9/11 and the Left: Is there any way forward?

[Laodicean]

[JackRiddler]

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Fascinating thread to review from the start. Somehow I had not before caught the first couple of pages, which are the most interesting. They started off a prior thread on demolitions (the link to which is on the first page of this one). MacC and Nathan had some exchanges and that inspired this thread as a spin-off. (By the time I was responding, on p.4 to Alice, I mistakenly thought I was responding to a different, third thread about a video that was running at the same time. Sorry.)

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From the parent thread that spun off this one, I found this quite interesting:

Here is what I told people nearly a decade ago who asked me what I thought about 9-11.

1) Money was put up front by some entity to get a job done. Doesn't matter who -- it was laundered endlessly no doubt. The money was put up. The op was paid for.

2) It is impossible for all photos of said terrorists to be available 24 hours after the "attacks", but not have them 24 hours BEFORE the attacks. (this is an angle that I have not read elsewhere and I don't know why the mainstream never jumped on it or questioned the nil chance of this possibility. As I have said elsewhere, I have spoken with military people who become amazed by this point when I have brought it up.)

3) The plan was hatched before the cold war dinosaurs got caught in the largely open source snare known today as the Internet.

4) We know who did it. It was not Islamic radicals.

5) Now that said Internet exists they are blowing chaff up our asses in order to conceal their identity.

6) The great power of the Internet has already revealed the culprits. Opensource, distributed computing and intelligence.

7) We know who it is -- we already know the truth. Again -- chaff up our asses.

Had the Internet existed circa JFK assassination, the truth would have been known within a week.

9) They think they are smarter than us.

10) Yes, they are much more evil than anything many of us will ever fathom.

11) But we are here. Networked like never before.

And my addendum Feb 2010:

12) They are trying to triangulate the people who get it. PKD's Homoplasmate if you will.

# The Empire is the institution, the codification, of derangement; it is insane and imposes its insanity on us by violence, since its nature is a violent one.

# To fight the Empire is to be infected by its derangement. This is a paradox: whoever defeats a segment of the Empire becomes the Empire; it proliferates like a virus, imposing its form on its enemies. Thereby it becomes its enemies.

# Against the Empire is posed the living information, the plasmate or physician, which we know as the Holy Spirit or Christ discorporate. These are the two principles, the dark (the Empire) and the light (the plasmate). In the end, Mind will give victory to the latter. Each of us will die or survive according to which he aligns himself and his efforts with. Each of us contains a component of each. Eventually one or the other component will triumph in each human. Zoroaster knew this, because the Wise Mind informed him. He was the first savior. Four have lived in all. A fifth is about to be born, who will differ from the others: he will rule and he will judge us.

# Since the universe is actually composed of information, then it can be said that information will save us. This is the saving gnosis which the Gnostics sought. There is no other road to salvation. However, this information—or more precisely the ability to read and understand this information, the universe as information—can only be made available to us by the Holy Spirit. We cannot find it on our own. Thus it is said that we are saved by the grace of God and not by good works, that all salvation belongs to Christ, who, I say, is a physician.

# In seeing Christ in a vision I correctly said to him, "We need medical attention." In the vision there was an insane creator who destroyed what he created, without purpose; which is to say, irrationally. This is the deranged streak in the Mind; Christ is our only hope, since we cannot now call on Asklepios. Asklepios came before Christ and raised a man from the dead; for this act, Zeus had a Kyklopes slay him with a thunderbolt. Christ also was killed for what he had done: raising a man from the dead. Elijah brought a boy back to life and disappeared soon thereafter in a whirlwind. "The Empire never ended."

# The physician has come to us a number of times under a number of names. But we are not yet healed. The Empire identified him and ejected him. This time he will kill the Empire by phagocytosis.

http://deoxy.org/pkd_tcs.htm

And from the current thread, this was one of the most interesting bits, back in February 2010 or so:

This just occured to me, while I was browsing the recent additions to a commie email list, over whether or not the Tea Party "movement" in the US represented a proto-fascism, or just a sort of paleoconservative anti-statist/gov't movement that can't really go anywhere. There's obviously arguments on both sides: the Teabaggers are at root racist nationalists, but not all racist nationalists support militarism and some are probably pro-demobilization; Teabaggers are "psychologically ripe" for demagogery, but their ideology is a confused mishmash that isn't coherent like fascism; etc.

Then it struck me: none of that is really the point. Like you might expect from a populist movement without an academic, legal or political leadership principals it's a hodgepodge of left and right wing populist sentiments, though not nearly so much as Joe Stack's (who is, none the less, apparently a Tea Party hero despite his intermittent and inauspicious communist leanings) with no unifying theoretical principle. So what does that mean?

It means it's ripe for manipulation. It obviously opens up the Overton window--e.g., "death panels". But more to the point--the commies on the mailing list didn't seem at all aware the the far-right industrialists of the Koch funded the Tea Party's astroturfing from its more recent inception (before they stole it from the Paulistas). Why does that matter? It shows the direct interference of moneyed, capitalist interests in popular politics--going so far as to underwrite a faux-populist movement--by virtue of $$$ alone. Is that important? You fucking bet it is, when the people writing the checks want to roll back labor rights until they match the Chinese's.

So? So the exact same elements discernible in the Teabagging of late 2008-present existed in the lead-up to not only 9/11 but WTC93 and Cable Splicer, etc. In fact, look into the Kochs and JFK. Wow, it's like there's a class of industrialists and mobsters so opposed to welfare capitalism (JFK) as too leftist that they may or may not order assassinations over it, but they certainly will pour billions of dollars into decades of propaganda and covert action to prevent anything but pure neoliberal policy, to use an anachronism.

Or don't, pretend it's just a bunch of nonsense made up by the far-right "paranoid style" of America.

What it is, IOW, is direct evidence of the capitalist class acting in an adversarial mode to manipulate politics. It's history, with people, dates and dollar signs. It's the type of thing that they train everyone except historians to avoid--empiricism. Recently I read, to paraphrase, that "the bourgeois has punished Haiti since its revolution." Okay, wow, gee, duh, but can you maybe put that into dates of embargos, amounts of reparations, immigration and foreign aid policies, etc., into some vague schematically-oriented language that is largely meaningless without empirical data?

Now, I can understand the urge to avoid that sort of thing because it's possible that someone might make the "bad apples" argument about the individuals involved. But that's a horseshit argument in itself. Because you make a process-oriented, system-wide claim about something from particular pieces of data and evidence, right? Apparently, for the priesthood, you don't.

It aggravates me more than I already am irritated to say that, because I generally sympathize with these people's ends. But I don't understand the inability and unwillingness to interpret history--especially history that would serve your ends--through one's preferred lens, and instead just ignore much of it.

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(Otherwise, Indira's avenues, Dr. Graham... more vital threads that have gone completely ignored by the former 9/11 truth movement stuck with its two factions, one pathologically focused on the demolitions hypotheses, really an epistemological fallacy, the other still agitating through a bunch of powerless but bloodthirsty-sounding macho postures.)

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[8bitagent]

Everybody has THE TRUTH. (Or they "think" they do.)

They often get pretty loud about it, when challenged.

And then all listening stops.

That's where 9/11 "Truth" is today. (Or it seems so, to me.)

The 9/11 "Truth" movement pretty much became the Alex Jones bullhorn circus and the Church of Controlled Demolition(meaning, CD became 100% of the focus)
Hell, I openly enjoyed the 2006 South Park episode making fun of the truth movement(which I had been a part of for a few years by then) because it perfectly captured the insanity.

There's a reason why a lot of the left(aside from the older greyed activist types) balked at or ditched the "truth" movement...it became apparent that a lot of what was being paraded about was disinfo.

This idea that Cheney orchestrated 9/11, that a drone or no plane hit the Pentagon, that Flight 93 didnt crash in Shanksville, or that al Qaeda wasnt involved...to me these are blatantly false.

A much more likely scenario is that al Qaeda and Bin Laden's religious fantaticism is used and that they are puppeteered by a more higher network. In this case, the "official 9/11 story" can be true, as well as the notion of al Qaeda being nothing more than insane proxies. I see both the US and al Qaeda mere puppets, manipulated to fight eachother.

Here's some stuff a lot of the truth movement missed:

9/11 hijacker operative and al Qaeda leader invited to Pentagon after 9/11
http://www.foxnews.com/us/2010/10/20/al ... on-months/

FBI hijacker timeline shows the hijackers had helpers at the airports, had mysterious men in their hotels as the attacks were happening, had their credit cards all paid for(and were STILL in use after 9/11),
and had major major help from the Saudi government:
http://www.historycommons.org/news.jsp? ... 393703-423

CBS piece: Ptech, bin Laden, and the inner sanctum of the US government's agency computer systems:


Documentary for film exposing how Dubai falcon camps were where rich elites tied to governments and pals of Bush finance and use al Qaeda


I've also seen new evidence uncovered in the B Thing/Israeli Art Student/white van/Hollywood florida stake outs/Israeli Spies/Mossad angle.

But this apparently is not "sexy" enough compared to Acme bombs and fake drone planes, with Dick Cheney smoking a cigar

[8bitagent]

and just to add, someone mentioned before that the effects would have been the same whether the buildings came down or not,
i totally reject that,
i watched the buildings burning after the planes had hit and was filled with quite mixed emotions,
when the first building peeled into itself i felt a horror, trauma and disbelief like none i have ever felt,
everything changed not on 9/11, but when those buildings peeled into themselves

Absolutely! Prior to that it was a couple of horrific plane wrecks. We've all had to deal with plane wrecks, we've all seen them, experienced their reality, we all have the psychological tools to observe that from afar.

But the buildings to collapse and suddenly NOT EXIST, that was the master stroke of this operation. The satanic genius of it.

And that was THE MINDFUCK of the whole event. The mindfuck that nobody will ever get over.

That was unprecedented, unimaginable, and literally unthinkable.

That was the day the unthinkable became reality. And everybody had to just deal with it.

So it did, in fact, change everything.

It was the most powerful psyops ever. Except for ... maybe the first two nuclear bombs. But in that case, everybody knew who did it and why. 9/11 was a mystery on the day it happened and an even greater one now.

I agree...while I am exhausted on the Building 7 meme, I agree that the mind fuck of the towers simply *not* being there anymore...such imposing iconic figures of NYC, is very powerful.
In illusionist terms, one could say we had the pledge, the turn and then the prestiege.

In symbolic terms, 9/11 left America in an altered state of consciousness, a spell...for which we are still in a fugue state like fog...and a spell so powerful, even many leftists turned into war supporting asshles.

and just to add, someone mentioned before that the effects would have been the same whether the buildings came down or not,
i totally reject that,
i watched the buildings burning after the planes had hit and was filled with quite mixed emotions,
when the first building peeled into itself i felt a horror, trauma and disbelief like none i have ever felt,
everything changed not on 9/11, but when those buildings peeled into themselves

It's true, the buildings did have to fall(in the mind of whoever was behind it) Anti truthers who claim that the effect would have been the same are deluding themselves.
They have brought down the Deutche Bank floor by floor, widdling it away(sorry to CD truthers who were hoping to see them control demolish it) and thats what would have happened to
the WTC had it been left standing.

I think whoever planned it needed to ensure the towers would be brought down, so I share that view at least with CD'ers. But was it really 'controlled demolition'? "spray on nano thermite"?
Who knows. I certainly can see how 550 MPH fuel laden planes violently seering through the upper decks of towers can mess a structure up. And I think perhaps they were engineered to fall that way, like chutes.

Who made the WTC? It was David Rockefeller and the Saudi Bin Laden Group's star architect, Minoru Yamasaki. Maybe they'd know.

[Joe Hillshoist]

Great thread.

For some reason I got stuck on this song and listened to it 20 times yesterday.

(Possibly cos I'd just come acroos a little Glen beck creation I didn't know existed called the 9/12 Project.

Subtitled: We the People Demand Answers.

I though of you Jack, and had a moment of outrage on your behalf. And one of awe at the sheer awesome baldfacedness of it all.)

[JackRiddler]

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Thanks Joe, I like (if that is the word) the Ani DiFranco video!

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[Bruce Dazzling]

One for the Austerity/Schadenfreude thread...

Cuz take away our playstations and we are a third-world nation

Wow, I had never heard that awesome Ani DiFranco song.

Thanks, Joe!

[Joe Hillshoist]

Its a ripper piece of poetry isn't it.

I still can't listen to that without getting a little choked up.

yes, the lessons are all around us and a change is waiting there
so it's time to pick through the rubble, clean the streets
and clear the air

Bloody pre mature submission...

I forgot what I was gonna say, but really there's not much left to say after that:

and that was just a few years ago
so let the record show
that the FBI was all over that case
that the plot was obvious and in everybody's face
and scoping that scene
religiously
the CIA
or is it KGB?
committing countless crimes against humanity
with this kind of eventuality
as its excuse
for abuse after expensive abuse
and it didn't have a clue

I always thought that last line was a question.

[8bitagent]

One for the Austerity/Schadenfreude thread...

Cuz take away our playstations and we are a third-world nation

Wow, I had never heard that awesome Ani DiFranco song.

Thanks, Joe!

Yeah thanks for posting that, I had never heard that song. Love the lyrics, Im guessing its a 90's song...but it applies today.

Take away people's Smart Phones, xbox 360 subscription, 1000 channels...and man, theyd be complaining as if they were a Haitian refugee

[Joe Hillshoist]

Im guessing its a 90's song...but it applies today

It was written about sept 11 and the Florida election theft.

I didn't first hear it till 05.


Mind you it certainly seems like the 90s went all the way to the Iraq war sometimes.

[8bitagent]

Im guessing its a 90's song...but it applies today

It was written about sept 11 and the Florida election theft.

I didn't first hear it till 05.


Mind you it certainly seems like the 90s went all the way to the Iraq war sometimes.

A lot of people bought into the Y2K hype. I always felt the real Y2K was September 11th 2001(least it literally was in the Coptic Egyptian and Ethiopian calendar),
and that sense that day we as a world have been stuck in this walking dead, almost fugue like state. Where time stood still on September 10th, and since then it's been some weird
fog filled vestibule leading to nowhere. The Wrong Way Wizard Blog had this great review on Eyes Wide Shut a couple years ago, opining that in his view the 1999 final film of Kubrick
represented post 9/11 Manhattan; a kind of twilight hour.

On a practical level, 1999-2011 all looks and feels the same. You know when you were in the 1980's, you could look at footage or stuff from the 50's, 60's and 70's and identify each of those periods by song, dress, music and the look and style of movies? In the 90's you could look at stuff and go "man, that was so 80's".

But if you pop in The Matrix, Fight Club and other films from 1999/2000, they look like they could have been filmed yesterday. Pop music today sounds like it could have easily came from that year too.
While cells got small and then big again(smart phones), and everything has been remade/rebooted/mashed up on youtube, with everything summed up as tweets and facebook de-friending...in some ways it seems like some things(especially aesthetically) the clock is stuck a decade past.

[8bitagent]

On another forum, someone was trying to tell me that it was because of the "due diligence of the US government with cooperation from allies in the region" for the "al Qaeda" threat to have lessened.
But they said al Qaeda was still out there and hasn't been destroyed.

I responded by lamenting just how much protection al Qaeda and their financiers have received from the US government and Europe(I know, I know, in truther world al Qaeda is a "hoax")

Or...they are invited to power luncheons at the Pentagon

Or...if you're the high level al Qaeda financier and Mohamed Atta associate Mamoun Darkazanli, you're protected by German intelligence

Or..if you're top level Saudi government officials and agents who helped the hijackers,
you're protected by the US government

Hell, if you're the leaders of Qatar and give safe harbor and money to Khalid Sheikh Mohamed and Osama bin Laden, you get to do millions in business with Rudy "Mr 9/11" Guiliani

Now, if you're the biggest financier of bin Laden and al Qaeda, you get to have your backdoor software running on virtually every government system

It pays to have friends in high American government positions if you're financing and puppeteering al Qaeda, such as when Kagan helped strike down lawsuits by 9/11 family members against the Saudi kingdom. Or when the Saudis got the FBI off their back from investigating bin Laden terror financing by Saudis. Of course, even Clinton was helping to protect and free some of the highest terror chiefs in Bin Laden's cabal(around the same time the Pentagon was using al Qaeda to strike Serbian positions in the Bosnian war)

Oh wait, I forgot to mention how US funded Pakistani Intelligence supports and aids the very Taliban blowing up US troops with IED's

This is just the tip of the iceberg. And I havent even mentioned how al Qaeda linked terror groups in Pakistan are used to stage terror bombings in Iran under the complicity and support of the CIA.

There's such a large wealth of mainstream news articles showing just how much Sunni extremist groups are simply a controlled and protected proxy of both Western and Arab globalists.

[Laodicean]

On the 8th of March 2010 Cynthia Mckinney (a former US Congresswoman and 2008 Green Party Presidential nominee) and Dr Nafeez Ahmed (best selling author and political scientist) address a meeting of Members of Parliament on the subject of the need for an independent investigation into the events of September 11th 2001.

[MacCruiskeen]

There is a very pertinent discussion going on at the group blog Qlipoth right now. Best to follow it at the source:

Wednesday, April 06, 2011
Socialization of losses and...

http://qlipoth.blogspot.com/2011/04/soc ... s-and.html

...but these great and righteously angry comments (mainly by a brilliant woman who posts variously as "Molly", "Chabert" and just plain "Qlipoth") are too good to lose, so I'm archiving them here, complete with furious typos (she's a very fast typist and an even faster thinker).

Le Colonel Chabert said...

the headless chicken vision was i guess promoted by structuralist marxists too, to a point, especially in "theorising" "the state". but the best of them were caricatured by academics too...like the difference is always lost, in these "philosophy" marxists, between an explanation of how parties act and fight the class war, and an explanation of the conditions which impact upon who succeeds...the difference between explaning nazis or fascists as political agents, human actors, and explaining the situation which allowed them to prevail over competition. Academics of the sood left are always all about "not blaming" - its always about how their own class in innocent, so the explanation of the situation in which fascists act is taken for an explanation of the fascists actions and actors, and any more specific account, any rich historical materialist account, is treated with hostility.

[...]

Blogger Qlipoth said...

WK:
"mass death and instability above and beyond military/economic intention is the actual purpose?"

yeah. obviously. it's not "_beyond_ military economic intention" but it is the intention. because countries that are destroyed and in constant chaos can never become independent. The people are enslaved. What the US does not want is for Iraq to emerge from the ashes like Japan. The US empire wants most of the world to be like Haiti. The US empire does not actually believe its colonial mythology, that it could rule over client states of relatively prosperous people in a relatively stable world forever because they are childish. This was the basis of the fables about Iraq - the US wants the "cake walk" and to leave an elected puppet, a little formal democracy it can control with subtle financial and diplomatic pressures. (We knew when the Bush regime pushed early for debt amnesty for Iraq that this was not the idea). Because you can't control and exploit people that way forever - this is the fantasy of genuine white supremacists, but the actual policy makers know better from their long genocidal experience and from the history of the core. They know what was required to maintain empire (at home and abroad, i would reexpropriate that word from negrihardtism) and they know that now that there is no rival superpower, their surest thing is permanent chaos and de-civilisation, destruction of basic infrastructure, attacks on the population's physical and mental health, etc.. The US imperial managers know that they can only maintain empire over people by force and terror. The idea that the situation in Iraq and Afghanistan and Haiti is all a mistake is really silly. If it were incompetence, then there would be a greater diversity of results - sometimes something would go "right"; some policy would tend in the other direction.




so
"Is not possible that it's both planned AND subject to hubris and idiocy?"

the belief in hubris - the framing of basically a sneer at cokeheads in this fashion, as a sneer at their impiety, and a prophesy of their inevitable fated punishment by offended olympians - is the kind of superstition that the ruling class' courtier intellectuals inculcate in the public, for obvious reasons. Hubris and Karma belong to the same loose vocab of confidence in the morality of the existing system guaranteed by God.

You have to be a believer to consider this as an exaplanation for anything.

"And isn't a lot of leftist argument against 'conspiracy theory' that it makes the ruling class appear more competent and omnipotent than they actually are?"

Well I wouldn't say it's an argument so much as a line, a packaged opinionette. The pseudo left dissidents who are in the pay of capital do routinely insist that only paranoid sick people see the ruling class as a coordinated, cohesive (to varying degrees at different times) bloc of the population - the proprietors of the means of social reproduction and their upper servnts- acting to protect their common interests. The is no shortage of pundits and intellectuals who are well rewarded - or hope to be - for repeating incessantly that the ruling class are flawed, well-meaning people who really have very little power and that anyone who thinks otherwise should be committed to an asylum.

...

8:48 PM
Blogger Qlipoth said...

So far from "omnipotence", the servants of the ruling class repeat their own sincere beliefs (having nothing to do with being paid to think this way) that the ruling class certainly has not enough powervto oppress anyone or exploit anyone who is not complicit and whose complicity and volunary servitude is really the block to liberation.

Not only to theyu have so little power, they don't even really know how to use the little power they have and end up bungling sometimes by using it in their own interests in ways that don't alwyas share the benefits when they mean sincerely to promote the commonweal.


It's as fanciful and superstitious a belief as that the Gods are going to punish Henry Paulson for his arrogating their divine perogatives.

The ruling class itself - the owners of capital - isn't especially competent, but they have the smartest, best informed, best trained people as their servants, with fantastic resources of information and analysis, and the class as a whole defer to the smartest and most successful of their own number with regard to strategy and policy.

And I don't care about people harping about "conspiracy theory" anymore. Fifteen years ago one could see some people were worried about ZOG-type stuff, but now this has really just deteriorated into a way of intimidating people into silence about the obvious. Nobody even claims "al Qaeda" was behgind the anthrax attacks on congress and the media anymore but has any one of these shreilkers, these sneering soodleft fuckheads apologised for their tireless verbal abuse, their veiled threats, their insinuations that people who were unconvincedf should be locked up, straightjacketed, and electroshocked? Until I see some apologies from the leadetrs of that I don't even want to hear about "conspiracy theory" in that connotation. These smae people shriek constantly about conspiracy theory in response to everything that five weeks later they are obliged to accept as established historical record. It was a conspiracy theory to suspect the bush regume was lying about wmd, that the NYTimes reporters were working for US intelligence, that the anthrax was not sent by any pious muslims, that the US was behind the death quads in Iraq and the bombing of mosques, that Private Lynch story was fake, that the US deliberately provoked an insurgency in Iraq to have an excuse to occupy forever, that the treasury wasn't going to buy "toxic assets" from a range of banks with the tarp funds, that US intelligence was involved in Mumbai, that the US was blocking aid to haiti earthquake victims, every one of these things, unless printed by the most sober white man in the most sober pub (say, Greenwald) sets off the shrieks of conspiracy theory! conspiracy theory!

I begin to feel that I can't take anyone seriously who uses this term anymore.

THE US GOV IS VERY CORRUPT.

OBAMAMANIA WAS ASTROTURF MARKETING.

THE RULING CLASS MANAGEMENT DOES NOTHING BUT CONSPIRE NOW.


those who are just stamping their feet insisting that nothing is planned, that they personally could really outwit the US imperial overlords if they wished - these are the people who actually fir that caricature of the greasy nerd in the tinfoil hat on the plaid sofa. The person who has to whinge about "conspiracy theory" every time someone informed raises points about ruling class strategy.

8:48 PM
Blogger Qlipoth said...

Reember the Pentagon actually ANNOUNCED IN THE PAPER they were going to arrange death squads in Iraq. THEY ANNOUNCED they were going for "the Salvadoran option". The sent Negroponte, expert, to Iraq.

A few lonths later, there are the deathsquads at work. Their deeds are reported in the press. And these bruilliuant leftists, sober rational reasonable analysts, are informling us it must be IRAN!! And you say to them - look, these are negroponte's death squads, look ehre in the msms three months ago they said they had to go for the "salvadoran option".*

Oh no, chabert, not another conspiracy theory!

9:16 PM
Blogger Qlipoth said...

Kenoma - one of the things Gowan stressed was that the big financial crises - Mexico, Asian crises, Argentina - happened with considerable time between them, one at a time, but that this was just how it happened to occur. There was no reason for this. But because it happened this way, the bailouts were possible. But had two happened at once, it would have been beyond repair. So they learned that inevitably there was a crisis coming that could really fuck them, from which they could be losers, sooner or later. And the solution was their "disaster capitalism" way of thinking - what if we make the crisis (which we can do) instead of trying to prevent it (which we may not be able to do)?

9:34 PM
Blogger Qlipoth said...

"something I think you'd recognize from the pages of the NLR"


yes, and weirdly the worst afflicted is the supposed "political marxist", Brenner.

yeah there is an absurd misreading of marx here beneath it all -something whose many effects are analysed by Charles Mills .

Rather probably not a misreading so much as a nonreading. I am pretty sure now that a lot of these celebrity marxists have read very little marx. Like althusser they have picked up famous chapters and passages, but never read capital, really have no idea what it's about or what it says. And what they have read they take in this strange pomo solipsist way, as a kind of allegory of their own experiences of consuming cocaculture.

10:04 PM
Blogger Qlipoth said...

"But the stupidity/hubris thesis is just tacked on as bald assertion, and seems to be compelling"

one thing that has to be conceded is that it is complicated. look back at a great series in the New Yorker about one of these insider trading trials related to drexel. The prosecution had to spend the first two months just teaching the jury about investment banking so that they could understand the charges, and what was illegal.

A lot of the bourgeois left dissidents, too, are unusually ignorant for their class. ("Conspiracy Theory" can often mean "I wouldn't have thought of that." Well you're a professor of political theory at UCLA and not head of development for Bertlesmann North America; what you ordinarily think is by no means the limit of what can be thought by people with command of vast social resources and knowledge.)

The pundit left spend their lives in academia, which they take for a microcosm of the world (for Foucault, a prison was a kind of school). They have no idea how competent people really are at upper rungs of big companies.

10:33 PM
Blogger Qlipoth said...

h and WK about "conspiracy theory" and its critics on the left.

Don't you think the critics of "conspiracy theory" who worked so hard to incriminate religious muslims for acts of terrorism and to demonise and pathologise anyone who merely stated that were not persuaded that cases had been proven against these fiendish evil people, and who thus really helped establish the climate which has allowed for the mass round ups and tortures in the vast US gulag - tens of thousands of victims - may not really be the best judges of what kind of conversation is safest for "the left" to have? Since their own idiotic utterances have demonstrably assisted in enabling mass murder and torture?

I don't want advice from those people who believed that preposterous anthrax story about what is rational and what makes the left look ridiculous. These people have the critical faculties of toddlers entranced in front of disney cartoons. They are krackheads of kultukewlness. They do not think, they worry about how to present themselves. What they say has nothing to do with what they deem actually reasonable and true, but what they think will make them seem reasonable to an audience that is a figment credated by Murdoch. And these people are not even ashamed to admit this is their criteria because they have no notion of what's wrong with it. Opportunists who can argue ferociously and viciously for positions they don't believe as easily as for those they do. They are "politics as pr" and they promote plenty of "conspiracy theories" like the nefarious plot of the "liberal multiculturalists" they peddle following zizek which he got out of the protocols.

They will happily see everyone who they think might taint their kewlness by proximity strapped to a table and shocked until smoke comes out of their ears.

11:33 PM

http://qlipoth.blogspot.com/2011/04/soc ... s-and.html

[A short note about the blog Qlipoth is probably in order here, because the comments box can look pretty confusing to anyone not familiar with the site. It was started by "Molly" a few years ago as "a kind of experiment" in anonymous group blogging. She invited me and a few other people to take part in it, and we in turn are free to invite anyone to join in. I don't think anyone knows exactly how many qlipoths there now are, and I only know the offline identity of one of them (hers). Some of the qlipoths also have their own blogs elsewhere (and their own blog-names), but some don't, and many of us just log in as "qlipoth". So you get the weird and disorienting impression, sometimes, of one person called "Qlipoth" arguing incessantly with herself or himself in a range of writing styles. However, anyone with a Google account can submit a comment under the posts under any name they choose. (There is also one very unhappy and rabidly misogynistic troll there [just in the comments boxes, not as a member of the blog team], whom Molly is too kind to ban.)

Finally: "qlipoth" is a term from the Kabbalah (though the blog is anything but religious, mystical or esoteric), and the motto is taken from Beckett:

"What matter who's speaking, someone said, what matter who's speaking."]

[MacCruiskeen]

This is fantastic, again from Molly (in reply to W. Kasper), earlier in the same thread:

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9:13 PM
Blogger W. Kasper said...

"there is a transition underway to something like Plato's Republic."

It's the cheesiest of sci-fi scenarios, and conspriatorial, but it's telling how only the poorest people I know are prepared to accept that's what's happening. Many in the middle class deluded by notions of luck, merit and justice. There's a huge, rapid, re-definition of 'citizenship' (if not 'human') going on right now. Even basic policing is vanishing where I live (UK) - their energies appear more directed at dissenting organisations etc. Street crime, rape etc: no longer a priority. Intersting how our government wants to reduce jail numbers. In the past year alone, worker/employer imbalance has adjusted sharply. 'Small businessman' rhetoric isn't part of the package - they're just proles like everyone else now. And no, there won't be as much violence required. Media etc. can just create mutual suspicion, fear and rebooted ideas of 'normal' to keep most of us quiet.


1:32 AM
Blogger Molly said...

cheesy sci fi and conspiratorial why? I think the feeling, the position of spectatorship, is so powerful,that people who are used to watching characters on television, and knowing more than those characters, feel they watch the ruling class on television and know more than the ruling class. So as characters don't live in the world where they can watch later episodes of their show to know their fate, the ruling class is presumed not to live in the same universee as we do where all the books available to us exist. They can't know, as we know, the the global financial system is unstable; they can't know as we know that there is climate change; they can't know as we know that we are trying to organise resistance to them; they're in a bubble, they react impulsively to everything, the news, which takes them by surprise every day. This is how many clerk class people think of the ruling class - as being fictional characters incapable of interpreting their dramas as we the spectators interpret them with all our theory the ruling class has no access to. They are the people who know only what is printed in the NYTimes and who believe it childishly.

In the US there is more awareness, quicker recognition, because of the history of slavery which is not a faded-to-nothing memory to african-americans. people recognise the effort to return the population to slavery. it was recognised in the Katrina operation - which did put into action the plan for mass detention that was revealed at the Iran Contra hearings. People flown all over the country, treated as prisoners, parents seperated from children...If you speak plainly about this you are denounced as a conspiracy theorist but that is just the usual propagandistic intimidation. The city was ethnically cleansed, it was a rehearsal. Even the once sacred rights of private property were denied. Then Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram...these are genuine developments. The volunteer thought police on the academic pseudo-left of course will leap all over anyone doing more than mildly criticising these as bad policy. Right wing talk radio, Fox News and Zizney of course are out front with a) the tortures not directly ordered b) they are not really tortures but the equivalent of frat hazing c) anyone who criticises this is acting like the US didn't torture before and is therefore naive and uncool and an apologist for prior torture d) anyone who criticises this is a thirdworldist left relvativist and an apologist for the "much worse" tortures we know happen "in China and the Arab World".

So these significant developments are not to be noticed, not to be understood. It's uncool to oppose them. So one gets bogged down even trying to fend off the abuse one gets just for mentioning these things and this kind of prevents really the sinking in of what it means, and the assassination sqauds, the warrantless wiretaps, how significant the developments are. Similarly, the pseudo-left astroturfers focus on young people sneering and attacking them as naive if they attempt to force international and domestic law to remain in effect...they are uncool because as we know the law isn't God's divine justice but the instrument of power etc etc.. and to try to force the rule of law is to be a naif who thinks earthly courts are God's own bench, Jesus' way of protecting the weak, and doesn't get that "the system is the problem". But soon all this propaganda won't be needed, because we are terrorised. One didn't quite get how terrorised we all were until Obamamania and the fears of martial law. But the ferocity of the volunteer thought police regarding the government tortures and detentions - bradley manning now - speaks of repression and painful denial. We are terrorised - wde are afraid of our goivernment, afraid to disobey, afraid to be tortured. Thus the patently disgusting performance of the left about Assange, like its a big joke, he's a schmuck, maybe a rapist, maybe a cia agent, therefore it's funny he could end upo in the custody of the US torture gulag! hahaha! let's make jokes about his arrogance and take bold stands as defenders of feminism when we demand his extradition, demand complaince with the US torturers. He's a probable rapist after all.. not a boy scout. Like people said about the Jews next door when taken away well he never said good morning on the stairs, well he left his garbage on the stoop, well he was nconsiderate, an embezzler, beat his kids, played his violin at all hours when people were sick and needed sleep...

the US petty bourgeoisie has gone along with a great deal already, not only passively accepting but helping out, volunteering to police criticism, denouncing the alarmists, insisting nothing has really changed, being quite clear tyhat they trust the US gov enough to wish to see assange extradicted to a regime which sees him as a terrorist, and tortures terrorists, because he has been accused of a crime.

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