I must seriously question either the motives or the intellect of anyone who cannot see though the smokescreen of the “official story.” You don’t have to buy any of the alternate theories to know, without a doubt, that the official story is complete BS.

All this did was prove how little Rushkoff actually knows, or understands. But hey, he’s a rich author, he MUST know better than the rest of us. Pssshaw!

Later doofus.

I have to admit that I do this with some trepidation. I can already feel the assault on my inbox. But after a good long think about potential time and energy being lost by our entire community to senseless and ultimately inconsequential musings, I have…

Link: MAGPIE » RUSHKOFF on 9/11 conspiracy theorists – Arthur Magazine blogs for you…. Our government excels at doing its really bad stuff out in the open. They break laws in order to spy on citizens, and refuse to acknowledge objections from lawmak…

* “9-11 theorists are unwittingly performing as the unpaid minions of the administration’s propaganda wing.”

No they aren’t. They’re trying to record a little unconventional history before it’s blotted from the books.

And you must know that you are more than free to disassociate yourself from them – unless you feel you need some helping hands with your work, and wish to borrow from the ‘conspiracy’ nuts, who peddle ‘drivel.’ (That word never goes down well, by the way).

I don’t see a lot of 9-11 rethinkers anymore, frankly. I think they’ve been fairly well pulled under the sweep of the war, the depressed American soul, and the ever-churning machine of agit-prop news.

But they’re not robbing anybody of anything, I think.

They are clearly venting their spleens and spinning their wheels (maybe your point), against an immovable object, because the promises of America or the brave-new-world, or whatever Enlightenment they subscribed to aren’t paying off and panning out…

They’re pushing a boulder up a hill, hoping against hope, (against reality), that ‘truth’ is bigger than hierarchy and tribal group-think…

They’re idealists, and we all are idealists for something.

Maybe your point is that it is an immovable object. Or that, even if some or any part of the inside job/5th column idea of 9-11 were true, that mainstream America would never – could never – accept it.

If so, I agree with you. It’ll be 200 years before any glimmer of this makes it, with some un-curdled consideration, into the mainstream’s thinking, or pale, tepid bestseller list.

I don’t touch the thing myself, for these very reasons. It won’t budge. And Empires do what they want, in any case. We’ve been overly indulged to imagine that we’re free of the grip of history, and of human nature. Now it is upon us, in full force, and many are recoiling with disgust.

Me, I accept it more easily than I do other things. The towers fell. I do not begrudge those who imagine a fifth column at work, I do not begrudge those who have seen an ancient face in a particular aspect of Islam, and who fear it, or feel it to be the enemy.

I have my own idealisms to vent, of course… my relative libertarianism puts me up against many realities of human nature… lessons for me to learn.

Thanks for posting on it. (Was directed from GNN – Lappe’s blog – see me at http://liam.gnn.tv/users/blogs.php and http://liamscheff.com

Thanks,

Liam

Yoko Ono, also in Arthur #26.

In any case, try to criticize the strongest points,rather than using perjorative terms to attack straw men.

If you do not have the courage to critique our best evidence, I hope your family will forgive you for your profound cowardice.

http://www.arthurmag.com/magpie/?p=2275

you can easily dismiss us,
but yo……

What’s most interesting is how all these building-obsessed Americans shy away from the big-picture scenario. Because it’s easy to fixate endlessly on the temperature of metal, and harder to explain why the plot they imagine would make any damn sense.

Even if sinister “Council On Foreign Relations Insiders [sic]” wanted to blow up the trade towers to justify a war, why go to all this trouble? Truthers work so hard to tell us that, when it comes to believing what we saw on national TV, Americans are “sheeple” who will go along with anything.

But then they turn around and credit the public with incredible stubbornness and critical thinking when it comes to invading the Middle East. As if the public couldn’t be talked into a war at the drop of a hat anyway…or just by blowing up a building and framing Saddam, let’s say. No, no, the grandest of all plots would be necessary to persuade peace-loving Americans, complete with disappearing airline passengers and faked camera footage from hundreds of angles and dead right-winger Barbara Olson.

Such a frightening vacation from sanity.

…

But what about the….

crowd. 99 percent of the readers will miss the point of your article entirely. But let’s try to put it an easier way. Either all of the conspiracy theories must be right, or none of them are. But since 99.999999999999 percent of them hold up as well as cheap Wal-Mart toilet paper, and the remaining ones are convenient misinterpretations of data, it has become pretty damn clear that there was no conspiracy, and those who believe in conspiracies have made themselves the administrations unpaid dupes. Yep, DUPES!

Conspiracy theories are there because people don’t want to think that we are weak, but they would like to believe that it would take a conspiracy of geniuses to hurt us. It’s like the JFK assassination. Theorists just can’t bring themselves to believe that Kennedy was able to have been killed by one man. He was just too great, so they must spin fantasies around the facts, and invented “facts” to show how he was too perfect to die at the hands of one crazy man. Conversely, despite reams of evidence that Dr. Mengele died of natural causes in South America under an assumed identity, there are many theorists who hold onto the belief that he was just too evil to die of natural causes, and that he must be hiding out there, somewhere, waiting for justice.

Look, I like good fiction as much as the next guy, but I hate bad fiction more than you can imagine, and the conspiracy theories around 9/11 are some of the worst fictions I can imagine. Their evidence is so weak, and flies in the face of simple reason so clearly, that I can hardly believe that the people who believe them can’t step back and see that they are being used and manipulated by the very people who they are attacking. If anyone did discover real evidence of a conspiracy, don’t you think that the administration could, if it wanted to, make them disappear? But it’s easier to just let them run their fool mouths off, and draw more gullible people into believing things that distract from the administration’s real crimes. I said it before and I’ll say it again, if you believe in the idiotic conspiracy theories, you are no more that a Bush Administration DUPE.

But nobody who has been sucked into being a sucker will ever admit to it, so as usual, I’m preaching to the choir, and talking to the walls.

Thank you, Douglas, for an excellent article.
Too bad nobody is listening.
Sigh.

This will definitely be of interest to at least a couple of you: Conspiracy of dunces.

But strange and unexpected details don’t necessarily point to the fallacy of the central premise — especially when the alternative involves the active c…

As you say, there are a lot of smart people out there who seem to think that there is some value to these ideas. And I think that some of the talk around these theories also concerns the power that the Bush administration has wielded as a result of 9/11. Whether or not you think there is any truth in this line of questioning, it seems like an odd thing to declare the issue closed just because you’re convinced it won’t lead anywhere – I bet there is a lot of important information that could be uncovered about this monumental event in history and its aftershocks, even if it’s done by people who are concerned with things that you think are unlikely. And I doubt that some of the people who were personally affected will feel comfortable moving on until they’re convinced they know the truth about what happened.