Board of Aldermen

Loose Change.

1) If you haven't seen it, watch it...right now. It's streaming on the web at several locations. Just search Google Videos for 'loose change' and watch it.

2) If you have seen it, what do you think? I'll be honest, I damn near shat myself the first time I watched it, but I still had/have my doubts. After watching it a second time, I'm still not sure.

Alright, Aldermen. Let's discuss it.

My God man...I watched this last night at about 1AM. I couldn't sleep afterwards. I just lay there thinking about it. I always told myself it'd be cool if the government really was an evil organization, but now that that's apossibility...I'm not so sure how I feel. That stuff about the Pentagon...wow.

Dude, I know. I've watched it 3 nights in a row and it gets harder to sleep each night...maybe because I've also been artificially paranoid as well, but still. I'm at the point now where if I'm going to be skeptical of the "official story" then I might as well be skeptical of the story Loose Change presents.

So fucked up.

The problem I have with Loose Change is that, like most revisionary texts that pride themselves on being outside mainstream discourse, there’s no way to argue with them. Since all of my information comes from mainstream sources, or at least not the cabalistic sources that the filmmaker has access to, all my information is flawed—but if information is this suspicious, then there is no particular reason to believe Loose Change either. The only way to verify any of this is to go digging around myself, which I’m sure is next to impossible at this point. I recently came across a book in a Barnes and Noble called Politically Incorrect’s Guide to Islam and the Crusades. This text made the same argument, but from the Right: if you don’t believe that in fact Muslims are evil and bent on the conquest of the world, and that the Crusades were a purely defensive move on the part of the Church (honestly), then it’s because your mind has been polluted by mainstream liberal academics who inexplicably want to defend the Muslims who want to destroy them. Unfortunately for us, this academics constitute 99% of the sources on the subject, so rather than researching what Politically Incorrect says, we have to take it all on faith. The evidentiary standards here are simply unacceptable.

If you listen to the filmmaker’s interview, linked on the same site that Jobey found Loose Change the radio commentator, Jack Blood, makes this readily apparent. About 80% of what he talks about is how the mainstream media is the patsy of the government. But he’s not talking about just ABC or CNN, let alone Fox. He indicts even the “liberal” media. Anybody that’s going to tell me that Salon.com and its ilk are pansy news corporations are going to have to come up with some solid evidence. Most of what Jack Blood talks about outside 9/11 are drinking water conspiracies—remember how the right-wingers of the 50’s , communist conspiracy theorists, told us that fluoride was a communist plot?—and this really doesn’t say much for his credibility. I understand that this is a blatant ad hominem fallacy, and to extend it to the arguments in Loose Change might seem even worse, but this is the kind of guy that this filmmaker chooses to entertain. If you want problems with his evidence, take a look at Gilgamesh Rex’s post on the subject on his “Things I Know” blog (available through Jobey’s blog). This guy can’t even get his history right, as Rex points out: the filmmaker cites an accident involving a B52 which occurred before the B52 was deployed—the plane was actually a B25, a much smaller plane. If you’re going to try to blow people’s minds, not to mention indict our government of something so horrible, you might want to apply an evidentiary standard to yourself. Finally, the most glaring problem I see with this “plot” is that I can see absolutely no realistic motive on the part of the US government. What could possibly be in it for them? I can think of a number of motives that seem impossibly absurd, but if the sort of motives that would result in this kind of action were actually in play, America and the world would have a lot more to worry about than 9/11, and the makers of Loose Change are only scratching the surface, and their film is next to insignificant.

Is it possible that many of the circumstances surrounding 9/11 have been misrepresented? Certainly; but either the Bush administration is bumbling or its not. So either they bungled the defense of our country and are now trying to cover aspects of their failure up, or they planned and executed one of the greatest tricks in the history of the world—but some amateur filmmaker figured it out?? I don’t think so.

Not to mention the fact that "Loose Change" begins by criticizing the media coverage of the events of 9/11 and then uses this media coverage to support all of it's conjectures.