re: Are you / we addicted to outrage?

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Yeah, and people were ridiculed for believing them. Now we know some of them were factual, so people are naturally going to be more receptive to additional, similar explanations. They'd be naive fools not to.

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As with so many things in life, it comes down to a matter of degree. There's a big difference in my world between believing that the FBI doesn't investigate people equally depending upon their political affiliation (which is confirmed to the point that it's not a belief anymore) and believing that if a plane happens to crash this week it had to be engineered by Joo Illuminati to distract everyone from some bombing that Israel engaged in in Gaza.

There's an application of reasoned thought process and evidence in the former. In the latter there's no thought process and nothing but pure circular reasoning, begging the question, and confirmation bias based on having accepted the conspiracy premise before even considering the event.

And again, there's two sides to all of this. Some conspiracy theories that people were ridiculed for believing were proven to be true, o.k.— based on that fact you could come to a wide range of conclusions (including but not limited to):

1. Society/government is becoming unworkably corrupt, so we have to do something extreme to survive it and everyone should be ready to take to the streets over it, abandon principles over it, etc.! AAAAAHHHHH!!! REEEEEEEEEE!!!! Civil war! California should secede!

2. Interesting. You know, it's probably been much this way my whole life, we just didn't know about it. (Notice that this viewpoint does not deny any evidence of truth nor discount future theories with evidence to support them. It simply doesn't melt down about the whole thing).

Like the fact that violent crime was much higher when I was growing up in the 70s than it is now. But everybody thinks it's higher now because we hear so much more about it. That doesn't mean that one shouldn't take precautions against crime. It does mean that becoming a paranoid neurotic, believing that a violent killer is behind every corner, is probably not a good idea.

I think it's very likely that many of these things probably happened even more often or even more egregiously in the past, when things were much easier to get away with. If you think about past abuses of governmental power that we do know about, like local police brutality, that seems to fit the trend.