A denunciation of Loose Changers
Jun. 10th, 2011 05:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sabotabbyBecause it's been awhile since I've made this particular rant. You'll stop me if I repeat myself, right?
I am on several mailing lists that frequently clog my inbox with the same requests for endorsements, angry letters, forwarded articles, and demonstrations, talks, meetings, film screenings, and other events of interest to leftists. Most of these mailing lists started as Palestine solidarity listservs but somehow bred like rabbits on Viagra and expanded their topical range to be about anything vaguely left-leaning. The listserv rant is actually a separate rant; basically, these mailing lists are useless because I get the same forward from Al Jazeera ten times a day (protip: I have an app that brings Al Jazeera right to my Android! Like, the entire English language site. I don't need articles in my inbox too!) and the more frequently a subject line appears, the less I'm likely to actually open the e-mail. That goes double for the ones marked "URGENT."
But anyway.
I did open one of these e-mails today, since I knew it would piss me off. It was from Reel Activism, a well-named but apparently politically naïve film series at the Bloor St. United Church (that's the lefty church, for all you non-Hogtowners). Tonight's film is "Explosive Evidence," a film by, I shit you not, Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth. The accompanying text was a spiel by a theologian named David Ray Griffin, and the introductory blurb mentioned an "important 9/11 conference to be held September 8th-11th in Toronto." Because, yeah. That's exactly what we need.
I believe that to the extent there is an anti-war, anti-imperialist movement in North America, the 9/11 Truthers need to be purged from it. They can be treated more gently at demonstrations than would, say, an infiltrating white supremacist group because they pose less physical danger, but they should not be allowed to march or appear on cameras with us. My intolerant stance comes as a direct result of Loose Changers hijacking legitimate political agendas with their fairy tales and making the rest of us look like moonbats. There are already plenty of people on the left who make the left look like moonbats; we do not need people who are not actually leftists to make us look more like moonbats.
While it's possible to believe a simple version of the conspiracy and a) be a leftist and b) not be an unmitigated moron, it's highly unlikely. The simple version is that highly placed people in the American government knew in advance that there would be a terrorist attack on September 11th and let it happen because they hate America, puppies, and rainbows. If you believe this, you're wrong, but given that there have been many government conspiracies that have turned out to be correct, I won't hold it against you.
The Truthers believe in more complicated conspiracy theories, though, which include things like controlled demolitions, false flag operations, Reichstag parallels, and so on. There is nothing particularly left-wing about their politics, other than that they generally are opposed to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (you know, like that raging socialist Pat Buchanan). They're generally one-issue activists, but they show up at everyone else's rallies like a parasitic organism, mugging for the cameras and professing sympathy for causes that they know nothing about.
As I've said before, here are the things you have to believe in order to be a Truther:
1) The vast majority of engineers and architects are lying bastards.
2) Not only are they lying, they are lying about an event that directly caused the deaths of 3000 people and indirectly tens of thousands of more. So they are not just lying, they are actively evil.
3) A bunch of guys with commercially available video editing software and crackpot theories cobbled together from various internet sources, a large percentage of which were written by anti-Semites wearing tinfoil hats, are more trustworthy than Popular Mechanics.
4) Despite the existence of Wikileaks, and the difficulty of maintaining secrecy in an age of information overload, and the fact that the Bush administration is no longer in power, a cover-up is still possible and still effective.
5) The Bush administration was competent enough to pull something like that off and wasn't caught, except by Alex Jones.
You don't have to also believe that the Jews did 9/11, but it certainly helps. Here are some other things that Truthers seem to believe:
1) It actually matters. Assume that the Jews did 9/11, or Bush, or whatever. Assume that the truth gets out. How quickly do you think this will result in a withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan? If your answer is "with exactly the same haste as we are currently witnessing," you are correct.
2) 9/11 is the most important and awful thing to happen, ever. It's been over a decade. I realize America is entirely solipsistic and doesn't care about far more catastrophic tragedies in the rest of the world, but that doesn't really explain Canadian Truthers, of which there are apparently many.
3) Terrorist groups have no real reason to hate America. There is nothing about America's foreign policy that would make a bunch of people want to fly planes into buildings.
I get that demo marshals like big crowds, a substantial number of people on the left feel that Truther theories have a bit of credence, and progressives in general are a tolerant bunch that don't like to kick anyone out of meetings or silence anyone's voices but I'm pretty sure that there are others like me who don't come around to as many things because they're tired of demo detritus, marches that are off-message, and having their inboxes full of dogwhistle propaganda. The noise to signal ratio in the local activist scene is unacceptable.
Enough already.
I am on several mailing lists that frequently clog my inbox with the same requests for endorsements, angry letters, forwarded articles, and demonstrations, talks, meetings, film screenings, and other events of interest to leftists. Most of these mailing lists started as Palestine solidarity listservs but somehow bred like rabbits on Viagra and expanded their topical range to be about anything vaguely left-leaning. The listserv rant is actually a separate rant; basically, these mailing lists are useless because I get the same forward from Al Jazeera ten times a day (protip: I have an app that brings Al Jazeera right to my Android! Like, the entire English language site. I don't need articles in my inbox too!) and the more frequently a subject line appears, the less I'm likely to actually open the e-mail. That goes double for the ones marked "URGENT."
But anyway.
I did open one of these e-mails today, since I knew it would piss me off. It was from Reel Activism, a well-named but apparently politically naïve film series at the Bloor St. United Church (that's the lefty church, for all you non-Hogtowners). Tonight's film is "Explosive Evidence," a film by, I shit you not, Architects and Engineers for 9/11 Truth. The accompanying text was a spiel by a theologian named David Ray Griffin, and the introductory blurb mentioned an "important 9/11 conference to be held September 8th-11th in Toronto." Because, yeah. That's exactly what we need.
I believe that to the extent there is an anti-war, anti-imperialist movement in North America, the 9/11 Truthers need to be purged from it. They can be treated more gently at demonstrations than would, say, an infiltrating white supremacist group because they pose less physical danger, but they should not be allowed to march or appear on cameras with us. My intolerant stance comes as a direct result of Loose Changers hijacking legitimate political agendas with their fairy tales and making the rest of us look like moonbats. There are already plenty of people on the left who make the left look like moonbats; we do not need people who are not actually leftists to make us look more like moonbats.
While it's possible to believe a simple version of the conspiracy and a) be a leftist and b) not be an unmitigated moron, it's highly unlikely. The simple version is that highly placed people in the American government knew in advance that there would be a terrorist attack on September 11th and let it happen because they hate America, puppies, and rainbows. If you believe this, you're wrong, but given that there have been many government conspiracies that have turned out to be correct, I won't hold it against you.
The Truthers believe in more complicated conspiracy theories, though, which include things like controlled demolitions, false flag operations, Reichstag parallels, and so on. There is nothing particularly left-wing about their politics, other than that they generally are opposed to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (you know, like that raging socialist Pat Buchanan). They're generally one-issue activists, but they show up at everyone else's rallies like a parasitic organism, mugging for the cameras and professing sympathy for causes that they know nothing about.
As I've said before, here are the things you have to believe in order to be a Truther:
1) The vast majority of engineers and architects are lying bastards.
2) Not only are they lying, they are lying about an event that directly caused the deaths of 3000 people and indirectly tens of thousands of more. So they are not just lying, they are actively evil.
3) A bunch of guys with commercially available video editing software and crackpot theories cobbled together from various internet sources, a large percentage of which were written by anti-Semites wearing tinfoil hats, are more trustworthy than Popular Mechanics.
4) Despite the existence of Wikileaks, and the difficulty of maintaining secrecy in an age of information overload, and the fact that the Bush administration is no longer in power, a cover-up is still possible and still effective.
5) The Bush administration was competent enough to pull something like that off and wasn't caught, except by Alex Jones.
You don't have to also believe that the Jews did 9/11, but it certainly helps. Here are some other things that Truthers seem to believe:
1) It actually matters. Assume that the Jews did 9/11, or Bush, or whatever. Assume that the truth gets out. How quickly do you think this will result in a withdrawal from Iraq and Afghanistan? If your answer is "with exactly the same haste as we are currently witnessing," you are correct.
2) 9/11 is the most important and awful thing to happen, ever. It's been over a decade. I realize America is entirely solipsistic and doesn't care about far more catastrophic tragedies in the rest of the world, but that doesn't really explain Canadian Truthers, of which there are apparently many.
3) Terrorist groups have no real reason to hate America. There is nothing about America's foreign policy that would make a bunch of people want to fly planes into buildings.
I get that demo marshals like big crowds, a substantial number of people on the left feel that Truther theories have a bit of credence, and progressives in general are a tolerant bunch that don't like to kick anyone out of meetings or silence anyone's voices but I'm pretty sure that there are others like me who don't come around to as many things because they're tired of demo detritus, marches that are off-message, and having their inboxes full of dogwhistle propaganda. The noise to signal ratio in the local activist scene is unacceptable.
Enough already.
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no subject
Date: 2011-06-10 10:10 pm (UTC)The middle east, for us, should be like the fucking forbidden zone in the planet of the apes. There should be a big sign outside of it saying "this is where the animals live. Americans, you enter here, youre on your fuckin own."
no subject
Date: 2011-06-10 10:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-10 11:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-11 02:14 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-10 10:25 pm (UTC)The sad thing is, there are otherwise, intelligent, cool people who believe these theories. On the Gaza Freedom March there was this Canadian Muslim woman who was both intelligent and seemed really cool and politically on the ball in so many ways, but was absolutely convinced by the 9/11 conspiracy theories. Thing is, if you start reading these things you can become completely closed to anything that contradicts it.
Worse, she was, if not a Holocaust denier, at least a sceptic. (I.e. it was "only" 1 million or whatever).
Maybe I was just wrong in my early impressions of her general coolness and soundness, and actually she's basically batshit but seems cool at first impression. At least, mind you, it wasn't something she made a big thing of. She was interested in freeing Palestine much more than in proving that 9/11 was a conspiracy. That only came up much later in conversation. So not the sort of liability to a protest movement that the really serious Truthers are.
But I think the reality is that people are complicated and capable of having really well-thought out, compassionate approaches to some things and totally closed-minded and idiotic approaches to others.
no subject
Date: 2011-06-10 11:19 pm (UTC)I should add that I don't believe all of these people should be purged. Just the Truthers. If people want to believe that the moon landing is faked, that's their right even if it's stupid, but the second they start showing up at rallies demanding an inquest into Apollo 11, they've got to be silenced.
no subject
Date: 2011-06-11 12:13 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-10 10:31 pm (UTC)I believe that to the extent there is an anti-war, anti-imperialist movement in North America, the 9/11 Truthers need to be purged from it
I second this, while we're at it LaRouche followers too.
I've heard an good interview on the radio about this in general, though haven't read the book.
http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2011-05-12/jonathan-kay-among-truthers
Another point: What in the hell do Truthers expect to do about it? Unlike legitimate political movements, there's no game plan for an endgame or a political goal except "uncovering the truth", after which there occurs some kind of grand deus ex machina in which the "evildoers" are punished in some kind of great exercise of justice (in what form nobody seems to know).
It's all quite sad, because even if they had a coherent plan, it wouldn't really do nothing to improve anyone's daily life or condition in life. They do out it all of out of a solipsistic desire to be right over everyone else in a "see I told you so" fashion, exploiting the collective tragedies of people they don't even know as a vehicle.
no subject
Date: 2011-06-10 11:24 pm (UTC)I think Truthers have watched too many movies where plot goes like this:
1. Hero discovers cover-up.
2. Hero broadcasts truth about cover-up to The People.
3. ...
4. Profit! Uh, or an epilogue where The People rose up and replaced the corrupt government with a good one.
It doesn't work that way, of course. Our government captured Afghan civilians (because we paid informants to turn people in, which means that they just turned in anyone they didn't like), then handed them over for torture. Then covered it up. The entire truth was revealed, with the result that the government got a larger number of seats in the next election. That's how conspiracies really work.
no subject
Date: 2011-06-11 01:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-11 12:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-10 10:34 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-10 11:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-11 01:37 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-11 01:54 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-11 02:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-11 09:32 pm (UTC)GODMarxHitlerRichard NixonBatman to test your commitment to the Cause, man.Julian Assange must have been in on the 9-11 attacks, too, duh!
Date: 2011-06-10 11:01 pm (UTC)If I were to engage any conspiracy, it would be that Truthers and Loose Change were an invention of the right wing to make leftists look like moonbats. (Note: I don't actually believe this.)
I didn't like when the leftist bookstore I volunteered at gave any credence (read: bookshelf space or space on the bulletin boards) to Truthers. I once discreetly recycled some Truther literature from the free lit rack. Its absence made the rest of the flyers, pamphlets and zines look less crazy by association. Like you said, it's frustrating when legitimate concerns, particularly those about conspiracies that are not so covert, that happen to exist and screw up people's lives or even kill them, get ignored because you're too busy yell "Go away!" at the people who believe the government invested in holographic plane technology to cover up the fact they were blowing up the WTC. Because, right.
The US government's style of doing really bad things tends to be doing them in a way so weakly covered up that they're almost flagrant and then saying "What the fuck are the rest of YOU going to do about it? I thought so." I'm sure there are some terrible things the general public doesn't yet know about, but it really doesn't take much for things to get out -- people blow whistles or share photos. Surely some young government agent not thinking about the fact that people like to spread gossip would have bragged to his friends about his involvement in kidnapping the passengers of United flight 93 and making them record their voices into a computer that simulated the frightened calls to family members and 911 and OMG THEY REALLY BELIEVE THIS IS A THING THAT HAPPENED FFFFFFUUUUUU --
Re: Julian Assange must have been in on the 9-11 attacks, too, duh!
Date: 2011-06-10 11:02 pm (UTC)Re: Julian Assange must have been in on the 9-11 attacks, too, duh!
Date: 2011-06-10 11:15 pm (UTC)Re: Julian Assange must have been in on the 9-11 attacks, too, duh!
Date: 2011-06-10 11:18 pm (UTC)Of course, if the world was run by evil space iguanas, why is he publishing books that are sold at Barnes and Noble? Seems like beings crafty enough to dupe humanity for centuries about the fact that they come from space and are reptiles would be wise to that publishing books about them and selling them in chain stores thing.
Maybe they WANT us to think he's crazy, so we don't realize he's telling the truth.
Re: Julian Assange must have been in on the 9-11 attacks, too, duh!
Date: 2011-06-10 11:26 pm (UTC)Re: Julian Assange must have been in on the 9-11 attacks, too, duh!
Date: 2011-06-10 11:58 pm (UTC)Re: Julian Assange must have been in on the 9-11 attacks, too, duh!
Date: 2011-06-11 12:05 am (UTC)Re: Julian Assange must have been in on the 9-11 attacks, too, duh!
Date: 2011-06-11 03:44 am (UTC)Re: Julian Assange must have been in on the 9-11 attacks, too, duh!
Date: 2011-06-11 12:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-11 02:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-11 04:15 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-11 08:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-11 12:29 am (UTC)1. as you say, a correct American foreign policy that does not provoke terroristic responses in the least, except as commanded by the US itself
2. an overwhelmingly powerful and careful creation of a secret history and immense damage
3. the ability to project into the future the precise results of faking 9/11, and
4. the inability of any terrorists that might be out there to possibly damage the US without the assistance of the US in the first place.
No wonder it's attractive, especially to the sort of leftist who isn't an internationalist, but whom is used to seeing the US as a heroic state that simply needs to have its course corrected occasionally by protest movements sponsored by "We, The People", or the Democratic Party, etc.
no subject
Date: 2011-06-11 01:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-11 01:55 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-11 09:38 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-11 11:41 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-11 12:25 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-11 01:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-11 01:56 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-11 03:15 am (UTC)And Griffin is a loon. Make sure to ask him about Bilderbergers.
no subject
Date: 2011-06-11 03:32 am (UTC)I'm not going to the thing. Those people scare me.
no subject
Date: 2011-06-11 04:02 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-11 07:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-11 12:57 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-11 08:05 am (UTC)I had the fortune of being the first non-9/11 question after those five, and I got a unanimous round of applause when I said "For the record, I don't know why everyone else is here, but I have a question about October 14th, 2008."
The most I am willing to believe is that there are still a few surprising details we don't know about the security failures surrounding that day. And the best I can come up with to say about Truthers a decade later is, they just have a severe psychological fixation which, for reasons unknown to me, targets one traumatic moment in history.
no subject
Date: 2011-06-11 12:57 pm (UTC)You rock so hard. I long to have moments where I get to say something like that.
no subject
Date: 2011-06-11 02:35 pm (UTC)Icke--whose name I hadn't known but theories I had--is especially interesting to me because his theories show up in a novel by Whitley Streiber. I have a long-term project about fantasy and belief, examining the definition of fantasy as "what we don't believe in" by looking at supernatural fiction by people who believe in something like the supernatural element in the works. Streiber is just fascinating that way.
I sympathize with everything you say here; please don't think I'm trivializing the issues by my morbid fascination with the lunatic fringe.
no subject
Date: 2011-06-11 02:50 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-06-13 08:05 pm (UTC)Onlookers just point at the marijuana flag waving crowd and laugh and sometimes rightfully so.