No disrespect to the SDMB intended, but if people haven’t learned anything from other sources debunking the 9/11 conspiracies in the last 16 years, they’re not going to learn anything here. They’re not interested in learning the truth. They’re just interested in trolling their particular version of THE TRUTH!
Which is why you answer them with pie recipes.
I recommend pecan pie, since that’s a tree nut. And also delicious.
Jet fuel doesn’t melt steel beams!
See, what happened is, several hundred demolitions experts secretly installed thousands of pounds of thermite on the building’s support beams. In buildings occupied by 50,000 people during the weekdays. Nobody noticed or managed to collect a shred of evidence! And then all those experts, being employed by ‘the government’, have all kept their mouths shut for 15 years! Or maybe what happened is the government used several hundred hitmen who murdered all the demolitions experts. But now they had several hundred hitmen who knew too much. So they had another group of several thousand hitmen murder all the first set of hitmen, and their families, and the families of all the demolitions experts.
All done overnight, nothing hit the press. But now the problem is that there were several thousand government hitmen who knew too much, and they had just finished murdering the hitmen who knew too much, so what they did was…
See, my theory is far more plausible than “a big roaring fire weakened some thin steel beams supporting thousands of tons of building weight and there was a failure at the bolts and once the thing started falling it came down like dominoes”
And the reason I haven’t been murdered by the packs of roving government hitmen who have killed thousands of people to keep the secret, including people who knew the people who were killed, is because…
Don’t worry, they’ll get to you. It’s a long list.
And there’s a shortage of hit-men. Somebody is killing them all.
I voted ‘yes’, and the reason is that, while ignorance can’t be specifically fought in the morons posting Truther nonsense, it still matters to fight it. To me, I’ve seen a tangible shift in the last few years of people who seem to be getting the message. I recall one memorable conversation from some people I overheard talking about 9/11, and one of the people said that, while they used to believe it was a conspiracy, they had seen this show on the Science Channel debunking the idiots and had been convinced. And the others who started off saying they were pretty sure that 9/11 was a Bush false flag actually listened to the guy who’d seen the show and seemed to at least be willing to watch it. I took heart from that random conversation that I wasn’t even involved with. I’ve also noticed that there have been a lot less loopy 9/11 CT threads on this board in the last few years compared to the previous 5 or so (and no new threads about how the pyramids in Egypt were actually water powered machines :p), so, you know, perhaps ignorance really CAN be fought. Even if those professing idiotic CTs might not be accessible to reason, others who are less pig headed can be reached, IMHO.
Pecan. Followed by lemon meringue.
Can I get brownies instead of pie? Gooey chocolaty brownies, and since we’re talking about 9/11 truthers can we make the brownies with no nuts!?
I can’t be reasoned with! Look at my post above! Makes total sense that ‘the government’ could have kept it all a secret this whole time! Look how competently they handled other major events around the same time period, like the Federal response to Hurricane Katrina and the Iraq/Afghanistan Wars! Total competence!
The few honest Truthers can be reached. However, there are very few of those left compared to 2003 or so.
An honest Truther is one who is honestly ignorant of reality and who doesn’t have some ulterior motive for believing 9/11 Trutherism. They’re the dupes, the ones who got taken in by 9/11 Truth in specific and who are just dense enough, and just uncurious enough, that they haven’t seen the logical holes whatever specific Truther narrative they’ve bought into and haven’t done the research to debunk it for themselves. They can be brought around with logic and facts, assuming they’re not also so insecure they can’t bear to be wrong.
However, most of those people have fallen away from the movement, such as it was. That phase of any given conspiracy theory has a relatively short life, simply because it runs on people honestly believing in the fiction the theory’s creators are selling, and conspiracy theories, as fiction, are universally shit. They have logical holes and massive implausibilities baked into them. It’s an inescapable part of the genre.
Even worse, from the perspective of a true believer, is that they’re sterile. They claim to be doing research, and yet never find anything new. They claim to be working for social change, and yet never advance any causes. They just churn the same lies and the same vague promises, and after a decade plus, even the most starry-eyed get tired and fall away. Like any new religion, or any love affair, the initial flush of fervor cannot last: It either all blows up in death and explosions, calms down and becomes part of everyday life, or it dissolves as people lose interest.
So most current 9/11 Truthers are those who believe for some other reason, either mental disease or frank bigotry, usually antisemitism. They will mouth the same narratives as the honest ones, but scratch them and you’ll find either raving emptiness circling endlessly around some damaged mentality or simple hatred which has found a convenient mask. These are the kinds of people who keep conspiracy theories going, and these are the kinds of people who drive away the honest dupes by being too honest about their true feelings in the believers’ safe spaces, the forums devoted to discussing the theory and supporting fellow believers in a world of infidels.
The real nutballs nearly always believe in many, many theories at once, occasionally generating grand unified theories which attempt to explain the whole world in a way unburdened by mere facts and logic. Crank magnetism even leads to them believing conflicting theories, like how Bin Laden died long before we killed him and is alive and well in a secret Illuminati hideout. Consistency doesn’t matter. Belief matters, and being on the inside of something, and knowing more than you.
I like pie.
Blueberry pie for me so long as it is virtual (The pie is a lie?), watching calories.
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They’ve pretty much finished up with the people who were in on the Pearl Harbor conspiracy and making good progress on the ones who know the real truth about JFK (Oliver Stone keeps slipping out of their grasp!) They’ll get to the 9/11 group in a few years.
I approved of Christopher Hitchins response to one (2 minute video). “Say your piece, but when you finish with the microphone, it’s all over. I won’t waste time on you”.
Of course, he had an auditorium full of other people waiting to ask their own questions, so he wanted to go on. If people here want to spend time answering this, they can. There might be a few of them willing to listen to reason & evidence. They do seem to be getting fewer & fewer, only true believers left. But it’s getting far enough in the past that a lot of people weren’t even born when it happened. Hopefully we can get them some accurate info before the ‘truthers’ get to them.
My sister is a state building official (not NY), so she gets pretty cheesed off by this crap.
Ah, yes. It’s hit men all the way down. Some of them Turtle Hit Men. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle hit men.
Alllll the way down.
You’re dealing with conspiracy theorists. Nuts come with the territory.
They are not worth the effort. Fuck them.
But I don’t vote in public polls as a matter of policy.
You can’t rationally argue with someone whose entire point of view is “That’s just what they want you to think!”
I don’t argue to convince the truthers. I argue to humiliate them. I want any person on the fence on this issue who strays by the thread to realispze the utter intellectual bankruptcy and moral insanity of the truther movement. When conspiracy theories go unchallenged the tend to fester and grow like mold.
I do the same for other nuttiness such as Sandy Hook cts and Boston Marathon bombing cts.