[M]y question in response is how did you learn about these theories?... As abhorrent as these propositions are, how do any of us find out about them and understand their rationale?Well, he came at that obliquely, but I guess that means he would allow a white supremacist to teach his theory if he'd managed to get himself hired here. But he won't say it head on, and he won't even look straight at the Barrett problem, which is not that the students are learning that many Muslims believe this theory, but that they are learning it from someone who actually believes it's true, which ruins any useful potential for understanding Muslim culture. The interesting issue here is why they believe something so plainly false. How can someone who believes it take students down that path? That issue has some relevance to a course on Muslim culture. The evidence supporting the theory is something that might be profitably examined in an engineering class, using the tools of that discipline. But it's hopelessly off topic in a humanities course.
Perhaps we read about them in the newspaper or in magazines; perhaps we hear about them in discussions with friends; or perhaps they were part of the curriculum of a class we took at the university. We are told that a small number of academics in this country, and a much larger number of Muslims in other parts of the world, believe that the U.S. government was implicated in the disasters of 9/11.
Why shouldn't students at the University of Wisconsin learn that, with whatever evidentiary bases exist for that assertion, as they also study the conclusions reached by the 9/11 Commission to which most of us subscribe? Why shouldn't Kevin Barrett have to answer his students' questions about how such a horrendous and far-reaching disaster could be orchestrated by our government without even one person "blowing the whistle" and bringing the conspiracy to an end?
Bartell does end with this:
Mr. Barrett may not be the person I would hire to teach this course on Islamic culture and religion. But neither would I fire him or prevent him from teaching solely on the basis of his controversial, even bizarre, views. I think Provost Farrell made the right call.May not be? Controversial, even bizarre? Why pull those punches? Barrett is absolutely not the right person to teach this, and his views are idiotic, even evil.
Tell it straight, and then it will mean something when you back Farrell. I do.
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The problem for many institutions is their failure to admit a mistake until it is far too late to matter. Barrett and his class are not going to go gently into that good night as the UW administration hopes. By the end of semester, they will be wishing they had not equivocated about his views now because nothing they say then will help them out of this predicament of their own making.
This just keeps getting uglier. It makes the university seem so impotent, cowed by a part-time teacher who espouses ideas clearly wrong. The defenses become increasingly elaborate and evasive.
Sheesh. I was angry about this for awhile, now I feel sorry for the kids attending the non-science classes, for it seems likely that mediocrity and truthiness are given a wide berth.
What's the problem with having a Holocaust denier teach? As I understand it, the Holocaust deniers just don't think that six million Jews died. They think the numbers are lower, 2 million or so.
I'm assuming the six million number is correct, but I don't get offended that some people think otherwise. Hey - if they have evidence - let them present it and then let others refute it. I'm a Jew, but I fail to get worked up about this stuff. Even if the source of the beliefs is anti-semitism, so what? Like we should be shocked that some intellectuals are anti-semetic. Shocker.
But this 9/11 is a conspiracy guy doesn't appear to even be open to debate. I wouldn't want to have ANY professor at my college who is unwilling to have his opinions challenged.
It's better to just stop talking about him. He's a moron, but the publicity is only helping him.
Well then, could someone please tell me the name of the open and outspoken white supremacist who is teaching at UW? How bout letting me know the name of an open holocaust denier at UW?
Could you also point me to the organization which each of these people founded to prostelitize their white supremacist and denier philosophies?
For the record, the name of Barrett's group is Muslim Jewish Christian Alliance for Truth and you can find their website at mujca.com.
When you find me the professors at UW that reach this level, please let me know. I'd be interested to see how their cases play out in the media and with the administration of UW when such activities became public.
--Jason
Well, except my recollection (which may be wrong) is that when you started, even though this was a natural topic people might expect you to blog about and you obviously have strong feelings about it, you sort of wanted to avoid the whole ugly topic? But I'll look and see if my recollection is wrong (hell, feel free to kill this with comment moderation if it is). Not that you've been shy about voicing your opinion since!
Calling Bartell's statement oblique is charitable. He isn’t making any real effort to provide a plausible rationale for the hiring decision. He is trying, awkwardly, to draw some of the enemy fire.
If I'm not mistaken, he is suggesting that it would be appropriate to hand a taxpayer-funded position of authority to a white supremacist or Holocaust denier for the purpose of holding such a person up to students' scrutiny. I don't believe such a rationale could possibly have motivated even the misguided decision in the Barrett case. Surely Barrett wasn’t hired just so the students could see how stupid Barrett's theory is.
In some cultures, it is or was apparently a prevalent belief that one could cure HIV by sleeping with a virgin. Would a public health course be enriched if a teaching position was handed to a proponent of this theory?
Slightly less preposterous but stranger in its own way is the notion that the Barrett hiring is a good thing because it will ensure that students are exposed to Barrett's viewpoint along with “the conclusions reached by the 9/11 Commission.” If we are still talking about a course entitled “Introduction to Islam,” this isn’t much of a solution—instead of only wasting class time on the proselytizing of an apologist for genocide, we will also waste class time reading the collected works of the 9/11 Commission!
I don’t think Bartell does anything here to help his University.
For me, it's a question of which is worse? A white supremacist or a lawyer who seems incapable of comprehending the first amendment? A holocaust denier or a university professor who can't tell the difference between reasoned argument and ad hominem attack?
In each case, the former is so obviously, laughably, provably wrong that any supposed "damage" they could do is greatly reduced.
The true damage to our society has often come from the seemingly respectable, perhaps even geniunely well-meaning folk who just can't seem to notice that they're tap-dancing around the edge of authoritarianism.
I'm pretty sure one of them even came from Wisconsin.
"For the record, the name of Barrett's group is Muslim Jewish Christian Alliance for Truth and you can find their website at mujca.com."
That website (which, hilariously enough, is absolutely terrible, go figure - is it an unwritten rule that the more outlandish the theory, the worse the site will be designed?) is apparently hosted by Badger Internet (the DNS name www.mujca.com resolves to the IP address 209.83.8.11, the reverse DNS entry for which is www2.badgerinternet.com). If UW has too little shame to do something about Barret, and is too insulated to be amenable to pressure, perhaps Barrett's ISP has more shame (or less insulation). Since it is now readily apparent that UW have made their bed and are determined to lie in it, perhaps other avenues should be explored?
I can readily say that if my company turned out to host a site like that, I would be strongly militating for us to tell them to look elsewhere for service.
Barrett + Farrell = Bartell.
(Sorry to have nothing substantive to say about this. The names are making me giddy.)
Wow -- I just watched Neil Heinen's interview with Barrett. If anyone is interested, you can get the podcast here.
Watch the interview and then tell me you still think he's "moronic", "insane" or "evil". Even better, try refuting anything he says with actual evidence, as opposed to opinion or attacks.
As a matter of fact (Liberal that I am) I did post last February in support of a Holocaust denier's right to express his views in public. And a university is exactly the kind of place where that sort of thing should be openly discussed-- and openly dismantled. What I wrote in that post was:
You could throw everyone who denied the Holocaust in prison tomorrow, and it would not end Holocaust denial. It would instead only be a victory, not for the old Nazis, but for the new ones who would love to be able to limit what we can read, write and speak about.
Instead, we must make it clear what a poisonous doctine it is. But do it in a free society where we can make it clear that even a poisonous doctrine can be expounded in public, so that we can together publically criticize the ignorance that goes with it.
I stand by that post. Invite the Holocaust denier. Then hold his 'facts' up against the spotlight of truth. Like cockroaches, these types thrive much better when you turn off the lights.
But if we refuse to let someone who is truly odious be heard today, then who will we decide not to allow to be heard tomorrow?
I have heard that the UW essentially signed a one semester contract with Barrett (before he announced his intention to teach the conspiracy stuff). It would probably be worse for the UW and probably more costly to try and fire him at this point
Instead, the UW should apologize and say it made a mistake but then point to the thousands of other "instructors" it has hired who have not announced they will teach conspiracy theories after signing a contract.
Ann asks why the 9/11 conspiracy theorists believe something so obviously false.
I think the answer is that they are arguing from different premises. The psychological mechanism of 9/11 denial is the same as for some types of psychotic delusion:
www.hedweb.com/bgcharlton/delusions
The 9/11 denialists premise is that the GW Bush administration really is evil, and really would deliberately and horribly kill any number of US citizens to achieve some kind of tactical political advantage, like bolstering the military.
Obviously, if you believe that the government operates in this way, then this opens up a vast new search space for political theories about how and why things happen.
Believing in the evil intent of the administration, all else follows rationally. In other words, 9/11 denial is mostly a matter of logical argument from false premises.
The trouble is that the premise of the argument involves making inferences about the intentions of other people (ie. the US president and administration).
But we can never know for sure what is in other peoples' minds. This is why conspiracy theorists are so hard to argue away from their beliefs.
Therefore, allowing KB to teach 9/11 denial in undergraduate lectures is not simply about exposing students to an alternative interpretation of neutral facts - it is about convincing people of the utterly evil motivations of the US government.
editor theorist said...
Ann asks why the 9/11 conspiracy theorists believe something so obviously false.
I think the answer is that they are arguing from different premises. The psychological mechanism of 9/11 denial is the same as for some types of psychotic delusion:
www.hedweb.com/bgcharlton/delusions
Or...perhaps it's because we have different definitions of "obvious" and "false".
Mine go something like this:
obvious: Clearly and easily provable.
false: Not true.
While yours (and Ann's) seem to be:
obvious: Because I say so.
false: See obvious.
Seriously, if Barrett's views are obviously false, you should have no problem posting (or linking to) actual scientific and/or historical evidence that completely destroys his arguments After all, this is pretty easy to do for white supremacists, holocaust deniers and creationists.
The 9/11 denialists premise is that the GW Bush administration really is evil, and really would deliberately and horribly kill any number of US citizens to achieve some kind of tactical political advantage, like bolstering the military.
Sadly, the evidence (yes, evidence) is against you on this one. It's very difficult to argue that the Iraq war is anything but BushCo ordering the deaths of thousands of US citizens (and tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians) in order to achieve a political goal. You also have the spectacle of Katrina, where Bush may not have ordered the death of US citizens, but he certainly didn't seem to care that much when it happened.
Again, I'd welcome any opposing evidence you have that Bush & Co are actually not evil and have the best interests of the American people at heart (and not just the rich, white, Republican ones).
Barrett, (with his late discovery of religion,) reminds me much of the son of a co-worker some years ago.
The co-worker was a devout agnostic, and raised his son without any religous education whatever, (for or against.) In his mid-20's the son "got religion" big time. His father remarked on how he couldn't believe the stuff his son was spouting.
When I worked in medical research, I heard many people say you had to keep your emotions away from your work. If your work became a Crusade against disease X, and you lost your objectivity, you would fervently support any treatment, drug, etc despite all scientific evidence that it didn't work. I've met folks like that.
In education, you also can't teach well if you loose your objectivity and go on a Crusade, especially if it's the subject you're teaching. That's why Barrett is a very poor choice to teach that class.
I said: The 9/11 denialists premise is that the GW Bush administration really is evil, and really would deliberately and horribly kill any number of US citizens to achieve some kind of tactical political advantage, like bolstering the military.
Gnocci replied: Sadly, the evidence (yes, evidence) is against you on this one. It's very difficult to argue that the Iraq war is anything but BushCo ordering the deaths of thousands of US citizens (and tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians) in order to achieve a political goal. You also have the spectacle of Katrina, where Bush may not have ordered the death of US citizens, but he certainly didn't seem to care that much when it happened.
Again, I'd welcome any opposing evidence you have that Bush & Co are actually not evil and have the best interests of the American people at heart (and not just the rich, white, Republican ones).
My response: Gnocci illustrates my point very clearly. Gnocchi apparently believes that there is an exact moral equivalence between a government going to war (a war in which they expect some thousands of their citizens to be killed), and a government deliberately arranging to crush and incinerate some thousands of their citizens in an explosion.
But this presumed moral equivalence between war and mass murder is - to put it mildly - not universally subscribed-to.
Only those who see war and mass murder as precisely equivalent would regard all governments which would go to war as evil.
The majority of people see war and mass murder as different, and would not regard the current US administration as evil in the way that mass murdering governments (Hitler, Stalin etc) are evil.
The 9/11 denial theory therefore only has plausibility to people who believe - as a premise to further argument - that the US government is morally indistinguishable from National Socialism or Stalinism.
Mike said...
I watched the interview Sunday morning and I think it clearly demonstrates Barrett as delusional.
Really? The video clearly demonstrates that Barrett is delusional (i.e. strongly holding a false belief in spite of invalidating evidence)?
If you make the charge, you need to present at least some evidence that invalidates his position. It's not enough that he holds a view that you don't like.
Barrett presented no evidence in the interview to refute
Now we actually get to something that's "obviously false". Even though Heinen says he doesn't want to have a debate on the merits of Barrett's arguments, Kevin does manage to sneak in a few statements that are clearly falsifiable (i.e., possible to disprove given appropriate counter-evidence).
Here they are with the timestamps:
4:38: Barrett states that the steel from the trade towers was shipped off to China and melted down before anyone could test it. Is this true or false?
4:47: He states that Stephen Jones has found traces of thermate on the steel samples he's tested. Has Jones found such traces or hasn't he?
5:56: Government has numerous videos of the Pentagon crash which it will not release, including videos seized from a nearby gas station and hotel. True or false?
6:38: Barrett states that the public has never been shown video evidence of a plane hitting the pentagon. True or false?
7:43: Barrett states that scientific experiments have been done showing that cell phone calls were not possible from Flight 93. Did those experiments occur or didn't they?
7:56: He states that there was no sign of a plane at the supposed flight 93 crash site and that the wreckage was strewn over miles. Can you show where this is untrue?
This is the reason I'm so annoyed with the discussion on this blog. If you're advocating in favor of removing someone from their job (or, as Ann suggests, preventing him from ever being hired in the first place), you need to show some justification for your position. Ad hominem attacks and/or straight-up misrepresentations of fact are simply not sufficient.
Editor Theorist said...
I said: The 9/11 denialists premise is that the GW Bush administration really is evil, and really would deliberately and horribly kill any number of US citizens to achieve some kind of tactical political advantage, like bolstering the military.
Gnocci[sic] replied: Sadly, the evidence (yes, evidence) is against you on this one. It's very difficult to argue that the Iraq war is anything but BushCo ordering the deaths of thousands of US citizens (and tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians) in order to achieve a political goal. You also have the spectacle of Katrina, where Bush may not have ordered the death of US citizens, but he certainly didn't seem to care that much when it happened.
Again, I'd welcome any opposing evidence you have that Bush & Co are actually not evil and have the best interests of the American people at heart (and not just the rich, white, Republican ones).
My response: Gnocci illustrates my point very clearly. Gnocchi apparently believes that there is an exact moral equivalence between a government going to war (a war in which they expect some thousands of their citizens to be killed), and a government deliberately arranging to crush and incinerate some thousands of their citizens in an explosion.
...[snip]...
The 9/11 denial theory therefore only has plausibility to people who believe - as a premise to further argument - that the US government is morally indistinguishable from National Socialism or Stalinism.
Wow, I guess we can leave subtlety in the dust for this discussion.
E.T., can you really not see the difference between a war fought for self defense (say, WWII) and a war fought for political or monetary gain, with premises based on cherry-picked if not wholly fabricated information? Or do you just want to stick your fingers in your ears and hum the Star-Spangled banner until the nasty man stops talking?
My beliefs are based on evidence, not some irrational hatred of government. Your theory -- let's call it the 9/11 Gullibility and Submission to Authority Theory -- seems to be based on the premise that anything the government says should be taken at face value. Any skepticism directed at their self-serving statements is "nuts" or "moronic" or "evil".
The simple fact is that no matter what nefarious motives you ascribe to me or Mr Barrett (see Ad hominem), you continue to refuse to engage with our argument -- which I'll call the 9/11 Patriotic Skepticism Theory -- using any logical or fact-based methods. It's almost as if you have no empirical evidence to support your position.
Gnocchi said: The simple fact is that no matter what nefarious motives you ascribe to me or Mr Barrett (see Ad hominem), you continue to refuse to engage with our argument -- which I'll call the 9/11 Patriotic Skepticism Theory -- using any logical or fact-based methods. It's almost as if you have no empirical evidence to support your position.
My reply: I don't have anything to say about motives. But the widespread refusal to engage in debate about the specifics of 9/11 denial theories is - I suggest - due to the fact that the denialsts are arguing from a premise which a majority of the population refuse to accept and regard as false.
In other words, most people will not discuss the specific aspects that the 9/11 denialists want to discuss because they do not accept the foundational basis of their case.
The majority clearly do not believe that the US administration would deliberately mass murder its citizens, the 9/11 denialists thinks that they would (and that the majority are naive).
I suggest that the perceived moral nature of the US administration is the basis of disagreement. If the 9/11 denialists want to convince the majority of their views they would first need to demonstrate that the US government is capable of planned mass murder for political ends.
The worry about teaching is that the process by which someone might set-about trying to convince an audience that their government was capable of deliberate strategic mass murder of its own citizens is inappropriate for an introductory undergraduate course in religious studies.
editor theorist said...
...the widespread refusal to engage in debate about the specifics of 9/11 denial[sic] theories is - I suggest - due to the fact that the denialsts[sic] are arguing from a premise which a majority of the population refuse to accept and regard as false.
Now here we agree. Just like creationists, 9/11 Acceptalists simply refuse to believe evidence presented to them.
Now I know how annoying it is to be compared to creationists (believe me), but in this case the parallels are hard to ignore. Someone produces evidence that collides unpleasantly with your world view, and instead of examining that evidence honestly (since that might lead to more world-view uncomfortableness), you simply ignore the evidence and either attack the presenter or respond with other logical fallacies. (e.g., "The 9/11 evidence cannot be true because the Bush administration would never do such a thing" vs. "The fossil record cannot be true because God would never create something that would go extinct.")
The only problem is, don't we usually use the term "denialist" to apply to the folks ignoring the evidence? Just asking...
If the 9/11 denialists want to convince the majority of their views they would first need to demonstrate that the US government is capable of planned mass murder for political ends.
I was going to leave this one alone, but I can't resist commenting on the absolute ironclad impossibility of this requirement.
How would I "demonstrate that the US government is capable of planned mass murder for political ends"? Well, by showing that the US government actually did engage in planned mass murder for political ends. Seriously, what other argument would you accept?
Of course, before I can present evidence of the crime, I have to show that the government is capable of committing the crime, which requires me to show that the government actually committed the crime...and the tail-chasing commences.
Again, parallels to Evolution Denialism are unavoidable. ("you can't present fossil evidence until you can show that God would allow species to die out", etc, etc, etc...)
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