There are kooks everywhere. Some people believe they have been abducted by UFOs and others believe that the moon landings never happened. There are many who believe that the 9/11 tragedy was a conspiracy of the United states government.
One thing that all kooks have in common is their ability to completely detach themselves from reality. Wanna see a good example?
David Klinghoffer posts on the Intelligent Design Creationist website Evolution News & Views. His latest display of kookdom is to try and link evolutionary biology with 9/11 truthers [Darwinism and 9/11 Conspiracy Theories: The Parallels].
I hope the Discovery Institute has a full-time psychologist on their staff.
With the approaching 9/11 anniversary, Slate has been running a series tracing the rise and ongoing evolution of 9/11 Truth theories that try to show how the attacks 10 years ago were really an inside job. According to this thinking, 9/11 was no attack by Islamic terrorists. Rather, the towers were detonated by an expertly covered-up collusion among Zionists and U.S. government operatives. You might have expected these notions would, if entertained at all, be dispelled by the exhaustive debunking job that Popular Mechanics did with its 5,500-word article on the subject back in 2005. Not so, as those who take an interest in conspiracy culture know well.
What I found striking about the first installment in the Slate series, by Jeremy Stahl, is the parallels with what we know about the thought and writings of Evolution Truth activists: our ever-loving friends in the Darwin Lobby. You may recall the news of a few months back that Glenn Branch, deputy director of the Darwin-lobbying National Center for Science Education, had collaborated with 9/11 Truth conspiracist James H. Fetzer in editing a special number of the journal Synthese on "Evolution and Its Rivals." That issue of the journal became so notorious for the incivility of its contributions that a whole fracas broke out and made the pages of the New York Times.
It may have seemed just a delicious coincidence at the time to find Branch and Fetzer teaming up so comfortably. Yet consider the features of 9/11-style paranoid thinking and some similarities to its evolutionary counterpart ...
"You may recall the news of a few months back that Glenn Branch, deputy director of the Darwin-lobbying National Center for Science Education, had collaborated with 9/11 Truth conspiracist James H. Fetzer in editing a special number of the journal Synthese on "Evolution and Its Rivals." That issue of the journal became so notorious for the incivility of its contributions that a whole fracas broke out and made the pages of the New York Times."
ReplyDeleteCan anyone give us links on this?
You may recall the news of a few months back that Glenn Branch, deputy director of the Darwin-lobbying National Center for Science Education, had collaborated with...
ReplyDeleteOoh, guilt by association! Does Klinghoffer really want to go there? Because I have it from reliable sources that Klinghoffer associates with HIV/AIDS denialists and anthropogenic global warming denialists.
Moon landings? Aliens? Don't mock, I have documentary footage:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P6MOnehCOUw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyInKT95eG0
It's the same people in both films! And they're English!
If you really think that there was *no* conspiracy committed by the U.S. government which bears upon the 9/11 attacks, then you simply have not spent much time and effort investigating the issue.
ReplyDeleteThis is not to say that there are not plenty of kooks advancing cockamamie paranoid theories about the event - there are more than enough of these.
But beware the glib dismissal of any and all governmental conspiracy as being of the same parcel as, say, propositions that the WTC was leveled by explosive charges.
The FBI and CIA were involved with the main characters of this affair for months and years before the tragic event itself. Large amounts of money were transferred to nefarious figures, standard operating procedures were inexplicably ignored. FBI field agents made the cover of Newsweek because of their concerns about counterproductive interdepartmental conspiracy. Conspiracy is what the CIA does!
We have not had a true investigation into this event and we need one. Blithe statements sweeping all conspiracy theories about 9/11 under the same crackpot moniker commit a grave disservice to the victims of the event, and to the national ethos of the U.S.
Re Bayesian Bouffant, FCD
ReplyDeleteThat's in addition to Holocaust revisionist John West.
They forgot the commonality of styling themselves as brave dissidents facing down an entrenched conspiracy to ridicule them and suppress their revolutionary findings. Oh wait, that's a commonality between cdesign proponentsists and truthers.
ReplyDeleteWhat events need to occur for a buildings like those to collapse and fall straight down thrice...
ReplyDeleteA symmetrical uniform collapse would require uniform symmetrical damage...
Having that occur 3 times is about as likely as taking an axe to a tree and having it fall into a split pile of cord wood.
"A symmetrical uniform collapse would require uniform symmetrical damage..."
ReplyDeleteYour evidence for this proposition is...?