Its all a Conspiracy, 24 hours a day

Today I finished watched the first 4 episodes from the new series of 24.  It is ridiculous, as it should be, but the thing about it that grates the most is the whole secret cabal of powerful and rich men(ie. THEM) that are masterminds behind somewhat insane plots.  I mean, really, starting wars/having people killed/mass complicated technological plots/etc to make money is a bit idiotic, there are far easier ways of doing so.  But, it is at the end of the day just a TV show and I can forgive it for its stupidity (if i can live with people saying gibberish like "I pinged the line to reset it." as a perfectly valid way of stopping a hacker, i can live with anything).  It is, however, lazy writing.  With the amount of money that is pumped into the show by Ford and they're always shiny new motors, you think they could get a semi intelligent writing staff, or at least a technology/anti-nutjobconsipiracy consultant to guide them in a slightly better direction.  Still, its ace to see ol' Jack Bauer running around beating people up again.

The larger irritant though is that there are people out in the real world that actually believe all the conspiracy theories that are bounced around the internet.  I mean, its nice that these nutjobs think that there are plenty of amazingly intelligent people out there, a real positive vote for the human race.  But that they think said intelligent people would be stupid enough to do some of the crazy conspiracies that are abound, is somewhat counter intuitive.  It belies the experience of the nutjobs that they've never worked in a group environment before, getting lots of people of varying intelligence and capability to all work towards one goal without any cockups is practically impossible.

I understand where it comes from though, trying to put simple explanations on complicated events or by assigning some unknowable level of intelligence to people doing things or events you don't understand.  The latter of these I've experienced much myself in IT, most people view computers as this unknowable complicated thing that they just can't understand as they don't have this "thing" that people who understand do.  This "thing" is merely experience and practice, attainable by anyone, the only difference being its easier to get to by some people.  This carries on into everything, if you don't know about steel melting temperatures or the unpredictable nature of what happens in a building fire etc then thinking that the twin towers were taken down by explosives is a much simpler and readily acceptable idea.

Of course, sometimes simple explanations are missed and a complicated plot is put in place to explain a certain bit of evidence or event.  The best example of this is the moon landing, all kind of theories have been put forward, mostly about the photos.  Most of which are because people have a bad understanding of photography or because NASA did at one time release some fake photos along with the real ones to protect the technology used.

There'll always be idiots around though, so no point worrying about it :)