rigorousintuition.ca

some clown, Arthur Goldwag, has a very boiler plate "truther" hit-piece up... please feel free to take a swing...

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/11/03/goldwag-some-thought.html

here's the post I made:
(more in reply to other comments than the op)

oh great, the standard Coincidence Theorist has spoken...

Goldwag's dismissal of serious questions around 9/11 is standard, by-the-book garbage. As usual he mentions the more loony stuff and completely avoids the facts that clearly show that the "official explanation" is bull.

There are two types of "9/11 truth" out there though, there's the non-sense designed to discredit (pushed by professional disinfo artists and the mildly deranged) and then there's the really serious facts pointing to some kind of real truth beyond the official lies. No credible researcher claims to know the truth - yet.

I have neither the time nor interest to go through this whole comments section responding to all the arrogant dickery on display. Rest assured there are more facts out there than should be necessary to convince any non-biased thinker than a real new investigation is needed.

All of you arrogant defenders of orthodoxy need to consider - 20 years ago you would have been just as SURE that the US was attacked in the Gulf of Tonkin - and you'd have been just as wrong as you are today. but hey - you think you know better, fine, sleep easy.

I know some folks would disagree with what I've said there, and are very convinced of CD, but I'm not. I just think it's clear that we haven't been told the truth, major clear avenues of investigation were never followed by "the authorities" etc... Maybe someone has a link to a good one pager on why the official story has to be lie?

Frikkin' Naomi Klein just gave two speeches in the SF Bay area and she lies about 9/11 and repeatedly uses the expression, "conspiracy theorist."

She's been doing this deceptive evasion for two years since her book, 'Shock Doctrine, ' was published.

Excellent 2007 article about her presentation's sin(s) of omission-

http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/view/40143

Naomi or Noam am I
Peter Zaza
October 12, 2007
Not sure if that's a clue for a cryptic crossword, or I'm about to tell you a story.

I went to see Naomi Klein a few nights ago here in Victoria BC Canada. She was finishing up a book tour for her recently released "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism" before heading abroad for the next stage of her promotional tour.
.....

Let me get this straight. She writes a book called "Shock Doctrine: the rise of disaster capitalism" but fails to mention that 9/11 is a part of that?

Wow.

Hugh Manatee Wins wrote:Frikkin' Naomi Klein just gave two speeches in the SF Bay area and she lies about 9/11 and repeatedly uses the expression, "conspiracy theorist."

She's been doing this deceptive evasion for two years since her book, 'Shock Doctrine, ' was published.

Excellent 2007 article about her presentation's sin(s) of omission-

http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/view/40143

Naomi or Noam am I
Peter Zaza
October 12, 2007
Not sure if that's a clue for a cryptic crossword, or I'm about to tell you a story.

I went to see Naomi Klein a few nights ago here in Victoria BC Canada. She was finishing up a book tour for her recently released "The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism" before heading abroad for the next stage of her promotional tour.
.....

most of these "credible" types are like that, they're trying to baby-step people forward and seriously questioning 911 is assumed to be far too much of a leap to ask their audiences to take. The calculus has got to be that as it is, with that answer, she can still get on tv occasionally, if she brings lihop/mihop into it, she instantly looses the chance to reach possibly millions of people. Maybe she actually believes what she says about 911, but it's also entirely possible that it's just a tactical decision.

anyway does it really matter? public intellectuals aren't exactly having any influence on the obama administration anyway and no one in washington seems to give a damn what people think anyway...

such a damn mess we're in...

Good comment on that article, drew.

Hugh Manatee Wins wrote:Excellent 2007 article about her presentation's sin(s) of omission-

http://www.americanchronicle.com/articles/view/40143

It is excellent - thanks.

How about this: everyone doesn't need to get everything. Remember justdrew's comment in the original post: No credible researcher claims to know the truth.

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.

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?

Nordic wrote:Let me get this straight. She writes a book called "Shock Doctrine: the rise of disaster capitalism" but fails to mention that 9/11 is a part of that?

Wow.

Not at all. You should read it.

.

These pieces almost always have the same tone and are drawn from the same set of fallacies, generalizations, substitutions of part for whole, cherry pickings and misrepresentations focusing solely on the madness of "conspiracy theorists," rather than the events of September 11th or possible relation to the deep state. Independent study of the events and their background almost never enters into it - as Chomsky said, who cares about 9/11? It's always a response to what someone said about 9/11.

In the early days, when to doubt that all Americans felt a consensus about the meaning of 9/11 was semi-treasonous, publishing these was a specialty of those called to stem skepticism about the official story. Corn, Berlet, Michael Albert, these were firemen of a sort, reacting to Ruppert, Nafeez Ahmed and the original "physical evidence" claimants. By around 2006 and ever since, it became a ritual declaration, independent of actual provocation. It allows the initiate to demonstrate ideological purity, in a kind of farcical evocation of swearing you're not a Communist. It's not strictly required, but it's wise, trendy and thought to confer general career advantage, like a framed certificate on your wall.

One part of the ritual lies in writing as though you just reached your breaking point of exasperation with the "theories" and came up with your own original refutations independently. They're like break dancers copying and trying to add to each others' moves, except it's each others' sneers. If this crippled pursuit featured an MTV Award, I would think Taibbi's turn would have to be the favorite.

^ What jack said.

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.

Jeff wrote:How about this: everyone doesn't need to get everything. Remember justdrew's comment in the original post: No credible researcher claims to know the truth.

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.

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?

I assume this is in response to HMW's reference to Naomi Klein. I have no opinion as to her motives or character. They are opaque to me. In the article Hugh referenced, there is an account of this exchange between an audience member and Ms. Klein:

"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?"

"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."

In my view, her unqualified, blanket response fosters a lack of differentiation between credible researchers like PD Scott, Hopsicker and Griffin on the one hand, and the deluded, or worse, on the other. Tarring them all with the same "conspiracy theory" brush is not helpful! The fact is that the premise that 911 was - like the Gulf of Tonkin incident - a manufactured pretext for war is plausible, researchable and worth studying. As justdrew noted above.

On edit:
Sorry - certainly wasn't trying to pile on - Mac's post wasn't up when I started.

Ach, god, why did I follow the link and start a comment at the bottom of 300 other comments. I thought I could stop doing that. Given that I say nothing new, or that hasn't been said as well and better elsewhere, it's also a form of ritual repetition, isn't it? The fuckers are right, damn it: I need a life.

here it is:

Ahem.

Dear Debunkers,

You can't simply assert a general contradiction between bureaucratic incompetence and organized crime and pretend an argument has been made.

Large, wasteful bureaucracies that harbor incompetence (as well as routine personal corruption and patronage) are actually standing invitations to those who would engage in more organized exploitation and criminal activity. We see this daily in the capture of regulatory functions of the government by corporate interests, as when some Wall Street bank hires everyone fresh out of their stints at the SEC, or gets to appoint the Treasury Secretary.

One of the logical fallacies from the rote debunkers of 9/11 skepticism is in seeing a paradox between incompetence in the government environment and organized criminal activity, which is not prevented but enabled by such incompetence.

The orchestration of September 11th as a psychological operation that could confer carte blanche for the existing war plans and intended policies of the Bush regime would not have been committed by "the Pentagon" or "the CIA" or "the government" per se; but by a network ensconced within those and other agencies.

In other words, the relevant actor would have been a covert operation, not a bureaucracy!

The wealth of loose ends and unlikely synchronicities suggesting such a network begin with the prima facie systematic AWOL on the part of the chain of command during the attacks (from Bush down to Rumsfeld and including Myers, Eberhart, Winfield and Mies) and the reactions of the air defense system on the day; and continue with the prima-facie systematic protection of the alleged hijackers from discovery prior to the day. These loose ends in turn have not been pursued systematically by journalists, the laughably compromised official investigations (Zelikow, hello, despite his exposure by the 9/11 relatives) or, for the most part, by the majority of 9/11 researchers and activists who rely on "case closed" slogans about demolitions (or god forbid, the Pentagon hole) and get cranky over working out the details of the Able Danger suppression or the implications of the September 11th wargames mirroring the actual attack.

Incompetence and imperfection within the operation itself could still rely on the incompetence of the bureaucracy as a whole to cover for it. Also on the reluctance of the media to investigate, on fear and patriotic denial during a time of "war," and on the cultural assumption that all allegations of covert operations within the government are "conspiracy theory" and therefore crazy until established by court standards. (Or enter the history books, a la "Remember the Maine," the "Gladio" false-flag terrorist networks organized in cold war Europe by NATO and the CIA, and the Gulf of Tonkin fabrication.)

Another common fallacy is to apply scientific parsimony to political events. "Occam's Razor" is not a scientific law, it's only a rule of thumb for formulating hypotheses that then still require testing. In the present context, it's just another thought-stopping platitude. When falling rocks can issue press releases denying that they're falling, get back to us. Until then, accept that deception is a daily part of political theater and is often designed to confuse people about what they should consider plausible.

.

Assent to most of what you say, MacC. But Kevin Barrett unfortunately is more relevant than your idiot in the pub, who never successfully placed himself up high as a spokesperson in the "9/11 truth movement" and then caused great and repeated damage to it for years through statements that are hard to dismiss as simply psychotic, demented and stupid, though they are that, but also suggest a systematic intent to destroy. (I thought we were talking false-flag attack theories, no?)

I would have preferred a movement that saw public intellectuals and activists who had yet to accept it but who were skeptical about the exploitation of 9/11 for war as its potential allies, rather than attacking them as "gatekeepers" and enemies, or demanding that they make immediate expressions of loyalty to demolitions theory.

The example given above of the question to Naomi Klein is not such a demand but a reasonable question. But as you know there have been plenty of more confrontational approaches to the "designated gatekeepers" in public. Do you think Zelikow has been dogged by this type of public attack and by Internet screeds calling him complicit in the 9/11 crime complex as often as Amy Goodman or Noam Chomsky?! The answer unfortunately is obvious.

standard "9/11 truth" hit-piece on boing boing

Ask a standard question, get a standard answer.