Wed., September 2, at 8pm, with:
Sander Hicks* arguing yes.
Saul Devitt** arguing no.
(And the group NYCCAN fighting in court, meanwhile, over whether to make it a ballot initiative question.)
Hosted by Todd Seavey and moderated by Michel Evanchik.
Free admission, cash bar. Basement level of Lolita Bar at 266 Broome St. at the corner of Allen St. on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, one block south and three west of the Delancey St. F, J, M, Z subway stop.
This is, in effect, our second of three debates on “conspiracy”-related topics, last time having been UFOs and October being the validity of Obama’s birth certificate. So, whether you like it or not, we will have gone “spacer” > “truther” > “birther,” as the slang puts it. You can decide which if any stop to get off at — but best to come hear the arguments first.
*Sander Hicks argued the case for a 9/11 inside job two years ago at Lolita and now argues more broadly that more investigation urgently needs to be done into the subject. He has also made that case in his book The Big Wedding. And you may have seen the bookstore/cafe he used to own, Vox Pop, in the news recently because of the mysterious decapitation and theft of the head of the store’s Statue of Liberty replica (followed by the appearance of a creepy, anonymous, al Qaeda-esque video of same). Brooklyn terror cell? Extremely odd government intimidation tactic, as Sander suggests? Prank by Brooklyn art students majoring in video production? Publicity stunt?
None can say — but with a little networking assist from me, Sander got a chance to comment on another video — one critical of 9/11 Truth claims — for a New York Post piece by Maxine Shen, if you’d like a flavor of his thinking — and this time they didn’t call him a “java jackass,” as they did in a previous article.
I will say this: Even if Sander’s specific theories prove to be inaccurate (something you can mull as an audience member at Lolita this Wednesday), they are less strange than a conspiracy theory promulgated by one of his acquaintances, who thinks that that Air Force One fly-by of (the real) Statue of Liberty a few months ago was the result of Pentagon jets (in cahoots with the Kremlin) attempting to shoot down Obama, who narrowly avoided death by flying to a highly-visible location (while on his way to visit the U.N. and convey world-saving information about swine flu). Bet you haven’t heard that one before.
**Saul Devitt is a relatively straightforward computer programmer and would-be debunker who keeps up on the latest odd tech claims, whether false or, as in the case of doctors giving blind people sight by transplanting teeth into their eye sockets, odd but true. Perhaps he also has an opinion on the claim that traces of “nano-thermite” government explosives were found in the ruins of the World Trade Center (a claim admittedly promulgated by a scientist who used to say he’d found archaeological evidence of Jesus having visited South America).
Regardless, we will sort some of this out on Wednesday, and if you don’t attend, you may just regret it for the rest of your life.
4 comments:
Once you’re off the conspiracy theme, it’ll be time for a debate on what Disney will do to Marvel Comics. Or maybe that is a conspiracy topic.
[...] •And tonight, at our Debate at Lolita Bar (between Sander Hicks and Saul Devitt) on whether to reopen the 9/11 investigation as the Truthers want, you can vote on that question as well, in our traditional audience poll at the end of the evening. [...]
NY should re-open the 9/11 investigations, in fact they should never have closed it because the original story is impossible. a jet liner could not have brought down the world trade centers, especially in their own foot print. this has already been proven. so what needs to be investigated is who put explosives on every floor and in the basement and in the third building that came down later in the day for no apparent reason. what a totally lame and unbelievable story the american public has been sold. OPEN THE INVESTIGATION!!!
[...] I think I may have been present at the moment when the victor in our Debate at Lolita Bar last week, Sander Hicks, became open to 9/11 conspiracy theories. We had lunch some time after September 11, 2001, and a genuinely pained-sounding Hicks — trying to fit that horrible day into a right-left framework — said he almost felt as if there had to be some alternate universe out there somewhere in which Gore became president instead of Bush and the attacks were prevented and none of the subsequent events ever happened. Some might argue he imagined his own alternate universe after that point, one with a very different sequence of events than the one most of us accept as the story of 9/11. [...]
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