Sunday, May 19, 2024

David Deutsch Again

 


I've been slowly making my way through Deutsch's The Beginning of InfinityThe Beginning of Infinity (along with two other books) and I've been accepting the occasional bad metaphor, unfair generalization, vague wording, because, on the whole either I agree with him or I get where's he coming from.  All the while though, I'm thinking that I wish he had a co-writer or a more courageous editor.

Then I got to this:

Conversely, advocates of highly immoral doctrines almost invariably believe associated factual falsehoods as well. For instance, ever since the attack on the United states on 11 September 2001, millions of people worldwide have believed it was carried out by the US government or the Israeli secret service. Those are purely factual misconceptions, yet they bear the imprint of moral wrongness just as clearly as a fossil -made of purely inoganic material - bears the imprint of ancient life.  And the link, in both cases, is explanation.  To concot a moral explanation for why Westerners deserve to be killed indiscriminately, one needs to explain factually that the West is not what it pretends to be - and that requires uncritical acceptance of conspiracy theories, denials of history, and so on.

I mean come on!  I DON'T think that 9-11 was an inside job.  I don't believe that Westerners deserve to be killed indiscriminately, but it does not REQUIRE conspiracy theories to prove that the West is not what it pretends to be.  Wake up and smell the coffee you supposedly intelligent man!

2 comments:

zoombats said...

I often pondered the "cause and effect" of 911 and the Hammas raid as being two world changing events that will have and have had serious repercussions on many lives. The rewards garnered by"the victims" have been huge and it shows that there are many gains to be had from a crisis.Even the insurance coverage to the owners of the World Trade Centre were acceptable to the costs. The Israelis rewards? well they have enabled the desired results and at what cost? Minimal I would say if I was a betting man. I don't ever think there were inside jobs but the turning of a blind eye to approaching crisis and the return in spades is more believable. No matter the perpetrators or the costs to the initial costs the result has been well worth the exposure of the true greed and underbelly of those supposed victims. I'm reminded of Dennis Hopper in True romance when he asks, "if that's a fact, tell me am I lying?"

thwap said...

zoombats,

So many intelligence people say that they warned Netanyahu that it removes the prop against a conspiracy theory, that of the impossibility of keeping all the conspirators quiet.

Netanyahu has his own narcissistic desire to stay out of jail and his psychotic racism to cause him to have allowed the raid to happen as it did.

I'm not saying that I'm certain. Just that I lean towards that.

With regards to 9-11, there's a chapter in one of Al Franken's books about how the incoming bush II regime shut-down or ignored many ongoing intelligence operations. I don't think 9-11 was an inside job but I do think that bush II, cheney, rumsfeld et al. were making it possible for SOMETHING to happen and 9-11 was what they got.

And, since the 9-11 Commission was a coverup/whitewash, it doesn't bother me if people think bush II and Cheney did it directly.