The Antisocial Socialist

Were I a very different sort of person, I would see a nefarious connection between the tenth anniversary of the September 11, 2001, attacks and the fact that my hold on Jonathan Kay's Among the Truthers: a journey into the growing conspiracist underground of 9/11 Truthers, Armageddonites, Vaccine Hysterics, Hollywood Know-Nothings and Internet Addicts came through at just the right time to allow me to finish it on September 9th. Of course, I'm not remotely that sort of person, but the pattern-recognition part of my brain still twigged a little when I realized the coincidence.

I confess that I am obsessed with conspiracy theories and the conspiratorial mindset. I blame X-Files in the 90s for both causing my interest in conspiracy theories and inoculating me from believing in them. Kay is similarly obsessed, though for different reasons—as he admits in the book, he actually shares many traits with people who believe in conspiracy theories. In fact, the book contains a conspiracy theory as elaborate and bizarre as any depicted in Loose Change or Zeitgeist, one that draws mindboggling links between Das Kapital, Protocols of the Elders of Zion, Orientalism, and modern conspiracy movements.

Yep, there's an agenda at work here. Kay is a writer and editor with the National Post, and he doesn't so much want to debunk Trutherism as use it as a tool to slam the typical bugbears: Marxism, social justice and anti-war movements, atheism, and Kant's supposed "moral relativism." (It's always Kant's fault.)

I'm not going to say you shouldn't read it or that it was a complete waste of time; there is certainly good information in the book, and he's correct in stating that there are more 9/11 conspiracy theories out there than there are books debunking them. It's important to understand the conspiratorial mindset and to critically examine the claims of Truthers, especially given what I've said repeatedly about their infiltration into legitimate social and political movements. It's not a harmless crank theory. He does interview actual Truthers and present case studies, and that stuff is valuable to know about. I just wish this book had been written by someone who wasn't as much of a crank as his subjects.

( I get the feeling this is gonna be long! )

Because 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.

Let's start it off with the Horrifying Story of the Day. After one half of an elderly gay couple was hospitalized after a fall, Sonoma County douchebags confined the couple to two separate nursing homes and sold off their possessions. One of the men died alone, the other was eventually released from the nursing home and is now impoverished.

Um, I can't even deal after reading that. Here's a picture of a puppy:



Anyway, apparently what you can do is blog about this, pass it on over Facebook or Twitter. Send a letter to the local paper, the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, at letters@pressdemocrat.com.

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I really liked Adam Savage's speech to the Harvard Humanist Society.

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Via ironed_orchid: Are you worried that you're not a smug enough liberal? Check out the new ethical dilemmas. (Spoiler: It's okay to pee in the shower. Um, good to know. Please don't pee in mine.)

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The worst vehicle in the world, probably driven by the worst person in the world.

- U.S. health care: So no public option? The health care debacle in the U.S. has gotten so twisted and entangled that I'm not sure what's going on. All I know is that they'll cover prayer but not gynecological check-ups or basically anything that's part of that "special interest group" composing over half of the American population.

+ Nice op-ed by Zizek on anti-communism in the former Eastern Bloc. You can pair it with this article if you'd like.

+ I finished reading A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini and it made me cry. Yes, I know you all read it two years ago.

- I am quite sick of seeing all of those re-usable shopping bags that are either black and say "this bag is green" (har har) or say "this bag is not plastic." You've had to pay for plastic bags in Toronto for quite some time now, so even people who litter and voted Conservative because of their position on the Alberta tar sands and club baby seals in their spare time carry them now. So carrying one that toots your environmentalist horn just makes you look like a smug yuppie. So there.

+ Good 9-11 conspiracy article, through which I found a link to all of the people who would have had to have been involved for the Truther conspiracy to make sense.

+ I am a crusty old lady (see above) but I wore Docs to school today and the kids were like, "nice kicks, Miss!" And then I had to ask if they meant my boots.

P.S. +++ The season finale of Mad Men. I love this show so much. Perhaps there shall be a separate post about how much I love this show.

The Truthers have let my people off the hook. We might have killed Christ, but apparently we didn't do 9/11.

To my more observant friends: Enjoy your matzoh!

So the anthrax thing was an inside job. Colour me unsurprised, but it's nice to see it come out into the open.

Of course, this is just going to inflame all the Loose Changers again, isn't it?

09.11.73

While searching for appropriate images, I came across Marcelo Montecino's collection of photos on Flickr. "Some of my brother's photographs are included here. He was killed by the military in late October 73."

Anyway, carry on.

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Oh, there was that other one. ( Under the cut )

There has been another round of conspiracy theorizing over at anarchists. It seems like one of the most popular conspiracy theories these days (after "Jews faked the Holocaust!") is that the official story about 9-11 is...well, somewhat lacking. The Left, for obvious reasons, seems to be more willing to entertain such theories than the Right, and I am genuinely interested in knowing who among you believes what.

When it comes to conspiracy theories, and in particular to the Bush administration, I tend to go with Hanlon's Razor, "Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity," and its corollary, "Any sufficiently advanced stupidity is indistinguishable from malice."

( Cut for a long poll. )

On a related note, and this is not snark, I'm not entirely sure what a "disinfo agent" or what a "confusionist" is, although I keep running into the latter online. Are they the same as Discordians? Why do they keep showing up on anarchists?

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And now, for your Ted Nugent Quote of the Day:

Though modern man has mostly come to depend on technical services and indulgent conveniences, the pulse of the warrior rages on—even downtown. Mother Nature can be a bitch, but we love her madly anyway. That flash of history from caveman to European to pioneer to city dude reveals a powerful force of intellect, courage, reason, and creativity that is alive and well. Leaping into the millennium on the backs of strong, uppity entrepreneurs and timeless Jeremiah Johnsons, the pecking order is accurate and in place. And there's not a damn thing you can do about it. Conform to this truism or perish. You get what you deserve.