CalPundit wonders about Steven Den Beste’s sanity:
Several weeks ago, weary of his futile efforts to understand the French psyche, Steven Den Beste announced that he had exhausted all other logical possibilities and come up with the only possible remaining reason why the French continue to oppose our war with Iraq: they have supplied banned weapons to Saddam and are afraid that an American invasion will turn up evidence of their treachery. Mind you, this is not just garden variety sanctions breaking he has in mind, which nearly everyone has done, but active help developing nuclear bombs and other WMDs.
Now, Den Beste’s essays usually strike me as being bastard stepchildren of JFK assassination conspiracy theories: long, closely argued tracts that are full of facts and surface plausibility, but drawing conclusions that any rational person recognizes as fantasies. So I didn’t take this very seriously.
[…]But I’ve got a question about all this. I have no doubt that the French have sold Saddam lots of stuff —- that’s no secret, and U.S. companies have also done business with him —- but if they really had sold him WMDs (or the makings for WMDs), wouldn’t their best bet be to support the U.S. wholeheartedly in return for us keeping quiet about the whole thing? Especially since, as Den Beste himself admits, it seems obvious that “the US is going to move with or without any further UNSC resolution.”
Does this make any sense at all? And who are the people who take it seriously?
Now, why can’t we invert this conspiracy theory and think that the US wants war because it is worried about WMD stuff it gave Iraq in the 1980s? In fact, that’s what this short post by Amber did.
WOW! you let her out of purdah?
Yeah, when I started checking out the blog stuff, I was astonished that this guy was given any credibility. On Usenet, he would have been an obvious kook/nutbar/loon.
Hmm. Long, closely argued, poorly written screeds coming to some whacked out conclusion. Weak or misinformed understandings of history. That’s more “kook” than nutbar or loon.
As an aside —what’s the correlation between kookiness and an engineering background? It seems to me that elderly engineers are more subject to being whacko than, say, elderly historians.
Ikram –
The engineer-kook nexus has a name, though I can’t recall what it is.
It’s been hashed out a lot on the newsgroup talk.origins, specifically related to how creationists are often engineers. The principle may have been extended to other net.kooks.
Being an engineer myself, I am not sure about the kookiness of engineers. However, I agree that engineers are more likely to have strange opinions (like creationism) than natural scientists.
You also have to realize that there is some difference between the current crop of engineers, almost all of whom are college-educated, and older ones who learned the trade (like DenBeste).
I would only have suggested that engineers are nutso are on engineer’s weblog — anywhere else would be rude
That last conspiracy theory you end with has been sitting in my DRAFT section on Blogger for months (of course, I never post).
But yeah… who knows?
What’s happening with you, Jim? Seems like you have a life now unlike us bloggers