Over at OoL, James offers his thoughts on WTC7. I’m going to respond here rather than in detail there as I don’t want to drag it down too much there as we have already had two admins seriously disagreeing recently. I don’t want to make too much of a habit of it.
Sure, James has a point about sociopaths reaching the high echelons of society and government, but this is not exactly a new revelation. It isn’t of itself evidence that it applies to the whole of government, nor that western governments have actively engaged in false flag operations against their own people (well, not since the Reichstag fire, anyway). Nor for that matter that it is necessarily a socialist thing.
Conspiracy theories are one of the few areas where we disagree. Wildly, it seems. I am a pragmatist and have spent much of my working life making judgements based upon evidence. My background and qualifications are based upon verifying evidence before reaching a conclusion about the facts before me. Also, I have spent some time being involved in emergency planning and running exercises, not to mention training those who have to respond. Given this, and experience of the MSM’s tendency to get things wrong whenever they have to deal with subject matter not familiar to them (pretty much everything), it is little surprise, then, that I have little time for conspiracy theories that pose the idea of false flag operations by western governments against their own citizens. Not least, because such things are entirely unnecessary. A few misleading reports about plots and arrests will do the trick nicely. Remember the ricin plot where there was, er , no ricin… and, er, no actual plot?
Time and again, the truthers raise the issue of Peter Power’s emergency exercises on the day of the London Underground attacks – and time, after time, I point out that these are not unusual – despite being regaled with “questions that must be answered”*. All of the major responders to potential incidents have to have plans in place and have to practice them on a regular basis. That such a coincidence as happened on the 7th July 2007 occurred may be surprising to some, but it is less surprising than the government deliberately deciding to run a mass murder operation. Likewise, with 9/11.
The truthers will have us believe that the BBC reporting on the event, claimed that WTC7 fell before it actually did and that this is “evidence” that they had foreknowledge. Look, these people didn’t understand what they were talking about when they regaled us about the sighting of SN109 causing the Ladboke Grove crash. Had they any understanding of railway signalling (oh, such as asking someone who does, for example) they would have realised that the driver of the fatal train had already failed to respond to two previous signals, making the sighting of that one somewhat moot. Besides, the actual underlying causes were rather more complex and involved such things as competency management. Every time they discuss something within my field of expertise, they get it wrong. Is it any surprise, therefore, that they got it wrong on this occasion? No, not really. It is far more credible an explanation than the one that they were part of some global plot. Come on people, these folk couldn’t find their arses with both hands, an OS map, compass and SatNav.
Perhaps my biggest concern here is that we have real world misbehaviour going on. While we are wasting our time chasing phantoms the coalition is busy back peddling on the DNA database.
The DNA of more than one million innocent people will not be wiped from police records, The Daily Telegraph can disclose.
Instead the police will retain DNA profiles in anonymised form, leaving open the possibility of connecting them up with people’s names, ministers have admitted.
The admission appears to break a Coalition commitment to delete all innocent profiles, apart from those accused of violent or sex crimes, from police databases.
Civil liberties groups accused the Government of a “disgraceful U-turn” and a “breach of promise” to destroy innocent people’s DNA.
This is real and it is going on right now. When we highlight and criticise such behaviour, we want to be taken seriously. Our opponents can, however, shoot straight back with the conspiracy stuff and write us off as swivel-eyed loons and they would have a point. We need to keep our powder dry for the real issues, not the imaginary ones.
*Never, ever get into answering the “questions that must be answered”. The truther will never accept the explanations and will merely regale you with even more – on a logarithmic scale.
Top piece, L. Agree entirely.
I thought you might 😉
Forget all the Truther nonsense, its the line about 9/11 being ‘Zionist revenge’ that’s rather more concerning here. The guy has stepped over a line and unless he recants I sure as hell won’t be going back, and I would hope you have the integrity not to either. I went through the exact same thing at Tangled Web with a fellow writer who became a Truther and slowly but surely went down the path that ended up with ‘The Jews Did It’. It was truly horrible to watch someone who had always been so…sane, go off the rails in slow motion, and eventually he was asked to leave by unanimous decision of his fellow writers. Looks like James has got there already, and he belongs on Stormfront and Ummah with the other loons who think that somehow its always those nasty Jews wot done it, not on such an otherwise great cooperative venture as OOL.
I think you are maligning him on that one. His comment read in context was simply listing some of the theories that have been put forward, not necessarily one that he supports.
A few months back I had a fly-by troll accuse me of being a Zionist conspirator because I didn’t believe the truther version of events. Ah, well…
For me, OoL is damaged by giving this stuff house room.
Well, aye. Occam’s razor and all that. It’s always best to think of how a conspiracy would best be performed to achieve the desired ends and then compare that to what actually happened. If 9/11 was designed to support the invasion of Iraq, why not go the extra mile and use Iraqi terrorists, not Saudis? That would strengthen the case somewhat, no? Same question with 7/7, and if the aim was to whip up hatred of Muslims, why did the government go out of its way to stifle Islamaphobia after 7/7?
When I lived in the North-East, some rich conspiracy theorist paid to have a 4 hour troofer DVD inserted in every copy of the local rag. I watched the whole thing with an open mind, but in the end couldn’t buy the theory. A lot of it hinges on people who know nothing about engineering and physics telling us how buildings should fall down in such a scenario, despite the fact that there are no precedents for such events happening. BTW, why did the buildings have to fall down in this plot? The effort of planting all these bombs added hugely to the risk of the plotters being caught. As if flying two planes into the WTC wasn’t enough of an atrocity, they had to raze the towers as well? Why?
It’s all guff, as you say. A good rule of thumb is that if someone can only explain a theory by linking to a youtube video, it’s bollocks. David Aaronovitch’s Voodoo Histories is highly recommended.
It’s the age old tendency of humans to see patterns that aren’t there, it’s no real surprise that religions are riddled with conspiracy theorists, the whole notion of hidden malign forces be it goblins, Satan or Men in Black is bonkers. On the question of blaming the Jews I always find it very amusing ( perhaps not the right word ) that the one people who have very good reason to believe in conspiracies against them rarely do, whilst their persecutors are paranoid about the world being out to get them.
You still haven’t disproved or indeed given any evidence that the WTC7 was not CRd, which everyone on the ground said it was. So all the peripheral issues don’t address that one.
On the other hand, LR, I did give evidence [not speculation] about WTC7, over three posts. And that’s all I was arguing, not all the other strawmen.
It’s not up to me to prove or disprove anything as I am not the one claiming conspiracy. The evidence tells us that this building collapsed in an unusual manner – we have contemporaneous images, eyewitness accounts and there was – for a while – the debris left behind. All that this tells us is that the building collapsed and that the collapse has no precedent, nothing more, nothing less.
You linked to various youtube videos where people gave an opinion. This is not evidence. Sorry, but even if someone is an expert, their opinion is just that; an opinion, without supporting evidence to verify it. That’s why both sides of a court case will bring in expert witnesses – to undermine the other side’s expert witness, because experts don’t always agree with other experts in the same field.
So far, no such verification has been produced. The expert in the youtube video provided nothing to substantiate his statements, merely expressed his opinion.
I ask again, do you really understand what I mean when I talk about verification of evidence? I ask, because from your comments it is not clear that you and I are talking about the same thing here.
The thing that usually worries me about conspiracy theories is that they invariably require the cooperation of a large number of people whose silence the other conspirators can be absolutely 100% reliant on forever. Depending on the nature of the conspiracy you might be leery of people who talk in their sleep a bit or have a family history of dementia taking the form of reliving past experience, and if so the number of currently living people I have personally met who can be relied on to that extent is very approximately none whatsoever, and I’m counting me in that. Taking the classic example of the moon landings, it would have involved more expense and risk buying so much silence for forty plus years than building the rockets and just going to the bloody moon.
In addition to asking if the conventional narrative isn’t a more attractive option for potential conspiracies I think the other question you have to ask is who gains and what? As a casus belli and an excuse to restrict liberty of your own citizens are planes slamming into buildings insufficient? Is it necessary to bring two of those buildings down? Does bringing down a third that was not hit gain anything that was not already achieved by the first two, or even just the plane crashes themselves? It raises the body count but a 9/11 that just had the plane crashes and immediate casualties would have been almost as big a wound to America – that they were attacked in their own land is what provoked the response, not simply the number of dead people and destroyed buildings.
As I’ve said before, it’s all Occam’s/Hanlon’s razor stuff, and just because governments and corporations react to an event in a way that their advantage (and what else would we expect any group or people to do in response to anything apart from try to maximise their advantage) it doesn’t mean they caused it – governments especially are simply not that crash hot at thinking ahead. But I don’t doubt that governments do appreciate conspiracy theories for distracting people from what they’re getting up to and what they’re getting wrong, so much so that I sometimes wonder if the real truth that’s out there is that a lot of conspiracy theories are started by people in government. Sure as hell they benefit from so much tangential speculation and since it can be just one or two people saying the right thing in the right place for it to take on a life of its own the large and permanently silent conspiracy problem is solved. Yeah, the more I think of it the more the origin for all these conspiracy theories simply has to be a secret government op… it’s the only thing that makes sense. 🙂
There’s a perverse and compelling logic to that…
Ah, so now we’ve dialled down to just thinking that ‘Zionists’ destroying the towers in order to gain revenge for some unspecified slight is one of only two possibilities that you bothered to list, James. The other one being Muslim revenge which you apparently don’t believe in in the first place. Not a great deal better, is it?
Tell you what, say straight out that you personally don’t believe that Israel or the ‘Zionists’ had anything to do with the controlled demolition you believe took place and I’ll apologise calling you a Nazi muppet and bow out of this altogether. Can’t say fairer than that, can you?
Don’t even need an enquiry its so obvious that is was Osama Bin Lavon.
DSD,
I don’t agree with James Higham on this and a number of other topics, but even I thinking you are pushing the bounds of credibility to breaking point and beyond to see anything in that article as seriously suggesting that 9/11 was a Zionist conspiracy.
TNL
Do you really think the rantings of some pointless space cadet needs refuting?
Whenever people claim that there is some huge conspiracy I always think of Monica Lewinsky. If Bill Clinton a hugely talented politician and the most powerful man in the world at that time could not stop the fact that he was banging one his interns get onto the front pages then there is simply no way that any of these much bigger conspiracies could happen.
There will always be a lot of conspirations everywhere in the World. I’ve read a lot about conspiracy and I got to know a lot about it.
Ooh, don’t go out in the woods – there are conspiracy theorists! Who meet and exchange crazy ideas and go insane.
If you meet them show no fear. Just repeat “the government loves me” over and over again, and you’ll be safe.
The Cameroon-going-native, and crawling to the “guvmint-knows-best” so-called “civil servants” behind thes disgraceful DNA business is, as you say a much more serious case.
TT – dismissing the nonsense spouted by conspiracy theorists doesn’t mean that I believe the government is my friend. That’s a non sequitur.
As I said in the original piece, wacky conspiracy theories based upon the ravings of the idiots that made Loose Change et al, undermines real concerns. It makes us all look like swivel eyed lunatics by association who can be written off as tinfoil hatters. I have no wish to be associated with conspiracy theories that have no basis in the real world.
I can accept that politicians and bureaucrats are nasty opportunist control freaks who will use events to their advantage. That does not mean that they caused those events and no one has provided any evidence to support such an assertion.
Some bloke opining on youtube is not evidence.
LR,
it’s disingenuous of you to claim ‘no one has provided any evidence’. There is evidence of lots of things that I expect you either reject a priori or fail to see the relevance.
For instance, why not debunk Operation Gladio’s connection to terrorism? According to you, the last time any government used a false flag attack it was the Reichstag Fire.
You write:
“When we highlight and criticise such behaviour, we want to be taken seriously. Our opponents can, however, shoot straight back with the conspiracy stuff and write us off as swivel-eyed loons and they would have a point.”
I see. You don’t want to be written off in this way, so you surmise the best approach is to use the same tactic on other people.
Personally, I’m past caring if people call me a conspiracy theorist and dismiss my views on everything because of this.
Assertions on youtube videos are not evidence, they are opinions. Those opinions have been comprehensively debunked elsewhere.
Perhaps, because I’m not remotely interested?
Strawman. What I am doing is distancing myself from the ludicrous assertion that secret government agencies are plotting against their own peoples – without a shred of reliable evidence to support the assertions. I repeat, some bloke on youtube expressing an opinion on a few seconds of video footage is not evidence. It is – and I clearly have to repeat this – opinion. And Opinion is not the same thing as reliable evidence. If people posit stupid assertions, they can expect them to be treated with ridicule. Frankly, I’ve been remarkably patient and polite given the arrant nonsense of the truther theories.
Nowhere have I said that I reject James’ other arguments on issues of liberty – nor yours for that matter. Merely this one. Your accusation therefore is unfounded.
“What I am doing is distancing myself from the ludicrous assertion that secret government agencies are plotting against their own peoples – without a shred of reliable evidence to support the assertions.”
Okay, but then I mentioned Operation Gladio, which would give an example of such a thing, and you said:
“I’m not remotely interested”
Fine, but how can anyone rationally dispute with you, if you refuse, due to lack of interest, to consider evidence to the contrary of your opinion?
It’s the same nudge, nudge, wink, wink stuff that we see about 9/11 and 7/7, so, no I’m not interested. Washington had lots of fingers in lots of anti-communist pies during the post war years. This is not news nor is it evidence of some global conspiracy to undermine democracy or wage war on its own people.
The only reason I’ve expressed any interest in debunking the WTC7 stuff here is because James chose to air it on a platform that I share. If he had only published it on Nourishing Obscurity, I’d have ignored it, which is what I usually do.
LR
I’m afraid rather a lot of people do think that opinions are the same as evidence, in fact they have considerable difficulty in recognising the boundary between, ‘stuff in my head’ and ‘stuff in the outside world’, there’s thousands of them on the left ( see any CiF article ) but unfortunately there appear to be just as many in proportion on ‘our’ side of things. I despair of some of the wingbat stuff I see on libertarian blogs.
I now have this image of Father Ted in my head…
36 hours and counting…oh dear oh dear oh dear. So the man I’m so unfairly maligning still declines to refute my supposedly deeply unfair accusation. Can’t say I’m exactly shocked. Tell you what, let’s be scrupulously fair – could someone who knows him poke him and ask him to pop back and answer the question, just in case he missed it?
I trust you are satisfied with James’ answer over at OoL?
I am indeed, and have given apology accordingly.
DSD, I’m not sure if you’re aware but not all Zionists are Jews and not all Jews are Zionists, not by a long way. I’m aware that James has made his position on this clear but I still think it’s worth pointing out that it was you that attempted to slur him by insinuating that he was somehow claiming it was ‘the Jews that did it’.
I have to say I find this refusal to investigate anything that might be considered a conspiracy theory highly amusing, if a little sad. It’s really quite simple. The occult oligarchy that has thus far operated on a broadly national basis are currently in the process of moving to a new global system. Their euphemism for this 21st century feudalist system is a New World Order. They’re not even hiding it from you.
Revolution Harry.
Your fantasy of a New World Order is very similar to the sort of anti-semitic propaganda that saw the Jews as the malign hidden force at work in the world and also linked to the arguments of those who maintain that Zionism and the Israeli state are part of the western elite’s attempt to impose their will on the whole world. This is why A. The New World Order stuff is dangerous nonsense and B. why many of us get very uneasy at any linking of Zionism with 9/11, even if it is only to suggest that since blaming it on the Jews is a lie so, quite probably, is blaming it on militant Islam.