I just found out that a couple of my band mates believe the US destroyed the World Trade Center.
Has anyone ever “turned” a truther or is that just a hopeless cause? Is the best policy is to just not talk about it, or is there a simple argument that works?
Beyond the entertainment value of mocking them and manipulating them into making comically nonsensical statements, I’d say the discussion was pretty useless, yes.
Based on what I have seen on this forum, it is about as futile an enterprise as you will find. It can be amusing at times, but ultimately fruitless.
They’re up there with anti-vaxxers. Don’t waste your breath.
It’s usually futile to discuss anything with truthers. You wouldn’t be calling them truthers if they had expressed any rational thought on subject.
Years and years ago, I was able to convince someone with the argument “So you think Bush, the guy who bungled the Iraq invasion, was enough of a mastermind to pull off this attack?”
I think there are two flavors: the first pays little attention to current events, but somehow ran across Loose Change and it made a big impression. This is just like a 10 year old who sees Star Wars and becomes convinced that the Force must be real. These people could learn, but you have to first get beyond the hurdle of “the truth is often a lot more ordinary than you wish it to be.”
The second flavor is every other kind of Truther – the conspiracy theorists, the mentally ill, those who are convinced they are smarter than the King of Harvard because of all the time they spend on the Internet, and so on. Don’t bother.
Cheney was the mastermind behind 9/11.
I think there are 2 that are the first flavor and only 1 second flavor.
But, I don’t plan on doing a taste test to verify.
There’s a difference between a guy who saw a video once and it seemed convincing to him, and we know the government does horrible stuff all the time, so it stands to reason, blah blah blah, and a guy who comes on the dope to post links to Loose Changed.
People can be educated, sometimes. It depends on the reasons they believe things. If they’re emotionally attached to their belief, then no it is not possible to argue them out of something they weren’t argued into.
But the easiest thing to ask is what happens when a blacksmith heats up metal. A steel bar doesn’t have to melt or even glow red hot before it can be bent much more easily. A blacksmith can bend a bar into a horseshoe after it’s been sitting in an ordinary fire, because the hot steel is much weaker than room temperature steel.
Another thing is to show someone a video of a building that implodes, and show them how they blow the bottom of the building, and it looks like the whole more or less intact building is falling into a hole in the ground. Then show the video of the WTC towers collapsing, and how the collapse starts at the airplane impact sites. Point out that buildings don’t fall over like trees because the forces holding the building together are a lot weaker compared to gravity. You don’t need a lot of force to collapse a tall building because the building is already doing a lot of work just holding itself up against gravity.
Another is to contrast the inept behavior of the Bush administration post-9/11 with the three-dimensional chessmasters who would have pulled off the greatest hoax in history.
Well, from what I recall some of the Loose Change idiots eventually had to change their tune on a few things, somewhat, as they were looking like complete idiots spouting stuff that had already been debunked. They didn’t do a complete 180, but they did eventually change some aspects of their ridiculous narrative. So, in that sense, argument does some good. It also helps folks on the fence, or who just don’t care enough to really dig in. Slick little pieces of crap like Loose Change can be compelling and convincing since you don’t need to think that much, and they lead you by the nose to the ‘answer’…the one they want to give. Combating that narrative with the facts can often be frustrating to the true faithful, but I think the vast majority are just ignorant folks who saw a video, and THEY can be convinced. Some of them, at least.
It comes down to whether you enjoy debating with people who have nutty and often stupid ideas, and you feel like knowledge and truth are more important than just letting things go and letting ignorance spread. The flip side of that coin is you don’t have to always argue with everyone about everything. Just because they are wrong, doesn’t mean you have to be the one to educate them. Personally, I love a good fight, and love sarcastically busting people’s bubbles on things like 9/11 Truther nonsense. It’s a pretty target rich environment to heap scorn and sarcasm onto some idiot espousing the various ‘theories’, and you can really make someone look stupid. Often, making someone look like complete and total idiots does more good than anything else, since people don’t generally want to be on the side of the folks who look really stupid (ok, so, that doesn’t seem to be working wrt the Republican party this election cycle, but it’s a general rule of thumb :p).
FWIW, I encountered exactly one person on the IMDb boards who pretty much went from a Type 2 to a Type 1. She’s still a Truther but no longer buys into Alex Jones, et al.
Dylan Avery has been distancing himself from the Truth Movement now that he doesn’t have to depend on a conspiracy theorist for the financial backing of more Loose Change videos. Combine this with the fact that he started out with a purely fictional narrative and one suspects that he didn’t really believe what he was putting out in the first place.
That sneaky bastard! You know, I never trusted him… and now I know why. :mad:
I generally think I owe it to the world to tell my truther friends that they are nuts and spend 2-3 minutes on it. At that point, I tell them I’m not going to debate it, and change the subject.
People take silence as concurrence more often than not, and I don’t want them to think they have more allies than they do. I hope (against hope I guess) that if they get enough ‘no’ votes that they will change their minds.
You could try this tactic (xkcd)
The only thing I find weird is how that third building, which hadnt been hit, also collapsed. I know it was from all the vibrations and I’m not saying conspiracy or anything but it still seems odd.
You could try this:
If Cheney & Co. Had Really Plotted The 9/11 Attacks by Matt Taibbi.
Read the whole thing. It’s hilarious! And he’s right. The whole conspiracy idea is so sublimely ridiculous that the only sane thing to do is laugh at it.
The “vibrations” were huge parts of a burning building falling in to it.
It wasn’t the only other building destroyed. The World Trade Center was a complex of seven buildings. A church across the street was also destroyed, and another high rise office building was so severely damaged that it had to be demolished.
Truthers try to have it both ways. They say it was suspicious that the Twin Towers fell into their own footprint and they also say it was suspicious that other buildings were damaged or destroyed even though nothing hit them. But the truth is that those two problems cancel each other out: the Twin Towers did not collapse neatly like a planned demolition, as evidenced by the amount of damage the collapse did to other nearby buildings.