- Top Features:
- War Room
- Glenn Greenwald
- Broadsheet
- Joan Walsh
- Camille Paglia
- Since You Asked
- Follow Salon:
Read other letters about this article
Some people claim Obama is a Muslim, despite all the pork sausage he's eaten on TV at diner campaign stops.
Some people claim Mikhail Khodorkovsky is an impoverished political dissident in jail merely for criticizing Putin, despite the fact that his actual charges were corporate fraud and tax evasion and several of his former employees and business partners ended up dead from contract killings after they got in his company's way.
Yup, you can read all kinds of things on the Internet.
I think many people like to line the universe up with their politics. If information doesn't fit the politics, then it has to be wrong.
So people whose politics don't line up with Obama's ignore the fact that he eats pork sausage on TV -- therefore he cannot be Muslim.
And people who (rightfully) feel appalled by Putin's politics look at Khodorkovsky with an absolutely uncritical eye, either ignoring all the dead former employees and business partners, or coming up with elaborate conspiracy theories to explain them away.
The Internet is not going to clear anything up for people who feel satisfied that their politics tells them everything they need to know about the world.
