our parents, our teachers, preachers, scientists, government officials, friends.  And everything any of them 'knows', they heard from someone else.  They regale us with their facts, and we sift through them and draw from them the ones that best suit our own dispositions.

So there is obviously a body of opinion somewhere in Europe that's constructed an edifice of 'fact' that allows people who wish to believe that way to go right on ahead and believe it.

Sort of reminds me of a guy I knew a long time ago, a lunatic, who believed Communism was created and maintained by 'The International Zionist Conspiracy'.  Had a whole roomful of pamphlets and posters someone ELSE had put together to support this pile of drivel presented as truth.

Interestingly, tonight brought another insight into human abilities to wrap preferences around factoids.

Ah well.  I suppose I'd best not go into that one.

But I promise you, I love every minute of it, once I get over being stupified, being tempted toward the seed of anger.  What's not to love about us humans, after all.

Jack