9 QUESTIONS FOR THE 9/11 COMMISSION | Jesse Ventura Off The Grid


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Dean's first post in this thread mentioned Sandy Hook, 9/11, the Boston Marathon bombing ... and the beheading by ISIS of journalists ... emphasis added. All were, in Dean's conclusion, hoaxes, false-flag.

I note especially his insistence that some unnamed faction of some unnamed power performed the ISIS 'beheddings' ...

Recent behedding: knife didn't draw blood, fade out to still camera pan... hahahaha, thats a pretty low budget false flag hoax.

...


Let me be clear about what I think happened in each of these events:

...


Sandy Hook: All actors. I'm not sure whats more funny, the guy laughing before his press conference, or his supposedly dead kid getting her picture taken with the president after she died. Performed by federal government faction in order to increase fear, gun control, police militarization, and survailence.

Recent Behedding: Actors. False flag hoax, to increase hate towards muslims and justify attacking Syria/Iraq more.


Here's something just coming out: Naomi Wolf has topped Dean's conclusion that the ISIS beheadings were 'staged' ... and topped his list of hoaxes by accusing the US government of importing Ebola into the USA for nefarious purposes, under cover of humanitarian assistance.

(she even manages to finger the Scots independence vote as fraudulent)

Wolf's arguments for these conclusions is examined at Vox.com:

Author and former Democratic political consultant Naomi Wolf published a series of Facebook posts on Saturday in which she questioned the veracity of the ISIS videos showing the murders and beheadings of two Americans and two Britons, strongly implying that the videos had been staged by the US government and that the victims and their parents were actors.

Wolf published a separate Facebook post, also on Saturday, suggesting that the US was sending troops to West Africa not to assist with Ebola treatment but to bring Ebola back to the US to justify a military takeover of American society. She also suggested that the Scottish independence referendum, in which Scots voted to remain in the United Kingdom, had been faked.

Wild-eyed conspiracy theories are common on Facebook. You may naturally wonder, then, why you are reading about these ones. Partly it's because Wolf's posts on ISIS deeply offended many people who knew one or more of the four murdered Westerners whom Wolf accused of being actors. And as American victims James Foley and Steven Sotloff were journalists, their outraged friends included a number of fellow journalists, so you may have seen them discussing Wolf's posts online and wondered what had happened.


The Vox article includes a screenshot of a since-deleted Facebook post.

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Wolf deleted the post at the urging of New York Times foreign correspondent Rukmini Callimachi, who commented beneath it on Facebook. Callimachi, who has reported extensively on these cases, later explained on Twitter (I've cleaned up the abbreviations that are common Twitter shorthand), "What she fails to understand is that the kidnappings — 23 in total — have been under blackout for much of the past two years because ISIS told families of Henning, Foley, Kassig, etc., their sons would be killed if it became public."

[...]

Wolf's record of respectability gives her a platform and helps advance her conspiracy theories further than they would travel otherwise. This is not to argue that all of Wolf's earlier work must be discarded on the basis of these Facebook posts, but rather to urge others to see the broader context of Wolf and her thinking. In other words, it is important for readers who may encounter Wolf's ideas to understand the distinction between her earlier work, which rose on its merits, and her newer conspiracy theories, which are unhinged, damaging, and dangerous.



What might explain this paranoiac, even manic 'connecting the dots' from Wolf?

I have been boning up on WTC7 controversies in order to offer Dean (and other conspiracy believers) some counter-evidence to his conclusions on that issue. I thought I would put up Wolf's unusual beliefs for comment ...

I note that today on Facebook she is quoting from Global Research, an outlet definitely in the Nutterzone. That story was built on an article from Russia's RIANovosti site. It surely would have been easy for Wolf to find confirmation herself, as in this BBC story. It is so weird to me that she skims by details and entailments, in this small story and in her other delusional retellings.

I think something has gone wrong in Wolf's reasoning. She seems to be zooming from one 'fake' to another, with a huge confirmation bias contributing to cognitive error.

I think I will have to dig out my copy of The Paranoid Style in American Politics, as well as do a re-read of the Michael Shermer article, Why People Believe Conspiracy Theories: Why people who believe in one conspiracy are prone to believe others.

Here's an interesting excerpt from the Shermer piece:

[...] a trend I have detected that people who believe in one such theory tend to believe in many other equally improbable and often contradictory cabals. This observation has recently been confirmed empirically by University of Kent psychologists Michael J. Wood, Karen M. Douglas and Robbie M. Sutton in a paper entitled “Dead and Alive: Beliefs in Contradictory Conspiracy Theories,”[**] published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science this past January. The authors begin by defining a conspiracy theory as “a proposed plot by powerful people or organizations working together in secret to accomplish some (usually sinister) goal” that is “notoriously resistant to falsification … with new layers of conspiracy being added to rationalize each new piece of disconfirming evidence.” Once you believe that “one massive, sinister conspiracy could be successfully executed in near-perfect secrecy, [it] suggests that many such plots are possible.” With this cabalistic paradigm in place, conspiracies can become “the default explanation for any given event—a unitary, closed-off worldview in which beliefs come together in a mutually supportive network known as a monological belief system.”

This monological belief system explains the significant correlations between different conspiracy theories in the study. For example, “a belief that a rogue cell of MI6 was responsible for [Princess] Diana's death was correlated with belief in theories that HIV was created in a laboratory … that the moon landing was a hoax … and that governments are covering up the existence of aliens.” The effect continues even when the conspiracies contradict one another: the more participants believed that Diana faked her own death, the more they believed that she was murdered.

The authors suggest there is a higher-order process at work that they call global coherence that overrules local contradictions: “Someone who believes in a significant number of conspiracy theories would naturally begin to see authorities as fundamentally deceptive, and new conspiracy theories would seem more plausible in light of that belief.” Moreover, “conspiracy advocates' distrust of official narratives may be so strong that many alternative theories are simultaneously endorsed in spite of any contradictions between them.” Thus, they assert, “the more that participants believe that a person at the centre of a death-related conspiracy theory, such as Princess Diana or Osama [bin] Laden, is still alive, the more they also tend to believe that the same person was killed, so long as the alleged manner of death involves deception by officialdom.


___________________

** full, creepy, fascinating paper here: Dead and Alive: Beliefs in Contradictory
Conspiracy Theories

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I'm tired of people being baited and then banned or driven off the site.

Mike,

Since all of you are good people who have posted together for years, I'm letting you all work this disagreement out. If this were going on with newbies, I would have stopped it.

But, I would appreciate you doing a little introspecting and answer the following honestly.

Would you like it if I banned Jonathan?

Would that please you?

I won't do that, but think about your inner reaction. If you felt, "Yes!", when you read it, then I, in your shoes, would check your fairness premise and accept your own partisanship.

btw - Nothing wrong with that. Heh. I have seen you bait people at times. I've even seen you come out of the blue and call someone the foulest of names without provocation because you disagree with his or her post. I've seen that several times and if I put in the time looking it up, I can quote a string of your posts where you do just that.

So are you really "tired of people being baited and then banned or driven off the site," meaning all people, or do you think some people--the ones you disapprove of--should be "baited and then banned or driven off the site"?

And how about some people--like Keer whose absence you constantly complain about--just leaving on their own because they are control freaks and I don't let them play their control games here? He's not banned. He stays away because he wants to.

Why doesn't a dude like that generate an audience for his own stuff? He has a blog and Facebook account last I heard. Both are just sitting there dying, monuments to nobody showing up. Not even you show up. (Think about that one.)

I know why he can't generate an audience, not even of stupid people, much less intelligent.

Do you?

I can apply that same standard to the others no longer on OL whose absence you sometimes complain about. Where are they now? Why don't they have an audience of their own? Why do I have to provide the audience they can't just to please you?

So be tired.

My top value on OL is the health of this forum, not your personal likes and dislikes of different people. If you want more excitement, try running a forum of your own and see what happens. It's a barrel of laughs.

All that said, I like you. I think you're a good person whom I am honored to know.

Michael

I would absolutely not like to see Jonathon banned. I most definitely would not be pleased. I have learned from Jonathan, I simply don't like his incivility.

And yes, I've told people to go fuck themselves in a fit of anger. I've also deleted a large number of posts because they were written in anger, some slipped through. The usual cause of my anger is because of feeling personally baited or witnessing someone else being baited, whether or not I agree with them on what they've posted. I regret posting in anger, more so I regret getting angry in the first place. I am far less reactive after near ten years of participating on this forum. I have experienced personal growth you might say. The process was first noticing uncontrolled anger, then either not starting a reactive post or deleting a post already started, to controlling the anger, to not feeling the anger in the first place. Haven't quite gotten through the last part just yet.

I do miss Ted, I learned more from Ted and appreciated him more than any other single person on any forum. I don't think I've ever interacted with a brighter, or wiser, person on any forum or outside of the internet. I'm sorry if my opinion about Ted offends you. I am a better person because of knowing Ted and it would be unjust to deny it. Ted's marketing appeal with respect to your value and perspective is irrelevant. I still explore Ted's blog and find things of interest and links to related material. Ted explicitly invited anyone who was interested to post articles and events and literature to his website to share and discuss. His stated purpose:

"Radicals for Happiness focuses on matters which bring people joy of all kinds, from the light-hearted to the profound."

Evidently not a popular subject. I'm reminded of the newspaper saying "if it bleeds, it leads". I guess the contrary would be "if it makes you happy or think, it goes in the sink".

I am tired. I don't want anyone to be banned I simply want civility. I also miss Robert Barathon, and Dragonfly, and where has Merlin been lately? Specialized knowledge and alternate perspectives lost. This is your website and I of course respect your ownership of it but I think you could do a better job sometimes of managing valuable resources and perspectives. Most of the people that have come here share the important values of objectivism and are highly intelligent. But many of the brightest lights no longer shine in these discussions. I really don't like to post much, the last fews days have been difficult and distracting. I prefer reading the discussions of the much more learned and experienced people here. I really am an ignorant dullard, Jonathan got that right. I would rather be enlightened that to enlighten.

Perhaps when I retire, when not teaching kettlebell classes, I will start a forum and simply moderate and sit back and enjoy the discussions.

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I understand much of what you posted Mikee.

Also, the way I heard the newspaper blood quote, was:

"if it bleeds, it leads".

However, both work.

A...

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I am tired. I don't want anyone to be banned I simply want civility. I also miss Robert Barathon, and Dragonfly, and where has Merlin been lately? Specialized knowledge and alternate perspectives lost. This is your website and I of course respect your ownership of it but I think you could do a better job sometimes of managing valuable resources and perspectives. Most of the people that have come here share the important values of objectivism and are highly intelligent. But many of the brightest lights no longer shine in these discussions. I really don't like to post much, the last fews days have been difficult and distracting. I prefer reading the discussions of the much more learned and experienced people here. I really am an ignorant dullard, Jonathan got that right. I would rather be enlightened that to enlighten.

Perhaps when I retire, when not teaching kettlebell classes, I will start a forum and simply moderate and sit back and enjoy the discussions..

"Civility" is the idea Jimmy Wales tried to introduce to the old Atlantis, destroying it.

Most posters eventually stop posting, I am sure for myriad reasons, especially getting on with their lives. That may happen to me, soon. (I wouldn't completely go away.) A youngster going off to college seems guaranteed to stop posting. That's not hard to understand.

OL is all about the ideas, but if someone is all about being right regardless of being wrong he'll get plowed under or ignored. This means having one's ego in the right place, not up one's ass. That's why existentially I may appear to have a modest ego, but that's not my experiencing of it. When I was a little boy my ego was too much in the wrong place and exposed to damage and fragile, but a basic toughness was always there to carry the day. Now, toward the other end of my life, the opposite is true even though I still discover an occasional vulnerability.

I frankly don't care too much if posters are so dedicated to winning arguments they waste their time and energy. I only want there to be some value left after I strip all that away. It's not that I'm so virtuous I can't fall off the wagon, so to say, and try to eviscerate someone to make a point, I just know that winning an argument is impossible because argument is combat and nobody has a real deployable weapon for that (but I'm working on one!) in OL-land.

If you're tired it may be because you are fighting someone else's battle--Dean's battle, for example. If you want to do that there is an art. Jump in--banga! banga! banga!--jump out. Go drink a Coke. (Just try to have some fun doing it.)

--Brant

Dragonfly wasn't banned, BTW--George H. Smith ran over him and he couldn't take it--so he went to Objectivism Online, which I do not read--OL is the only Objectivism site I read--and while I liked him he seemed to hate Objectivism and its orthodox denizens so much I can't remember anything from him to the contrary

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I'm sorry if my opinion about Ted offends you.

Mike,

Who said I was offended by your opinion of Keer?

Certainly not me. I'm glad you stand up for your values.

However, I'm not you. That dude has personally offended me in the grossest terms possible. He did that as instigator, too. And yet he is still not banned, but he has had to deal with the consequences. Apparently that offended his delicate narcissistic sensibilities.

I was just pointing out that you don't see the whole package with people like him. You only see your own perspective and seem to be quick to ignore the instigating bad behavior of those folks while pointing the finger at someone else to blame for the results of their actions.

In your case, this is mild and I don't find it offensive at all. If you want a good example of this attitude taken to an extreme, though, think of Phil Coates. He ignored all bad instigating behavior, but criticized the reactions. And he didn't just point the finger at one person to blame for the instigator. He pointed it at everybody. Notice how people would get pissed by this and mock him.

You attribute Keer's lack of audience to his choice of subject matter. Pardon my French, but that is horseshit. There are sites all over the Internet flowing with selective egghead stuff that get tons of visitors. Here are just a few diverse ones from my own list of favorites:

Deep Glamour (Virginia Postrel)

Changing Minds

Creativity Games

The Art of Manliness

The fundamental issue is not "if it bleeds it leads." That's for news sites and concerns only one form of attraction, not for sites like the above.

Each of those sites gets tons of traffic. I could find discussion sites as well, but I don't visit that many of them. However, if you want to put in the time and restrict it to easy pickings, just look at how many selective egghead Facebook Groups and Fanpages there are, both closed and open, that have extremely high traffic numbers.

I do hope you will start your own discussion site one day. Then you will understand what you now ignore, not by someone telling you but by reality smacking you in the face.

Given your current attitude and refusal to consider the requirements of group behavior based on attraction (as opposed to groups with required participation), should this persist and should you open a discussion site, I predict you will close it down out of disgust within a year. In the past, several discontents coming from OL who liked to ignore what it takes to get and keep an audience tried and did just that.

And I would even root for your success just like I did with them. In fact, in a few cases, they got in contact with me to ask how to fix their sites. I advised as best I could without a smidgen of bad vibes. I like to see people creating new stuff.

But for as much as I tried, I was not able to help those who ignored reality about human nature in group.

Michael

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[....] George H. Smith ran over [Dragonfly] and he couldn't take it

That isn't how I'd describe what happened.

so he went to Objectivism Online,

Did you mean ARCHN?

Although there is a member of Objectivism Online named Dragonfly2, according to the profile the poster is female, first name Katherine, lives in Canada, joined March 19, 2009, last active April 21, 2013, only one post. Weird post for a first-time poster. Apparently said more than shows up. The post was edited by a moderator.

Ellen

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Brant,

Dragonfly lives in the Netherlands. Your spelling is close but not quite. You didn't answer if you meant ARCHN.

I doubt that he'd ever have attempted to post on Objectivism Online, the site being notorious for heavy use of moderation.

Ellen

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Oh, I hadn't been to ARCHN in a very long time. Maybe I did see him there. I don't like the theme or premise of ARCHN. Human nature isn't so narrow as to exclude Ayn Rand and her ideas as a launching point for discussion save to point out how right the premise is. As for general moderation of a site, as opposed to a specific poster being moderated, being done at O - O--I won't ever suffer it. If I had my own site all posts would be automatically deleted after a week except any I'd chose to save, but that site wouldn't be like OL and would serve a different purpose. Being lazy I'd just ask Michael to give me a corner here for the articles I'd write, but I'm not writing articles. Most of my material is short and reactive. Ironically I am sort of a moderator here. If I see BS I whip the mules back into line wid the truuth.

What is the precise spelling of Peter's name?

--Brant

OL's hypocrite

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Peter replied to my email. He's doing fine. Only posts on Dutch sites these days. Plans to update his paintings' sites but procrastinates. Moved to Germany three years ago. Lives on 8000m2--does gardening. Had it with utopian Objectivism and libertarianism--too religious--but is all for small government.

--Brant

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