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Rowan Berkeley

Published Letters: 176

Monday, May 12, 2008 06:25 AM

Ludwig who?

I think he meant this guy:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludwig_Wittgenstein

Monday, May 12, 2008 07:30 AM

That would HELP McCain

Think about it. It would attract the support of people who would otherwise vote Democrat, not people who would otherwise vote Republican. You are blinded by your own ideological fantasies if you think it would attract people who would otherwise vote for McCain - look at what Michelle Malkin's crew say about him and his ACLU buddies:

http://michellemalkin.com/2008/05/12/the-bob-barr-candidacy/

Monday, May 12, 2008 08:08 AM

I mean, this is what Barr looks like to the Malkins

On May 12th, 2008 at 10:18 am, lgm said:

This MM post illustrates the difference between social conservatives and economic conservatives. Libertarians are economic conservatives. They believe in maximal individual freedom (e.g. to engage in homosexual activities and buy and sell drugs). They are against government activities such as wiretapping. They would not want the government to prevent nonviolent people from other countries living in America even if they refuse to learn English and take jobs away from Americans. True libertarians also are against things like public school, social security, welfare, or even government funded road building.

http://michellemalkin.com/2008/05/12/the-bob-barr-candidacy/#comment-318380

-- now, is anyone who would otherwise have voted for McCain as opposed to Obama gonna buy that???

Monday, May 12, 2008 09:05 AM

Certainly the "MindWar" reference is genuine

I posted the link to Vallely and Aquino's "From PSYOPS to MindWar" a few days ago, or rather to Mike Aquino's homepage, but to make it even easier, here is the document itself:

http://www.xeper.org/maquino/nm/MindWar.pdf

I wonder why no one has mentioned Doug Valentine's very Manchurian Candidate type exposé of McCain as POW, discussed here:

http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn04192008.html

Monday, May 12, 2008 09:36 AM

Since the smear has come up

I have dozens of letters in Glenn Greenwald's columns, and I shall be delighted if people will read them, and, if anyone can detect any trace of anti-Semitism in them, I shall be fascinated to hear about it. Similarly with my blog, which you can reach by clicking my name. I mean, I have been dealing with this material in all its aspects, almost full-time, for decades.

Monday, May 12, 2008 11:14 AM

@ quickstrategy

I was wondering what the origin of the assertion that a Barr candidacy would pull voters from McCain is, but it's impossible to tell just from googling around. I suspect that the assertion is a ploy by one of McCain's media strategists, but this would be extremely difficult to prove. The 'you' I referred to is those of you who allow themselves to be misled by it. The author of the ploy, ex hypothesi, wouldn't believe it for a minute, and as for the AP writer and all the other hack journos who repeat it, I think they are trained (or train themselves) not to think about whether any story they handle is true or not, but only about whether it's attractive as a story, i.e. an attention grabber. That's what they're paid to do, isn't it.

Monday, May 12, 2008 11:24 AM

more @ quickstrategy

p.s. - I suppose you could suggest (either sarcastically or seriously) that, it's more likely the originator of the suggestion that the Barr candidacy would pull more voters from McCain than from Obama, or however we want to phrase it, actually did believe it, and was thus, by my reasoning, stupider than I am.

In England this sort of reasoning falls into a category called "cock-up versus conspiracy explanation" and normal people will always hurry to tell me that everything I find odd or suggestive is evidence of "cock-up" (i.e. incompetence, stupidity) rather than "conspiracy" (i.e. intentional management and manipulation of public thought). On the other hand, we also have a phrase, "well, they would say that, wouldn't they?" which has come to mean, it's an obvious lie.

Monday, May 12, 2008 06:22 PM

It's true this is no place to display 9-11-itis

It's also true that within the "9-11 movement" there are large numbers of people promoting silly or sinister theories, so much so that the more moderate elements have to spend a lot of time disavowing them, which is presumably the point. The more moderate elements, as I put it, concentrate on the mechanics of the collapses (of the Towers, as well as of Building 7) and seem to me to have made convincing engineering points. I am especially impressed by the work of Gordon Ross, who is himself a structural engineer. There is a 25-minute video of him on googlevideos explaining why the towers fell in the bizarrely spectacular way they did, which really doesn't make any sense at all on the conventional view:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=4801566025292753615

and he covers the same material on his website at

http://gordonssite.com/index.html

The merit of this type of argument is that it doesn't require any hypothesis about "who" or "why", except the minimal obvious one, which is that whoever-it-was had access to the maintenance areas (such as the liftshafts) of the three WTC buildings for a few dozen hours over the weeks before the events.

One can, however, easily develop a circumstantial argument regarding motive, as Jerry Mazza does here:

http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_3135.shtml

Incidentally, from the psychological warfare point of view, the '9-11 Truthling' community is really interesting (the derisive term comes from the video troll who currently glories in the nickname of 'Nicointelpro Haupt').

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