Hard News: The March for Democracy
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@deborah coddington:
why do issues like raising children have to be a "right wing/left wing" thing?
Right wing / left wing is literally one-dimensional, which presents problems when it comes to pigeonholing people. For instance, the idea of gay marriage is disliked by conservatives, and conservatives are seen as right-wing. Thus if you support gay marriage, you must be left-wing. Right? But what about gay people who prefer a more free-market economic policy? Which box do we put them into?
That's why I'm a fan of the political compass, which seeks to give a two-dimensional representation of political opinions. If you were in ACT, but you dislike their law and order policies, perhaps you'd find yourself down in the bottom-right somewhere (near DPF maybe :-) ) -- but take the quiz, if you want to know. (here's how they rated NZ political parties at the last election)
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if we treat people like scum, they behave like scum. ...I read all the time. I listen to different people .... I try not to stay stuck in the blinkers, that's why I left the Act Party and its narrow focus.
So, there is hope and the hope is that others of the far right will lose their blinkers too.
Respect Deborah. -
And like Gio, I really really resent people like Gage being given respectability by an institution that not only receives massive state and local government funding, but is supposed to be a place where scholarship and a respect for historical and scientific truth are paramount.
I hear what ur saying, and I'm pretty sure that for the purposes of this discussion, Soundings Theatre is just a venue that shares the Te Papa premises; no editorial or institutional mandate can be inferred from its booking. And long may THAT last. Would you really want it any other way?
Not "truthiness". Not reality as an optional extra. TRUTH.
C'mon... there's no such thing as the truth...
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I hear what ur saying, and I'm pretty sure that for the purposes of this discussion, Soundings Theatre is just a venue that shares the Te Papa premises; no editorial or institutional mandate can be inferred from its booking. And long may THAT last. Would you really want it any other way?
I think it's pretty extraordinary to suggest that our national museum is just another venue, especially when it comes to hosting an event of this kind, that impinges on knowledge and the past.
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Ok then, explain to me exactly what happened that day.
"Mrs. Thatcher will now realise that Britain cannot occupy our country and torture our prisoners and shoot our people in their own streets and get away with it. Today we were unlucky, but remember we only have to be lucky once. You will have to be lucky always. Give Ireland peace and there will be no more war."
It seems to me that what happened was Osama Bin Laden was considerably luckier than the IRA were.
As for subsequent events - it is not unknown for people to seize an opportunity and bend it to their ends.
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> I would guess that the firm compassion of the "It's Not OK" campaign has probably done far, far more good in this country than the anger and indignation expressed by the McVicars and McCroskies of the world.
I think you're right. I'm proud to have played a small part in it.
I like to think Mark is right too. But then I hear people talking about "It's not OK" who are not sympathetic already, and I despair, just a little.
I can say this, whilst I personally found the overall message just one that 'preached to the choir' (of which I'm generally a part), one line stood out and affected me "It's not OK to take it out on your family because you've had a hard day". It kept resonating in my mind, not because I've ever been violent to my family, but because it got me thinking about a number of other ways you can "take it out on your family", some of which I've been guilty of. It did change my ways a little. You can hurt people just by ignoring them, too. The way my child psychologist father tells it, it's one of the worst things you can do to kids, and a lot of misbehavior stems from it. At some level, a lot of kids would rather be smacked than ignored. Neither one is OK, really.
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Ok then, explain to me exactly what happened that day. Not easy, as most of the evidence was carted away before you could even say Conspiracy.
This is where I start Liverpool kissing the desk. I can't explain everything that happened at the WTC to the satisfaction of 9/11 "truthers". I don't even know with absolute certainty how my foster sister died when an intoxicated driver slammed into the car she was in; but I've got no reason to doubt the results of the inquest that was held.
But what defies any rational explanation was how hundreds of people failed to notice that their offices were being wired up for a controlled detonation by a conspiracy that involved hundreds (if not thousands) of people operating in total secrecy and with robot-like precision. Nobody noticed, Steve.
It's also pretty sick to imply that people who were trying to recover and identify corpses were somehow complicit in destroying evidence. Especially when a good number of them have suffered serious physical and mental health problems as a result.
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The hardest thing in the world to prove is that we went to the moon, innit?
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Steve B: on the war thing, if you were faking up a casus belli, wouldn't you, minimally, try and make it point to the right country?
I think the term is Refuge In Audacity.
"Never do anything by halves if you want to get away with it. Be outrageous. Go the whole hog. Make sure everything you do is so completely crazy it's unbelievable."
— Matilda Wormwood, MatildaAnd how does Silverstein's insurance payout provide evidence of anything?
It doesn't but he sure went to a lot of trouble to get covered for exactly what happened, if you did that and your house got hit by a plane the insurance company would raise an eyebrow or two.
Maybe I'm just a cynic but the possibility of collusion would not surprise me. -
In response to Giovanni's question: the event with Richard Gage at Te Papa was arranged before I was approached about an interview.
As for the interview, I should probably have declined to go to the 9/11 well again, after the interview with David Ray Grifffin in August 2008. Gage looked interesting, but I hadn't done enough work on sussing out his detractors (check out this forum for instance). It's like creation/evolution - stirs up a hornet's nest and nobody wins.
(I also let Kim down with the Rod Carr interview earlier on Saturday - hadn't realised the extent of the controversy in Christchurch about the University and the music school.)
So, mea culpa. Mistakes. That's how we learn, apparently.
OK, back to finishing off replies to the 200+ emails from listeners... the best ones are from first-time haters in America and Australia who now think that Kim is the female Bill O'Reilly.
Oh, and Peter Griffin has a report on Richard Gage at Te Papa, to go with Giovanni's one.
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..a conspiracy that involved thousands of people operating in total secrecy and with robot-like precision
You do know the buildings were mostly occupied by lawyers and investment bankers? They may have thought it was just one of those normal consipiracies that go on all the time...
But yeah, it was 19 nutjobs who got lucky, with a very tenuous link to various other nutjobs in Saudi, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Not justification for an ongoing and unwinnable war.
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I think it's pretty extraordinary to suggest that our national museum is just another venue, especially when it comes to hosting an event of this kind, that impinges on knowledge and the past.
AFAIK anybody can book the theatre as a venue; it has been used for public addresses, music performances, film screenings, Armament Industry conferences, and so on. Are you really suggesting that Te Papa should somehow vet every seminar, performance, film, speaker, and whotnot for suitability? Whom do you suggest would carry out this task? And by what/whose standards? Extraordinary...
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This is where I start Liverpool kissing the desk. I can't explain everything that happened at the WTC to the satisfaction of 9/11 "truthers".
But quite willing to just sit back and swallow the official line. Where is your curiosity man? Where is your scepticism of the honesty of powerful elites?.
Oh, and mind your head on that desk. -
I, for one, feel sorry for Craig's desk.
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It doesn't but he sure went to a lot of trouble to get covered for exactly what happened, if you did that and your house got hit by a plane the insurance company would raise an eyebrow or two.
If someone had previously tried blowing up my house, I'd go to considerable trouble to find someone willing to insure my house against an encore performance. I'm just crazy that way.
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Are you really suggesting that Te Papa should somehow vet every seminar, performance, film, speaker, and whotnot for suitability? Whom do you suggest would carry out this task? And by what/whose standards? Extraordinary...
Isn't that what every other museum in the world does?
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You know how Gage's (and others') conspiracy theory more or less hangs on the fact that having a jumbo jet slam into your building and burn up seems more likely to cause your building to buckle and perhaps topple over than to collapse like a controlled-demolition? I've never heard this put forward anywhere, but just imagine if the building WAS demolished in a controlled fashion -- by design, by the building owner, as a contingency plan in the case of catastrophe. The principle being that this is more acceptable than having the thing come down over blocks and blocks of Manhattan, killing 10s and maybe 100s of thousands of people?
[Edit: jumbo jetS, buildingS, thingS]
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Before I get totally pilloried here I would like to point out that I take both sides of the 911 story with equal scepticism However. If you take the classic line of "follow the money" the Official theory (yes, both sides are theory and not of the scientific kind) sounds suspicious to say the least and don't get me started on the Bin Laden family and Wahhabi fundamentalism.
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Isn't that what every other museum in the world does?
No idea -- do they? However I can't find any suggestion on the "corporate" end of Te Papa's website that event bookings will be vetted for suitability. It looks like the only requirement to book it is that you can afford it.
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The hardest thing in the world to prove is that we went to the moon, innit?
Not really. Someone had to place the laser reflectors there, unless we're now turning it into a debate about extraterrestrial lifeforms capable of taking part in earth-based conspiracy theories.
And don't forget the USSR. Does anyone really think they wouldn't have blown it all wide open if the Americans didn't actually get to the moon? The technology of the day was more than adequate for tracking the lunar lander, and there was not a word from the Soviets to suggest that the Americans hadn't made it.
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You know how Gage's (and others') conspiracy theory more or less hangs on the fact that having a jumbo jet slam into your building and burn up seems more likely to cause your building to buckle and perhaps topple over than to collapse like a controlled
If the plane were a hammer and the building were a solid block, maybe.
Planes are in fact very fragile objects (and would not get off the ground if they were not). They disintegrate very easily when slammed into buildings. The vertical collapses of the buildings were not the motions of posts toppling over, but cascades of falling storeys overwhelming the strength of supporting structure weakened by heat, striking those beneath with greater kinetic energy than they could withstand. The majority of the energy released was, in effect, not the energy of the planes exerted laterally, but the gravitational energy of all the building materials that were lifted up when the buildings were first constructed.
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And don't forget the USSR. Does anyone really think they wouldn't have blown it all wide open if the Americans didn't actually get to the moon?
<threadjack>
I think there's no doubt that the USA went to the moon at least once. But there's less certainty that they went as many times as they claim to have done :) -
I Dunno, you scepiks, don't you remember the 'Merkins blowed up the Moon?
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Before I get totally pilloried here I would like to point out that I take both sides of the 911 story with equal scepticism
It's hard to pin down what the actual 'sides' even are. Seems like there's a wide collection of theories both ways. You could draw a line in the sand and say 'one side thinks that the collapse of the towers was entirely caused by the planes, the other does not'. But it's not even that simple.
On the first side, there are many nuances, ranging from merely thinking it likely that the planes did all the damage because of a lack of evidence to the contrary, right through to people who believe they can explain in excruciating detail exactly how a plane crash into that particular building could do exactly that, to those who claim to know exactly who was in the planes, how they pulled it off, and why.
The other side could be as nuanced as saying 'it seems unlikely that planes could do that to a building', right through to 'A building can't be dropped that way, it must have been explosives placed here, here and here.', to people who even have theories about who placed these explosives, and why.
Both 'sides' can always retreat to the central position that says very little, and is merely an expression of opinion about statistical likelihoods of an event that has only 1 data point.
I'm fairly willing to believe Gio's portrayal of the Truther presentation as a fairly unbalanced look at their side, full of rhetoric, cynically exploiting the human angle to push subliminally their bizarre theory.
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Just to elaborate, here's how you get a tall building to collapse vertically when hitting it with an airliner from the side. Apologies for the length.
The initial impact will ruin the structure of a couple of storeys well below the top of the building. The explosion of the burning aviation fuel-air mixture will strip the fire-protective coatings off the steel truss structure of the towers, exposing them to far more heat than would be the case. Steel looses a substantial portion of its strength when hot but still far from molten.
A falling object accelerates (in vacuo) at about ten metres per second per second. When it impacts something beneath, the force is not merely its weight but its mass times its acceleration.
One floor falls onto another with the force of its weight and everything above times its acceleration. The structure beneath may have been weakened by heat already. This force is in any case far more than the structure was initially designed to withstand and Murphy's Secomd Law takes hold - that which has gone wrong gets worse. The building collapses like a vertical stack of dominoes.
A minor note: Gage referred to puffs of 'smoke' coming from lower storeys well before the wave of collapse had reached them and took these as 'proof' of explosive charges being detonated. He should know that shockwaves propagate at the speed of sound in their medium (sound is a series of shockwaves after all), which is much faster than gravity-induced acceleration. Buildings are complex structures and I can easily imagine the shock of the impacts of collapsing floors at upper levels propagating through the structure to find points of concentration below, causing sudden catastrophic buckling, producing lateral bursts of dust and debris.
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