Neither, it’s pretty much verbatim. They were serious.
Is this a fact or just your opinion?
How do you explain Abu Ghraib?
Agents (police, FBI, CIA, Army, contractors … ) of Government can do and will do horrible things under the pretense of being experts in what they do and being assigned a task to carry.
If a financial disaster of 2008 can happen to the allegedly best minds of financial world representing best minds of so called private sector why would mediocre government officials be any better?
Regardless of conspiracy discussed, I’m quite astonished at how little awareness people pay to the events in the world that surrounds them. It’s like they never met a person or group that wants to have things their way no matter the cost. Or that if they don’t get it then there’s nothing to it.
One of my close friends is a truther (or at least was, last time the subject was breached.) My own father has elements of it, but he just listens to too much talk radio and whatever the conspiracy-du-jour is, he latches onto it, and then eventually forgets about it. I just shrug it off and do my best not discuss it. Admittedly, with my father, my reaction might be a bit more hostile. The odd thing is, my friend who is the truther was a big fan of anti-conspiracy theory books like Jon Ronson’s Them: Adventures in Extremists, so I’m not entirely sure how this all fits into his worldview.
If it is conceded by truthers that the US government was not behind the attack then those truthers are not morons or idiots for thinking that Israel or any other culprit was behind the attack.
Well, yes and no. “Truther” covers a very wide range of beliefs, from the merely implausible (“George Bush knew it was going to happen, and did nothing!”) to the benignly ridiculous (“The government put explosives in the towers!”) to the out-right delusional (“There were no planes at all!”) to the maliciously racist (“Did you know that all the Jews who worked at the WTC called in sick the day of the attack?”).
IMO, the first two categories are no big deal. I have a few friends who fall into the first, and one who falls into the second. They’re otherwise good people, and I don’t hold their lack of critical thinking abilities on this issue against them.
The third category, you’re starting to talk about genuine mental illness. I would be concerned if one of my friends suddenly started spouting that sort of stuff - and I’d be greatly alarmed if my wife and mother of my children did so.
The fourth category is where I’d start seriously rethinking if I want this person to be in my life anymore.
Willful ignorance. W didn’t know and didn’t want to know. When the story went public and he couldn’t ignore it any more, people landed in jail.
In any case, the larger point I was trying to make is when the Commander in Chief comes calling and wants you (the soldier, the CIA interrogator, the special forces operator, etc) to answer his specific questions, would you be the one to say no?
And as I said before, if I found myself married to someone who believed this was the kind of world we lived in, I’d file for divorce. Not only that, I would tell her that the government told me to file for divorce or they would kill me because my wife knew too much about what was really going on with 9/11. If she wants a conspiracy she can have it.
9/11 was 10 years ago. Has your wife been concealing these views of hers (or her ongoing interest in, and increasing acceptance of them) for the last decade? Unless you have a really shitty marriage, it seems much more likely that she has only recently been heavily influenced by someone or something. It might be a good idea to find out who or what.
Yep. Number two is my friend. Number four is my dad.
I know exactly who (someone from her hometown who she talks to on facebook), but she is a grown-up and I am obviously not going to try to dictate who she can and can’t talk to. I can’t say that she shows a lot of ideological consistency. She has also been watching a lot of Fox News lately, but they are decidedly anti-Truther (unless there is some way they can pin it on Obama…).
She also told me that she thought it was suspicious that we didn’t see any pictures of Osama bin Laden. I tried to point out to her that if he wasn’t dead, why would al Qaeda go along with it, but she thinks that he was on the CIA payroll or something. I tried to point out that she was thinking of Hekmaytar and that billionaires aren’t typically on anyone’s payroll.
I think she has decided that I am just one of the sheeple and that’s that, but I worry about what shit she might be telling my kids when I am not around.
Rob
Or maybe not. She just sent me this:
Government Cannot Protect Us From Violence by Ron Paul
I won’t bore you with the text except to say that the gist of it was if only the citizens of London and Norway were armed, they could have prevented this senseless tragedy. While I believe that guns don’t cause crime (although I will concede that they make crime more deadly) and I am a gun owner who used to have a CHL permit, I don’t believe that recent downward trends in the crime rate are due to an increased number of concealed handgun permits. I am also suspicious that Ron Paul actually wrote it. I found it on ronpaul.com which is a fan site.
Pick your fights. My last girlfriend–college educated, 3-digit IQ, raised by two mainstream Methodist ministers–was a Birther and a big fan of Fox News and Sarah Palin. No conspiracy theory about George Soros was too far out there for her to put stock in it. I had to focus on the many things about her that I adored, but it was a bit like dating Michelle Bachmann.
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No, non-Muslims who claim the Jews were behind 9/11 are morons.
Returning to the OP, it seems to me sweeteviljesus that there are three ways to handle this. First, as others have suggested, you could follow through on your instinct simply to agree-to-disagree. This is the easiest plan to implement. Second, you could immerse yourself in the literature, become an expert and maybe change her mind. But, you’ve indicated you don’t have the time or energy for such an endeavor and, besides, your prospects for success aren’t great. Third, and what I would do, is ask her to suggest a few sites you could read to understand her position. Take the time to read those. Then, if you’re not convinced (as is likely), have a conversation where you state only that and why. Not arguing that she’s wrong, only explaining why you’re not convinced. At this point, you end up at agree-to-disagree, but you’ve made a good faith effort. In any healthy relationship, that’s as much as she can expect of you.
As for why you’re not convinced, there are several reasons that don’t require you to become an amateur expert. These were things which occurred to me when I first read about the theory. For example, I have a hard time believing any group of people in government had a conversation about bringing down the Twin Towers and killing thousands of civilians. Further, I don’t believe we have the intelligence capacity to mount an operation of this scale and complexity. Moreover, I don’t believe an operation of this kind could have been pulled off without someone spilling the beans. And I find it unspeakably implausible that the government would go to all this trouble to frame OBL instead of Saddam Hussein. IOW, the CT doesn’t make sense.
Your list of simple reasons could be completely different, of course. But, again, the objective isn’t to change her mind. It’s to defend your skepticism. And to ask that the little ones (to the extent they’re involved) at least be told it’s a subject over which reasonable minds can differ. IMHO, that’s as much as you can expect to achieve under the circumstances.
One of my friends in college turned out to be a Truther. It was a terrible shock: he was someone I liked and whose opinions I respected and then it turned out he bought into claptrap that I thought no sane person actually believed in. We were talking one day and the conversation somehow got onto 9/11 and seemingly out of the blue, he started spouting Truther nonsense and proclaiming the widespread evils of the conspiracists in the American government.
What made it all the worse for me was that he was a German national. I hadn’t previously felt such sentiments before, but it made me so much angrier that a foreigner was espousing this garbage rather than another American. I was (and am) pretty far left, but I found myself vehemently defending President Bush and actually meaning it. I think I wound up saying something fairly nasty like, “Well, I guess you’d know plenty about governments conspiring to commit unspeakable atrocities, since your country pretty much wrote the book on it.” That of course Godwinned the discussion and we avoided the topic like the plague after that. It was highly unpleasant.
What you didn’t know however was that they were working as an evil proxy for a banker who was shorting the market.
The real villian is a creative wall street trader :p:smack:
My girlfriend expressed doubts about the moon landings once. Given that my dad started working for NASA during Apollo 17, I put her straight. Not sure if she believed me but we’ve never discussed it again and that suits me.
I have noticed, however, that a lot of people I know from the European continent (as she is) seem to be more into this kind of lazy thinking than Anglos. The “where’s the plane” Pentagon nonsense was popularised by a French guy and seems to have a lot of takeup in France. And most of the Italians I know seem to lap this stuff up without any critical thinking. That’s just anecdotal, mind you.
I always wondered why people questioned the plane. Planes making plane-shapes holes in buildings comes from Road Runner cartoons.
The actual plane (with actual people on it) involved in the Pentagon attack was made of aluminum which is more of a hard, shiny paper than it is an actual metal. It hit the concrete and steel reinforced, blast-proofed, kevlar-curtained armored segment of a five-story building. I’m surprised it made a hole at all.
Well in fairness the hole shapes in the WTC had wing marks and were definitely different from the Pentagon. I did initially have questions myself about it (and I sincerely mean questions, not the disingenuous “implying something” kind) - that were satisfactorily answered. The problem really seems to be people taking the initial sensationalist conclusions of a CT and not doing any subsequent comparative reading from other, more boring sources.
They get sterile offspring though.
Hm, not really, the Thierry Meyssan book got good sales when first released but that’s mostly cause it was a “new thing”. A decade before, the conspiracy books on the JFK assassination were high salers too. Both the Meyssan book and Truthers get regularly lambasted. And I cant think of any book, except that of Meyssan, that went for the conspiracy angle and became a best seller.
Seems to be far more popular a topic in the States than in “Continental Europe”.