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9/11 Truth and the Silence of the I(nternational) R(elations) Discipline
38 Plays4 years ago
This week Josh and M discuss and "peer review" David A. Hughes article “9/11 Truth and the Silence of the IR Discipline,” as published in the academic journal Alternatives: Global, Local, Political.
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Josh is @monkeyfluids and M is @conspiracism on Twitter
You can also contact us at: podcastconspiracy@gmail.com
You can learn more about M’s academic work at: http://mrxdentith.com
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Transcript
Introduction and Neutral Stance
00:00:00
Speaker
This week we're reviewing a new article on 9-11 by David A Hughes which is entitled 9-11 Truth and the Silence of the IR Discipline. Our reviews of the article itself, not about 9-11. As such, we're not going to make any claims about whether we think 9-11 was an inside job or not.
00:00:18
Speaker
We're just here to evaluate the arguments presented in the article that certain scholars are deliberately not considering the question as to whether 9-11 was an inside job or false flag event. Now while we do have views on 9-11, those views should be immaterial to the evaluation of the arguments being presented in the paper. So do you think we've done enough to justify our fence sitting in this regard? God, I hope so. I have splinters in my buttocks.
Podcast Introduction and Location
00:00:56
Speaker
The Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy, brought to you today by Josh Addison and Dr. M. Denton. Hello and welcome to the Transmetropolitan Podcaster's Guide to the Conspiracy, We Hope.
00:01:13
Speaker
I am Josh Addison sitting here in Auckland, New Zealand, where is Dr. M. Death? M. Death, off to a good start. Dr. M. Death is sitting in Hamilton.
Technical Issues and Future Plans
00:01:26
Speaker
Now, we recorded an episode last week, and when I say recorded, I mean, we spoken to microphones for the duration of an entire episode, but it turns out that episode was not so much recorded
00:01:40
Speaker
as just cast into the void.
00:01:44
Speaker
by an uncaring universe. Yes, we decided we'd try this new thing, and the podcast has guided the conspiracy by effectively not recording episodes, but performing them nonetheless. In fact, we've got this grand plan of doing church halls and town halls around the country and not telling anyone where we're going to be. So if you find us, it'll be very exciting. Yes, we tried using the Zoom system, which has a cloud recording ability.
00:02:11
Speaker
and whatever was uploaded to the cloud was never returned to us. So somewhere out there there is presumably a recording of not just our episode on one year after the mosque shootings in Christchurch and nine to ten years after the Christchurch earthquakes if we never covered on this podcast previously
00:02:35
Speaker
but also a patron bonus episode. And they're probably being trolled now with information by the NSA, the FBI, the CIA, the KGB, the FSB, the Stasi, MI5, MI6, NZ SIS, and all manner of other acronymed organizations who are very interested in what we have to say.
00:02:59
Speaker
Now, I mean, I guess we could have just re-recorded last week's episode this week, but it's a bit of a balancing act. Which is more effort? Coming up with a topic for a new episode or saying everything we already said a week ago, I don't know. This might have been more effort, but it certainly seems less boring for us. So I think the plan is, given we've got a largely scripted episode, which we could perform again,
00:03:28
Speaker
we'll probably do it again but in a month or so's time when it doesn't feel like we're replacing material from last week, if we give it a month we have time to actually come at it again afresh because we've got all the material, we just need to record it. That's true. So this week though we're skewing more academic.
Reluctance of IR Scholars on 9-11 Truth
00:03:49
Speaker
As we said in the intro there's been an interesting paper just come out about 9-11 and 9-11 Truth which is
00:03:58
Speaker
generally these days, the code word for 9-11 conspiracy theories doubting the official events. So we thought we'd have a jolly good academic look at this piece of writing. Yes, we're going to engage in what is essentially a kind of post-publication peer review. And as we said, just to reiterate,
00:04:24
Speaker
We're not going to be evaluating arguments for or against 9-11 truth conspiracy theories. We're going to be evaluating what this paper says about them, because if we tried to have a go at the 9-11 conspiracy theory, we'd be here for the rest of time, basically. I guess that seems like a fair summation of the event at hand.
00:04:45
Speaker
So, with all the necessary disclaimers made, I guess we should just get into it. We should indeed. Let's go into the murky world of international relations.
00:04:59
Speaker
Right, so the paper we're looking at today is called 9-Eleven Truth and the Silence of the IR Discipline by David A. I assume it's Dr. David A. Hughes. It does say he has a PhD from Duke University. So it's Dr. David Hughes. IR, of course, standing for International Relations, which sounds
00:05:17
Speaker
A little bit sexy. No, no, I think you'll find it stands for International Rescue, which is run by the Tracy family and they've got, you know, Thunderbirds 1 through 6. Oh, I'm sorry, it's this Thunderbirds fan fiction. I thought it was... Well, what else does I stand for? Well, apparently, International Relations.
00:05:36
Speaker
probably the sort of things you get up to in Romania, I assume. I am not going to comment on my international relations in this particular juncture. Very well. Well, so David Hughes, we should say, according to the blurb on his paper, received an email from Christchurch, Oxford, PhD from Duke University.
00:05:55
Speaker
has taught international relations at the University of East Anglia, Royal Holloway University of London, Nottingham Trent University and the University of Lincoln. So he appears to be a fellow who knows what he's talking about when it comes to international relations. But what is this particular paper that he's written all about?
Challenge to Official 9-11 Narrative
00:06:11
Speaker
Well, let me give you the abstract.
00:06:14
Speaker
International Relations, or IR, scholars uncritically accept the official narrative regarding the events of 9-11 and refuse to examine the massive body of evidence generated by the 9-11 Truth Movement. Nevertheless, as calls for a new inquiry into the events of 9-11 continue to mount with the International 9-11 Consensus Panel and World Trade Center Building 7 evaluation inquiries having recently published their findings,
00:06:42
Speaker
and with a US federal grand jury on 9-11 having been announced, now would be an opportune moment for IR scholars to start taking the claims of 9-11 Truth seriously. A survey of the 9-11 Truth literature reveals that the official 9-11 narrative cannot be supported at multiple levels.
00:07:03
Speaker
Two planes did not bring down three towers in New York. There is no hard evidence that Muslims were responsible for 9-11 other than in a patsy capacity. Various US governmental agencies appear to have had full knowledge of the events and to have covered up evidence. Important questions regarding the hijacked planes need answering, as do questions about the complicity of the mainstream media in 9-11.
00:07:30
Speaker
I ask scholars avoid looking at evidence regarding the events of 9-11 for several reasons. They may be taken in by the weaponized term conspiracy theory. A taboo on questioning the ruling structures of society means that individuals do not wish to fall outside the spectrum of acceptable opinion.
00:07:49
Speaker
Entertaining the possibility that 9-11 was a false flag requires Westerners to reject fundamental assumptions they've been socialized to accept since birth. The war on terror has created a neo-McCarthyite environment in which freedom to speak out has been stifled.
00:08:07
Speaker
Yet if I ask scholars are serious about truth, the first place they need to start is 9-11 truth. Strong words. So the basic... Yes, quite strong words. If I'm understanding it correctly here, the basic thrust of this argument is that the dialogue, I guess, around the war on terror and basic and international relations as it relates to
00:08:36
Speaker
the United States as it relates to the war on terror, as it relates to all the various countries that are involved in the war on terror, fundamentally rests on, or these days, at least fundamentally rests on the events of September 11, 2001. And if it were to be shown
00:08:56
Speaker
that the official narrative about what happened on September 11, 2001 was false, then pretty much the entirety of international relations theory would have to be reevaluated.
00:09:10
Speaker
And I guess I agree with that. If it were to be shown that 9-11 was a false flag or whichever particular 9-11 Truth Consortium theory you have to be holding to, then yes, that would have a very, very significant impact on the field of international relations.
00:09:31
Speaker
That's a fairly big if, built in right at the front there, isn't it? Yes. Now, it's important to note that whilst the beginning of the article kind of stresses that no scholars uncritically evaluate. That's the wrong way to put it.
00:09:46
Speaker
The scholars critically evaluate the 9-11 story because all scholars put forward hypotheses which fit in with the official theory of 9-11 with some very few exceptions, that the planes are brought down by hijacked planes piloted by terrorists trained by the organization Al-Qaeda. The author then narrows things down and go, hey, I'm only really going to focus
00:10:11
Speaker
on one set of scholars here, the scholars in the international relations community. So I think this is a problem for scholarship in general, but I'm going to narrow my focus to simply our scholars. Now, I don't actually know all that much about international relations scholarship.
00:10:31
Speaker
I do know an awful lot about the general academic scholarship around 9-11 though and I do kind of worry that the central claim here that people are simply accepting the official narrative and thus have never evaluated it isn't actually strictly true.
Evaluation of Alternative Hypotheses
00:10:52
Speaker
Yes, I mean he says right at the start
00:10:56
Speaker
He uses phrases like without hesitation, everybody's accepted the official version without hesitation and likes to make claims along the lines that anyone who accepts the official version does so because they're either not capable of investigating the facts properly or not interested in investigating the facts properly.
00:11:23
Speaker
or just plain doesn't want to for reasons that he eventually gets into. So straight away, you do have to wonder, how true is that? But as you say, he does restrict his scope. But basically, it's so that it would be possible to write the paper that he wants to write, because in just the same way that we don't want to spend an awfully long time evaluating 9-11 conspiracy theories to evaluate this paper, he doesn't want to have to trawl through the entire of academia
00:11:53
Speaker
to try and make a point, especially when he's restricting himself to international relations. So he does say neither start. Here I quote from the paper. Challenging academic conformism vis-a-vis the official 9-11 narrative requires A, showing that the academic literature does not adequately address 9-11 truth, B, explaining why it should, and C, explaining why it does not. There are methodological limitations on A and B in particular.
00:12:19
Speaker
namely that there is a ridiculously large amount of official academia out there, so any sort of a survey is going to have to cut itself down. So he sort of does restrict himself to the field of IR, but he does say some fairly strong, and I would have said some fairly contentious things. The one that popped out to me was
00:12:43
Speaker
No IR scholar has ever evaluated the evidence for the official 9-11 narrative against evidence for the alternative hypotheses. Without systematically weighing evidence for competing theories against the available evidence, there is no logical way to argue that one theory is more or less consistent with the available evidence. Therefore, having failed to undertake the necessary academic due diligence, IR cannot claim to know what happened on 9-11. Now that to me
00:13:09
Speaker
sounds like an invitation to put forward any theory you want whatsoever. That sort of seems to be saying, if you don't evaluate the official theory next to any other theory that could be an alternative to it, you can't claim that the official theory is true.
00:13:26
Speaker
That strikes me as a bit shaky. Yes, there does seem to be a problematic move for the sheer fact that the author in this case is going, I see no evidence in writing that anyone has ever compared the official narrative to some variation of the Inside Job Hypothesis. And I'm sure we'll get on to the very different versions of the Inside Job Hypothesis you can actually run later on in this discussion.
00:13:51
Speaker
And that seems problematic because if it turns out you have to compare all theories to all rival theories, you're not really going to get very far very quickly. I mean, no scholar in IR, as far as I'm aware, have evaluated the notion that unicorns actually run all of our political systems.
00:14:10
Speaker
I've just put that out there. No scholar has engaged seriously with that claim. So basically, we should say, who knows? But I think more importantly to this particular discussion, it might be the case that if you survey the academic literature,
00:14:26
Speaker
No one has sat down and said, yes, I've looked at the 9-11 truth material, and I find it unconvincing. Many people will have looked at it in the background, gone, actually, I'm not convinced by these particular arguments. They're also not arguments which are widely shared or put forward by other members in my field.
00:14:47
Speaker
So I don't need to bring them up. So there's no indication just because people haven't written about the topic that that means they haven't investigated the topic. It simply shows that they don't think it's worth spending any time to write it down. Yeah, I mean the the whole thing about this paper is that it basically takes it as read that 9-11 truth theories
00:15:12
Speaker
are the correct version of events. Although he does do a kind of line in, I'm just asking questions, man, but yes, by and large, there's a big assertion that the inside job hypothesis is correct and the international relations community is being abrogate in their duty, sort of a real word, I just made that up, but it works, by not acknowledging that. I mean, yes, when you went through the
00:15:40
Speaker
went through the abstract to begin with. He very clearly says, two planes did not bring down three towers in New York. No hard evidence that Muslims are responsible for knowledge of events and so on and so forth. And in fact, further in the main body of the article, he does sort of spend a bit of time making various claims about what happened on 9-11 and referring to various works that have been
00:16:08
Speaker
published on it. One of which is by someone who was resident in Auckland. Yes, I don't know. That did not sound familiar to me. I don't think it was one we've looked at before. No, so I mean, I've read it and passed comment on it online, but I don't think we ever covered this on the podcast. So back in 2017, a law lecturer at AUT University
00:16:32
Speaker
which will make people hear snigger because AUT stands for the Auckland University of Technology. So when you say AUT University, you're saying the Auckland University of Technology University, and that seems ever so slightly redundant. But this particular law lecturer, Amy Baker Benjamin,
00:16:48
Speaker
wrote a piece in a law journal that was published called 9-11 is false flag why international law must dare to care, which kind of runs exactly the same kind of argument, but from a legal perspective rather than an international relations perspective.
Claims About 9-11 Events
00:17:08
Speaker
Right. Now in the section where he goes through sort of what he what he sort of claims basically
00:17:18
Speaker
self-evident truths or at least unassailable truths about the events of 9-11. There's quite a few of them. I'm not quite familiar enough with the breadth of 9-11 conspiracy theories to be able to pin them down to one thing. He definitely appears to be a mihop rather than a lehop guy. He does appear to be claiming that the US government actually
00:17:48
Speaker
was behind 9-11. They made it happen on purpose rather than let it happen on purpose. Although he does claim that they had foreknowledge of it and so on, he appears to go beyond that and rather than saying they knew it was going to happen and allowed it to further their own ends, they actually made it happen to further their own ends. And yeah, there are a lot of claims basically and as we are not going to
00:18:15
Speaker
go through the entirety of 9-11 conspiracy theories and evaluate them there. He obviously is not going to go through the entirety of 9-11 conspiracy theories and provide proof for every one of them there. He simply refers to a whole bunch of articles. So his paper itself is full of lots of very, very definite claims and then the evidence that he appeals to to back up those claims are in the form of the references later on.
00:18:42
Speaker
But I think as you point out in your notes, all of the evidence he puts forward is kind of consistent with a let it happen on purpose rather than make it happen on purpose hypothesis. A lot of it is. He does get into the sort of jet fuel can't melt steel beams type thing as if to imply that it's not
00:19:06
Speaker
possible that planes crashing into the Twin Towers could have caused them to collapse and that it's not possible that damage from debris caused WTC-7 to collapse. So he does seem to be, it looked to be more than just a lee-hop to me, but certainly yes, some of the points that he puts a lot of emphasis on could just support the idea that the US government
00:19:32
Speaker
U.S. government knew about it and let it happen. And at one point he said- And there's a slight of hand that goes on in this discussion. So he makes a very bold claim that the 9-11 commission report and the two subsequent missed reports, the engineering reports about the failures of WTC 1 and 2, have been convincingly debunked by David Ray Griffin, a philosopher of religion who's written several books on 9-11 truth hypotheses.
00:20:01
Speaker
and goes, so these are no longer credible sources. But what's interesting here is they're no longer credible sources to people in the 9-11 truth community because they take it that David Ray Griffiths
00:20:17
Speaker
debunking has been definitive, but it's not the case that David Ray Griffiths... I think it's Griffin, isn't it? Yes, it is Griffin. I apologize, David Ray. I've called you Griffiths when actually you are Griffin instead. It's not accepted outside of the 9-11 Truth community.
00:20:38
Speaker
that actually his debunking of the 9-11 Commission Report and in this report is in fact such a severe debunking that they are no longer credible sources. So there's quite a lot of sleight of hand in the presentation of the evidence
00:20:55
Speaker
when it comes to this particular argument. Now, you might agree with David Ray Griffin that the 9-11 Commission report isn't good, or that this report aren't good. But that is a contentious claim. This is not something which is universally agreed upon by all people in this debate. Yeah, and that really seems to strike at the fundamental issue I think we both have with this paper. It's
00:21:22
Speaker
It's coming from a 9-11-truth perspective, and as far as this paper is concerned, the fact that the official version of 9-11 is false and that 9-11 was some sort of a false flag or something is undisputably true. Everything he says is predicated on this notion.
00:21:47
Speaker
coming from that perspective it does make it make sense to if you really believe that this stuff is is uncontrovertibly true then the fact that it isn't taken
00:21:59
Speaker
isn't really taken into consideration by other academics, is something very weird that in order to account for you have to look at the ideas of socialisation and neo-McCarthyite taboo. But in the context of looking at this paper not as a 9-11 truther,
00:22:21
Speaker
A lot of it appears to be putting the cart before the horse. Yes, it's not particularly convincing if you aren't already in the made it happen on purpose camp. So if this is meant to be a publication, which is meant to sway people to treat 9-11 seriously and reopen an investigation,
00:22:44
Speaker
it's not going to be very successful because rather than guiding people to, look, there are some open questions about the event that the official theory cannot account for, you are just told repeatedly, if you believe the official theory, you are wrong. But without much argumentation is to explain why you're wrong. Other than here are some references. There's a lot of them. Don't you feel stupid now?
00:23:13
Speaker
to the extent of sort of saying that modern academia is sort of anti-science because how could you truly believe in the notion of sort of science and truth if you know that this stuff is complete nonsense? If you know deep in your heart that none of it is actually really true,
00:23:37
Speaker
I've got another point which actually takes us back to the very beginning of the paper and that is the discussion that we should treat 9-11 as a prima facie false flag event because of the history of false flag events in Western history.
Historical Context of False Flags
00:23:56
Speaker
Ah yes yes now false flags obviously a topic near and dear to our hearts they show up everywhere and long time listers will know we've
00:24:04
Speaker
We've talked about a lot of false flags. We even had a series going at one point where we looked at nothing but false flags for a month or two. And many of the ones we looked at turn up here. So what's interesting is that the author runs an argument that goes, look, there are all of these false flags that have occurred, which have been covered up by various Western governments over time, including several false flag operations run by the Americans.
00:24:33
Speaker
Given this particular fact, surely we should treat seriously the distinct possibility that 9-11 is a false flag. Now that's the charitable interpretation. The author seems to go, we must take into account that 9-11 was probably a false flag. So he makes an even stronger claim than the one that I made. And this I find kind of fascinating because of the list of false flags that he lists,
00:25:00
Speaker
He mentioned some which we have covered in the past, Operation Northwoods, the Glaktwitch Incident, and the Gulf of Tonkum, but he also asserts that the Reichstag fire was a false flag, and that one of those false flags which most modern historians go, know the Nazis did not start the fire. Yes, they conveniently blamed the Communists for the fire, but they didn't actually start it. And now I feel as though I'm about to start a midnight oil song.
00:25:30
Speaker
Don't you mean, you're talking about beds are burning. I thought we didn't start the fire. Yeah, that was really Joel? I believe so, yes. Not actually Jermaine. That was actually Jermaine's local Joshua. Yep. No, fair enough. Go for the antiquity in reference every time. So as I said, as he said, first of all,
00:25:56
Speaker
he said he wanted to show that academic literature does not adequately address 9-11 truth and his method for doing this is to basically say everybody knows that 9-11 truth conspiracy theories are true and the fact that academics don't talk about them shows they're not doing their job properly which as we say is a little bit cut before the horsey but then he
00:26:16
Speaker
goes on later to explain why it doesn't, why academic literature doesn't address 9-11 truth. And the first thing he talks about is the weaponization of the term conspiracy theory, a topic near and dear to our own hearts.
Conspiracy Theory as a Pejorative
00:26:31
Speaker
And he does bring up the whole CIA thing.
00:26:36
Speaker
Although, as you point out in your note, at least he doesn't actually claim the CIA invented the term because they didn't. It's been around a lot longer than that. Now, the idea that the CIA invented or weaponized, quote unquote, the term conspiracy theory, something we looked at, I think in our first year of podcasting, it was a good ways back, either that or early into the second.
00:27:01
Speaker
And as we said at the time, basically, conspiracy theory and, well, at least conspiracy theory, I think, had been used as a pejorative term before the particular paper in the 1960s that people always point to to say, here's the CIA trying to weaponize the term conspiracy theory. Was it possible that they sort of promoted the term conspiracy theorist? I can't remember exactly the details of it.
00:27:30
Speaker
So it is the case that the term was being used in a pejorative sense before the CIA got their dirty little hawks into it. But it is true that they did want to tarnish the reputation of certain people who didn't think that JFK was killed by Lee Harvey Oswald as being conspiracy theorists. So they were going, look,
00:27:53
Speaker
one really good way to get people to stop paying attention to these people is to call them conspiracy theorists. They weren't technically weaponising a term, they were taking an existing term and going, look, there's a convenient pejorative we can apply to these people and it will do the work for us. So there's that to begin with and following that it goes into more
00:28:21
Speaker
I think is the term he uses reasons. So he talks about taboo a lot. He talks about... Sorry, George, I think you'll find that... Taboo. Taboo. Taboo. Possibly. He talks about the idea that 9-11 truth is a taboo. It's the topic that dare not speak its name. Yes.
00:28:49
Speaker
sort of leans on that claim to basically say, this is why academics don't talk about it. It's become a taboo topic. It's something you're just, you're not allowed to talk about. And indeed goes into the idea that, you know, academic careers can be ruined by taking 9-11 truth theory seriously. And there's money, there's funding money in looking into the theories that the powers that be want you to look into, which is
00:29:17
Speaker
It's sort of 100% untrue, but it's a bit of a distortion of academic reality, is it not? Yeah, so I mean, it is the case that if you're looking for funding for hot topics you want to study, you tend to study things which are of the moment. Now, there's an interesting aspect of this paper, which I quite like, which is talking about how a
00:29:39
Speaker
After about five years, people stopped talking about 9-11, and they started talking about the War on Terror. And as the author points out, the 9-11 Truth Movement kind of gets into gear at that particular point in time.
00:29:55
Speaker
So it actually might be understandable why IAR scholarship has ignored 9-11 as an alternative hypothesis for quite some time, because by the time evidence was being amounted for we should question the official theory, most scholarship had moved on to, look, there's a war on terror going on now. It's terrible. Look at the consequences. We need to analyze that instead.
00:30:19
Speaker
And that kind of reflects the reality of academic research. You tend to do research on things which are topical and of the moment. And I think one thing which certain 9-11 truthers have never been able to get comfortable with
00:30:36
Speaker
is that not many people care about the event of 9-11 now. People care about the events which happened afterwards, the invasion of Iraq, the war on terror, the war in Afghanistan, and all those other things. But 9-11, even though it's a momentous event, which probably did reshape Western civilization to a very large extent,
00:30:59
Speaker
is but a footnote in history and this is one of the weird things. I mean 9-11 was in 2001 which means I teach undergrads now who were born after 9-11 and a lot of them have no awareness of it whatsoever because it's just not been a big part of their history growing up. Now I guess
00:31:26
Speaker
The one thing, one of the main things that occurred to me reading through this paper is that it kind of exemplifies the problem I have with a lot of 9-11 truth stuff, which is that it spends all its time bagging the official theory. All the stuff that's brought up is, you know,
00:31:52
Speaker
It wasn't planes crashing. Buildings couldn't have collapsed this way. It's all the case in the negative. But I don't believe anywhere in this paper, he actually lays out a positive case for here's what really happened. There's generalities. It didn't happen the way we thought it did.
00:32:19
Speaker
the US government was probably behind it. There's a whole lot of what didn't happen on 9-11, but not an awful lot of here's what did happen on 9-11. And surely if, as you said earlier, people should be evaluating the official theory against alternative theories, he doesn't really put forward an alternative theory. His only alternative theory is that the official theory isn't right.
00:32:47
Speaker
I mean, I suppose by implication, he is trying to argue that if the official theory is incorrect, there's one and only one hypothesis that accounts for this, which is the 9-11 truth movement hypothesis. And you might argue that maybe the reason why he's vague on that
00:33:08
Speaker
is that he's also aware that the 9-11 community of truthers is actually fairly divided as to who they think is really responsible and how the event went down. So he doesn't want to write an article advocating for one particular variation of the inside job hypothesis.
00:33:28
Speaker
for the sheer fact that this is meant to be a salvo against the official theory and not a salvo supporting one particular rival in this particular game. I think that's what's going on there. He's aware that it's better to attack the official theory and not confirm which particular theory he adheres to because it's better for the movement as a whole. And you might even say that's a kind of
00:33:54
Speaker
epistemically virtuous thing for him to do in this situation. Maybe he's going, look, the official theory is clearly wrong. I'm not entirely sure which of the other viable alternatives is the better one in this case. So let's just make a case for going, we should dismiss the official theory, and then the proper investigation to get to the real truth of the matter can actually commence. Yeah.
00:34:19
Speaker
I would not be that, am I being too charitable? I would not be that charitable myself. I mean, he really does seem to, when he talks about the failings of international academia in the IR field, he really does sort of say that they should
00:34:39
Speaker
they should be looking into the right theories, not the wrong bad discredited official theory, without saying what the alternative hypotheses they should actually be investigating are. He's more just about, yeah, the official theory is wrong. And so anyone who believes that is obviously wrong, I don't know. I think
00:35:02
Speaker
Before we go into the reaction to this paper, was there anything, any other points you wanted to bring up about it? Movies. Ah, movies. So there's a section towards the end where he basically does special pleading about how the film industry is against 9-11 Truth Is, because A, the event looked like a big budget action film, and then people had the temerity to make films about 9-11.
00:35:31
Speaker
which support the official theory, which could be some kind of cognitive programming being used by Hollywood elites to make us not question what really happened on that day.
00:35:45
Speaker
Aren't the more recent Star Trek ones all 9-11 analogies? There was the claim that Into Darkness was a kind of 9-11 analogy, but that film was so awful that I'm not entirely sure what it was meant to be, other than being at the Cumberbatch pretending to be gone. Yeah. The new Picard series seems a little bit...
00:36:09
Speaker
a little bit sort of, if not, flaky. I bet it's the same writer, same producer as the Star Trek films, Alex Kurtzman. Stu, I don't know, so maybe the author of this paper just isn't, Dr Hughes isn't looking
00:36:27
Speaker
This is looking closely enough to find 9-11 support in the entertainment industry, I don't know. But no, so I was going to say that the reaction to the, okay, first of all, first thing, as an academic, you might be able to explain this to me. What does it mean that this paper was published in a, I believe it was reviewed and published in a journal? Does that mean
00:36:53
Speaker
the journal agrees with it? Does it mean they simply thought it was rigorously researched and argued enough to be worth printing? What is the significance of this paper actually being published in the first place? So the fact it was published in a peer-reviewed journal
00:37:09
Speaker
means that at the very least it was submitted to a journal and was sent out to one or more reviewers who read the document and either recommended a revise and resubmit or acceptance.
00:37:25
Speaker
Now, not knowing too much about the peer review process that this journal engages in, I don't know whether it was blind peer review, so the author was basically, their name was taken out, or how many reviewers there were. So are you about to say? I just, the acknowledgement at the end of this paper says, my thanks go to the two anonymous reviewers. Well, there we go. I didn't get to read the acknowledgement. I never do.
00:37:51
Speaker
No. So certainly he doesn't know who the reviewers were, although I don't know if the reviewers knew who they were reviewing. But sorry, carry on. Presumably not. They shouldn't have. If the paper was blinded, then no one in the system other than the editor would know. And even then there are systems which is double-blind review, where even the editor will not know who the paper is by before they assign the reviewers. So this indicates
00:38:16
Speaker
that it was considered worthy enough to publish in a journal. Now that doesn't necessarily mean much because there are journals and there are journals. Some journals are easier to publish in than others because some journals have higher acceptance rates.
00:38:33
Speaker
Some disciplines have a very high acceptance rate, so philosophy has one of the worst acceptance rates for peer-reviewed papers in any academic discipline, in that only 20% of papers which are written ever get through peer review. So four-fifths of philosophical writing gets discarded at some particular point.
00:38:58
Speaker
IR might be similar, or it might be that virtually everything you write will be published in some journal somewhere. But it was peer reviewed, which means it has gone through a quality assurance check, which means at least two academics went
00:39:14
Speaker
we think this is worth publishing. Now that doesn't mean they agreed with the content. It might just mean that they think it raises sufficient interesting questions that more research should be done. So publication does not mean endorsement as in it doesn't mean that the journal or the reviewers think this is a great paper. I agree with everything.
00:39:38
Speaker
Sometimes it simply means it's done enough work that other people should read it and follow their own research agendas about it. And so the reaction to it, from what I've seen, there was an immediate negative reaction to this paper being published. There was, I believe, somebody was saying on Twitter that they were given this paper to review and declined to review it, presumably
00:40:04
Speaker
based on, I don't know if it was based on any more than the title or having had a look at the abstract or whatever. There was one person who said, I was asked to review this, I declined to review it. And if I had reviewed it, I would have declined it or whatever you rejected it.
00:40:22
Speaker
And then there was a bit of a to-do on the internet, and I understand the editor eventually posted a response to the controversy. So yes, and they posted it in the worst way possible. So the editor of the general, which is Lekin Edo-Ozteg, wrote a document, presumably in Word, and then presumably took their phone and took a photo of the screen.
00:40:51
Speaker
and then took that screenshot. And I'm using that in the loosest terms possible on the internet. That's the most accurate term. That's also true. So it's kind of terrible to look
Controversy and Peer Review Process
00:41:03
Speaker
at. But basically the gist is, yes, there's controversy around the publication of this paper, including a burst of outrage on social media that we're being we're subject to publishing an outright conspiracy. And the article went out to unqualified reviewers.
00:41:21
Speaker
First of all, the article does not put forward a conspiracy theory. That's quite debatable, especially given the definition of conspiracy theory we use on this podcast. The article raises questions about 9-11 and highlights the attention should be paid to
00:41:37
Speaker
other explanations of the event and that the article went through a proper peer review process and the reviewers are respectable scholars in the field of international relations and then their editor exhorts. I kindly ask those who attack the editorial board members to stop. The editorial board members do not read all the articles before publication. All responsibility regarding the article belongs to me and the author. Well fair enough.
00:42:07
Speaker
Yeah it's possibly a little disingenuous to do that he was just asking questions lines when in the abstract it's specifically saying two planes did not bring down three towers. Yeah it is putting forward a conspiracy theory and that's not necessarily a bad thing as we know. Yeah so I mean it's a little bit interesting it's um
00:42:28
Speaker
I personally am not convinced by this paper for basically the reasons that we've already said it. It only makes sense if you already assume that 9-11 truth conspiracy theories are true, and if you don't, there's nothing particularly persuasive about it. So is there any more to say? So I was thinking about this when I was reading the article the other day. If I had been the reviewer, what would have been my particular view?
00:42:55
Speaker
I'm of the opinion that if I'd been the reviewer on this paper, which I wouldn't be because I'm not a specialist in international relations, I would have suggested a major revise and resubmit. So I think there's an interesting gist here, which is why aren't people looking at alternative theories for this particular event?
00:43:19
Speaker
I think most of the evidence put forward as to your idiots for believing the official theory end up being quite contentious. But I could imagine a version of this paper which is going, look, given the nature of the event and given the consequences of the event,
00:43:37
Speaker
We want to be really, really sure that the alternative explanation, and here's the evidence for it, doesn't hold water. So people who are specialists in this particular field probably should at least have an account as to why they prefer the official narrative over the rival conspiracy theory. Now, whether the author could actually rewrite the paper in that kind of neutral tone, I don't know.
00:44:06
Speaker
But that's probably what I would have gone for myself. Try and rewrite the paper that doesn't assume 9-11 was an inside job and see what happens then. Well, there you have it. And I guess also it's nice that a lot of it says stuff that we are fairly sympathetic to, the idea that conspiracy theory is used
00:44:33
Speaker
incorrectly, we would say, as a pejorative, as a way of discounting things that maybe should be looked into more closely. But yeah, as you say, it possibly doesn't make the best case for it. No, no, unfortunately not. No. So there you have it.
00:44:51
Speaker
And just some time for us to wrap up the episode, I think. Indeed, but for patrons, all going well on this recording actually works, we've got exciting patron content and you too can become a patron by joining our Patreon or Podbean patron campaign for as little as a dollar a month. And if you do, like our patrons, you'll get to hear about Patton Oswald, Corey Feldman, Corey Haim,
00:45:20
Speaker
San Britanban, a guy called Matt, who is apparently trying to paint a terra cell in our country, and the fact that Russia once again is up to no good. Heaven for Fend. So yes, that's what we're going to go and talk about now in the recorded episode, recorded bonus episode for our patrons. To the rest of you, obviously, thank you for listening to us. That's really awesome.
00:45:48
Speaker
If you felt like it, you could go and leave reviews for us on iTunes or whatever else you can leave reviews for podcasts on. That's the thing people say, isn't it? We got an email recently asking us to promote our podcast and it turns out the last time someone wrote a review for what is now Apple Podcasts.
00:46:09
Speaker
was back the first time I went to Bucharest. So it's been nice to have a more modern review about the more modern version of the show because we've grown and changed and hopefully got only slightly worse. Yes, in fact, what was that other, we got an email, we got an email about a week ago.
00:46:27
Speaker
from some service that supposedly tracks the popularity of podcasts that they wanted us to sign up for. Oh, weren't we kind of like fourth popular in Turkey or something like that? Something like that, yes. It was, let me see if I can find the, here we go. Was it fourth popular in Ankara, so quite specifically a region of Turkey? I think it was just Turkey. Hang on, I think I found a link. Let me have a look. Let me have a look. Fetching latest rankings. Oh, it's changed. Oh no, it's a different one.
00:46:57
Speaker
Now we're number 51 in society and culture philosophy podcasts as listened to in New Zealand. Unfortunately, we're number 230 in England, but I swear last time we were number 46 in Turkey. So there we go, beloved in Ankara.
00:47:16
Speaker
more or less. So yeah, Tasep Erdogan really likes his podcast. He likes the podcast's Guide to the Conspiracy. And we have a authoritarian dictator on your side. Everything's going very, very badly. So with that ringing endorsement to go out on, I think all that really remains is to say to you, our listeners, goodbye. Toodly pip pip.
00:47:43
Speaker
you
00:47:50
Speaker
You've been listening to the podcaster's guide to the conspiracy, starring Josh Addison and Dr. M.R. Extended, which is written, researched, recorded and produced by Josh and Em. You can support the podcast by becoming a patron, via its Podbean or Patreon campaigns. And if you need to get in contact with either Josh or Em, you can email them at podcastconspiracyatgmail.com or check their Twitter accounts, Mikey Fluids and Conspiracism.
00:48:51
Speaker
And remember, silent green is meeples.