JM - I have argued the points elsewhere. If you wish and are open minded yourself, and want to look into what we do know and what we can and can't know, then I will send to you what I have written. But it is very hard to know where to begin because you don't particularly lay out any particular thing that you believe.
But I fear given how you have replied here, that you are likely to twist empirical evidence beyond the point of torsion. If you will notice I was replying to Doug on a specific point that "9/11 conspiracy" narratives are believed by people who are "psychotically delusional." Some such people may be psychotically delusional but probably not most people who just grab onto the theory as the only alternative explanation that allows them to remain happy about the world. As I said I think it is the path of least resistance.
But their is a further question: If you are right, what have I gained in knowledge of the world?
As a thought experiment, let us suppose that everything in the "9/11 conspiracy narrative" is true to the point of worse case scenario i.e. suppose somebody in the basement of the White House hired people to ram planes into the WTC. After you get rid of the evil doers what will have changed in the world? Besides a lot of handringing and a few executions that would make Watergate look small, will people have gained any knowledge about what the U.S. really does in the world? What did knowing about Tonkin Gulf change about Vietnam? People didn't learn a damn think about the thousands we were incinerating and the millions we were murdering. Tonkin Gulf was a big deal because it was propaganda aimed at Congress, not because it told us anything about U.S. war crimes.
So what would be the knowledge benefit of "knowing" even the worse-case 9-11 conspiracy to be true? I don't think that the knowledge gain is absolute-zero but I do believe it is very small.
People who believe "9/11 narratives" often point to the Reichstag Fire. (Let me point out that that was a conspiracy that was never secret. Everybody knew it at the time and it was just a justificatory joke.) Nothing was gained by knowing that the Nazi's faked the Reichstag Fire. We gained no exta knowledge about the Nazi's themselves. They were exactly the same murderous thugs before and after. It is the same with the Bush Regime. If the U.S. people don't know what they are it is because we haven't been paying attention over the last 30 years. (It is also because the U.S. left hasn't done its job.) Further, if we don't know what the Bush Regime is like it is because we haven't been paying attention to the greatest crimes these people and their predecessor have committed in the world. These people murdered 40 times more people in El Salvador alone than died on 9/11. If we spend the bulk of our time to spinning stories about the WTC and not talkiing about what we know that the Bush Regime and does because they tell us they are doing it then we are in effect lying to ourselves. If people personally think that the WTC tragedy ranks among the open crimes that the U.S. government committs then they don't know what even the Kennedys' did in Latin America. We United Statsians are so obsessed about ourselves that we think when something bad happens to us it is a world turning event. Well if it is a world-historic event it is only because we have the power to destroy much of the human ecosystem, and our people are not organized enough to prevent our ruler war criminals from acting. But as an "event" in itself it is not unusual in the amount of destruction it caused. On that level it is only unusual in the "weapons" used.
I chose an actual conspiracy to make a similar point in my previous post. There was no knowledge gain from the Iran-Contra conspiracy. During the Iran-Contra Affair these arguments were gone over so many times that I can't even count. I have the pamphlets on my shelf that argued --- 'The conspiracy showed what was really going on in the world, that the government was hijacked, etc., etc.' The same thing was said about Watergate. But the only thing that happened really was that one group of rulers discovered that another group of rulers cheated on them. Not only did nothing fundamental change, there wasn't even any gain of knowledge. Nothing changed from knowing that Poindexter, Oliver North and company had convinced Iran to cooperate with the largest terrorist state and sponsor of terrorism in the world (the U.S.) in funding a terrorist operation in Nicaragua.
The reason there was no knowledge-gain is that the worse atrocities were out in the open, and few people here took the time to look. You could go to El Salvador or Guatemala and look into the mass graves of people murdered by our government and people back here would rather talk about how Iran-Contra hijacked our government. Here we sat picking the scabs of our sorry little political system as if that were the only thing that could matter, in the whole universe, worrying about our little Alfred E. Neumann conspiracies, while at the same time "we" (our rulers and our money) organized the slaughter of thousands of people in Central America, out in the open where everybody could see. The only thing that could change was our knowledge that Iran was willing to participate in U.S. terrorism. We learned nothing from the whole affair. Though many on the left at the time were spending great amounts of time and energy exposing the vast web of the conspiracy and how it hijacked "our" government.
It is almost a rule that you can count on. __The worse atrocities are always out in the open but ignored.__ So there can be a "secret" bombing of Cambodia that is secret to no one and a "secret" contra war that I could see easily just by travelling to Nicaragua and secret mass slaughters with our money. But how important is that when we can think about all the conspiracies that "stole" our government from "us"? The real atrocities, the non-secret "secrets" can be ignored while. people are obsessing about JFK's assassination or Watergate or Iran-Contra or 9/11 or we can invent trivialities.
It is the same with 9/11 conspiracists. The real crimes will go on forever in front of our eyes, there, there and there for anyone with eyes to see if they choose to see, and instead of stopping them they think their time is best spent thinking about how there was some kind of secret coup d' etat and the 9/11 conspiracy narrative will explain it all.
Joe, I don't know you and I don't know what you believe. I also don't know what you think you know. But is it going to stop one more war crime by our rulers? Were the war crimes committed by our current rulers greater than the war crimes committed by all of our rulers since 1940 or just about the same? How is the Bush regime different in the amount of violence it has committed in the world than our previous rulers. They are more bellicose and argue that they have a god given and law given right to do the things they do but their actual actions are less than Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon, individually. So as for me would my orientation to the Bush regime be any different if you convince me you are right? I don't think so. Would I still have to convince you that Kennedy was a greater war criminal than our current George Bush? I don't know. You tell me. __If you convince 90% of United Statsians that what you believe is true, actually is true, (putting aside its actual truth-value) will it stop or limit any of these war crimes now or in the future?__ Will it stop the U.S. from perpetrating more terrorism in the world?
9-11 narratives are worse diversions than computer games.
>
> 9-11 is not a 'special' issue, it is no different than any other
political phenomena, try thinking about it that way and drop the
'conspiranoid' stuff, lets just use plain English (or whatever language one
chooses).
>
JM: I am not sure what exactly you are talking about! Explain. I am looking at it as any other military, political, or human phenomena and quite frankly beside the fact that happened to me and I saw the buildings collapse from the top of my roof, (not owning a television), I don't see anything particularly special about anything during 9/11. Unless you are willing to talk about this act of terrorism (no matter who originated the act) as nothing special except that it happened here, I am not sure we can actually see eye-to-eye.
> Joe W.
>
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