nihil wrote:Let's pretend to agree that George W. lit the fuse. You know, as if you can prove this with such fascinating evidence as:

Why isn't there a photo of the plane crashing into the pentagon?

or

Why did the towers fall this way and not that way?

or

When I fold this $20 bill, why does an image of the burning towers emerge?

And then I agree by saying something along the lines of: "Yeah, most people are so unaware. They act as if we've been fucking the world for so long that there are people out there that would actually want to attack us! Those people are so clueless Clocker Bob. Man, I wish they could comprehend what you and I know to be the only answer. Bush had to set up this plan in order to find a reason to go to war.
You know, I actually talked to someone who was so naive the other day. He mentioned that bin Laden told the press that this was going to happen way back in like, 1998? What a fool. I can't believe that he didn't realize that Osama and George were drinkin' buddies. What a fool."

I follow you, but I just want to interject here that GWB is not a cart builder, he is the horse placed in front of the cart after The War On Terror was agreed upon as the new massage parlor of global military financing after the cartels determined that the Cold War had fulfilled its usefulness in that regard.

The Project for a New American Century rogue's gallery organized their assets, called in favors, and somehow made GWB a presentable candidate to the US electorate. While The House Of Bush is tied together with the House Of Saud, the CFR, the CIA, etc., GWB is not a plotter, he's an easily managed front man.

nihil wrote:Again, let us pretend that we agree on this scenario.

Sure, boil it down to: This war was in the works before 2000 and certainly before 9/11, and yes, we agree.

nihil wrote:Who does it help? What does it accomplish? If you really think that you can end the war or improve domestic social conditions by exposing this "scandal", then of course you are free to go down this road. But in my opinion, real change is made by popular movements. Look at history. Look at the recent elections in Central Americas. The powerful are intimidated and sueded by popular grassroots movements. Not by exposing scandals.

I don't understand how you think that there isn't room on the road to justice for both grassroots movements and the scandal exposers. And that many of us have our feet in both camps.

When a scandal is exposed, the dirty laundry of the greasiest and most sinister factions of the American political system is aired in public. Hopefully, careers are ended, jail time is served, fines are paid, whatever.

Take Halliburton, for example. They've been ripping off taxpayers and rigging contracts because they own their overseers. While you attempt to unelect their overseers, I'll attempt to tie Dick Cheney to 9/11, and we'll meet at a very happy place where we can watch Dick burn in hell.

nihil wrote:If you can prove that real change has been made by exposing a conspiracy to murder many American lives....I will send you a naked picture of my girlfriend.

That's a trick question on multiple levels. I can hardly prove real lasting change has been achieved in America as the result of the exposure of any conspiracy along its history, because America 2006 is the most corrupt it has ever been.

This gives credence to all the grand thinkers who compare America to other empires that decayed from within and without, and see the same trends. We are the worst country we have ever been. Our tendency to only act for global good if we are simultaneously exporting and installing exploitation capitalism has never been stronger.

The roster of countries who resent our ambitions is longer than ever, and it's not only because they don't want us to succeed, it's because of how we act after we succeed.

We say, "Let us run the world, we're a capital D Democracy, we're smart and fast and pretty", and they look at us and say,

"Get the fuck out of here. Your popular culture is a cesspool. Your streets are violent and overrun by drug users and drug sellers. Your citizens are so wasted that they can't even find Iran on a map, they barely vote, and your school systems turn out dumber versions of these adults every year. You can't even make your great economic system work for those inside your own country; you cannibalize your middle class so you can give their jobs to our brown-skinned people for 10 cents on the dollar!"

When the Monkey President tells America the we were attacked on 9/11 because "they hate our freedoms" while simultaneously increasing domestic wire-tapping, how silly does he look? Whether you believe al Qaeda is an agent of US intelligence or not, when you examine the motives of widespread Islamic contempt for America, it's not our freedoms they're hating us for, it's that we look exactly like Babylon to them, Infidels, Inc.

So, I can't prove real, lasting change has been achieved by exposing a scandal, just like you can't prove real, lasting change has been achieved by your grassroots movements. We are both on the same slippery slope.

The rate of America's decline has been slowed by implementation of legislation after a scandal has been uncovered. Do you want a list of those instances?

Clocker bob, I would be interested to hear about when you first seriously started thinking about and pursuing conspiracy theories. Like, what was the first one that really grabbed you? How many different theories do you pursue, and do they all relate or fit in to one broader, overarching theory?

Andrew L. wrote:Clocker bob, I would be interested to hear about when you first seriously started thinking about and pursuing conspiracy theories. Like, what was the first one that really grabbed you? How many different theories do you pursue, and do they all relate or fit in to one broader, overarching theory?

Andrew, I'll gladly respond to your questions, but only after you retract / modify / support this earlier statement you made regarding me:

Andrew L. wrote:But you don't seem to understand economics at all.

Every conspiracy theory I present is intimately dependent upon my grasp of the economic ramifications of it, so if we can't agree that I'm qualified to offer opinions on capitalism, then we can't discuss conspiracy theories with each other.

clocker bob wrote:

The same elite interests controlled the governments of the USA, the UK, Russia, and Germany during WWII. They concocted a great war to enrich all sides, and yet people have the gall to tell me that a country wouldn't kill 5,000 of its own citizens on 9/11 to provoke a war?

You, sir, are paranoid delusional. The above statement, she is poppycock. The logic is flawed. Conspiracy theorists tend to use very flawed logic. For instance, in a given war, certain companies and industries profit, hence, those entities are likely to have been involved in starting the war in the first place.

Most conspiracy flakes i know tend to like easy answers, like most people. The nearly infinite complexities of human history make it very difficult to follow without becoming disoriented - at least with regards to signposts and moral anchors. The history can be as new as days or months, as with 9/11 and the current war. This is not a recent symptom of modernism or post-modernism, or capitalism; it is a symptom of human history, most clear in war, where subjective views of events are stretched to their polar extremes in the narratives of people.

Conspiracy theories often create connections that are aesthetically pleasing, which is why they are so familiar to fiction, in the sense that they ARE a fiction, as opposed to reality, with all its endless narrative and loose ends. Conspiracies read like good novels - twists and turns, men behind curtains, shadow organizations, and most importantly, at the end of the road, a bad guy.

Conspiracy Theories taken seriously are thusly crap; but they can be a fun ride.

clocker bob wrote:
Andrew, I'll gladly respond to your questions, but only after you retract / modify / support this earlier statement you made regarding me:

Andrew L. wrote:But you don't seem to understand economics at all.

Every conspiracy theory I present is intimately dependent upon my grasp of the economic ramifications of it, so if we can't agree that I'm qualified to offer opinions on capitalism, then we can't discuss conspiracy theories with each other.

To understand capitalism one needs to first understand capital, not capitalists.

For you, it would seem, a systemic analysis only serves to loop back and validate a sexed-up, fetishistic understanding of power as the chicanery of an elite group. Everything seems to boil down to individual agency for you. There is no account of the importance of ideology (in the Marxian sense); you write as if capitalism is simply a monumentally successful plot undertaken by a bunch of evil men. This understanding suggests either ignorance or disavowal of the most basic tenets of critical political-economic thought going back to Marx & Engels and continuing through its constant reworkings.

It's all about "them" and "they" for you. This seems symptomatic of a conspiratorial mindset.

clocker bob wrote:

This wealth is like an island in an ocean. Events occur in the waters surrounding it, elected officials come and go, governments change direction, but the hands gripping the wealth never flinch. They choose their heirs, they choose their partners. And they make alliances. They die, but the wealth lives on, in New York, in London, in Geneva.

They make alliances to make their businesses more profitable. They conspire. They use their wealth as leverage, shuffling around the livelihoods of the under classes like chess pieces.

You could see these people as suits, as you say. Most of them are white men in suits. You could see their club as a knot, as you say. You or I will never unravel it. Why you don't see these men as conspirators, I don't understand.

They are members of elite organizations who make plans without the oversight or control of any elected representatives. You seem to want to narrow the definition of conspiracy to only allow only a small segment of their daily business to qualify; just because every plan they make isn't followed by the instructions, "Keep this a secret", that's meaningless.

Every plan they make begins life as a secret, in the sense that they never expect to have to answer for it.

They don't have to plot- they just have to do. It's like breathing for them.

You say that people organize and resist the state-sponsored violence required by capitalism. They don't. Even when they think they do, they don't. They kill each other and they draw some blood, but they never get near the top of the pyramid. Bad guys ultimately win, every time.

Control of the wealth swiftly returns to the same capitalists, different names maybe, but usually the same blood lines. The Russian revolution threw out the Romanovs so a different crew of parasites could run things, and they lied and called it communism.

The same elite interests controlled the governments of the USA, the UK, Russia, and Germany during WWII. They concocted a great war to enrich all sides, and yet people have the gall to tell me that a country wouldn't kill 5,000 of its own citizens on 9/11 to provoke a war?

In addition to a disavowal of political-economic theory, and critical theories of subjectivity, your posts suggest ignorance of history in general, including the history of anti-capitalist and anti-colonial struggle as well as the material and social history of the emergence of capitalism itself.

Bob, the extent to which some of these criticisms are true of your thinking is one index of the way you have already internalized power, making it spontaneously your own, bearing it with you as a principle inseparable from your identity.

Your understanding of capitalism, from what I can glean, can't account for your own position within it, for its real hold on you: the way you think.

Conspiracy theories are of a piece with an instrumental (and fetishistic) logic that is bent on relentless accumulation and acquisition with no dialectical or relational understanding of its own ideological coordinates--such theories inevitably mirror rather than demystify the specious resolution of real contradictions.

It is little wonder to me that someone would spend his days chasing after the "descending vector" of conspiracy evidence on one hand, and then effuse madly about the revolutionary call of the Hollywood film V for Vendetta on the other. It makes sense that the flakey pseudo-anarchist individualism underwriting that film would have a conspiracy theorist spilling over the side of his cognitive map. A special little 54 million-dollar Hollywood adventure movie made just for special revolutionaries like you.

A poster called "nihil" doesn't think stuff matters. TGTBT?

clocker bob wrote: Don't watch the puppet after you figure out whose hand is in the puppet.

Please tell me whose hand is on the puppet. Give me a single name. According to your definition, it can't be anyone overtly involved in politics.
And please don't say the fucking Carlyle group or something.

Andrew, I asked you to demonstrate for me that I don't comprehend economics well enough to develop or endorse conspiracy theories.

Instead, you've largely resumed your attack on conspiracy theories, as well as psychoanalyzed me, boldfaced a shitload of words in a post I made earlier, and told me that it's predictable that I would enjoy V for Vendetta.

You don't need to prove to me that I have a conspiratorial mindset. When have I denied it? I wrote the posts, in threads about conspiracy theories and 9/11. They seemed appropriate there, for some funny reason.

Look, you write like an academic. I am not. I'm a high school graduate who has tried to maintain good reading habits after I left school. I don't write anywhere other than in e-mail and on the EA forum currently, and I do not teach or lecture.

You write like a person who writes often. I willingly concede that your understanding of economics is greater in breadth and in depth. I can't discuss Marx, Engels, or dialectics with you other than in the most superficial manner. But I understand economics at a self-taught layman's level. I enjoy economics, so I've read some Marx, some Adam Smith, some Keynes, some Thorsten Veblein, and current people who appeal to me, Paul Krugman and a hundred web sites I'm not going to list.

What I'm saying is that the foundational principles of commerce and trade and currency and credit and debt are not a foreign language to me. I use this knowledge to formulate my opinions, just like you- just because I don't come to the same conclusions that you do when you apply your economic education to world events, well, that doesn't mean that I used a fishing rod to shoot a bear.

As far as using "they" and "them" a multitude of times in the earlier post, that's simply an example of trying to condense my thoughts into a space small enough for people to not get tired of reading them. I can't footnote the whole post- it's a discussion forum. There are "they''s and "them''s, and if you want, start a new thread entitled "A Who's Who Of Global Capitalism" and I'll be right behind you.

Andrew L. wrote:
Your understanding of capitalism, from what I can glean, can't account for your own position within it, for its real hold on you: the way you think.

This one really lost me. What are you saying here- that my understanding of capitalism, right or wrong in your eyes, can't account for the way that I think?

If that's what you meant, I'll try and address that later.

stephensolo wrote:

clocker bob wrote:

The same elite interests controlled the governments of the USA, the UK, Russia, and Germany during WWII. They concocted a great war to enrich all sides, and yet people have the gall to tell me that a country wouldn't kill 5,000 of its own citizens on 9/11 to provoke a war?

You, sir, are paranoid delusional. The above statement, she is poppycock. The logic is flawed. Conspiracy theorists tend to use very flawed logic. For instance, in a given war, certain companies and industries profit, hence, those entities are likely to have been involved in starting the war in the first place.

When I made that statement about similar elite interests controlling opposing governments during WWII, I knew that I had made it too brief as soon as I posted it.

I'll expand on it before Monday, and then people can resume attacking me for saying it, but at least I'll have some of those wacked-out conspiracy theories on display to flesh out my allegations.

Boy, I can't wait.

We're going to talk about Standard Oil and ITT and Ford Motor and IG Farben and Swiss banks and the train that delivered Lenin to Russia. We're even going to talk about JEWS! Guarantee I'll be called an anti-semite by at least one of the three people who will likely read the posts...

The Kid wrote:

clocker bob wrote: Don't watch the puppet after you figure out whose hand is in the puppet.

Please tell me whose hand is on the puppet. Give me a single name. According to your definition, it can't be anyone overtly involved in politics.
And please don't say the fucking Carlyle group or something.

In the puppet, not on it. And I'm sorry to tell you that the Carlyle group may be somewhere in that puppet.

You'll get your names, but you're angry, so you'll have to wait in line.