Jeff wrote:Remember justdrew's comment in the original post: No credible researcher claims to know the truth.
Jeff, if you feel the line's important enough to reproduce in bold type, then you should at least not edit out the final one-word qualifier:
justdrew wrote:No credible researcher claims to know the truth - yet.
Which is true but only trivially so, because 'research' essentially just means 'a search for the truth in a particular area of study' and there's no point in looking for what you already think you know you have. Nonetheless, this didn't prevent the NIST Circus, the Kean-Hamilton-Zelikow Circus, and the Corporate Media Circus from doing precisely that. After all, they were getting paid for what they did -- i.e., confirming a set of carefully-circumscribed hypotheses handily supplied to them by their government as indubitable fact -- and money is a cult that can corrupt even researchers who are even more honest than they.
Of course, every researcher, whether credible or incredible, does start with one or more initial hypotheses, held with a greater or lesser degree of conviction (cf. Chomsky and Herman's well-researched 'Propaganda Model' of the media); because otherwise that research would have no shape, form or direction. And at the same time, every
honest researcher (e.g., Chomsky and Herman) will attend to all of the relevant evidence as it becomes available, both that which tends to confirm his preferred hypothesis and that which tends to disconfirm it. Otherwise, it's not credible research; instead, it's the kind of thing Senator Max Cleland described as "a scam".
And to what end do researchers research? Well obviously: to know the truth eventually, as far as that's humanly possible.
Not to pretend, grotesquely, that there's no such thing as truth, or at least no hope of ever discovering it.
To think every researcher, to be relevent, needs to give obeisance to 9/11 Truth (whatever that is supposed to mean today), is just more circus cult auto-destruct sequence.
Nobody -- least of all the person into whose mouth you put those words --is demanding that Naomi Klein or anyone else "needs to" "give obeisance" to anything whatsoever.
In fact, all the guy did was to quote her incredibly weak, lazy and evasive rote-response to a perfectly polite and reasonable and relevant question:
Quote:
Hal Sisson's question was, "In view of your remarks relating to events which create economic emergencies and subsequent capitalistic opportunities and predations - disaster capitalism - do you have any comment or opinion in regard to the fact that many of them may well be covert false-flag operations by rogue elements of western government or intelligence agencies - events such as 9/11, the Gulf of Tonkin or the Madrid and British bombings?" This was exactly what I kept thinking about all evening while she described events like Katrina, the tsunami that devastated the coasts of Southeast Asia, or the fires in Greece. In many instances governments will clearly manipulate people's misfortune to push through repressive laws and gross examples of economic opportunism after such events, but I was also interested in her thoughts on how some of these events are purposely created within the Hegelian dialectic. Although she is clearly willing to unveil post 9/11 misdeeds such as the out-sourcing of war operations to Halliburton and Blackwater, it is the event itself and the forces behind it to which Hal Sisson's interrogative bespeaks. Her answer started out all right - she said, "First of all, I'm not so sure I would put anything past these people. It's just that with these conspiracy theories I feel that we're taking away all this energy that could be going toward other issues that are so important right now".
Useful things, quotes, especially when they're both accurate
and relevant.
Even quotes that are accurate but irrelevant can be made to do a job of rhetorical work, though, as you demonstrate here:
Jeff wrote:Kevin Barrett
wrote of Chomsky, "If he convinces even one person to do something other than work for 9/11 truth, he may as well have personally murdered all 6 billion people on earth." Then how come Barrett's killin' me here?
Yes, that was incredibly stupid of Barrett, but then he does have a tendency to say incredibly stupid things. But so what? So what, exactly? In other news, a guy in the pub said something incredibly stupid about Occam's Razor the other day, but I don't really see any point in sharing it with the board. Because the plain fact is that an incredible number of people -- including corporate hacks, government spokesmen, and even people as smart as Naomi Klein -- say an incredible number of incredibly stupid things every single day.
Or at least that's my hypothesis. Maybe I can get a grant to research it.
Or maybe there is in fact no such thing as the truth, or at least no hope of ever discovering it, even through honest research."Ich kann gar nicht so viel fressen, wie ich kotzen möchte." - Max Liebermann,, Berlin, 1933
"Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts." - Richard Feynman, NYC, 1966
TESTDEMIC ➝ "CASE"DEMIC
