Doug Henwood wrote:
>
> Apparently some 9/11-conspiracy-related premiums brought in $36,000
> in pledges in 90 minutes on WBAI.That's a very big number as these
> things go - the phones were ringing at capacity. I'm speechless.
>
There are with conspiricism, as with most isms, two 'levels': The inner core we see in one or two people on this list, who make the 'exposure' of conspiracy the heart of their politics. There is a much larger 'outer' sphere of those who are interested in varying degrees, but for whom suspicion of conspiracy is merely a more-or-less important footnote to their politics, which are otherwise centered.
There is no particular point with debating the first group, just as there is no point in debating creationists or right libertarians. (Unless members of the second group are present, in which case one directs one's remarks to them, not to the person one is nominally addressing.) And the content of one's argument, then, is not the falsity of the conspiracist's case (which one takes for granted) but the political futility of that case. And for that purpose, the focus can be on particular instances in which there was, not so much a real conspiracy in the conspiracist's sense but in a more restricted sense: i.e., the Tonkin Bay incident or, currently, the Downing Street Memos. The point is that even after being exposed, those Memos are having close to zero political impact. There are numerous other topics far more fruitful in turning people against the war or, what is far more important just now, in turning passive opponents of the war into active opponents. This is how Jan & I responded to the eruption of a conspiracist theorist in our local anti-war group -- and it worked quite well. We isolated him without needing to attack him personally.
My suggestion is that, at least possibly, most of those callers belonged to this 'outer sphere' -- those who were merely 'interested' in the possibility but not really committed. Hence you need not be quite so speechless.
Carrol
P.S. This is also my rationale for urging people to stop obsessing about (or even attending to) the Fox News et al take on politics. Listeners who swallow that stuff can't be reached anyhow. And in talking or writing to others, there are more important things to talk about than a redundant refutation of the nonsense from Fox.