Bad Blogger Habit

It is a very bad blogging habit to forego original thought and make posts that are just links to someone else's posts. Nonetheless, I recently saw a couple of comments that are just too good to pass up. Orcinus recently had a link to an earlier post on how to tell real conspiracies from paranoid conspiracy theories. Real conspiracies are characterized by:

• Limited objectives (sometimes just a single, narrow purpose)
• Limited duration
• Limited participation.

As the boundaries of real conspiracies expand, the risk of failure or exposure increases exponentially. Paranoid conspiracy theories presuppose plots of virtually unlimited grandiosity, duration, and members. Real conspiracies break down long before they even approach such a scale.

Totally unrelated, but brilliant is the following epigram. "Conservatives love the (imaginary) America of the past, while liberals love the (imaginary) America of the future."