Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

Brian Tiemann
Silicon Valley-based purveyor of a confusing mixture of Apple punditry and political bile.

btman at grotto11 dot com

Read These Too:

InstaPundit
Steven Den Beste
James Lileks
Little Green Footballs
As the Apple Turns
Entropicana
Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
Eric S. Raymond
Tal G in Jerusalem
Aziz Poonawalla
Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue
Ravishing Light
Rosenblog
Cartago Delenda Est

Book Plugs:

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money. I think.
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Wednesday, May 31, 2006
15:19 - One state, two state, red state, blue state	(top)
Try as I might to avoid the subject in conversation, it was recently brought home to me that here on the West Coast, the prevailing sentiment�not just among my particular social circle, but among the bumper-sticker-wearing public in general�is not only predominantly leftist, but also all too ready and willing to engage in exciting speculation about (oh, just for example) whether 9/11 was an "inside job" by the government. There's such a feeling of disconnect, among members of the communities I necessarily inhabit, with things like patriotism, national pride, or indeed the idea that most people in the country aren't all fearful and hateful and intolerant like the movies all say, that 9/11 itself has never had a particularly huge emotional pull on a lot of their minds. And as such it's a ripe agarose on which to grow poisonous cultures like Loose Change. It's to the point where the "smart" young turks of the urban centers have taught themselves to throw logic and reason out the window, much obeisance though they might make to such words when it comes to mocking religious people, when the subject is politics in general and 9/11 in particular. It's not about coming up with a theory and testing it with evidence. It's about ferreting out little inconsistencies and weirdnesses and dissenting opinions on observed phenomena, obsessing over isolated contextless details as a smokescreen against having to consider what if any significance those details have as part of any cohesive alternative theory of what happened, throwing them all together into a big mishmash with a "Gee, look at all the stuff that don't add up", and then elbowing each other in the ribs and arching their eyebrows and saying that all this obviously means that it was all a huge fraud. (Never mind, for example, that the moment the second plane hit the WTC, we all knew we were under attack and at war, and that even if the crashes were staged, there was no logical need for the towers to fall in order to form any further pretext for war�arguing over these bits of "evidence" that the towers were "demolished" is like arguing that the Titanic sank way too fast for it to have been just because of the iceberg. Never mind that the collapse of WTC 7, even if it seemed to fall without any provocation, wouldn't indicate anything sinister as part of a plot to make it look like Muslim terrorists had crashed planes into the Twin Towers�what was this, a manufactured causus belli, or a giant incompetently planned insurance scam? Never mind that it makes no sense for a jet to have an external "pod" on it if it was trying to visually imitate a loaded 757, or for it to fire a missile at the building just before hitting�why not just have it explode on impact? Never mind that it makes no sense to carefully "disappear" all the passengers on the four hijacked jets and the jets themselves if you were just going to crash military planes and cruise missiles into the various buildings�you've already got the planes, and you've already committed to killing thousands on the ground, so why bother? Never mind any of that: On Saturday I was told, with the kind of amiable urgency that comes from someone who thinks he's surrounded by friends who all think exactly the way he does, that the theory that the WTC's floors "pancaked" into each other on the way down was false and the Popular Mechanics article promulgating it was "horrible" because, see, each floor would have pulverized on impact with the floor beneath it, apparently converting into magical fairy dust with no mass or downward momentum to transfer into the floors below it, instead shooting harmlessly out the windows like in the "incriminating" photos. And thus the buildings couldn't have fallen on their own. And, uh, we'd never have invaded Afghanistan, because the planes crashing would have just been a big forgivable misunderstanding if the buildings hadn't fallen down. And Bush would never have used 9/11 as an excuse to attack Iraq. Er, wait. He did do that, didn't he? ... Whaddya mean, he never linked Saddam with 9/11? Shut up! Don't confuse me with facts!) Too bad it's difficult in the extreme to find a gay person out here who isn't completely indoctrinated in this way, which means my opportunities for social interaction are pretty well and truly limited. If it's not 9/11 conspiracy theories, it's blind hatred of Christians and Republicans (the terms, of course, being synonymous), or militant veganism, or urgent phobic rantings about the imminent draft to feed the military-industrial complex or the train cars to the concentration camps for all non-whites and non-heterosexuals and non-Americans, or slavish devotion to The Daily Show and The Colbert Report and Family Guy. (I can take most of these. The latter, however, is really the limit.) But that's just out here, you see. In conversation with a friend in Tennessee, it was brought to my attention that while it may be true that 9/11 conspiracies are the province of leftists out here on the coast, back where he lives it's an entirely different story. There, it's the liberals who are the reasoning ones, the ones who reject Loose Change out of hand because of its factual holes if not for its logical fallacies, and who hold to a general platform of mutual respect for one's fellow man, economic policies that favor free markets, and genuine love for one's country. There, the 9/11 conspiracy theories are peddled not by hippies and goateed layabouts but by far-right-wing religious nutcases, the kind who leave "tracts" in your mailbox and who refuse to use the Internet because it's controlled by the Jews, the same ones who engineered 9/11. Funny, I thought. Out here, the far-leftists would at least agree with them that the Jews were involved. But that's all a very interesting lens with which to look at this stuff. Out here on the coast, the people my friend describes simply don't exist. They're a myth, like Super-Mega-Ultra-Chicken. Or, if they do exist, it's in such small numbers as to make them completely irrelevant, lacking even the will to drive around the country with shocking signboards like the Phelpses, who manage with their willingness to get on a bus to make their few dozen members seem a lot more numerous�and their odious sentiments seem a lot more widespread�than they really are. And that makes such people such a non-entity that they don't even show up on my radar. Their kind of behavior doesn't even qualify as "conservative", to my way of thinking. (My definition of the term comes from seeing more good in the country's history than evil, and if given the choice between eradicating some good with the bad or leaving it alone, preferring to opt for the latter; whereas my experience among friends and acquaintances who describe themselves as "liberal" here leads me to associate that term with those who see more evil than good in the country's history, and if given the choice between eradicating some good with the bad or leaving it alone, would rather opt for the former.) So maybe there really is a world of difference between the Red States and the Blue States, one that lies in where a sane person who doesn't go in for ridiculous conspiracy theories would place himself on the spectrum. A "conservative" out here would be a "liberal" out there by that token. And while this doesn't exactly take into account the moderates on both sides who differ for completely justifiable reasons on questions like the war or environmental politics or gay marriage, it would help explain why there aren't that many religious nutcases out here, or as many Che-shirt-wearing hippies out in the boonies, and why both parties are the ones making a happy home for stuff like Loose Change where they're the dominant fringe life form. If it's true that in the boonies, the tract-pushers don't even go on the Internet, then just because we don't see them in blog comment sections doesn't mean they're not out there. But it doesn't change the fact that it's the urban Blue State centers that produce the TV shows and movies, informing public opinion from coast to coast. Sooner or later, Loose Change or related presentations of 9/11 "skepticism" is going to go completely mainstream, thanks to Comedy Central and Adult Swim and the animated Fox lineup, and a pop-culture-loving youth class that sucks it all up. When it does, the young urban hipsters who rally behind it are going to find themselves in company they never anticipated. And it ain't gonna be pretty. Maybe Der Spiegel can interview both sides and broker an unprecedented peace.