NightRabbit-When did you realize, vis-a-vis other kids, that you are a piece of shit?

The BBQ Pit
41

Wow, you’re dense.

You don’t know, you don’t care, you don’t care that you don’t know…

…which is all fine, really, there are plenty of worse sins in the world…

…but even though you say you don’t know and you say you don’t care, and you say you don’t care that you don’t know, you insist on posting bullshit and expect to NOT get called on it here?

Tell me, which of these beliefs did you NOT call your own?

I count two “I”'s and a “me” in there, and nothing about “other people”.

YOU are asserting that the circumstances seem suspicious and coincidental.

YOU are asserting that it is incomprehensible that four planes could be hijacked and one flown into the Pentagon.

YOU are asserting that it’s more than a mistake.

YOU are asserting that it was “coincidental” that the plane flown into the Pentagon was flown into a newly-constructed area.

And YOU are asserting that the area was free of ANY employees (now shown to be completely false).

YOU are the bad habits of conspiracy theorists personified. “But I’m just asking questions!” “But I don’t really care all that much to actually DEBATE it with you.” “But it’s not really what I believe, just what SOME people think…” but of course you’re going to spew your ignorance anyway. Do us all a favor and shut up.

42

NightRabbit, what do you believe about 9/11? If you’re not a “nutjob”, then tell us just what it is about 9/11 that you think the government (and the cameras of every major television network) is lying about.

What is there not to “buy”? We all saw it with our own eyes.

43

Yeah, well if (and I emphasise ‘if’) NightRabbit is a “truther” then she’ll continue to think she’s right until the heat death of the universe. There is no debating such people. The best thing to do is make fun of them and insult them until they become convinced that their pet theory is socially unacceptable and that it is so embarrassing to hold such opinions that they simply never dare to venture them. It’s harsh, but at least it keeps the madness confined to the insides of their own skulls where it can’t hurt or annoy anybody else.

44

What makes me impatient with JFK and 9/11 conspiracy mavens is that IMHO, the televised, eye-witnessed, generally accepted accounts of events are already interesting enough without bringing in all this cloak-and-dagger shit. They’re both historical turning points, and what fascinates me most is the contrast between American culture just before the events and the changes set in motion afterwards.

But I think that part of what drives CTers is the inability to accept that it could be that easy. Like NightRabbit said, “Sometimes people aren’t comfortable with what the OP had claimed was ‘already-known’.” They don’t want to believe that one guy with a rifle could kill the President. Or that four planes could be hijacked with boxcutters instead of guns. And that the hijackers wanted to use the planes as missiles, instead of diverting them to different airports and releasing (most of) the passengers and crew unharmed.

So they come up with these elaborate theories that would never work. And if they can claim that the government, or some people in government, were in on it, that’s comforting, in a way. The government, and the military, can’t help us, because they never intended to. It was somebody’s fault, someone other than the shooter or the hijackers. It wasn’t that simple, and bad things don’t just happen. Except, they do.

45

you guys are really putting words into my mouth at this point. I never said that what happened didn’t happen, and I’m not constructing “elaborate theories”. I’m also not “spewing ignorance”! I’m non-confrontationally saying that I have my doubts! How is that at all threatening to ANYONE?? Can’t someone privately and non-offensively entertain ideas that you don’t agree with? Jesus christ, I’m a staunch athiest, but I allow people to question the idea of God at night, lying in bed, speculating about the nature of the world and confronting the evidence of the world that they may ordinarily dismiss and openly scoff at.

If anyone REALLY CARES (which I doubt, and I don’t know why I’m being harangued about it, except for the sake of being prodded and insulted by zealots who get some sort of enjoyment from intellectually berating the admittedly undecided), at the bottom of it, I really don’t trust that, if the Bush administration could send 4000 troops off to die for their agenda in Iraq, I don’t see how it’s so impossible that they would sacrifice however many more that died in the WTC in order to predicate a reason to go into the area to begin with. All the evidence that the government was warned about air attacks into NYC years before the attacks happened and yet still didn’t realize or respond to what happened until the planes actually hit. The fact that the guys who hijacked the planes were educated at US air bases. The fact that a plane could be flown into an important office building in washington and happen to hit the newly constructed area that isn’t yet fully staffed or operational. The lack of WMD evidence that almost suggests that Bush already planned to go into Iraq in response to the attacks no matter what the reality was. The statute that was changed for air defense just a few months before the attacks, and the fact that Rumsfeld was absent that very morning-- I don’t see how, if you’re the ONLY ONE who can authorize a defense initiative in the case of a national emergency, that there are mornings on which you simply CANNOT be reached. How does that happen? That doesn’t seem to make sense to me.

I’m not “concocting theories”, I don’t understand the “missile” argument, and I don’t know jack shit about demolition, OKAY, I’m just saying that I have my doubts! I’m not creating web pages or proselytizing, I know I’ll never know for sure, so I don’t know what the point is in going on about it, ESPECIALLY when I’m aware of how these suspicions appear in polite company. I don’t KNOW what happened but I HAVE MY DOUBTS. Why is that so hard to understand?? And I know by writing all this, that I’m just opening myself up to more attacks, but at this point, I don’t really care. This isn’t something that can be PROVED or DISPROVED. I’m not disputing FACTS. I’m disputing how the facts seam together. This isn’t a psychological defense mechanism, either, because I’m personally far-removed, emotionally, from the incident. I didn’t know anyone in NY, I didn’t know anyone who died, it’s all very third-person to me. This isn’t about “psychological comfort”, so don’t be condescending.

GodDAMN, I wish I’d never said anything. I feel like someone confused about God who is sick of hearing people preach at me why God doesn’t exist. I don’t care about debating anymore! It’s not because I’m afraid of being challenged, but because I don’t think there’s any way to really know and I’m tired of hearing the same things over and over that may be proof to you but afford me no more trust than I had before.

Other than that, I don’t really know what I can say, only that I don’t mean to “spew lies”, I’m not intentionally spreading anything that’s untrue, I admitted that I am unclear on many of the facts, and I’m seriously NOT interested enough in publicly perpetuating my confusion to the extent that I’m going to spend hours on the internet looking for some sort of confidence in the whole situation that I doubt any collection or manipulation of conflicting information from the media and the internet could possibly provide. I didn’t even want to get into this, I wanted to say that I was doubtful, and that’s all, and I feel like I was backed into a corner about it. If I’d wanted to debate it, I would have gone to another forum. And if I had known the can of worms that my post was going to open, I never would have written anything at all.

46

Upon second look, that’s possibly the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. That’s the “best thing to do” when confronted by something you don’t agree with? You’re an idiot.

47

Really? That works, huh? If I were to tell you that you were a stupid peice of shit for thinking you can insult people into submission, you would be insulted into submission? If I said that even stating such belief proves you’re batshit insane crazy for believing such and obvious load of drivel, you would quietly hide your idiotic beliefs?

Do you feel like being quiet now, like improving your ignorance, or are you just pissed off?

You can’t insult people into agreeing with you. You can’t insult people into disappearing. It doesn’t work, and if you are finding ways to justify it, you are just as deluded as the people you are denigrating. The difference is, you should know better.

48

Me three.

Not that I believe anything that NightRabbit said, just the OP is so silly with his/her own blowhard persona it’s almost like a caricature.

Not on the SD-goddamnnMB makes me cackle with laughter. What an ass.

49

Basically, it seems you’re giving reasons why you wouldn’t be suprised if it turned out the 9/11 attacks were anticipated but (whether directly or indirectly) allowed by the administration. At least one of your reasons is apparently based on a falsehood (the one about the Pentagon section being unoccupied at the time) but you’ve already said you don’t claim certainty about any of the possible facts you’ve mentioned.

I’ll say it: I too would not be suprised if it turned out the US Gov’t (or powers within it) had in some sense, for their own purpose, at least indirectly, allowed the 9/11 attacks to happen. And I’ve got fewer reasons than you: I just think Bush et al are a bunch of bastards.

-FrL-

50

[QUOTE=Cisco]
Are their lives more valuable or something? And yes, “bigwigs” and “higherups” did die.[/quote[

This is a stupid, stupid comment. The person you’re pitting would not be devaluing the lives of non-bigwigs by claiming that only non-bigwigs died. Rather, the person you’re pitting would be, if anything, relying on a presupposition that non-bigwigs are as or more important than bigwigs. From this presupposition, the conspiracy theory’s claim (that no bigwigs got killed) gets its visceral content (those damn bigwigs, thinking its okay to sacrifice non-bigwigs.)

So… yeah. You’re dumb.

-FrL-

51

The Pentagon has five sides. One of those sides included the “newly constructed area that [wasn’t] yet fully staffed or operational.” 1/5 is still pretty short odds.

52

How is that supposed to work?

It seems to me that if a conspiracy theorist does anything with the value of lives lost, she attempts to uphold that value. For much of the visceral (if not the propositional) content of a conspiracy theory’s claims relies on a presupposition that it is absolutely wrong to use another’s life for one’s own ends.

What do you think of arguments to the effect that to criticize the waging of a particular war is to show disrespect to the soldiers fighting in that war? (To be clear: I myself think this kind of argument is bankrupt. But I would like to know whether you agree.)

-FrL-

53

Personally, I find it incredibly frustrating when someone feels it’s reasonable to share their own opinion on a topic, while at the same time, finding it unreasonable that anyone else might find their opinion contentious and want to refute it.

…and here we are again. How can you honestly say you don’t care? You (again) re-state and justify your position, yet, at the same time, find it unacceptable and offensive that other people might want to educate you on your self-admittedly ignorant view point.

It’s really frustrating when someone is just interested enough to take up an opposing stance - but when you try to open a dialog and share your own view - “oh, I don’t really care.” You might not see it as such, but the interpretation on my end is that of disrespect. You have a platform to share your belief, and deny others that same opportunity in response.

54

No, because deep down she already knows I’m right. If she has half a brain (I’m giving her the benefit of the doubt here and assuming she does), she knew I was right within an hour of ever hearing the 9/11 conspiracy theories. At this point she’s spewing hate because she’s hateful and willfully ignorant.

You don’t have much experience dealing with conspiracy theorists, do you?

Do you have anything useful or interesting to add? How 'bout something that just makes sense?

55

What I wrote made perfect sense, and was correct. The reason you did not follow it is, I guess, already stated in my previous post.

-FrL-

56

Oh, because I’m dumb. Gotcha. I don’t follow the deep visceral content of NightRabbit’s batshittery because I’m dumb.

57

Oh no, not at all. You’ve misunderstood what I meant. I wasn’t arguing that verbal abuse should be the weapon of choice in all matters of disagreement. Rather, it should only be used as a last resort once all attempts at reasonable persuasion have failed.

I stand by this wholeheartedly. A cursory survey of our public discourse reveals that an inordinate amount of airtime and column inches are routinely awarded to hopeless kooks. Creationists, Homeopaths, Swifties, Truthers, people who think Saddam Hussein planned 9/11, and myriad other deluded fanatics upon whom the arguments of reasonable people are about as effective as a fishnet condom and about as welcome as a fart in a space ship. Once all reasonable entreaties have failed, the forces of lucidity and intellectual honesty have three simple choices:

  1. Shut up, and allow the agitators to spread their disingenuous poison like a memetic dose of the clap.

  2. Continue churning out reasonable rebuttals which, by their very nature, will inevitably get less airtime than the nonsense being rebutted.

  3. Mock the idiots, preferably in as ruthlessly sarcastic a manner as possible.

I think we can at least concur on the inviability of option 1. Option 2, while certainly noble, can inadvertently result in the widespread acceptance of gratuitously unreasonable quackery as a valid topic of discussion. Once it has been established that one’s opponent is not willing to listen to reason, continued entreaties and eviscerations of his faulty logic and blasé disregard for factual accuracy can inadvertently lend the conspiracist’s babble a patina of respectability. People on the the sidelines eventually begin asking the reasonable question “If these people are always being taken seriously, perhaps there is some merit to their arguments”.

On the other hand, lampooning and ridiculing the conspiracists has three beneficial effects. Firstly, it puts them on the back foot. It hurls the ball back into their court and puts them on the defensive, forcing them to expound their arguments in greater detail. Since their arguments are ludicrous and incoherent (especially in the case of 9/11 “Truthers”), the greater the detail in which they are forced to state their case, the more self-evidently stupid their case becomes. Secondly, it wins points with a great many fence sitters. A good joke delivered on a Saturday night talk show which exposes “Truther” spiel for the nonsense that it is will have much more impact on fence sitters than a hundred scholarly dissections of “Truther” idiocy in learned journals. As Mark Twain said “Against the assault of laughter, nothing can stand”. Thirdly, widespread mockery makes the conspiracists feel that their perspective is socially unacceptable. They will therefore be less inclined to inflict their nonsense on other people.

Well, that wasn’t really the kind of insult I had in mind. You weren’t to know that, though. It’s my fault for not being clear. What I had in mind was more pointed mockery and insults along the lines of “How can you possibly believe such unmitigated garbage?”. A kind of conversational intolerance, not of the conspiracists, but of the fundamental premises of the conspiracy.

If it was just you, then probably not. I would probably act in the way you predict and insult you right back. But if everybody, treated my beliefs as undeniably stupid, if an intolerance of my perspective was widespread to the point where it became a sort of underpainting in the tableau of our public discourse, an unspoken assumption that everybody just took for granted, then yes, I would probably keep my beliefs to myself. I think most people would. That’s why I favour option 3. But only as a last resort.

58

So, so ignorant. This probably won’t do any good, but in the interest of fighting ignorance and all that.

  1. The Bush Administration did not send 4,000 troops to die because of an agenda. The Bush Administration seriously believed that the whole thing would be wrapped up in a few weeks (much like Gulf War I) and that after that the Iraqis, glad for their freedom, would become the shining democratic light in the Middle East. Remember “Mission Accomplished”? Yeah, that didn’t happen like they planned.

  2. Bush and co. are in tight with big businesses, it’s their thing. So why would they, not only attack, but vaporize the business heart of New York City? Why would they do this knowing a disaster of this size would crumble the economy in the short term?

  3. The guys who hijacked the planes were not educated on US bases. They learned how to fly at private airfields in Florida.

  4. Are you actually arguing that a plane was being used as a precise weapon of attack on the Pentagon? A plane is big and unwieldy and if you’re aiming for a precise hit being just a few feet off could have ended with the whole Pentagon being destroyed. Something tells me this would be an optimal situation when planning our response.

And again, hundreds of people died, so that kinda blows that theory out of the water.

  1. Yes, the government was warned about hijacked planes being used as missiles, but why would it be a high priority? Before 9/11, a plane being used as a missile was only fiction (it was used as a plot point on the Lone Gunmen TV show). It also doesn’t get the terrorists anything and doesn’t follow any of the common stereotypes of a hijacking.

But this point is moot because the three planes hit the WTC and the Pentagon before anyone knew what had happened.

  1. I don’t understand your point about air defense and Rumsfeld. 9/11 was planes flying into buildings (and again, no one knew the planes had been hijacked until it was too late). How do you “defend” against that? Maybe you could ground all air traffic. Wait… that’s what happened.

  2. As for using the attacks to get into Iraq, I’m not sure that holds water. I watched Colin Powell’s testimony about WMDs in Iraq and he doesn’t mention Al Queda. While it was probably a talking point amongst some government people, the main point Powell kept hitting was “mobile weapons factories.”

I know you don’t want to debate, but do you have any comments on all of these very plausible answers to your doubts (and one mistruth).

59

I love everyone accusing me of “spewing” crap or “spreading” ignorance. Seriously, guys, I mentioned reservedly that, as another poster succinctly said, I wouldn’t be surprised if it turned out that Bush and co. were involved. I’m not actively PROMOTING it. I think there’s a big difference.

In re:

That seems narrowminded, to me, hindsight being 20/20 and all, but I don’t know how you can say, without a doubt, that that’s what they “seriously believed”.

Because going to war generally boosts the economy?

Here’s a newsweek article that says you may be wrong: http://www.wanttoknow.info/010915newsweek

Okay, well, thousands of people died in Iraq. I don’t think, that if Bush could have killed a list of random DC citizens in order to succeed in Iraq, that it’s completely impossible that he would have decided to do so.

Look I can only tell you what I would do and what seems reasonable to me. And completely writing a threat to the country off as the stuff of movies doesn’t seem to be a rational decision. I could be wrong.

Right…? Ok, well, I’m questioning that they didn’t know, or that there was really no structure in place to tell them.

“We still don’t have a full accounting of Rumsfeld’s whereabouts and knowledge on the morning of 9-11,” Gorelick acknowledged after the commission’s final public hearing. “We don’t have answers to the questions that you’re asking. But I’m going to make sure it’s nailed down,” she promised. Yet the final published report offers no further details on Rumsfeld’s inactions or the reason he was “out of the loop” (as the secretary himself put it) that morning." Quote from here: http://www.motherjones.com/news/update/2004/07/07_400.html.

Sheesh, do I really have to come up with a quote where they justify going to Iraq b/c of 9/11?

60

“Mission Accomplished” came less than six weeks after the beginning of the Iraq War.

http://www.cnn.com/2003/ALLPOLITICS/05/01/bush.carrier.landing/

No, supplying other people’s wars is what boosts the economy.

That article was published on 9/15/2001. In the years since then it’s been proven they studied at a private airfield.

Are you actually suggesting a President would purposely murder American citizens to start a war he had the authority to start anyway?

It’s all about priorities, and until 9/11, a hijacker using a plane as a missile was the stuff of fiction. There was discussions about such a thing, but they were all theoretical.

And what would you propose they do? Shoot down a plane flying over New York City?

OK, say you’re a terrorist who wants to drive a plane into a building. Are you going to warn anybody?

I ask again, what difference does it make where Rumsfeld was on 9/11? What would he have done? Would he have pulled a Kurt Russell and boarded one of the plane’s in midflight with an anti-terrorist squad and killed them all with the help of a plucky flight attendant?

Of course not, but (WMDs) to (WMDs) say (WMDs) it (WMDs) was (WMDs) the (9/11) main (WMDs) reason (WMDs) is (WMDs) ridiciulous (Gulf War I).