The dinkwallets out front of the VAG: how idiot leftists give aid and comfrot to George W. Bush
I went for a walk today up Robson and past the Vancouver Art Gallery. Now the VAG is a popular place for people to hold protests and demonstrations because it’s a big chunk of public space sidewalk and if holding up a sign gets too hard there’s a big set of stairs to sit on. There’s regular demonstrations by Iranian communists who want to overthrow the government of Iran, enviromental groups and pretty much everything else you can imagine. It’s a really interesting mixing of political beliefs protesting there on any given week.
I don’t always agree with the protesters, nor do I always understand what their point is (are we expected to invade Iran and overthrow the government or is protesting in Vancouver going to make the government of Iran crumble on its own), but I never really get mad. If you don’t like the Chinese government because they won’t let you practice your fringe religious beliefs that’s fine by me. If you hate German because they won’t let you be a Scientologist, that’s fine by me.
But today going past the VAG I finally got mad. I didn’t shout or yell or confront the asshats, I simply came home and blogged this. I got mad because they were protesting with the hopes of demonstrating to the world that the terrorist attacks that happened in New York [nymb] almost five years ago now, were a hoax. Yup, didn’t really happen. The World Trade Center was brought by the US government, nobody died on United Airlines Flight 93 and the Pentagon was hit with a cruise missle fired by the US Armed Forces and not an airplane.
My god, what splendid ignorance. Honestly these people might as well believe in unicorns and fucking Vulcans like Spock. At least with unicorns they could be 13 year old girls and play with My Little Ponies and with Vulcans they’d get Pon Farr and snazzy uniforms.
Hey you want to say that George Bush has absolutely prostituded the tragedy of 9/11 to meet a set of foreign policy objectives that were drawn up years before, I’m there with you. Did Bush, the CIA and others in the American government have information that if acted upon could have prevented 9/11, well there’s certainly evidence to suggest that they were strongly warned about it. You want to say that America invaded Iraq for oil and not for WMDs, democracy or any of the other offered reasons, right on brother. I’ll Bush bash with the best of them.
But did Bush plan the attacks on September 11th? No. The man can’t even eat a pretzel without choking, do you seriously believe he could pull this off? No I don’t need to see the grade eight science fair video called Loose Change [lc] that the protesters were telling people to watch, not again. Not even the new edit which removes the fact that it was largely based on incorrect Wikipedia articles that have since been removed [wp].
Jesus. I thought Vancouver sort of immunized people to believing in this bullshit. I mean I know we’re left of centre, but come on this is as demented as being a holocaust denier. Do these people just hate America, Bush and war so much that they’ll believe anything? The worst thing about this thing is that this makes it easier for supporters of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq and the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive strikes and global US hegemony, to classify anyone who doesn’t support them as naive easily conned idiots. By taking the reasonable and morally justifiable position of opposing Bush and the actions of the US government in regards to the Middle East and then taking that oppoisition into Crazy Town, it brings us all into Crazy Town in the eyes of the masses whose votes decide elections and thus government policy.
If you’re a suggestible sort and for some reason think that September 11th might have just been some kind of Photoshop magic trick on a grand scale then here are a few links that should set you straight and that deal with the Loose Change nonsense:
Penn and Teller: Bullshit episode on conspiracy theories [gv]
Point by point rebuttles of Loose Change [1], [2]
The Best Page in the Universe [bpu]
Related posts:
I don’t know why this makes you mad. It amuses me. There will always be conspiracy theorists. I like people who insist on questioning everything. They balance out all the sheep who just blindly follow.
And besides, it’s amusing to listen to their ranting. Kind of reminds me of the mockumentary about how the moon landings were faked. It’s an entertaining watch. And that was a lot more belieavable than faking 9/11.
Thanks for posting this. I agree with you completely. Sadly, I don’t think that the views expressed by the 9/11 conspiracists outside the art gallery are so far outside the mainstream anymore, if they ever were. I hear these kinds of theories and worse all the time around the water cooler, and not just around this time of year. It makes my skin crawl.
I have blogged about this before on my own sites. If anyone is interested, they can check it out here
or here.
When it comes to matters like this, there is fiction within fact and fact within fiction. Events happened and people died. Everything else becomes a mess of who and what you want to believe, not to mention what your source is. Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, CNN, BBC, or the internet, it just depends on where you want to take your information from. Five years after the fact, there are still questions unanswered. Not because they are unknown, but they are simply a matter of national security or apart of evidence in ongoing investigations. That breeds more questions, and this generates conspiracies.
I have a brother who is a commercial airline, former military transport, pilot and was in line to take off from Dulles on that day when the FAA shut everything down over D.C. Even he can tell you that it’s amazing how anyone cruised a large, trans-continental jet into the side of a building with just civilian aircraft training. One and a million shot, and he hit it. It’s elements such as those that gets people asking questions.
At my old college radio station, we had an alumni die at the Pentagon. The lounge at the new facilities we moved the station into is named after him. Craig Amundson’s family that I met on the grand opening of the station is evidence to me that real people died on 9/11.
For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. So imagine the other end of the spectrum. Blind patriotism is dreadfully more concerning to me then people questioning the events of 9/11. If anything, the idea of people in Vancouver promoting this theory is worth the time of getting folks to think differently about accepting a faceless war with open arms. Remember, there was a busted terror cell in Toronto with a big operation being planned not too long ago.
I wrote about it in a post on my site, but Rudy G. is looking to make a run for the White House in ‘08 as a republican. Don’t declare the era of conservatism gone when Bush ends his term just yet.
Jonathon:
The difference between believing that the moon landing was fake and pretending that 9/11 was a hoax is that one has stakes and one doesn’t. Nobody, except a handful of astronauts and monkeys, died in the run up or aftermath of the moon landing. If someone chooses not to believe it ever happened then sure they’re a dingbat, but they’re not likely to do anything about it.
Thousands of people died during the attacks in the US five years ago, and countless thousands of US and allied servicemen and Iraqi civilians have died since because of it.
If these people want to affect change to the foreign policy of the US then there needs to be an open and honest dicussion of the role of Iraq in the attacks (they had none), the cost in lives and tax dollars of the decision to invade Iraq under the pretext of 9/11 and what we should do about it now.
By clinging onto insane theories about government fixes a whole bunch of people who could actually be articulate and comitted supporters of a rational policy not only take themselves out of the debate but they smear the rest of us who are also against how the US war on terror has been implemented.
John:
I agree with you that in large part this steams from the fact that 9/11 never really got a full public airing, we don’t know all of the facts about how it happened. I don’t support Bush at all, but this sort of nonsense makes everyone who opposes his policies look bad.
As for things like how hard it is to fly a jet into a tower, I don’t know anything about that. I can do it on flight simulator on the computer, but that’s probably not the same.
The thing is that doesn’t matter to them. They, and in this I’m talking about Loose Change the movie they were quoting, take all events and mash them into the rubric of their theories.
Two planes hit two towers? Well it was too much of a success for untrained Arabs.
One plane crashed without hitting anyting? Well obviously it was crashed to make it look like the White House was under attack without actually attacking the White House.
The plane that hit the Pentagon didn’t cause enough damage? Well obviously it wasn’t a plane.
No matter what happens they’ll ignore evidence and take hersay and half turths and spin it into idiocy.