Ordinarily, I don’t bother to argue with those people, but this is the mother of my children and I feel compelled to convince her that there isn’t some secret conspiracy that deliberately blew up the twin towers. I either need a way to convince her or a way to get in contact with a support group.
P.S.: Now she’s downstairs showing my eight year old a cartoon about the Fed and how evil it is.
Wow. I don’t know what I would do.
There are two types of Truthers.
Unfortunately, I think she fits into category #2. I actually got really pissed at her the other night, but I took a deep breath and apologized. We may just have to agree to disagree. I know there are Republicans married to Democrats.
Rob
That’s cause the first kind doesn’t really exist. For some reason, the less people actually know about it, the more wholeheartedly they believe there’s a conspiracy.
If it makes you feel any better, I discovered that the Canadians I work with are all Truthers, believe that the moon landing was a hoax, believe that there was a conspiracy to assassinate Kennedy… and that any American who doesn’t agree with them disagrees because Americans are brainwashed sheep who have to believe that their nation is the best at everything so it can’t have done bad things.
Type 2 is more common than you might think.
(I need a drink)
Just pipping up as a 41 year old Canadian who has never met any Canadians like that! 
Reminds me of the time my wife and I were diving home from her parents house and said she didn’t believe in macro evolution.
I did not handle it well.
This is something she believes, it is a part of her, you can’t bash it without bashing her. I suggest being gentle, and always keep in mind how irrelevant this issue is in your relationship. Ask her for her facts and gently debate her support for them.
I daresay the best the OP can hope for is some angry conspiracy-fucking.
Unfortunately, I am no expert on the subject and I don’t want to appeal to authority. After all, she can claim “Architects and Engineers for Truth” (who the hell are those guys anyway?) and what the hell do I know. My argument is why would all these people lie?
We live in Austin, so we have Alex Jones on local radio. I tried to point out to her that not everything Josef Goebbels said was a lie either, but that doesn’t prove that the rest of what he was saying was true. Nor do I have the time nor the energy nor the desire to sift through all that crap to mount a decent argument.
Unfortunately, I don’t drink.
Rob
So the 19 highjackers just spontaneously decided to get together in the middle of the flights and ram four separate airplanes into things? No conspiracy? 9/11 most certainly was a conspiracy. We will never know where it stopped.
Conspiracy Theory means “bullshit”. It does not mean “any time people collude, conspire, or act in concert.” Starting with that nonsense is not a good sign.
Nor is it that you’re claiming that “we will never know where [the conspiracy] stopped.” Yes, we do. Al Quaeda planned and executed an attack against the United States.
Really, there is not much you can do about it. 
I’ve found through the years that people believe what they are going to believe, despite whatever evidence you can give them. There IS plenty of evidence you COULD give her (you could just do some searches on the myriad threads we’ve had on this board on this subject as a starting place…or just google ‘debunk 9/11 truth’ for a ton of cites on it), but in the end believe is just that…belief. It doesn’t require facts, it merely requires buy in.
My own in-laws, and really much of my extended family don’t ‘believe’ in evolution, and nothing I can say or do can sway them from that stance. My father in law is convinced that all of the fossil ‘evidence’ (his emphasis) is manufactured with the intent of secularist to sway people from the ‘truth’ (my emphasis), and in the end I just had to accept that there wasn’t anything I could do about it. So, I just don’t talk about it with them anymore, as that is a level of denial that is just not breach-able. Basically these days I just don’t bother trying to explain why ghosts, UFOs, magic bullets or the countless other myths and CTs are ridiculous to folks who are true believers…it’s not worth my time or effort when there is zero hope of reaching these folks. I don’t even really bother when the odd 9/11 Truther comes onto the board with some stunning new revelation (in the form of a YouTube video that I just HAVE to see) wanders in to start up yet another thread on the subject…most 'dopers are already convinced by the mountain of evidence, and it turns into an echo chamber of folks trying to convince folks who are simply not open to convincing.
You have my sympathy. My advice is to let it go and just agree to disagree. If it really annoys you, just don’t talk about it. If you think there is any hope, sit down with her and watch one of the 2 hour specials that are on NatGeo or Discovery on the subject, especially the ones where they have the most prominent 9/11 Truthers on to give there take, and then they have skeptics basically pick them apart and make them look like fools. If that doesn’t spark even a small seed of doubt in her then just let it go.
Good luck!
-XT
It was a conspiracy but only a complete moron would think the US government, Israel or any of the other culprits that idiot truthers point to was behind the attack.
Certainly it was a conspiracy…a conspiracy of a small terrorist organization to attack the US directly and cause as many casualties and sow as much fear and terror as they could.
Oh horseshit. Will we ever know every last detail? No…of course not. We’ll never know every last detail of a car crash involving a drunk driver and a car full of people who’s only crime was driving at the same time as some asshole who decided to drive while intoxicated. That doesn’t mean that we don’t know anything, or can’t piece together the main gist of what happened. There is mountains of evidence, and trying to say ‘well, we don’t know EVERYTHING’ is a total bullshit cop out. It’s the god of the gaps all over again. Because they don’t know exactly which beam failed first, that means we don’t REALLY know what caused the collapse. :rolleyes: Or because they don’t know the exact dynamics of bolt 531 on the air craft that hit the Pentagon we don’t REALLY know what happened to the building. Total. Horseshit.
-XT
By and large, they’re people who have had their names added to an online petition without their knowledge or consent.
Okay, simple debunking method here: Is President Obama in on it too?
You see, as POTUS, he has access to everything. If he wants to know something he will know it. “Need to know” does not apply to him; no one can keep secrets from him.
President Obama is a savvy president. He is media-conscious. He reads the newspapers. It’s a 99% certainty he’s heard this conspiracy shit before.
And guess what? It happened on the Republican watch. If you assume the conspiracy is true, a Republican president, with Republican advisors planned and committed the greatest mass murder in American history followed by wars that have killed thousands of US troops while costing over a trillion dollars.
If Obama can prove to the American public that any part of the conspiracy theory is true he will be president for a thousand years. At the very least, every single person in the Republican party would be lined up and shot, shot again for safety and buried face down under the Fukushima rubble. Nixon is a villain unto eternity for a break in. Imagine what the US public would do to mass murderers (of US citizens, those brown folk over yonder don’t count). What I’m trying to say is that this conspiracy would be the absolute ultimate nuclear ammunition to destroy the Republican party forever.
So if it’s true, why is Obama just sitting on it? Why did Obama compromise on the health care deal? Or the debt crisis? I would have taken Boehner aside and told him “listen up asshole, if you don’t do it my way and do it now, I’m going to get on the TV and tell all of America and the world what your party did in 2001.”
This is unless Obama is in on it too. If this is so than you and everyone else is screwed beyond all capacity. You literally have no control over your life at any point; you live and die at the mercy and whims of your corrupt and evil government. It doesn’t matter who you vote for or what you believe or what you do. You will be ground into dust whenever the government feels like doing so. Ask you wife if that’s the kind of world she wants to live in. If she says yes, divorce her.
I thought Need To Know still applied to the president.
Edit: I’ll just ask GQ, no need to hijack this thread.
Heck, I remember a Kennedy conspiracist who demanded a recreation of Oswald’s shots. OF course it wasn’t just “put a trained shooter on the sixth floor and see if he can hit a slow-moving target in the head”, but “the shooter must have a performance record identical to Oswald’s Marine record, he must miss the first shot, fire the second exactly 0.534 seconds later, hit the target in the upper back in such a way to also hit the secondary target, fire the third shot exactly 0.489 seconds after that and hit the target in the head, etc.” The “recreation” standards were so absurdly rigid that an exact recreation was impossible and I’m sure the writer knew this, and was using it as proof.
If all it takes is, “sit here and keep shooting until you kill that guy”, I figure anybody well-trained with a rifle could kill or at least seriously wound a limo-seated person at least 50% of the time. How hard could it be?