Brooker on 9/11 conspiracies

[shiels]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/jul/14/september11.usa

I was linked to this on another forum and immediately thought of dissensus because i know a lot of you are fans of Brooker and skeptical of the FOX news account of events.

 

[hucks]

350 comments.....

Actually, I don't think the article is all that. Fish in a barrel stuff for him. His TV reviewing is top notch, his other stuff less so imo

 

[Mr. Tea]

And when repeatedly pressed on that one, basic, overall point - that a conspiracy this huge would be impossible to pull off - they huff and whine and claim that unless you've sat through every nanosecond of Loose Change (the conspiracy flick du jour) and personally refuted every one of its carefully spun "findings" before their very eyes, using a spirit level and calculator, you have no right to an opinion on the subject.

Oh yeah? So if my four-year-old nephew tells me there's a magic leprechaun in the garden I have to spend a week meticulously peering underneath each individual blade of grass before I can tell him he's wrong, do I?

Haha, good old CB.

Edit:

Finally.

Okay here's what I know

1. Only a handful (circa 1500-5000; those who where alive prior to the three collapses, officials etc.) of people REALLY know what happened, the 'truth movement' highlights the anomalies, questions them and simply ask that others do the same. It is very easy to suggest that the cat would have jumped out the bag by now or the sabretooth tiger climbed down the mountain (cos that's how big and vicious this thing is), that's all it is; easy debunking...try harder.

2. PNAC, the main reason.

3i. Missle hit the Pentagon, this 'freudian slip' was on CNN and WAS (up until early last month) on YouTube. Care to debunk?

3ii. Seized tapes, why? Initial hole left by impact was small (with an exit hole), later collapse allowed for 'the plane turn to liquid' official fairytale.

So much more, very sure others will pick up where...

Ciao

Okay here's what I know

 

[IdleRich]

Didn't really see the point of this article - people who believe in stupid conspiracy theories are stupid, hold the front page. Wish I could get paid to produce that once a week.

 

[swears]

Didn't really see the point of this article - people who believe in stupid conspiracy theories are stupid, hold the front page. Wish I could get paid to produce that once a week.

I think it's a neat, amusing little summary of why these theories are so daft, and why people feel the need to make them.

So if you work in a cardboard box factory, and your job is to stare at the side of each box as it passes along a conveyor belt, to ensure they're all uniform and boxy enough - and you do this all day, every day...

The mental image of a man doing this made me lol.

 

[john eden]

Didn't really see the point of this article - people who believe in stupid conspiracy theories are stupid, hold the front page. Wish I could get paid to produce that once a week.

It's important because this type of stuff has increasing currency in what passes for "alternative" culture and sends a lot of people off down dead ends. Those dead ends also play host to a lot of very stupid or dodgy politics (for example anti-semitism).

It's also important that these things are debunked because they act as a way of disempowering people - i.e. there is nothing which can be done in the face of such a huge conspiracy and everyone else is really stupid because they don't understand it.

As with creationism, it is a battle of ideas which can have real rammificiations in culture, politics, etc.

 

[noel emits]

The whole 'massive conspiracies can't exist because they are impossible to maintain' is a totally fallacious straw man argument. How is it people can say that sort of thing while simultaneously believing a small conspiracy of cave dwelling Arabs managed to orchestrate the whole thing? Well which is it? Without getting into the details and what you do or do not believe about the whole business this doesn't make sense and also shows very little understanding of how secret operations might be carried out by...whoever.

This isn't debunking of any useful kind, it's just some twat comedian trying to show how rational and 'right thinking' he is.

 

[IdleRich]

"It's important because..."

True but this is a lazy article which preaches to the converted and could have been written any time since 2001 as an uncontroversial back-up to be wheeled out when he can't be arsed to do something topical. I think that Charlie Brooker can be quite funny and I took the article with me when I hid in the toilet at work this morning but I found this quite disappointing.

 

[john eden]

I think scale is a valid point.

If we look at well documented conspiracies such as Cointelpro, then there is a whole raft of proof and also a paper trail. Presumably there is also an indication of how many people were employed.

The 911 cultists always use the "cave dwelling arabs" description, often with an even more racist slant. Whilst Bin Laden seems to enjoy hanging out in caves, there is scant evidence that the 911 pilots (and indeed the 7/7 bombers here) lived in caves.

It is like suggesting that the provisional IRA were incapable of organsing a bombing campaign because they were all "thicko drunkard bog trotting paddies", for example.

Or that the ALF/ARM can't organise firebombings because they are all "weakling hippy vegetarian wallflowers".

 

[hucks]

The whole 'massive conspiracies can't exist because they are impossible to maintain' is a totally fallacious straw man argument. How is it people can say that sort of thing while simultaneously believing a small conspiracy of cave dwelling Arabs managed to orchestrate the whole thing? Well which is it?

Does anyone think this? It doesn't have to be either/ or...

 

[john eden]

True but this is a lazy article which preaches to the converted and could have been written any time since 2001 as an uncontroversial back-up to be wheeled out when he can't be arsed to do something topical. I think that Charlie Brooker can be quite funny and I took the article with me when I hid in the toilet at work this morning but I found this quite disappointing.

I agree that it isn't one of his best.

http://paulstott.typepad.com/911cultwatch/ - is one to check.

 

[Mr. Tea]

The whole 'massive conspiracies can't exist because they are impossible to maintain' is a totally fallacious straw man argument. How is it people can say that sort of thing while simultaneously believing a small conspiracy of cave dwelling Arabs managed to orchestrate the whole thing?.

But no-one's claiming that at all. Everyone know's bin Laden's the scion of a hugely wealthy, well-connected oil family (indeed, this is the subject of conspiracy theories in its own right) and has an enormous personal fortune.
And in any case, the logistics of committing 9/11, considerable as they may have have been, pale in comparison to the degree of organisation and secrecy that the US government would have had to maintain in order to carry out the attack and get away with it. I think it's also pretty telling that not a single person, anonymously or otherwise, has acted as a whistle-blower for this supposed conspiracy. Neither, as far as I'm aware, has any attempt been made to stop these fearless troofers who risk everything to spread the word by prining tee-shirts and putting videos up on YouTube.

Bin Laden is very much the missing piece from 9/11 CTs. After all, think about it from his POV: if he'd either been allowed to commit the attack by a complicit CIA/FBI, or if he'd actually had nothing to do with it but had had the blame pinned on him, why would he play along with it and accept responsibility? Surely he'd have said "Look, America, at what your own government does to you for its own selfish ends!" and then sat back and watched as the country destroyed itself in violent revolution? The only way around this is to claim that bin Laden is actually in on the conspiracy himself, that he is somehow the CIA's stooge, or paid-off fall man. Which is another problem with CTs in general: there is no limit to how high up the conspiracy goes, how general and all-encompassing 'They' are.

 

[noel emits]

It's important because this type of stuff has increasing currency in what passes for "alternative" culture and sends a lot of people off down dead ends. Those dead ends also play host to a lot of very stupid or dodgy politics (for example anti-semitism).

Anti-semites are anti-semites, they'll try and find all sorts of reasons to justify their idiotic beliefs.

It's also important that these things are debunked because they act as a way of disempowering people - i.e. there is nothing which can be done in the face of such a huge conspiracy and everyone else is really stupid because they don't understand it.

The truth is empowering - telling people they should stop looking for it is daft. Of course 'massive (secret) conspiracies' don't exist in the sense of a big number of people colluding to one known end. People only have to know what they have to do, and the higher ups in the chain don't have to know how these ends are achieved. The sort of Brooker is coming out with assumes that everything went to plan in that operation, and that there have been no 'whistle blowers'. Well lots of people have tried to talk about stuff and been gagged one way or another, and lots of evidence has been disposed of, and lots of basic proof has not been provided, and on and on...

As with creationism, it is a battle of ideas which can have real rammificiations in culture, politics, etc.

I think you're right. And people are rightly suspicious of some of the ideas that are being propounded.

 

[noel emits]

Shiels, I can't believe you mentioned the elephant in your first post.

 

[john eden]

Anti-semites are anti-semites, they'll try and find all sorts of reasons to justify their idiotic beliefs.

Indeed, but those ideas seem more able to take root in pseudo-scientific claptrap such as nazi racial theories, illuminati nonsense, david icke new agery, and 911 cultishness.

It is proof that a little learning can be very dangerous. For example I am most amused at the number of people who now seem to claim to be experts in stuctural engineering because they have seen some rubbish on youtube about how the towers could only have fallen in a particular way if Dick Dastardly and Mutley had been racing around them shouting "stop the pigeon" or whatever.

The truth is empowering - telling people they should stop looking for it is daft. Of course 'massive (secret) conspiracies' don't exist in the sense of a big number of people colluding to one known end. People only have to know what they have to do, and the higher ups in the chain don't have to know how these ends are achieved. The sort of Brooker is coming out with assumes that everything went to plan in that operation, and that there have been no 'whistle blowers'. Well lots of people have tried to talk about stuff and been gagged one way or another, and lots of evidence has been disposed of, and lots of basic proof has not been provided, and on and on...

All of these events produce doubt, which is a good thing. But they also seem to produce, in certain quarters, a fundamentalist certainty, which is a bad thing. It seems to me that 911 "truthers" spend far less time scrutinising their own theories for holes than they do the "official" version.

 

[Slothrop]

The whole 'massive conspiracies can't exist because they are impossible to maintain' is a totally fallacious straw man argument. How is it people can say that sort of thing while simultaneously believing a small conspiracy of cave dwelling Arabs managed to orchestrate the whole thing?

How much did the 'cave dwelling arabs' have to orchestrate, though? Learn to fly a plane(roughly, without having to be able to do the difficult bits ie take off, land, or give people a safe and comfortable ride) and then get onto some planes with some weapons. It's not quite the same as rigging some of the largest and most densely used buildings in the world for a controlled demolition without any of the people who work in them or are responsible for their security noticing anything out of the ordinary, making a few hundred people disappear, faking up phone calls from those people to their loved ones accurately enough to fool everyone who knew them, flying a couple of things that look a great deal like 747s into the side of the buildings, setting up fake evidence to point to the aforementioned arabs in caves (including videos where they take credit for it) and then rigging a series of internal enquiries, all in order to invade a country which is basically pretty useless. Yet apparently the people who did all that couldn't be bothered to plant some WMDs to justify the subsequent invasion of a significantly more valuable country.

I quite enjoyed reading this, largely because I've recently been getting bored enough to argue with Parson (formerly of this parish and "this highly energetic state doubles as cloaking device but the primary function would be the ability to travel at high speeds without the problem of mass due to the mass being so highly energized it loses not only visual detection but mass too" fame) on the dubstepforum, and have been dealing with a lot of the attitudes that CB is slating.

 

[noel emits]

Does anyone think this? It doesn't have to be either/ or...

I'm not sure what you mean. No, it doesn't have to either/or. But presumably the man in the street believes something* - and according to ever-so-rational and right-thinking Brooker it is that there wasn't a 'conspiracy'. Except that of course there was. The implicit racism and duplicitous thinking being I suppose that if some white people were involved they couldn't possibly have lived with themselves and would have to have gone on an important TV chat show and confessed all, which would definitely have happened and everyone would have believed them and everyone else involved would have said 'it's a fair cop' and it would have all come out and we'd all be much happier. But as it's Arabs of course they can have no guilty consciences.

* there is of course an official story as outlined in the 9/11 commission report.

 

[Mr. Tea]

It is proof that a little learning can be very dangerous. For example I am most amused at the number of people who now seem to claim to be experts in stuctural engineering because they have seen some rubbish on youtube about how the towers could only have fallen in a particular way if Dick Dastardly and Mutley had been racing around them shouting "stop the pigeon" or whatever.

Haha, indeed. It's amazing how much mileage they seem to get out of the fact that the towers fell straight down, rather than to one side. Well of course they fell straight down, that's how skyscrapers are designed to collapse, so as not to take any neighbouring buildings with them in the event of their destruction.

 

[Mr. Tea]

I'm not sure what you mean. No, it doesn't have to either/or. But presumably the man in the street believes something* - and according to ever-so-rational and right-thinking Brooker it is that there wasn't a 'conspiracy'. Except that of course there was. The implicit racism and duplicitous thinking being I suppose that if some white people were involved they couldn't possibly have lived with themselves...

'Implicit racism'? Well it's more implicit than the racism in the idea that them ay-rabs are a bunch of cave-dwellers incapable of doing anythings as technically demanding as hijacking a plane and crashing it, I'll give you that.

 

[noel emits]

'Implicit racism'? Well it's more implicit than the racism in the idea that them ay-rabs are a bunch of cave-dwellers incapable of doing anythings as technically demanding as hijacking a plane and crashing it, I'll give you that.

The 'cave dwelling arabs' meme was one officially pushed by the American government. That's the line - they were talking about Osama Bin Laden's mountain hide-out. Whether people actually believe that or not is beside the point.

The point about scale - and why I mention that, is that pointing at theories about 'massive conspiracies' when you are yourself talking about a 'small' conspiracy is tautological (of course ridiculous theories are ridiculous), fallacious and a straw man.