<br><br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 8/17/06, <b class="gmail_sendername">ravi</b> <<a href="mailto:gadfly@exitleft.org">gadfly@exitleft.org</a>> wrote:</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
At around 17/8/06 3:22 pm, Doug Henwood wrote:<br><br>> How about "psychotically delusional"? Would that pass muster?<br>><br><br>First of all let me note that this is a losing battle for me since I am<br>
limited to the three-post quota (and this is my third!) ;-).<br><br>And no, psychotically delusional will not pass muster. Perhaps<br>parsimony-challenged?<br><br> --ravi<br></blockquote></div>JM: P.S. I really like Ravi's quip about "parsimony-challenged" people. But I think that to some extent these "9/11 narratives" are a bit more contradictory. As an empirical hypothetical view they are not parsimonious but assume that the people in the Bush Adminstration are near perfect conspirators who are able to do everything at once, including set up explosives in the WTC Towers to create a controlled collapse. Given how deeply inept the Bush people are it is highly unlikely that they could blow up their back yard doghouses without something going wrong.
<br><br>But there is another way of looking at these 9/11 conspiracy narratives as parsimony itself. It is a little like using the idea of the Devil to explain everything that goes bad in your life. A conspiracy of this sort can operate as an overall explanation of why the
U.S. is so wrong in everything. The "conpirators" have hijacked our country, etc. Thus, Ravi is correct, the "empirical explanation" of how 9/11 happened can only appeal to the "parsimony-challenged." But the "narrative explanation" for the condition of the nation that these conspiracies represent is parsimony made large.
<br><br>Of course I am pointing to two different levels of "explanation." The first is the level of an explanation for the immediate events we call "9/11" and the second is an explanation for the "condition of the world." On the first level, the "9/11 conpiracy narrative" is a Rube Goldberg contraption. On the second level it is a very simplistic (parsimonious) non-explanatory explanation that provides a narrative for why we have all been so presidentially screwed.
<br><br>Jerry<br>