So, you believe in conspiracy theories, do you?

[DrVolin]

I would wager my life is at least as interesting as Mr. Brooker's. And just out of interest, I almost never remember my dreams. I can count on one hand the dreams I've remembered in the last 10 years.

[medicis]

I know this may be irrelevant now but.... regarding this quote from Tom:

"If your waking life is mundane, it'll inject some thrills into your night-time imaginings to maintain a healthy overall fun quotient. So if you work in a cardboard box factory, and your job is to stare at the side of each box as it passes along a conveyor belt, to ensure they're all uniform and boxy enough - and you do this all day, every day, until your mind grows so dissociated and numb you can scarcely tell where the cardboard ends and your body begins - when your daily routine is THAT dull, chances are you'll spend each night dreaming you're the Emperor of Pluto, wrestling a 6ft green jaguar during a meteor storm in the desert just outside Vegas."

Years.. more than I choose to count, ago, I worked for a very large landscaping company in my first summer after graduating High School and before leaving for Miami U. of Ohio (from which I flunked out). There were two main divisions of the company. One maintained lawns and stuff.. the other, in which I worked, put in lawns and stuff. Large stuff.. all the lawns and trees and bushes and ground cover for developments as well as such things as football field....

And it was in the latter that I recall a hideous few days walking behind a dump truck throwing rocks and crap into the truck bed. Hot as hell and a whole hell of a lot of rocks and crap.

Although I later became a forman when I returned to work for them during the summer of 1970 when KSU shut down (and before getting a job at a children's psych hospital and the beginning of my career) and I really needed a job. My Housing Maintenance job at KSU had shut down, of course because the school closed for the summer....

Anyway, and sorry to meander along.... ' I ' dreamed of picking up rocks. Lots and lots of rocks. Dreams seem to have, at least as one of their functions, the consolidation of information obtained during the day. Consolidating rocks in your sleep is a strange thing to endure.

Now, in contrast, last night I dreamed of one of my wives... and bizarre occurrences in New Mexico... And again... that was a strange thing to endure.

Go figure. Maybe that's why I smoked pot all those other years and suppressed the memories of the damn things....

[thegovernmentflu]

The glaring problem - and it's glaring in 6,000 watt neon, so vivid and intense you can see it from space with your eyes glued shut - is that with any 9/11 conspiracy theory you care to babble can be summed up in one word: paperwork.

Imagine the paperwork. Imagine the level of planning, recruitment, coordination, control, and unbelievable nerve required to pull off a conspiracy of that magnitude. Really picture it in detail. At the very least you're talking about hiring hundreds of civil servants cold-hearted enough to turn a blind eye to the murder of thousands of their fellow countrymen. If you were dealing with faultless, emotionless robots - maybe. But this almighty conspiracy was presumably hatched and executed by fallible humans. And if there's one thing we know about humans, it's that our inherent unreliability will always derail the simplest of schemes.

It's hard enough to successfully operate a video shop with a staff of three, for Christ's sake, let alone slaughter thousands and convince the world someone else was to blame.

Using this article's logic, it would be impossible for enemy governments like Saddam's regime to actually have committed the massive nefarious conspiracies the US and British governments tell us they're guilty of.

Remember how the mainstream media always pointed out that the Soviet Union's media was 100% state-run propaganda designed to mislead their population, and they now speak the same way of Iran? Nonsense! Too many people would have to be involved. Are you saying that some shadowy guys in a room came to every individual in the Iranian media and told them what to say, and nobody ever came forward? Stop spewing hate!

Remember how the mainstream media reported on the Hussein rape rooms and torture rooms? Well, that's conspiracy bullshit. You're telling me that they could run rape rooms in the palaces? How did they get away with that? Too many people would have to be involved blah blah blah spew hate blah blah blah Pluto blah blah blah tinfoil.

If someone like the author of this article is going to maintain consistent positions that can stand up to logic, they'll have to admit that large government conspiracies actually DO take place and that they actually only think it's ridiculous that such conspiracies could take place within their OWN country's government.... which is obviously an idiotic position to take. If they're hesitant to admit that they actually believe something that illogical, then the only other position they could take is that it actually IS impossible to pull off large scale conspiracies anywhere in the world, which would also mean that our media must be lying about enemy nations' governments being able to pull off such massive conspiracies. But if they say this they're also acknowledging that conspiracies can occur, since a Western media that deliberately misleads the public would itself be a conspiracy. So in either case the person has to contradict his own illogical position.

[smiths]

it is my contention that the guardian got marked some years ago,
it was probably the most left wing establishment paper in britain,
but was crucially very popular across the world via the web

the direction it has taken in the last four years is no accident,

personaly i am saddened because for a long while it was a daily read for me, now it is a never read

[orz]

Charlie Brooker is usually pretty good but this is disappointing. He should probably stick to making fun of reality TV shows.

Mind you if I had a column in the Guardian I'd probably troll like that too. I like to think I'd be a bit more imaginative than "lol wacky conspiracy theories are dumb" tho.

[orz]

Just what does he suppose happens during war? (Or Katrina or Reaganomics, for that matter. )
Millions die as people do their 9-5 jobs financing and support it.

This is totally spot on and I really wish it could somehow be communicated to Brooker in a way that he'd actually take seriously (ie not on the guardian comments page, and not preceeded by accusing him of being paid by MI5 etc). It's important even outside the context of 9/11 theories, and it's not something that people think about enough.

[gnosticheresy_2]

Mind you if I had a column in the Guardian I'd probably troll like that too.

This.

Charlie Brooker has been pretty funny in the past, tvgohome used to make me laugh on a regular basis and Screen Burn was pretty interesting (and funny).

He's trolling. And you guys are falling for it.

And as for the Guardian going in "a new direction" for the last four years, all I can say is eh? I've been reading it for 20+ years and it's always been the paper that sets the upper bounds on how left wing you can be in public discourse in the UK (i.e. not very). Any rightward drift started happening in the early nineties if not before, accelerating with the death of John Smith and Blair's rise to power.

[massen]

Don't you think this just might be a bit too important a subject to go 'trolling' in national newspapers over? Judging by some of the reactions I have seen and heard to this 'article' this kind of attitude has a resonance with a surprising amount of people.

I suppose one good thing that's come out of it is that it has further revealed some of the extent of the credulity and naivety of so many, how far they have swallowed offical theories for which there is very little or no evidence and how hard it is for some people* to even consider the possibility that there might be such a thing as consipiracy within a government.

* Particularly among self-defined 'anarchists' I note - the reason given being that it is 'disempowering' to believe in such things. Hmm, even if they are true?

[crikkett]

I would wager my life is at least as interesting as Mr. Brooker's. And just out of interest, I almost never remember my dreams. I can count on one hand the dreams I've remembered in the last 10 years.

That's a side effect of good pot, isn't it?. Interesting waking life, no need to dream. :wink:

Think of it as a balancing procedure carried out by the brain to stop you getting bored to death.

Good. I am about to be bored to death.

[Telexx]

I can appreciate writing that challenges me to revisit my assumptions and strip out lazy thinking, but this is weak.

FWIW, Charlie Brooker was one of the writers of Brass Eye's Paedoggedon, a 2001 mockumentary about paedophilia. Reading this I can see now how Brooker could find comedy in "paedo hysteria."

Brooker can be quite funny, and I like his TV work, however I agree that this is a weak piece.

However, as a satirist yourself Jeff, I'm surprised that you don't find the media-generated "paedo hysteria" that exists in the UK atm (e.g. a Welsh paediatrician having her house vandalised and the word "Paedo!" daubed across her door, etc) precisely the sort of topic that deserves a satirists attention.

BTW: Chris Morris is fantastic and Brass Eye (the main series, the paedo-special was quite weak) is well worth a look. Although not perfect, it phased into genius quite frequently:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ER0zKTGI2g8 ("A length of skin-clad tube...")

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xbq3kc29 ... re=related ("F.U.K.D & B.O.M.B.D - Cake, it's a made up drug").

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0N_CHOZ ... re=related ("Sodomised electrons")

Cheers,

Telexx

[massen]

If Morris had been involved it would more likely have been funny and pointed, and might have actually given people pause to think about their assumptions.

As it is this article is an example of exactly the sort of thing Jeff was talking about here:

Regardless of how informed our speculations may be, we should know by now they will never be respectable so long as the conventions that protect the criminals in high places remain assumed by the Gatekeepers, and uninformed argument-by-ridicule is sufficient to silence critics beyond the gate.
http://rigorousintuition.blogspot.com/2 ... ormal.html

Except as Brooker himself has to note many more people are now peering beyond the gate. Hey, maybe he was trying to provoke debate after all?

[Telexx]

If Morris had been involved it would more likely have been funny and pointed, and might have actually given people pause to think about their assumptions.

As it is this article is an example of exactly the sort of thing Jeff was talking about here:

Regardless of how informed our speculations may be, we should know by now they will never be respectable so long as the conventions that protect the criminals in high places remain assumed by the Gatekeepers, and uninformed argument-by-ridicule is sufficient to silence critics beyond the gate.
http://rigorousintuition.blogspot.com/2 ... ormal.html

Except as Brooker himself has to note many more people are now peering beyond the gate. Hey, maybe he was trying to provoke debate after all?

Agreed, agreed (particularly 'uninformed argument-by-ridicule'), and agreed.

As it stands Brooker's column now has 876 comments (and rising). I'm certainly not going to plough through them but I imagine that both sides of the divide ("9/11 was an inside job" vs. "conspiracy theorists are emotionally stunted fantasists") are represented poorly due to frothing emotions, ill-formed thinking, and shrieking voices.

Whatever... I've been through my abjectly terrified phase, sickened outrage phase, an evangelical didactic phase ("FFS! Open your eyes and see!"), and am now decidedly nonplussed by the whole shebang.

As a therapist I've learnt that, terror-tactics aside, you can only change the minds of people who want to change.

Cheers,

Telexx

[bks]

No matter how common it's become, when I see crap like this from Booker (who obviously does not care how stupid he sounds) or like this from some asshole named Virginia Heffernan, I'm still just flabbergasted.

http://themedium.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/08/milgram-the-torturers-of-new-haven-and-the-truth-of-that-obedience-experiment/

Heffernan's article should stop an intelligent reader DEAD. Who the fuck at the NYT had the idea to give space to someone who cannot even be bothered to WATCH THE ENTIRE 45-MINUTE FILM of Milgram's first study, let alone conduct actual research on it? What kind of pressure must these hacks be under to fill space, if they deem it appropriate for an empty-headed know-nothing to offer uninformed opinions on one of the most well-known and controversial studies of the 20th century? If this column made the cut, exactly which ones don't make the cut?

[/code]

[pepsified thinker]

(Of course) I disagree with him, but when he says this:

Like nutbag creationists, they fixate on thinly spread, cherry-picked nuggets of "evidence" and ignore the thundering mass of data pointing the other way.

I think he's got a good point. I don't mean to stake out a position and invite all comers, but the way analysis of 9-11 goes from a discrepancy in the timelines of various witnesses, or some other 'nugget', to a conclusion of some sort, is often painful to read.

And we probably have a lot in common with those drawn to challenging evolution--except that they're friggin' nuts, and we're just 'ahead' of the masses. (I believe that even though I say it sardonically--is there an emoticon for that?)

There are bound to be (occasional) idiots, or just overly-enthused people--I'm guilty on both counts more often than I care to admit--who happen to buy into the 'Truth' movement.

That's what Brooker is talking about--or exploiting, if you will. His limitation is that he is unable or unwilling to look beyond the examples of such folks to the evidence itself. He sees a less-than-solidly-supported conclusion and dismisses the 'nugget' on which it's based, and anyone who sounds like they're saying the same thing. That's sophomoric on his part.

But it makes an easy target for his kind of 'writing'.

Which is why he's unable/unwilling to look beyond such.

But a few rebuttal thoughts: if the 9-11 NYFD folks, whose lives are not what I would think of as boring, raising questions, does that make their questions more credible? Or if the overall 'boring' quotient of 9-11 Truth folks is exceeded by those accepting the official story, does that show something?

Also--he's making a slam at bureaucracy, saying it limits governments' actions (I see this addressed in others comments here). I think he's got a two-pronged attack going on with that, slamming 9-11 Truth folks, but also playing to GOP/Neo-cons with the 'any govt. is bad govt.'.

But further: the idea that such a conspiracy would be impossible because such action would involve insurance forms and written memos, and so on is, again, a demonstration of Brooker' limitations. But it has interested me and frustrated me to no end, that people seem to play be unspoken rules, and 'get' jokes, etc. that I did not get. Growing up the youngest in my family (nuclear and extended) might be a reason for this. At one point I bought up old ettiquette books--for laughs, and as cultural articfacts, but also because I had a fascination with such (unspoken) 'rules'.

The extent to which those in higher realms of power, and/or those who are social more adept, are able to play by such rules is a factor that's not adequately documented/incorporated in the arguments of Truthers and such.

Lastly, just out of curiosity, why did Brooker stop buying the Oliver Stone theory of 'JFK'? The use of that as a reference point in explaining/justifying 'conspiracy theory' is getting almost to the point of 'cliche' but,

...it's kinda interesting how Dallas and a grassy knoll are such central, enduring, potent turning point for so many.

[tom the mad]

I like this comment from the thread on this subject at....

http://www.911forum.org.uk/board/viewto ... 7dba2392f1

"Why does it have to be a "huge" number of people involved? If 19 Arabs could do it without any access to the government controls then why not 19 rogue members of the US administration? If three muslim bombers could carry out the 7/7 bombings then why not a few Mossad agents? If there needed to be a "huge" number of "Islamic terrorists" involved then why have there been no whistleblowers from their ranks."

The Guardian........anyone who employs Nick Cohen, and used to employ David Aaronovitch.....clearly shows where their heart lies....
(cheerleaders for the invasion of Iraq)

Interesting evening coming up.......

"9/11 - Finding The Truth - What Really Happened"

A mind blowing presentation by Andrew Johnson formerly of Scholars for 9/11 Truth

Many people around the world are now realising that the official story of 9/11 is almost completely false. In this presentation, we will look at the evidence as to why the story is false, but we will also look at how some elements of the 9/11 Truth Movement seem to be trying to cover up a secret which has the potential to transform the future of mankind. Prepare to be absolutely astounded by the scientific evidence. Controversial as it may be, the findings are impossible to dismiss.

NEW HORIZONS St Annes ...MONDAY 21st JULY 2008

http://www.newhorizonsstannes.com/