Cranks: A Brief Field Guide (Part 1)

Here’s a list of some of my favourite cranks (both general and specific).

• New agers of the “I don’t buy into your chauvinistic western imperialist concept of logic so you can’t disprove my argument” type.
• Holocaust deniers; not the standard boring kind, but anti-Israel ones who, as pointed out here have the honour of holding all 3 of these mutually exclusive viewpoints: (1)Jews are worse than Nazis (2) There was no Holocaust (3)Hitler should have finished the job
• Creationists of the “there isn’t one shred of evidence for evolution! Not one, not one, not one etc.” type
• UFOlogists, 9/11 truthers and others of the “lack of evidence shows how well orchestrated the conspiracy is” type.
• David Icke – he thinks lizards live among us and run the show. Many such as the ADL think “lizards” is a code for “Jews”. But no, according to some evidence, he really means lizards. Yep.
• Russian nationalists who teach their 9 year old kids about “US aggression in Afghanistan” and that “none of us know how soon NATO will start bombing so we have to be ready all the time”. My jaw dropped watching this.

BUT worldviews don’t have to be bankrupt for cranks to exist. They appear in ideas that are generally pretty good in their non-cranky form (interesting to note that it’s much harder to find a pure example of any of these):