Re: [OPE] The Dog Days of August?

davez@kth.se

on 2008-08-17 00:33 Philip Dunn wrote:
> I've read it. Pancake collapse? Overall it is an exercise in deception.
>   

It doesn't take an engineer to understand the mechanism of such a 
collapse, but it takes a good portion of speculative imagination to come 
up with a theory of "controlled demolitions". One has to be able to 
assess the likelihood of the available theories.

Your reply reminds me of something Alexander Cockburn wrote in a very 
good piece:

    "What is the goal of the 9/11 conspiracists? They ask questions,
    yes, but they never answer them. They never put forward an overall
    scenario of the alleged conspiracy. They say that's not up to them.
    So who is it up to? Who do they expect to answer their questions?
    When answers are put forward, they are dismissed as fabrications or
    they simply rebound with another question."

I think his political response is on point:

    "These days a dwindling number of leftists learn their political
    economy from Marx via the small, mostly Trotskyist groupuscules.
    Into the theoretical and strategic void has crept a diffuse,
    peripatic conspiracist view of the world that tends to locate ruling
    class devilry not in the crises of capital accumulation, or the
    falling rate of profit, or inter-imperial competition, but in locale
    (the Bohemian Grove, Bilderberg, Ditchley, Davos) or supposedly
    "rogue" agencies, with the CIA still at the head of the list. The
    9/11 "conspiracy", or "inside job", is the Summa of all this
    foolishness."

    http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn11282006.html (Also with link to
    a more detailed technical analysis by Manuel Garcia, physicist at
    the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.)

Unfortunately, I have first-hand account of the results of this 
theoretical void; healthy skepticism being abandoned for paranoia and 
rational basis for explanations abandoned for irrefutable beliefs.

//Dave Z
_______________________________________________
ope mailing list
ope@lists.csuchico.edu
https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/ope