Your "serious opinion" boils down to nihilism, though - you're arguing that nobody knows anything, errbuddy shaddap. That's fine. That's all well and good. The issue occurs when you advance that viewpoint while others are very much clearly not sharing it.

I can and do assume you're not trying to piss me off. But you're succeeding anyway. Me? I do my level best to only piss people off on purpose and presume that most thinking human beings follow suit. Accidentally pissing someone off, after all, fucks your whole day up. So this can go one of two ways:

K - "did you mean to piss me off?"

Q - "no, sorry"

K - "K"

- or -

K - "did you mean to piss me off?"

Q - "no, but I'll respond in a way that clearly means to piss you off"

K - "okay great I guess that's the end of meaningful discussion"

The intelligence community harbors some of the world's most repulsive monsters and always has. There's no reason to trust what they say. On the other hand, assembling a list of verifiable facts in order to assess any given situation requires zero trust. The only thing you have to worry about is the veracity of your sources and the more data points that agree, the more you can trust your data. Are their lies afoot? Fer sure. You may have missed it but you're currently engaged in a slapfight in a post the content of which is me arguing the US government is using this balloon to escalate their counterintelligence operations. The lie is the story. All models are wrong, but some are useful.

And when I'm the guy evaluating the facts and putting them up for discussion? And your discussion is it's all hateful bullshit anyway?

and if it makes no difference to you whether I'm trying to do it or not, can you get over it?

Clearly, it does make a difference to me. I recognize that your world feels safer when nobody cares what you think or say, but I do. Believe it or not I make an effort not to antagonize my friends, and hope that my friends feel similarly.