9/11 Conspiracy Debate on Democracy Now!
By kowalski Comments (6) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
I'm reposting this because I really do want people to watch this debate between the editors of Popular Mechanics and the two angry young men who produced Loose Change, aired yesterday on Democracy Now! and moderated by Amy Goodman. I think it's absolutely crucial for people here at RedState and elsewhere to judge for themselves the merits of the debate and the mindset of the participants.
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Amy Goodman featured a debate between the two indoctrinated and horribly misguided young men who produced "Loose Change" and the editors of Popular Mechanics who wrote "Debunking 9/11 Myths."
It really is instructive and disturbing to watch this interview and realize that these two very intelligent and very energetic and capable young men have been utterly subverted and turned against their own country by people like Amy Goodman and the Left in America. I felt a powerful sense of identification with them both, because I used to be very much like them. It's going to take about 20 years for them to straighten their minds out, but I doubt either of them will. Both of them have been irretrievably [note: originally, "irrevocably"] poisoned.
Meanwhile, Amy Goodman and her ilk will live on in shades of grey. This debate was more evidence of how irresponsible and destructive America has become to its young men because of leftist academics.
**BONUS: Watch the debate. These two guys kick off their anger and Rage Against the Machine by noting something about how Pop. Mech. is a Hearst publication and expecting Amy Goodman to give them props. At several times in the debate, I expected it to come to blows, and if there were any gates to crash, that would have happened too. That's what the organized academic left is doing to young men in this country. It's deliberate subversion.
Addendum to my earlier comment in HeavyM's thread: Goodman opened this interview by noting that the "documentary" (Democracy NOW! does refer to it as a "documentary" -- as do the producers) has been downloaded approximately 10 million times.
Except that many of the questions can be answered without recourse to a conspiracy theory. The point that the Eds. of Pop. Mech. are making in this interview is that the data to refute the "documentary" produced by these two fellows is available, but that they have ignored that data in order to tell their conspiracy story.
And they've also ignored it because of a very strong ideological committment and a belief that the government is covering up the "truth" about 9/11. It's very tough to unconvince people like that. They're past the age where they're going to be influenced easily -- their future direction has already been established.
I feel sorry for them, frankly. Both of them are extremely smart guys -- the kind of people we need in this country -- who have been pushed down an ideological "hate America, distrust the Government" path. With 10 million downloads, and an active blogosphere support network, they have all the positive reinforcement they need to keep their belief system alive and kicking against the Machine.
In my view, they are about 1 degree of separation from the homegrown al-Qaida converts -- and as they age a little, they'll find their "religion" and keep moving in that direction. Bermis basically bounces around in that interview like a jack-in-a-box. They're both cynical, jaded, absolutely distrustful of the government, and completely self-congratulatory and self-righteous. If he could have taken a punch, he would have. That boy is an Angry Young Man. That's the kind of young men Amy Goodman encourages.
When this country is turning out people who are math/science proficients like these two, we've really reached a cultural turning point. Maybe Chalmers Johnson will be proved right, after all. Lord knows our Universities have been working hard all these years.
I have not been around redstate along time but based on this article it seems you do have a certain political agenda to off hand refute any questions about 9/11 or why the government is hiding so much information. Do you know anything about Professor Steven E. Jones of BYU who has analyzed steel from the WTC and found that it contains sulphur evidence of military style explosives?
...that if the conspiracy theorists are right he just gave his IP address to an agent of the Man.
(Sigh) You gotta wonder at these guys. Except for mujadaddy; he's all right. Haven't seen him around lately, though.
Moe
The Fuzzy Puppy of the VRWC.
Which in Goodman's interview opens with the story of Flight 93. The narrators ask: "...it was shot down, it wasn't shot down..."
Among all the other factual and rhetorical errors these two budding documentarians commit in their work, this is one of the worst. They do not believe that a plane crashed there, and they studiously ignore the evidence that it did, in order to create their documentary. Instead, they open the segment with a false choice that excludes the alternative they don't wish to contend with, because it would utterly undermine their film. The rest of their work is just about as shoddy.
These two young men are clearly intelligent and inquisitive. But if you had to ask me, I doubt they are sociology majors or other kind of "fluff" majors. I bet they are people with either math or engineering degrees. Honestly. Here's why. Science students generally learn all sorts of information on how the world works. They learn that there's a certain elegance in the equations that govern the motion of matter. Indeed, that's a hallmark of scientific training: to search for order in an apparently chaotic world. After reading that transcript, I get the definite impression that these two men, Dylan Avery and Jason Berman, are trying to find this kind of elegant order in 9/11. Their problem isn't that they want to answer the unanswered questions, which seems so noble and pure (and scientific). Their problem lies in their premise: that it is EVEN POSSIBLE to answer _all_ of the unanswered questions. In science, if the first experiment doesn't go as planned, you do a second, and a third, and another still, to discover what's going on. You can't do that with something like 9/11. The "experiment" only happened once and, God willing, won't happen again. Many of the questions will never be answered because the only people who knew the answers are now dead. So, start with a faulty premise-that the answers are knowable-and add in a healthy dose of anti-authoritarianism (which isn't inherent to liberals, BTW) and you have the makings of a conspiracy theorist.