Nicole Belle, over at John Amato’s Crooks and Liars has a brief look at l’affaire Arkin, and springboards from there to a look at Internet argumentation and to make a plea for civility.
Not on Arkin’s part, mind you…ad hominem, slander, and dishonesty on his part are summed up as:
A little background: After watching an NBC Nightly News report that had troops bemoaning the lack of support at home Arkin posted that the soldiers should be grateful that we do respect them, even if we don’t support the mission.
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Apparently the masochist, Arkin responded again
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1500 comments and another closed thread later, Arkin had been insulted in every possible way. Never one to back away from a fight, Arkin takes issue with the ad hominem used in lieu of debate:
Belle says
So what do you think? Arkin’s plea for civility (one I share – you commenters can be brutal and seem to forget that there are real people behind the words you’re reading) suggests that a civilized exchange is a lost art. Is it the anonymity of the internet? Is it that certain topics are just too provocative to discuss calmly? Or have we collectively forgotten our manners?
The problem, of course is that Arkin deliberately used inflammatory language, deception, and slurs to make his original point – that the troops needed to be taken aside and told to STFU – and in my view lost whatever standing he had to complain that the audience “was mean to him”. A better writer and thinker than Arkin could have raised parallel points – which are important ones – about the relationship between troop opinion and public opinion, and the role of each is establishing the other. He could have asked about the cost of a polarizing political dialog that excludes the people spoken about. He could have done a lot of things. But then again, he’s Arkin.
Belle makes a plea for civility, but fails to make an even-handed one. He must not have more than one child.
Pleas for civility coming from Crooks and Liars.
Seriously, Pot – > Kettle.
It’s misleading because the whole point of the debate is elites telling everyone else to STFU. This includes Crooks and Liars, Arkin, Kos, etc.
Debate is possible among people of like-minded backgrounds and goals, i.e. same socio-economic background, desire for upward mobility, etc.
Arkin / Crooks and the rest form the new semi-hereditary elite. Note Arkin is a member of Greenpeace concerned with Global Warming. Yet drives a Chevy Tahoe SUV.
The Iraq War, Global Warming are all a means by elites to shut down social debate, mobility, and create a society along the lines of Cuba or Venezuela, a few party elites in hereditary positions, who are quite rich, the rest a mass of poor people getting some patronage controlled again by the hereditary elite.
Of course Arkin tells the troops to STFU. Of course Crooks backs him. That’s the point. The nation can’t be turned into Cuba without it.
Nicole Belle may be “looking for a little civility” in the blogs, but civility won’t get you a job with the Edwards campaign, will it?
Be wary of Crooks & Liars. Crooks & Liars is what’s known as a left gatekeeper blog; their job is to pretend to be leftist (earning their “credibility” with plenty of Bush-bashing) and then use that “credibility” to manage discourse, diverting discussion away from areas most harmful to the regime. They will take things right up to the edge but they know how much they can say and what they can’t say. On the most important issues they are obfuscators and distractors, discourse channelers, not genuine leftists. Just like Daily Kos, Huffington Post, MyDD, Democratic Underground, Moxie Grrrl, Educational Whisper, The American Prospect, Mother Jones, Salon, The Nation, Sadly No!, My Left Wing, etc. These kind of sites, though appearing to foam at the mouth with vitriol against the right wingers, are actually doing the regime a favor by limiting discussion on matters to keep it within parameters safe for the regime. If you don’t believe me, try posting something on for example Crooks & Liars that says: People in the reality-based community should have no problem whatsoever in realizing that the uppermost portion of a skyscraper is not going to be able to “fall” into and THROUGH the remaining vast majority of solid building as quickly, meaning as effortlessly as falling through air without something else (i.e. explosives) reducing said majority of building to such a state of offering no more resistance than air. Can we all agree on that? Sounds pretty straightforward; solid things offer vastly more resistance than air. Anyone who graduated elementary school SHOULD be able to grasp this, and SHOULD be able to therefore grasp that the Twin Towers and WTC # 7 building had to have been controlled demolitions. It is literally COMMON SENSE.
See what happens. I’ll tell you what happens: Anyone posting on Crooks & Liars who says anything that in any way questions the impossible official myth of 9/11 gets banned from commenting.
Want to see how Markos Moulitsas of Daily Kos fame has ties to the C.I.A.? Read here:
http://www.thehollywoodliberal.com/2007/08/11/more-on-the-daily-kos-cia-connection/
http://www.commonwealthclub.org/archive/06/06-06zuniga-audio.html
http://www.myleftwing.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=17528
http://wheres-my-left-wing.blogspot.com/
Want to see how Kos does the same shit as Crooks & Liars, covering up for the mass murdering clique who brought us the 9/11 inside job? Check here:
http://wagnews.blogspot.com/2005/07/daily-kos-outs-itself-as-controlled.html
So just because a blog APPEARS to be leftist, don’t assume they are genuine. Finding out where they stand on 9/11 truth and election fraud will let you know if they’re for real or just part of the cover-up.
Well, for starters, let me remark that all those bare URLs are frowned on here (they mess up Movable Type’s formatting).
As for your claims regarding the target website, that’s what makes it a cool Web: people can make up their own minds.
As for the specific claim you make regarding the WTC’s collapse, here are four observations off the top of my head:
1) You seem to think that office buildings are solid, like the Pyramids. They aren’t. The point of building a modern highrise is ti maximize the amount of billable floorspace present. Also, several aspects of the WTC construction aree unique–they got waivers to build with different structural and fire-retardant guidelines than was in the building code. The latter matters are in the public record, I believe.
2) You also offer no quantitative data regarding how fast things fell down at WTC, just your impression that they fell too fast compared to something you probably have never seen — a building falling nearly straight down that *hadn’t* had a demolition setup rigged. That’s not especially sound reasoning even if it appears plausible to you.
3) In every demolition I’ve ever seen, puffs of particulates are visible at seams. Such puffs are nowhere in evidence in the footage I’ve seen of the WTC. So presumably the charges that brought the towers down would need to have been precisely timed to councide with the debris falling from above. That’s really hard to do, as far as I can tell, and from what I can determine no commercial demolition project has ever been done that way; it violates standards left and right. If you can find an example outside of the WTC collapse, please provide a pointer.
4) Nobody anywhere has reported seeing any of the supposed charges or detonation wiring set, nor any unusual activity with some sort of cover story (“building maintenance”, “HVAC retrofit”, or the like); given the number of people who would have had exposure to such a project, and the time (days or weeks) it would have taken to rig, this suggests that any such charges are in your head, rather than having been present at WTC. The amount of explosives and their placement would have been substantial.
So, no, what you suggest is not common sense. It just sounds like it to you. Sorry about that.
Correction to above, for “fire-retardant”, please read “fire safety”.
I’m slightly “retardant” today, it seems. 🙂
_In every demolition I’ve ever seen, puffs of particulates are visible at seams. Such puffs are nowhere in evidence in the footage I’ve seen of the WTC. So presumably the charges that brought the towers down would need to have been precisely timed to councide with the debris falling from above._
I’ve seen puffs of particulates at the seams in still photos. I’m not clear you wouldn’t have those even without explosives. But that whole argument seems peculiar to me. Why did the conspirators need the WTC towers to fall down? It would have been better for them if the towers had remained standing with big airplane-shaped holes in them. A blight on the skyline for years. A long complicated effort to repair the towers, that might require large parts of them to be shut down during construction.
Putting in explosives on every floor arranged-just-so would be a big complicated operation, something that might easily get exposed. And for what? So the towers would turn invisible, instead of being visibly damaged for years? It’s stupid. I can’t say that the 9/11 conspirators weren’t that stupid. I can’t say for sure that they couldn’t be that stupid and then get away with it. But it doesn’t make sense.
The possibly-fake Bin Ladin interview had Bin Ladin saying in english that they didn’t expect the buildings to fall down. They believed the same engineering reports everybody else believed, that said an airliner strike wouldn’t make the building fall down because there was enough fire retardant smeared on the important parts.
I don’t want to argue that they must not have done it that way because they’d be stupid to do that. That kind of reasoning leads to triple-think. “We can get away with this because nobody would believe we were stupid enough to do it.” And yet, it sure does seem like a stupid thing to do. Hijacking a few airliners and aiming them at buildings was something a few people could do secretly. It might take some more effort to get rid of the air interceptors who are supposed to stop them. Breaking into WTC and wiring the whole thing with explosives just right so it would fall straight instead of not falling at all — that’s a much bigger job and one that might get found out. Then it takes extra cover-up to keep the metal samples from being examined, and so on. Too big a conspiracy, too many things could go wrong.
The only plausible reason I can see to do it is if the conspirators thought the building would fall down anyway, and they didn’t want to take the chance it would fall sideways and destroy a lot of other stuff. But it makes much more sense for AQ to hope they could just kill the particular people they were aiming at — stockbrokers — with minimal collateral damage. And it makes sense for more secret conspirators to hope for the same thing. Mining the buildings would make this the Rube Goldberg Device of conspiracies. KISS is as important for that sort of thing as it is for engineering.
bq. I’ve seen puffs of particulates at the seams in still photos. I’m not clear you wouldn’t have those even without explosives.
Really? All I remember seeing in WTC footage are puffs out of windows (utterly explainable as plain air-pressure blowouts). Not puffs at the corners of the buildings and at other major columns (sorry if “seams” was a poor choice of words). Det cord has a linear burn rate measured in miles per second, and the typical controlled demolition uses a lot of it. There’s a sort of “zing” effect not unlike watching a chalk line going snap on a construction site. Nothing at all like that is evident.
The other point I tried to make bears extending.
We don’t have a whole lot of experience with a tall building, built like a WTC tower, that suddenly has 12 or 28 upper stories drop several stories when two or three immediately-lower floors collapse because the steel structure is softened to 10% or its design strength due to tens of thousands of square feet of floorplan being exposed to burning jet fuel with a good draft / crosswind.
Basically, we only have two experiences like that in the history of “high steel” construction: WTC 1 and 2.
The prior poster’s intuition that “buildings are solid, not air”, when that many stories’ worth of building drops (say) 30 feet… …is questionable. And of course, every additional floor that collapsed added MV, mass times velocity, to the impact experienced by the next floor down. Not unlike a series of amazingly-large piledriver hits. You know how fast the pile goes when the driver hits it? Just about as fast as the driver. Funny how that works… Almost like it’s solid, not air.
QED.
Truthers like Len talk a big game about common sense but dont show many signs of it. We don’t engineer building based on ‘common sense’, we build them based on long established engineering principles. We are fooled every single day by principles that seem obvious but in fact behave differently in nature. Nothing in my experience leads me to believe two objects fall at the same rate regardless of mass (outside of carefully controlled experiments performed by ‘the man’ of course). If i believed my casual experience I would make a terrible astrophysicist. Perhaps i should join the truthers against the moon landing based on this observation.
And again- common sense causes me to ask why you would fill a building with explosives and THEN fly a plane into it. Was the plane packed with explosives as well? Lets start with WHY?
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So why don’t we know the distribution of steel and concrete in the towers?
How would that affect collapse time?
Conserve Momentum
psik