On (Some) "Educated" Liberals and Their Knee-Jerk Dogma Over "Conspiracy Theories"

I'd much rather be trying to entertain you with my grapplings to understand epigenetics, but this minor story got caught in my craw.

I'd rather take a few weeks and read a mess of stuff on a few topics, take illegible notes, gropingly trying to understand something way over my head and which seems as complicated as giving a good read to Finnegans Wake. I apologize for this entire blogpost-spewage, for it consists, to my mind, entirely of a digression from the endlessly truly interesting topics - interesting to me, at least - out there.

Salon Dot Com Shows Their Liberal Bona Fides
Robert Anton Wilson, still to my mind the greatest thinker about conspiracy theory I've ever read, once said in an interview with Philip H. Farber in 1997, "I am one hundred percent in favor of studying conspiracy theories because, next to quantum mechanics, they represent the best test of how well you can handle ambiguity and uncertainty."

                                    Salon editor Kerry Lauerman, who went to the U.of
                                    Indiana, where he - apparently - found out how to 
                                    know when the 
                                    interpretation of a public event qualifies as a "fringe" 
                                   "conspiracy theory" and 
                                    when good liberals should close their minds to any 
                                    further thinking about those events. 

I don't know if you caught this story or not, but I thought it both revelatory and confirmed for me the quality of university-educated in the Humanities-like hive mind that operates at Salon dot com.

Did you happen to catch Greg Olear's "Not All Truther Movements Are Created Equal" article in the online mag The Weeklings? If you haven't, please have a look now (it's short and well-written) and note that his four-paragraph preface was appended after what happened when Salon, which uses The Weeklings as one of their content-affiliates, picked up his story and then pulled it.

Joe Coscarelli of New York Magazine covers Salon's pulling of Olear's piece. Skip down to the italicized quotes from Salon editor Kerry Lauerman, who apologizes for the "unfortunate lapse," and that they at Salon have a long history of debunking fringe conspiracists, most recently the Sandy Hook ones. (And yet...by covering fairly exhaustively the Sandy Hook "Truthers," weren't they giving them more press than they deserved? This idea seems at least somewhat consistent with pulling Olear's piece. Just wondering.)

Jeremy Stahl of Slate covers this "lapse" by Salon and goes on to suggest they were right to do so, by linking all of his stellar debunking of the nano-thermite and Popular Mechanics experts on how much heat it takes to melt steel beams, etc.

The OG Goes On To Rant:
But to me, the real point was that indeed, Olear's suggestions did seem mild. The idea that all 9/11 conspiracy theories are equal to - in my current opinion, given my present state of ignorance and (mis)understandings - the execrable and baseless theories about Sandy Hook, seems classic "I'm such a well-educated liberal" dipshittery on the part of Salon and its pretentious editors. 

Stahl at Slate seems like a variant of this. He's far too certain of himself. But Lauerman is classic pretentious liberal asshole. Olear is merely saying there seems a lot of differences between 9/11 and Sandy Hook, and I think it was a valid point. Almost a trivial point. Olear also has doubts about the official story, AKA the 9/11 Commission Report. I think, after reading four and a half feet of books and articles on 9/11, that there seems valid room for doubt. (Olear's attempt to make distinctions between conspiracy theories, whatever your current position on Sandy Hook and 9/11 are, seemed sound to me, and did not deserve to be banished to the fringes in the Region of Thud. In my opinion.)

But Salon only seeks to apologize to their readers (which includes me; I read a lot of Salon's stuff) for fucking up and allowing a - again, I thought fairly benign - piece to sluice through. Their minds are closed about Sandy Hook (some really good reporting by Salon writers on the heinous a-holes fomenting conspiracies that a lot of it was faked so Obama could crack down/take away guns); Salon is also officially closed about 9/11, and I'd just guess also: the JFK/RFK/MLK hits, the Tuskegee Syphilis Experiments, the Reichstag fire, Gulf of Tonkin, that J. Edgar knew about Pearl Harbor before it occurred and FDR may have also, how the CIA tried to kill Castro, Watergate, Nayirah, Operation Northwoods, MK-ULTRA, Project Paperclip, and that the CIA was involved with the Contras and cocaine trafficking.

Such conspiracy theorists and their lowbrow ideation! My word and land o-goshen! Whatever has happened to our educational system! 'Tis a cryin' shame, just a shame!

Meanwhile, I still wonder about odd aspects of the whole 9/11 official narrative. For example, this piece ran in the San Francisco Chronicle just after. All I'm saying is I wonder.

Any one of us who think we should actually entertain ambiguity or uncertainty about real-world events must have gone to a bad community college; ambiguity is best left for reading Licherchoor...

I'd like Lauerman to tell me when a "fringe" "conspiracy theory" becomes that thing, and when does it become...Something Else. And how and when do you justify the changes?

Interestingly, one of the best books I read in 2012 was by David Talbot, Salon's founder. (I am trying to inject Irony here, folks. Please give me a modicum of credit.)

Talbot wrote the text of Devil Dog: The Amazing True Story of the Man Who Saved America, which resembles a graphic novel for kids (immaculately illustrated by Spain Rodriguez), but oh my: this is more for those adults out there who never heard about the most decorated Marine of his time, General Smedley Darlington Butler. And how he exfiltrated (is that even a word?) a fascist group headed by millionaires and Big Biz assholes like Alfred P. Sloan and Pierre Dupont, who sought to overthrow FDR. It's all true! (No foolin': if you want to read some US history that's hard to set down: read Devil Dog. Your head will swim. Why it hasn't been made into a movie by someone like Oliver Stone, I don't know.)

 Even if Butler wasn't approached by fascists who wanted him to lead a military coup near the end of his public career, his story is still almost too much to believe. But his story is well-documented en extremis. Still, it's hard for me to comprehend the things Smedley Butler experienced in his life; 'tis the epitome of marvelous. The attempted fascist coup AKA "The Business Plot"? That's the sort of thing Hollywood comes up with, but it's true!

Or, as Kerry Lauerman might say, "a fringe conspiracy theory." (Because of the conspiracy to brainwash him into thinking that anything not common in his social circle is suspect? I'm just guessing here. What a pretentious dipshit.)

Final: A Head Test
Q: Does all this ranting by this Overweening Generalist dude indicate that he's a 9/11 "Truther"? Explain your answer.