Morning fire

That's right, thanks to a truck driver in Oakland, we've finally arrived at the twilight for one of the most embarrassing American social 'movements' to have ever existed, the 9/11 'truth movement'. United by the central paranoia that 'something's just not right' about the massacre of thousands of people by Islamists on September 11th, truthers were able to cross political divides to come up with the most empty and distracting 'critique' that the American ruling class could possibly hope for. The left, which was looking for something more 'radical' than the superficial political economy on hand with the anti-war movement, was ready for the mystery meat of Alex Jones' (and others') cafeteria. Armed with the truth, they could now march with radical signs. Now they were digging deeper. The new critique took every aspect of existing society for granted in order to bury itself in forensics, in an almost monomaniacal search for the 'real killers'. Accordingly, an extraordinarily elaborate system of justifications was drawn up and distributed collectively, as a mode of participation....in something! The critique no doubt felt confrontational, since the dogma collectively prepared and re-hashed on the internet had to be disseminated within the anti-war movement through obscurantist arguments about the melting point of steel, the angle of incidence of security cameras etc. Hard work was demanded for all involved in constructing multiple fail safes in case the most obvious idiocies couldn't stand on two feet!

How tragic then that this enormous monument to crawling up one's own ass in self-refential 'scientism' now meets its end with the conclusive debunking of the 'movement's' central 'premise' i.e. that a free fire could not melt (or weaken) structural steel sufficiently to cause a structure to collapse.


Welcome to Oakland.

(CBS/AP) A heavily traveled section of freeway that funnels traffic off the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Bridge collapsed early Sunday after a gasoline tanker truck overturned and erupted into flames, authorities said.

Flames shot 200 feet in the air and the heat was intense enough to melt part of the freeway and cause the collapse, but the truck's driver walked away from the scene with second-degree burns. No other injuries were reported.

"I've never seen anything like it," Officer Trent Cross of the California Highway Patrol said of the crumpled interchange. "I'm looking at this thinking, 'Wow, no one died — that's amazing. It's just very fortunate."

Authorities said the damage could take months to repair, and that it would cause the worst disruption for Bay Area commuters since the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake damaged a section of the Bay Bridge itself.

It was Fark.com visitors who immediately picked up on the implications for conspiracy theory in this story, where fire had clearly weakened steel (enough to collapse a freeway overpass), proving that the 'theories' popularized by Loose Change et al (that the twin towers could only have collapsed via pre-set demolition charges since fires inside the buildings could not have reached an adequate temperature to weaken the structure) are utterly false and hereby proven so physically. No longer disproven only by mere circumstancial evidence such as the fact that a conspiracy of such a magnitude couldn't possibly be kept secret, as argued brilliantly by George Monbiot, and not merely by the fact that the conspiracy theory in question had to be studiously invented with ugly and visible stitch marks avoiding Occam's razor all the way...now after the Oakland fire, the only conspiracy theorists left are in fact actual conspiracists, engaged in an ongoing racket of inventing their own reality where they enjoy all the benefits of science without the pre-requisite of critically analyzing reality. Thus for them, the object of critique becomes the method of critique.

But this is no loss for the CT fringe, which of course existed in nuclei in variously libertarian, gun-clutching, anti-semitic and white supremacist guises far before people convinced themselves that the perpetrators of 9/11 were innocent of their greatest accomplishment. No, these lunatics will retreat back to exactly that line of acceptability that still permits them audience in the country historically responsible for the defeat of mid-century fascism. For the CTs it was an important foray, because their way of thinking was spread to hundreds of thousands of people worldwide (and the pre-requisite for the anti-semetic critique was laid; as a Fark poster put it, "Just blame the Jews and get it over with"). Daniel Kulla writes,
Conspiracy theory is the acceptance of defeat for the struggle against daily capitalist exploitation. It is loyalty to spectacular events that supposedly dictate everything but in fact draw power from our obsession with them. Marx described the dialectical method as a movement from the abstract to the concrete to the abstract to the concrete, progressively wearing away at levels of abstraction. In this case, the abstract was melted by the concrete, and society has the chance now to regain its senses and oppose the outrageous state of affairs that only survives by distraction.












*Note: I drink motherfucking Kirin Grand Ale, and it costs me an extra 30 yen for a smaller bottle of better beer. I'm not about to waste any of it on the 3rd grade physics of the 9/11 'truth' movement; hence the empty bottle.