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> Chomsky responds with the typical comment that it would take an unprecedented amount of coordination to have so many people keep the secret that it doesn't ev

> Chomsky responds with the typical comment that it would take an unprecedented amount of coordination to have so many people keep the secret that it doesn't even make sense. I remember hearing that argument made back in the 00's about government surveilance. The secret doesn't have to be kept perfectly, it just has to be made ridiculous.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
Judgmentality 5y ago
Now I want to relearn all the 9/11 conspiracy theories. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9/11_conspiracy_theories https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9/11_conspiracy_theories
- colordrops 5y ago
  One of the weirder ones is that there were over 80 cameras pointed at the plane that crashed into the Pentagon and the public has seen none of the videos.
  - sammalloy 5y ago
    I'm pretty sure that was debunked several years ago. Plus, video was finally released, so there's that.
    - lowkey 5y ago
      Per GP there were over 80 cameras but the pentagon, after years of calls for transparency shared a couple stills from one camera, so there’s that.
      - Judgmentality 5y ago
        Those stills have about the same quality as your typical Bigfoot photo though. Why not just release a damn video?
        atatatat 5y ago
        Sunlight cures all infection.
        shadowgovt 5y ago
        This phenomenon is a subset of the effect "Too much sunlight denatures complex molecules and kills carbon-based life."
        pyuser583 5y ago
        They dont want to reveal the locations of their security cameras?
        Judgmentality 5y ago
        If they already released a still, they already released the location.
        pyuser583 5y ago
        Of one camera. Not 80 of them.
        Judgmentality 5y ago
        I'm asking for them to release any video that shows what happened. If they already released one still, why not release the entire video? I feel like you're purposefully being difficult.
        pyuser583 5y ago
        I don’t have a lot to go on and so am I basically playing Devils Advocate. If I’m coming off as difficult, that’s why.
    - colordrops 5y ago
      What do you mean debunked? Who debunked it? Do you have a citation? Are you suggesting the HQ of the most powerful military in the world had no security cameras? This has the statement of the FBI agent saying that they had 85 videos, only one of which was released: http://www.judicialwatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/A_2006_doubletreeaffadavit.pdf http://www.judicialwatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/A_20...
  - patrickk 5y ago
    Another strange one is the speech than Rumsfeld gave about missing trillions at the Pentagon 1 day before 9/11, then completely forgotten in the face of increased military spending the next day. https://youtu.be/MfMjdKElgqY https://youtu.be/MfMjdKElgqY https://youtu.be/xU4GdHLUHwU https://youtu.be/xU4GdHLUHwU
  - hanniabu 5y ago
    Another thing I haven't seen any reasonable explanation for is how the towers collapsed perfectly in their footprint. It's hard enough to get smaller buildings to collapse perfectly in controlled demolition. Yet 2 towers that were among the tallest in the world both collapsed perfectly. With such tall towers they should have buckled unevenly at least a little bit, especially since the damage was off center.
    - atatatat 5y ago
      They're definitely built to collapse inward out of necessity to avoid damaging other buildings/creating dominos.
  - atatatat 5y ago
    I commented elsewhere on this oddity, and the Vegas shooting, contrasted to the coverage of the recent condo collapse.
  - LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
    Hm. No. The weirdest one is that the WTC was torn down by tactical nuke, buried under its basement, in context of Silverstein Properties having insured it at much higher value before, essentially pulling off a gigantic insurance fraud.
humbledrone 5y ago
It's worth noting that the government surveillance secret wasn't actually kept very well, largely because of exactly the effect that Chomsky describes -- keeping all the numerous people in on the secret didn't work, and so we found out about it. I'd argue that the government surveillance example actually strengthens Chomsky's argument.
- Dnsv 5y ago
  It's really about the upper limit of what a 6 inch chimp brain can process. Or a group of chimps can process. Whether it's a chimp in govt or outside Rationality has an Upper Bound. Stick that on the Fridge. When the problem faced is too complex and that upper bound naturally gets hit stories flow out of the head on both sides. The right move is not to focus on the stories. The right move, for this has been studied for a long time under the Theory of Bounded Rationality, is to focus on simpler problems.
BuyMyBitcoins 5y ago
> The secret doesn't have to be kept perfectly, it just has to be made ridiculous. Better yet, make it a partisan issue. Half of the country will refuse to believe it while the other half will be unable to do anything about it.
- atatatat 5y ago
  Confuse the issue more by flipflopping which party signals to their base to virtue signal giving a shit about the topic every....3-5 years.
bawolff 5y ago
The level of coordination required to fake 9/11 seems on a very different level than the level required to wiretap some central points on the internet. And that's not even considering usa basically had a dept of wiretapping (the NSA) already set up or that the nsa's activities actually did leak.
- wp381640 5y ago
  Not to mention that the post-911 NSA surveillance program leaked to the NYTimes within a few years
- emoII 5y ago
  Does it really require all that much coordination? Some top-level military exec(s) want the military to get more funding. They're in contact with Bin Laden. Bin Laden gets a bit of money to put a couple of arabs on a "work-trip" to the US. The military-execs offer a couple of pilots a "crazy increase to their life insurance". Check their schedules to coordinate the day of the attack. I know there's a lot of detail left out and a lot of assumptions made, but I'm not convinced that it has to be an extremely complex and coordinated plan.
  - ddxxdd 5y ago
    Military funding of Bin Laden isn't that far-fetched, and it may have possibly been true in the past[0], but 9/11 truthers believe that the World Trade Center was taken down by missiles and controlled demolition, and that people who thought they saw a plane were confused. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_CIA_assistance_to_Osama_bin_Laden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_CIA_assistance_...
    - jcbrand 5y ago
      AFAIK most "truthers" don't subscribe to the missile theory when it comes to the towers (the Pentagon is a different story). I sometimes wonder whether the more out there conspiracy theories are simply used to discredit any concern or skepticism of the official narrative by lumping those concerned with the crazies.
erk__ 5y ago
Has government surveillance not been an open secret for decades for example you can dig up EU reports on Echelon from the early 00's which talks about a 1997 study that said that ECHELON routinely intercepts all e-mail, telephone and Fax. The issue is more that most did not believe in it until hard evidence was presented by whistle-blowers like Edward Snowden. http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//NONSGML+REPORT+A5-2001-0264+0+DOC+PDF+V0//EN&language=EN http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//...
- colordrops 5y ago
  The official 9/11 story being a farce has been an open secret almost since the event. There are hundreds of verifiable facts that don't fit the official narrative.
  - bananapub 5y ago
    eg?
    - ttctciyf 5y ago
      Not a 9/11 truther, but there are some incongruities around official accounts of 9/11, for example the accounts of why CIA staffers actively blocked the FBI from being informed about the activities of future 9/11 hijackers, as discussed in the documentary "Who is Rich Blee". There's a morass of conflicting stories, but if you're interested you could start with a close look at [1]. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfreda_Frances_Bikowsky https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfreda_Frances_Bikowsky
      - ta988 5y ago
        Intelligence agencies have used all the recipes in the book to take a hit at each other, so there is that as well.
      - seppin 5y ago
        > CIA staffers actively blocked the FBI from being informed about the activities of future 9/11 hijacker That's not how it works.
shadowgovt 5y ago
The main difference between government surveillance and 9/11 truther conspiracy is that the government surveillance "secret" can be kept in the open because the bulk of the citizenry doesn't care, or actually thinks it's in their best interests for the government to be surveilling everyone. In contrast, the bulk of the citizenry would be up in arms if there were indisputable proof that our government orchestrated a terrorist attack on American soil that killed thousands of people. Evidence: the reaction to the Snowden leaks. Lots of Americans responded to that news with "oh okay; that's a rational thing for the NSA to be doing to combat terrorism."
- posix_me_less 5y ago
  > the citizenry would be up in arms if there were indisputable proof that our government orchestrated Not so sure about that. Large portion of population does believe that and they are not up in arms.
  - shadowgovt 5y ago
    It's not a wide enough margin. The Scrips 2006 poll suggested around 16% think it's "very likely" someone in the US government either assisted or took no action (as frame of reference, Pew Research suggests between 4 and 7% of respondent input is "bogus"... Not just random, but intentionally biased towards the most unlikely answer to troll the pollsters [https://www.pewresearch.org/methods/2020/02/18/assessing-the-risks-to-online-polls-from-bogus-respondents/ https://www.pewresearch.org/methods/2020/02/18/assessing-the...]).
    - atatatat 5y ago
      2006?!?!?!?!?!?!
      - shadowgovt 5y ago
        That was the generous year. Belief has waned since then. Statista probed the question in 2019 and found strong belief at 11%. https://www.statista.com/statistics/959504/belief-september-11-inside-job-conspiracy-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/959504/belief-september-...
atatatat 5y ago
And the Manhattan Project before that ;)

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

Judgmentality 5y ago

Now I want to relearn all the 9/11 conspiracy theories. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9/11_conspiracy_theories https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9/11_conspiracy_theories

colordrops 5y ago
One of the weirder ones is that there were over 80 cameras pointed at the plane that crashed into the Pentagon and the public has seen none of the videos.
- sammalloy 5y ago
  I'm pretty sure that was debunked several years ago. Plus, video was finally released, so there's that.
  - lowkey 5y ago
    Per GP there were over 80 cameras but the pentagon, after years of calls for transparency shared a couple stills from one camera, so there’s that.
    - Judgmentality 5y ago
      Those stills have about the same quality as your typical Bigfoot photo though. Why not just release a damn video?
      - atatatat 5y ago
        Sunlight cures all infection.
        shadowgovt 5y ago
        This phenomenon is a subset of the effect "Too much sunlight denatures complex molecules and kills carbon-based life."
      - pyuser583 5y ago
        They dont want to reveal the locations of their security cameras?
        Judgmentality 5y ago
        If they already released a still, they already released the location.
        pyuser583 5y ago
        Of one camera. Not 80 of them.
        Judgmentality 5y ago
        I'm asking for them to release any video that shows what happened. If they already released one still, why not release the entire video? I feel like you're purposefully being difficult.
        pyuser583 5y ago
        I don’t have a lot to go on and so am I basically playing Devils Advocate. If I’m coming off as difficult, that’s why.
  - colordrops 5y ago
    What do you mean debunked? Who debunked it? Do you have a citation? Are you suggesting the HQ of the most powerful military in the world had no security cameras? This has the statement of the FBI agent saying that they had 85 videos, only one of which was released: http://www.judicialwatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/A_2006_doubletreeaffadavit.pdf http://www.judicialwatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/A_20...
- patrickk 5y ago
  Another strange one is the speech than Rumsfeld gave about missing trillions at the Pentagon 1 day before 9/11, then completely forgotten in the face of increased military spending the next day. https://youtu.be/MfMjdKElgqY https://youtu.be/MfMjdKElgqY https://youtu.be/xU4GdHLUHwU https://youtu.be/xU4GdHLUHwU
- hanniabu 5y ago
  Another thing I haven't seen any reasonable explanation for is how the towers collapsed perfectly in their footprint. It's hard enough to get smaller buildings to collapse perfectly in controlled demolition. Yet 2 towers that were among the tallest in the world both collapsed perfectly. With such tall towers they should have buckled unevenly at least a little bit, especially since the damage was off center.
  - atatatat 5y ago
    They're definitely built to collapse inward out of necessity to avoid damaging other buildings/creating dominos.
- atatatat 5y ago
  I commented elsewhere on this oddity, and the Vegas shooting, contrasted to the coverage of the recent condo collapse.
- LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
  Hm. No. The weirdest one is that the WTC was torn down by tactical nuke, buried under its basement, in context of Silverstein Properties having insured it at much higher value before, essentially pulling off a gigantic insurance fraud.

humbledrone 5y ago

It's worth noting that the government surveillance secret wasn't actually kept very well, largely because of exactly the effect that Chomsky describes -- keeping all the numerous people in on the secret didn't work, and so we found out about it. I'd argue that the government surveillance example actually strengthens Chomsky's argument.

Dnsv 5y ago
It's really about the upper limit of what a 6 inch chimp brain can process. Or a group of chimps can process. Whether it's a chimp in govt or outside Rationality has an Upper Bound. Stick that on the Fridge. When the problem faced is too complex and that upper bound naturally gets hit stories flow out of the head on both sides. The right move is not to focus on the stories. The right move, for this has been studied for a long time under the Theory of Bounded Rationality, is to focus on simpler problems.

BuyMyBitcoins 5y ago

> The secret doesn't have to be kept perfectly, it just has to be made ridiculous. Better yet, make it a partisan issue. Half of the country will refuse to believe it while the other half will be unable to do anything about it.

atatatat 5y ago
Confuse the issue more by flipflopping which party signals to their base to virtue signal giving a shit about the topic every....3-5 years.

bawolff 5y ago

The level of coordination required to fake 9/11 seems on a very different level than the level required to wiretap some central points on the internet. And that's not even considering usa basically had a dept of wiretapping (the NSA) already set up or that the nsa's activities actually did leak.

wp381640 5y ago
Not to mention that the post-911 NSA surveillance program leaked to the NYTimes within a few years
emoII 5y ago
Does it really require all that much coordination? Some top-level military exec(s) want the military to get more funding. They're in contact with Bin Laden. Bin Laden gets a bit of money to put a couple of arabs on a "work-trip" to the US. The military-execs offer a couple of pilots a "crazy increase to their life insurance". Check their schedules to coordinate the day of the attack. I know there's a lot of detail left out and a lot of assumptions made, but I'm not convinced that it has to be an extremely complex and coordinated plan.
- ddxxdd 5y ago
  Military funding of Bin Laden isn't that far-fetched, and it may have possibly been true in the past[0], but 9/11 truthers believe that the World Trade Center was taken down by missiles and controlled demolition, and that people who thought they saw a plane were confused. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_CIA_assistance_to_Osama_bin_Laden https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_CIA_assistance_...
  - jcbrand 5y ago
    AFAIK most "truthers" don't subscribe to the missile theory when it comes to the towers (the Pentagon is a different story). I sometimes wonder whether the more out there conspiracy theories are simply used to discredit any concern or skepticism of the official narrative by lumping those concerned with the crazies.

erk__ 5y ago

Has government surveillance not been an open secret for decades for example you can dig up EU reports on Echelon from the early 00's which talks about a 1997 study that said that ECHELON routinely intercepts all e-mail, telephone and Fax. The issue is more that most did not believe in it until hard evidence was presented by whistle-blowers like Edward Snowden. http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//NONSGML+REPORT+A5-2001-0264+0+DOC+PDF+V0//EN&language=EN http://www.europarl.europa.eu/sides/getDoc.do?pubRef=-//EP//...

colordrops 5y ago
The official 9/11 story being a farce has been an open secret almost since the event. There are hundreds of verifiable facts that don't fit the official narrative.
- bananapub 5y ago
  eg?
  - ttctciyf 5y ago
    Not a 9/11 truther, but there are some incongruities around official accounts of 9/11, for example the accounts of why CIA staffers actively blocked the FBI from being informed about the activities of future 9/11 hijackers, as discussed in the documentary "Who is Rich Blee". There's a morass of conflicting stories, but if you're interested you could start with a close look at [1]. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfreda_Frances_Bikowsky https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfreda_Frances_Bikowsky
    - ta988 5y ago
      Intelligence agencies have used all the recipes in the book to take a hit at each other, so there is that as well.
    - seppin 5y ago
      > CIA staffers actively blocked the FBI from being informed about the activities of future 9/11 hijacker That's not how it works.

shadowgovt 5y ago

The main difference between government surveillance and 9/11 truther conspiracy is that the government surveillance "secret" can be kept in the open because the bulk of the citizenry doesn't care, or actually thinks it's in their best interests for the government to be surveilling everyone. In contrast, the bulk of the citizenry would be up in arms if there were indisputable proof that our government orchestrated a terrorist attack on American soil that killed thousands of people. Evidence: the reaction to the Snowden leaks. Lots of Americans responded to that news with "oh okay; that's a rational thing for the NSA to be doing to combat terrorism."

posix_me_less 5y ago
> the citizenry would be up in arms if there were indisputable proof that our government orchestrated Not so sure about that. Large portion of population does believe that and they are not up in arms.
- shadowgovt 5y ago
  It's not a wide enough margin. The Scrips 2006 poll suggested around 16% think it's "very likely" someone in the US government either assisted or took no action (as frame of reference, Pew Research suggests between 4 and 7% of respondent input is "bogus"... Not just random, but intentionally biased towards the most unlikely answer to troll the pollsters [https://www.pewresearch.org/methods/2020/02/18/assessing-the-risks-to-online-polls-from-bogus-respondents/ https://www.pewresearch.org/methods/2020/02/18/assessing-the...]).
  - atatatat 5y ago
    2006?!?!?!?!?!?!
    - shadowgovt 5y ago
      That was the generous year. Belief has waned since then. Statista probed the question in 2019 and found strong belief at 11%. https://www.statista.com/statistics/959504/belief-september-11-inside-job-conspiracy-us/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/959504/belief-september-...

atatatat 5y ago

And the Manhattan Project before that ;)