Why do people prefer to eat crap?

Note: If you are one of the hundreds of people who come to this site each day to read about Aleister Crowley and Barbara Bush, please take to heart the deeper meaning of THIS post. At the very end, I will be extremely blunt.

Pravda is dishing out conspiracy theory. And I'm talking about sub-Birchian right-wing conspiracy theory of the lowest order. I'm talking about deep-dish birtherism, replete with denunciations of the liberal news media and references to the all-powerful, all-pervasive Marxist scheme to take over the world.

This, in freakin' Pravda.

The Pravda story derives from the nonsensical theories promulgated by Joe Arpaio. I suspect, but cannot prove, that those theories were actually hatched in the mind of Arpaio's notorious crony, prosecutor Andrew Thomas. Thomas is in serious, serious trouble for his history of tyrannical behavior.

And now, let's take a look at what the American audience feeds upon:

I'm showing you a partial screen capture from my "Stats" page, displaying the three most popular Cannonfire pages of the past 24 hours. These three pages receive a lot of hits on most other days, as well. For the most part, the visitors come from right-wing sites which take these allegations ultra-seriously.

Please note the key factor that all three posts have in common.

I won't show the actual number of visitors, but the figures are distressingly high, especially in comparison to the site's overall traffic. On any given day, a large proportion of this site's readership wants those three stories.

Elsewhere, in the "real" media...

...we find that conservatives still want to buy anything that the notorious faker James O'Keefe decides to sell. National Review (a rag which called me a "conspiracy theorist" during the Weiner affair) says that O'Keefe is like unto Mike Wallace.

When I first read about his latest attempt to prove that voter fraud is a serious issue (even though, as we know, the whole thing is really just a propaganda meme designed to criminalize Voting While Black), I knew that there would soon be a follow-up story demonstrating, once again, that O'Keefe is a liar. That kind of day-after story follows O'Keefe wherever he goes, trailing him like an unwanted puppy.

And here we are. Also here. The right is trying to prove that there is a massive Democratic conspiracy to skew elections, when no such problem exists.

Irony: In his attempt to prove that voter fraud is real, O'Keefe appears to have committed -- wait for it! -- voter fraud. He thus will be investigated by the people who investigate such things. Wouldn't it be lovely if he shared a cell with Andrew Thomas?

Alas, O'Keefe probably won't sit in a jail cell any time soon. No doubt, "Mike Wallace II" will keep finding new wool to pull over new eyes.

All of these stories illustrate a larger point: People prefer a diet of crap to more nutritious fare.

How can America -- or Russia, or any other country -- survive if the average person has such a voracious appetite for sensationalistic, fact-free paranoid absurdity?

Update (written April 15, 2012): If you want to know why the April 1, 2006 story is still up, read the last ten paragraphs of this post. Bottom line: I have been conducting an experiment to see if anyone would react responsibly. In all these years, no-one has.

There are a lot of lazy loons who have published and republished that story without taking the simple step of writing to me for verification. I would have answered honestly. That kind of inquiry comes under the heading of Journalism 101, doesn't it? Yet no-one made the effort.

Why didn't anyone write to me about that story? I think because the people who want to believe in such foolishness secretly feared that I would tell them something they did not want to hear.

There are a lot of conspira-creeps out there who are psychologically incapable of admitting that they prefer paranoid sensationalism over verifiable research. As AC himself once said: "I get fairly frantic when I contemplate the idiocy of these louts."