In this video, Noam Chomsky responds at a recent Q&A at the University of Florida to a 9/11 truther. The participant asks Chomsky about the “scientific consensus” among a small group of engineers about the suspicious collapse of building 7. Chomsky lays out in 7 minutes why this is probably a crock of shit.
“There happen to be a lot of people around who spent an hour on the internet and think they know a lot of physics, but it doesn’t work like that,” Chomsky notes of many 9/11 conspiracy theorists.
“They’re not doing what scientists do when they think they’ve discovered something,” Chomsky responds. If, in fact, engineers have conclusive proof of shenanigans during 9/11, they should write articles, give talks to conferences and so on.
Some will argue, Chomsky says, dissenters are intimidated by a government crackdown on truth-teller. This is bullshit, the long time anarchist and government protester notes. “It’s almost riskless,” Chomsky notes about political activism. Complaining about the government in American academia is literally one of the safest professions around.
Re: "Watch Noam Chomsky Set 9/11 Truther Straight"
Posted: Fri Oct 25, 2013 4:22 am
by RocketMan
If, in fact, engineers have conclusive proof of shenanigans during 9/11, they should write articles, give talks to conferences and so on.
Oh Chomskychomskychomsky.
Re: "Watch Noam Chomsky Set 9/11 Truther Straight"
Posted: Fri Oct 25, 2013 4:53 am
by smiths
really, seriously, Chomsky does not set anybody straight in this response,
his central arguement for why the administration had nothing to do with it is that they would have blamed it on Iraq if they could have because thats who they wanted to invade,
but that is very short-sighted indeed, it wasnt the Project for the new American War, it was the Project for the New American Century for a century of dominance and unrestricted warfare you need a shapeless enemy that melts into mountains and emerges within domestic populations before disappearing again
you need Al Queda and its leader who was everywhere and nowhere like a ghost
blaming shapeless terrorists gave America wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Sudan, South East Asia, Syria, Lebanon etc etc etc
for a smart bloke thats a very stupid answer
Re: "Watch Noam Chomsky Set 9/11 Truther Straight"
Posted: Fri Oct 25, 2013 5:22 am
by RocketMan
smiths » Fri Oct 25, 2013 11:53 am wrote:it wasnt the Project for the new American War, it was the Project for the New American Century for a century of dominance and unrestricted warfare you need a shapeless enemy that melts into mountains and emerges within domestic populations before disappearing again
you need Al Queda and its leader who was everywhere and nowhere like a ghost
blaming shapeless terrorists gave America wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Sudan, South East Asia, Syria, Lebanon etc etc etc
for a smart bloke thats a very stupid answer
Re: "Watch Noam Chomsky Set 9/11 Truther Straight"
Posted: Fri Oct 25, 2013 7:27 am
by MacCruiskeen
It is sad to see the 81-year-old Noam Chomsky looking and sounding his age. Just very sad.
What's truly shameful is that a website that dares to call itself critical-theory.com takes advantage of an old man's oldness to betray the clear message of his entire life's work by praising him for his current weakness and weariness. "Eugene" is hiding behind Chomsky's courage and reputation and the huge achievement of Chomsky's scholarship & public engagement to snipe superciliously at mainly-unfamous people whose honesty & bravery & hard-won knowledge & truly critical thought and praxis he ("Eugene") cannot hope to match and makes no effort at all to even understand. That is merely contemptible.
God save the famous from their sycophants.
Re: "Watch Noam Chomsky Set 9/11 Truther Straight"
Posted: Fri Oct 25, 2013 9:36 am
by Wombaticus Rex
“It’s almost riskless,” Chomsky notes about political activism. Complaining about the government in American academia is literally one of the safest professions around.
So, "Watch Noam Chomsky Obliviously Ether Himself" would have been a better title, no?
Re: "Watch Noam Chomsky Set 9/11 Truther Straight"
“It’s almost riskless,” Chomsky notes about political activism. Complaining about the government in American academia is literally one of the safest professions around.
So, "Watch Noam Chomsky Obliviously Ether Himself" would have been a better title, no?
Well, critically-ill certainly would have been a better title for the clearly moribund critical-theory.com.
Re: "Watch Noam Chomsky Set 9/11 Truther Straight"
Posted: Fri Oct 25, 2013 12:45 pm
by JackRiddler
Sorry, the right headline is "Watch Stubborn Idiot Render Himself Easily Dismissible." After 13 years of constant failure, he still thinks demolitions theory advances 9/11 skepticism. He thinks "Architects and Engineers" has somehow provided a sufficient consensus of these two professions.
All of you pushing bombs in the buildings (in whatever form) as the opening for talking about 9/11 should not be surprised at the outcome. You will talk about squibs to the end of time. You will persuade no one who doesn't already think there were bombs in the buildings. You will advance no one's understanding of what happened as a political act.
Kevin Fenton has used the government's own documents to make an overwhelming case that a group of FBI and CIA members at Alec Station and UBLU intentionally and actively blocked and prevented investigations that would have rolled up the alleged hijackers prior to 9/11. None of you have anything to say about that. This guy could have been there with a copy of Fenton's book and asked Chomsky to review it (as someone who would be qualified to judge it, as opposed to the demolitions claim that always leaves the resort to claiming experts should look at it, you're not an engineer, blah blah).
Instead... same old shit.
The other fallacy here is the leader worship or celebrity-or-whatever worship that still attracts people to public pestering of Chomsky (and other figures who may have platforms but have nothing to do with 9/11, like Amy Goodman or Bill Maher) as if this will accomplish anything other than help discredit to what they are attempting to say.
Watch idiot be a willing part of the process that inevitably produces smug responses like Chomsky's, poorly argued articles like Eugene's, and increasing irrelevance of 9/11 skepticism to the majority.
Re: "Watch Noam Chomsky Set 9/11 Truther Straight"
Posted: Fri Oct 25, 2013 1:16 pm
by MacCruiskeen
JackRiddler wrote:poorly argued articles like Eugene's
It's not even poorly argued, Jack. It's not argued at all. It's not even an article. It's a dirt-cheap exhibition of forelock-tugging, and despicably supercilious to boot. (Nach oben bückeln, nach unten treten, wa?) It's an application for full membership of The Risk-Free Careerist Academics' Club.
JackRiddler wrote:smug responses like Chomsky's
It's not just smug. It is woefully ignorant, demonstrably untrue at several points, and abysmally poorly argued. And therefore very sad to see, because it's unworthy of him.
Re: "Watch Noam Chomsky Set 9/11 Truther Straight"
Posted: Fri Oct 25, 2013 1:47 pm
by brainpanhandler
Sad to be sure, but why would anyone expect Chomsky to want anything other than that new discoveries be vetted in a conventional sense? Chomsky occupies a room in the ivory tower. He is of it.
"what you do when you think you've discovered something is write articles in scientific journals, give talks at the professional societies, go to the civil engineering department at MIT or florida or wherever you are and present your results and then procede to try to convince the national academies, the professional societies of physicists, civil engineers, departments in the major universities, convince them that you've discovered something."
Chomsky won't be joining the RI forum anytime soon. At least not until his senility has advanced quite a bit further.
Let the man rest in peace for god's sake. He's earned it.
Hell, I thought Moore going after Heston was unseemly.
Re: "Watch Noam Chomsky Set 9/11 Truther Straight"
Posted: Fri Oct 25, 2013 1:49 pm
by American Dream
I'll take Peter Dale Scott's approach, any day of the week:
The Falsified War on Terror: How the US Has Protected Some of Its Enemies
Re: "Watch Noam Chomsky Set 9/11 Truther Straight"
Posted: Sat Oct 26, 2013 5:05 am
by Nordic
and increasing irrelevance of 9/11 skepticism to the majority.
Hm, I don't think you get out much. Because in my own travels through a great many, and a great variety of people, I am discovering the exact opposite. In that a surprisingly large and growing percentage of people out there know the official story is bunk, and realize that our government actively covered up the truth. More and more people seem to be talking relatively openly about it, too, compared to a couple three years ago.
I really don't know where you get your assumption here, and I'd be curious to learn it.
Re: "Watch Noam Chomsky Set 9/11 Truther Straight"
Posted: Sat Oct 26, 2013 8:06 am
by MacCruiskeen
I have to add something to what I wrote upthread.
In what I said about "Eugene's" horrible little screed there's not one word that I would want to alter, nor has my assessment of Chomsky's woefully sad performance changed in the slightest. But. JackRiddler is absolutely right about the blowhard in the audience.
Imagine it: You have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to present a question in public to a very old and deservedly highly respected man. You've had loads of time to prepare that one question. There's been no reason for you not to have honed that question to perfection and then written it down word-for-word in case you get nervous when your big moment comes. So... what do you do? [Cue drumroll] You arise in front of the camera and the great scholar and the hundreds-strong audience, and, in a steady, stentorian, manly, self-confident voice, you make a complete arse of yourself by taking an eternity to get to the fucking point and even then you don't even manage to make the fucking point absolutely clear. Your "question" is not really a question at all, but a boring, rambling, self-important speech that's just begging to be interrupted because it's slow torture and an imposition on everyone's time and patience. (How many more seconds does Noam Chomsky have to live? Seriously.)
Way to win friends and influence people. Ffs.
And that's why the CD angle is so wrong in situations like these. Even if you're not as profoundly annoying as Mister Big there, you still have literally no chance of making your point both successfully and succinctly. You have no hope of leaving no wiggle-room. None.
Note: When I made my very first post in this thread I hadn't actually seen or heard the video, because I couldn't get it to open. But I had read "Eugene's" sneaky little blogpost & the words he quoted from Chomsky, and I had heard Chomsky speak (on another topic) just a couple of weeks ago, when he already sounded sadly & noticeably aged -- although still very cogent and convincing and knowledgable and interesting. Whoever called him "senile" was factually wrong, and wrong in the other way too.
Re: "Watch Noam Chomsky Set 9/11 Truther Straight"
Posted: Sat Oct 26, 2013 8:15 am
by MacCruiskeen
By the way, I am sick to death of hearing about Godwin's effing so-called Law, so here's MacCruiskeen's Law, which has the virtue of being always both applicable and just:
The first person to use the word "truther" in any context has lost the argument and must eat his own shorts, regardless of what state they are in.
(Yes,"his". It will inevitably be some prick with a penis. This too is a Law.)
Re: "Watch Noam Chomsky Set 9/11 Truther Straight"
and increasing irrelevance of 9/11 skepticism to the majority.
Hm, I don't think you get out much.
First of all, why must you start with an insult? Your vague claims don't present any more organized data on what people think than I just did above. I arranged the original fucking Zogby poll on foreknowledge. I get around outside whatever bubble you travel in, and I spent five years doing actual work to build a 9/11 truth movement, only to watch Church of Demolitions and the Alex Jones fan club put a lid on it and guarantee its permanent fringe status.
In the meantime, "in my own travels through a great many, and a great variety of people" I find plenty of skeptics to this day - they make up possibly a majority of those who bother to have an opinion in New York. Nevertheless, the apathy about it has never been greater.
The smaller group who talk about it the most tend to come in two varieties: The first watch some squibs on video and hear that a "physicist" said something, and believe it because they want to believe it in the first place, and they're a fucking cult who have no clue how they come across. Generally they don't know jack shit, it takes four questions to find out they've never heard about Alec Station or the ISI connections or Able Danger or the war games, and a lot of them get aggressive if you imply that the alleged hijackers might actually exist and be part of the story, just like Oswald was part of that story. Maybe you're not fucking meeting people, or maybe you are one of the people I'm describing? Because another quality they have is the total delusion that their work is effective and that more and more people are "waking up" every day.
The second largest group of those who bring up the issue are detached from spectacle politics and, if they bother to even think about it, tend to proceed from "who benefits" to the obvious. They also tend to know little about the details, but they're also not deluding themselves they're heroes on the Pester Chomsky circuit. I can at least have drinks with them.
Posted: Fri Oct 25, 2013 4:07 am
