Skyscrapers on fire, not collapsing

[XT]

He has all the information, and he chooses to remain willfully ignorant. There is not going to be any convincing him, nor do I think it’s fruitful to try. The purpose of continuing this discussion is to provide the information to the lurkers or fence sitters who may be ignorant but open minded enough to view the thread and make an informed choice, opinion wise.

Well, that and to hammer yet another Truther wannabe into scrap, to humiliate and ridicule him or her, to dog them until they flee the thread and, the gods willing, the board. Not only is it our bounden duty, but it’s so much fun!

-XT

[Algorithm]

@Mozart1220

The video of the collapse speaks for its self. Comapre it to that of a controlled demolition. Very simple if you aren’t looking for excuses why it’s NOT a controlled demolition.

I’m not looking for excuses, I’m looking for supporting evidence.

I’ve watched many videos of controlled demolitions, and each of them contain a distinct feature: many audible explosions that occur in a regular series prior to the building collapsing. Like this or this.

Can you provide a video of the WTC (1, 2, or 7) collapse that demonstrates that feature?

[Cisco]

@xtisme

He has all the information, and he chooses to remain willfully ignorant. There is not going to be any convincing him, nor do I think it’s fruitful to try. The purpose of continuing this discussion is to provide the information to the lurkers or fence sitters who may be ignorant but open minded enough to view the thread and make an informed choice, opinion wise.

I don’t buy that as a reason to keep making the same points to him after he repeatedly ignores them. I don’t really buy that there are lurkers around here being convinced by these threads. None have ever spoken up, to my knowledge. If you aren’t religious about 9/11 Trooth, then you can figure the truth out within 5 minutes of googling. You don’t need to read a 400+ post thread on a board you lurk at to make a decision. We have to talk to our known audience, and our known audience is Mozart1220, who is blatantly ignoring everything we say. If we don’t address why he’s doing that, then there is absolutely no reason for him to stop. It’s actually working out really well for him.

[XT]

@Cisco

I don’t really buy that there are lurkers around here being convinced by these threads. None have ever spoken up, to my knowledge.

Well…the definition of a ‘lurker’ is someone who lurks, so it’s unsurprising that none of them have every spoken up.

(not sure if you were going for tongue in cheek there or not)

That said, I’ve seen some regular 'dopers modify their stance on this subject over the years. I don’t have any specific examples (too lazy to search and don’t remember who specifically atm), but I’ve noticed the change in attitude from uninformed and leaning towards at least some of the Truther/CT claims to opposed, and I think it was entirely based on these threads going many pages, and a lot of 'dopers jumping in to make the Truther crowd look like idiots. YMMV, but that’s my take.

If you aren’t religious about 9/11 Trooth, then you can figure the truth out within 5 minutes of googling. You don’t need to read a 400+ post thread on a board you lurk at to make a decision.

But a lot of folks don’t care enough to get involved, so only have a vague idea of the topic. Those folks aren’t likely to slog through the entire 400+ posts, but maybe are just skimming. And it might be a few posts that catch their attention, gain their interest or otherwise get them thinking. The fact that the Truthers don’t really have a basis for their bullshit, coupled with the overwhelming evidence of the ‘official story’, and further coupled by the fact that most of the people in these threads are adamantly opposed (and vocal about it) to the Truther non-sense might make a difference.

Regardless, I think it’s important to make these folks look bad, even if it don’t convince anyone on the fence.

We have to talk to our known audience, and our known audience is Mozart1220, who is blatantly ignoring everything we say.

No…there is no point talking to him or her, since they aren’t listening. It’s like the religious thing, or Evolution…you are never going to convince the faithful. Never. The thing is, it’s pretty obvious to even the casual viewer that good ole Mozart1220 is not engaging in the debate, is not providing any evidence, and basically doesn’t know what he or she is talking about. Amadeus is obviously ignorant of even the basics of the debate, and is simply parroting the same things over and over again. And each time he or she does that they come in for another round of beating. I’d say that the thread will bump along as long as Mozart et al keeps coming back to take more lumps, or until a friendly Mod puts us all out of our misery for this round of 9/11 Whack-A-Mole.

If we don’t address why he’s doing that, then there is absolutely no reason for him to stop. It’s actually working out really well for him.

I wish you luck, but I think you are bound for disappointment if you think you can make such folks as these engage. Personally, I don’t think it’s working out really well for them at all…the Truthers are, as usually, taking the same old beating.

To paraphrase, the crazies kept coming the same old way, and we keep beating them the same old way. To mix paraphrases, I think we need to keep up the skeer…

-XT

[El_Kabong]

@xtisme

The purpose of continuing this discussion is to provide the information to the lurkers or fence sitters who may be ignorant but open minded enough to view the thread and make an informed choice, opinion wise.

Well, that and to hammer yet another Truther wannabe into scrap, to humiliate and ridicule him or her, to dog them until they flee the thread and, the gods willing, the board. Not only is it our bounden duty, but it’s so much fun!

-XT

And to hear the lamentations of their women; don’t forget that.

[Skywatcher]

@xtisme

@Cisco

I don’t really buy that there are lurkers around here being convinced by these threads. None have ever spoken up, to my knowledge.

Well…the definition of a ‘lurker’ is someone who lurks, so it’s unsurprising that none of them have every spoken up.

One did speak up in a recent thread, not sure which but I think it was the “angle” one. Coincidentally, the lurker spoke up right after a “we do it for the lukrers!”/“what lurkers?” exchange.

[Cisco]

@xtisme

I wish you luck, but I think you are bound for disappointment if you think you can make such folks as these engage.

I don’t think you really get my point. My point is that Mozart is leading us all around in circles, and enjoying the hell out of it, while everybody else plays his game. Whenever a solid point is brought up, he’ll just talk right past it and then several dozen posts later he’ll bring up the same point/question again, as if it had never been discussed. It takes two to play this game. Why is everyone playing it? If a question is asked on page 8 that was answered on page 1, don’t answer it again-- that is pointless because he already ignored it once. Instead, point him back to the answer on page 1 and ask him why he ignored it. If he madly frolics through the woods and we don’t chase him, then he’s just madly frolicking through the woods, and there isn’t a sane person in the world who is going to watch that and decide the debate for him.

ivan astikov did this to us for years, until we finally started roadblocking his bullshit*, and (based in part on his conspicuous absence from this thread), I think it finally worked. Not worked in the sense that he came around on the issue of 9/11, just worked in that he realized we aren’t going to play ivanball anymore.
*The exact same tactics that Mozart is using, I should add: ignore, circle, return later as if the issue had never been discussed

[Marley23]

@Cisco

ivan astikov did this to us for years, until we finally started roadblocking his bullshit*, and (based in part on his conspicuous absence from this thread), I think it finally worked. Not worked in the sense that he came around on the issue of 9/11, just worked in that he realized we aren’t going to play ivanball anymore.

ivan astikov was banned in August. He convinced me (and most everybody else on the staff) that he was trolling around the time he started arguing that Flight 77 might’ve been ditching in Lake Erie when nobody was looking.

[Cisco]

@Marley23

@Cisco

ivan astikov did this to us for years, until we finally started roadblocking his bullshit*, and (based in part on his conspicuous absence from this thread), I think it finally worked. Not worked in the sense that he came around on the issue of 9/11, just worked in that he realized we aren’t going to play ivanball anymore.

ivan astikov was banned in August. He convinced me (and most everybody else on the staff) that he was trolling around the time he started arguing that Flight 77 might’ve been ditching in Lake Erie when nobody was looking.

Oh wow. I took about a month away from the boards (and most internetting in general) this summer. The ditching in Erie thing sounds familiar, but I had no idea he got banned. Any links?

[Miller]

@Mozart1220

Go figure someone on the internet would obsess on the lincoln logs, instead of the ratio I was referring to. I just used those as something anyone might have around the house to demonstrate how easily something that tall and thin could “tip over”.

Allow me to make a counter argument, using the same principle.

Take two Lego blocks, like this one. Snap them together. Hold the stack by the bottom Lego, and turn it sideways. The parts remain attached. Now stick twenty of them together. Hold the stack by the very bottom block, and turn it sideways. Well before you get the stack totally horizontal, it’s going to break in half. But why is that? Surely, if two bricks are strong enough to hold together when turned horizontally, twenty bricks should be able to do it! That’s ten times as many bricks: it must be ten times as strong, right? Wrong. Physics doesn’t work that way. When you scale up something in size, it’s relative tensile strength doesn’t increase as fast. And you can see this with your Legos. The taller you build your stack of Legos, the quicker it falls apart when you go off-center with it. Twenty Legos might hold together until you get to a 45 degree angle. Fifty Legos will snap before you get to thirty degrees. Now imagine a stack of Legos as tall as the WTC building. That’s about 65,000 Lego blocks. If you keep it absolutely, perfectly straight, it will hang together.* As soon as you get it the slightest bit off of true, it’s going to start coming apart. If it snaps in the middle, you’ve still got two pieces that are 32,500 bricks long - and we know that even a stack of fifty can’t hold together if it’s more than thirty degrees out of whack, so those two 32,500 brick pieces are also going to break up into smaller pieces. And those smaller pieces are still going to be tens of thousands of bricks long, so when they get slightly horizontal, they’re going to break up, too, into pieces that are thousands of blocks long. And so on and and so on, until your original 65,000 brick structure has broken down into pieces that are small enough that the effect of gravity on them alone isn’t enough to snap them apart. By the time the blocks have all hit the ground, you’re going to have a big pile of bricks that haven’t fallen all that far away from the tower’s footprint - just like what happened with the WTC, and with no explosives, or cables, or anything weird needed to achieve that effect. Just gravity and physics.

*Realistically, of course, this would be impossible. Aside from the issue of getting the tower to remain absolutely straight, the weight of the blocks on top would crush the blocks at the bottom. But for the purposes of this discussion, let’s assume the individual blocks are indestructible, machined to be perfectly flat, and are being constructed in a vacuum devoid of any seismic activity.

[XT]

@Cisco

I don’t think you really get my point

Nope, I got your point. Did you get mine?

My point is that Mozart is leading us all around in circles, and enjoying the hell out of it, while everybody else plays his game. Whenever a solid point is brought up, he’ll just talk right past it and then several dozen posts later he’ll bring up the same point/question again, as if it had never been discussed. It takes two to play this game.

I’m sure s/he thinks this…but I don’t think it’s the general perception of those following along. I think you are giving folks much less credit than they deserve if you don’t think that others see right through the fact that Mozart et al simply keep bringing up the same BS every, keep circling back the way you put it.

Anyone who doesn’t see that is probably not someone who any amount of convincing is going to work on.

It takes two to play this game. Why is everyone playing it?

Because it’s fun to keep putting the smack down on the guy. Let me put it another way…you’ve repeatedly asked this guy to go back and answer questions you posed earlier. You’ve given the guy post numbers, you’ve even repeated the questions. How’s that working out for you so far? Have you gotten him or her to engage you and answer those questions to your satisfaction? It doesn’t seem so, from my perspective. Nor am I really surprised…it’s the way of folks like this.

Instead, point him back to the answer on page 1 and ask him why he ignored it. If he madly frolics through the woods and we don’t chase him, then he’s just madly frolicking through the woods, and there isn’t a sane person in the world who is going to watch that and decide the debate for him.

Which you’ve done…and s/he has simply ignored you, or used the ‘well, tell me again what you said and then I’ll answer it’ gambit. You can’t MAKE people engage you. All you can do is either shrug and move on, or hammer them on something else.

ivan astikov did this to us for years, until we finally started roadblocking his bullshit*, and (based in part on his conspicuous absence from this thread), I think it finally worked. Not worked in the sense that he came around on the issue of 9/11, just worked in that he realized we aren’t going to play ivanball anymore.

It didn’t work…IIRC, he merely got his ass banned finally. Possibly due to frustration at being humiliated in threads just like this, plus Pit threads that further heaped the humiliation and lamentation of his women folk on his head. Perhaps this person will follow a similar trajectory…it can be hoped, anyway. I’ve seen Mozart in other threads and I have a feeling…

-XT

[42fish]

@xtisme

@Mozart1220

The video of the collapse speaks for its self. Comapre it to that of a controlled demolition. Very simple if you aren’t looking for excuses why it’s NOT a controlled demolition.

It only looks the same to people who don’t know what they are talking about. Yourself, for instance. Controlled demolitions start from the bottom. The Towers collapsed FROM THE IMPACT POINT (unsurprisingly, since they were hit by fucking air planes there). -XT

As long as we’re doing comparisons: a controlled demolition (assuming it’s done competently) doesn’t rain so much debris onto other buildings that they have to be destroyed. WTC Towers 1 & 2 took out WTC 3 & 7 and damaged the remaining three WTC buildings & the Deutsche Bank Building on Liberty Street so badly they were condemned. Meanwhile WTC7 damaged Fiterman Hall on West Broadway badly enough that it had to be destroyed and caused $1.4 billion in damages to the Verizon Building.

[Marley23]

@Cisco

@Marley23

ivan astikov was banned in August. He convinced me (and most everybody else on the staff) that he was trolling around the time he started arguing that Flight 77 might’ve been ditching in Lake Erie when nobody was looking.

Oh wow. I took about a month away from the boards (and most internetting in general) this summer. The ditching in Erie thing sounds familiar, but I had no idea he got banned. Any links?

Sent to you by private message.

[Miller]

@Cisco

I don’t buy that as a reason to keep making the same points to him after he repeatedly ignores them. I don’t really buy that there are lurkers around here being convinced by these threads. None have ever spoken up, to my knowledge. If you aren’t religious about 9/11 Trooth, then you can figure the truth out within 5 minutes of googling. You don’t need to read a 400+ post thread on a board you lurk at to make a decision. We have to talk to our known audience, and our known audience is Mozart1220, who is blatantly ignoring everything we say. If we don’t address why he’s doing that, then there is absolutely no reason for him to stop. It’s actually working out really well for him.

You know, you end up posting this, or something like it, in just about every 9/11 thread we have. It seems to me that you’re having as much luck convincing people not to argue with Truthers as we have in convincing them not to be Truthers in the first place. And yet you persist, much as we do, in trying to argue the point. I find that somewhat ironic.

As for “convincing lurkers,” maybe it happens, maybe it doesn’t. But I’ve had three RL friends bring up 9/11 Truth stuff in my presence, and using arguments that I first read here on the boards, I’ve managed to convince two of them to reject it as nonsense.* So these threads aren’t entirely useless.

Besides which, I like to argue. I also like to play video games. Sometimes, when I’m gaming, I want a game that’s going to make me work for every save point or weapon upgrade. And sometimes, I want to turn on God Mode and just run around blasting shit.

Threads like this are like God Mode for debating.

[sub]*The third friend is probably a lost cause - 9/11 is about mid-range in terms of crazy shit that guy believes in: he also thinks plants can feel and that you can regrow lost limbs through force of will. Really nice guy, a lot of fun to hang out with, but he’s pretty much a walking D.A.R.E. PSA.[/sub]

[pikey_pete]

@Miller

I like to argue. I also like to play video games. Sometimes, when I’m gaming, I want a game that’s going to make me work for every save point or weapon upgrade. And sometimes, I want to turn on God Mode and just run around blasting shit.

Threads like this are like God Mode for debating.

[sub]*The third friend is probably a lost cause - 9/11 is about mid-range in terms of crazy shit that guy believes in: he also thinks plants can feel and that you can regrow lost limbs through force of will. Really nice guy, a lot of fun to hang out with, but he’s pretty much a walking D.A.R.E. PSA.[/sub]

Miller, you are my new hero for the next 30 minutes.

[begbert2]

@Miller

@Mozart1220

Go figure someone on the internet would obsess on the lincoln logs, instead of the ratio I was referring to. I just used those as something anyone might have around the house to demonstrate how easily something that tall and thin could “tip over”.

Allow me to make a counter argument, using the same principle.

Take two Lego blocks, like this one. Snap them together. Hold the stack by the bottom Lego, and turn it sideways. The parts remain attached. Now stick twenty of them together. Hold the stack by the very bottom block, and turn it sideways. Well before you get the stack totally horizontal, it’s going to break in half. But why is that? Surely, if two bricks are strong enough to hold together when turned horizontally, twenty bricks should be able to do it! That’s ten times as many bricks: it must be ten times as strong, right? Wrong. Physics doesn’t work that way. When you scale up something in size, it’s relative tensile strength doesn’t increase as fast. And you can see this with your Legos. The taller you build your stack of Legos, the quicker it falls apart when you go off-center with it. Twenty Legos might hold together until you get to a 45 degree angle. Fifty Legos will snap before you get to thirty degrees. Now imagine a stack of Legos as tall as the WTC building. That’s about 65,000 Lego blocks. If you keep it absolutely, perfectly straight, it will hang together.* As soon as you get it the slightest bit off of true, it’s going to start coming apart. If it snaps in the middle, you’ve still got two pieces that are 32,500 bricks long - and we know that even a stack of fifty can’t hold together if it’s more than thirty degrees out of whack, so those two 32,500 brick pieces are also going to break up into smaller pieces. And those smaller pieces are still going to be tens of thousands of bricks long, so when they get slightly horizontal, they’re going to break up, too, into pieces that are thousands of blocks long. And so on and and so on, until your original 65,000 brick structure has broken down into pieces that are small enough that the effect of gravity on them alone isn’t enough to snap them apart. By the time the blocks have all hit the ground, you’re going to have a big pile of bricks that haven’t fallen all that far away from the tower’s footprint - just like what happened with the WTC, and with no explosives, or cables, or anything weird needed to achieve that effect. Just gravity and physics.

*Realistically, of course, this would be impossible. Aside from the issue of getting the tower to remain absolutely straight, the weight of the blocks on top would crush the blocks at the bottom. But for the purposes of this discussion, let’s assume the individual blocks are indestructible, machined to be perfectly flat, and are being constructed in a vacuum devoid of any seismic activity.

Dangit, now I want to do this (not with 65,000 bricks, but what I could fit in my apartment, maybe 8’). I wonder how much a few thousand bricks are at bricklink? Probably not all that expensive…

Of course, there would be a few of problems: 1) it would be nigh-impossible to get standing up, 2) it would take a high-speed camera to properly appreciate the effect of multiple in-air breakage, and 3) it would make a heck of mess. Legos bounce and scatter a lot further than girders do on impact.

[Mozart1220]

@42fish

@xtisme

It only looks the same to people who don’t know what they are talking about. Yourself, for instance. Controlled demolitions start from the bottom. The Towers collapsed FROM THE IMPACT POINT (unsurprisingly, since they were hit by fucking air planes there). -XT

As long as we’re doing comparisons: a controlled demolition (assuming it’s done competently) doesn’t rain so much debris onto other buildings that they have to be destroyed. WTC Towers 1 & 2 took out WTC 3 & 7 and damaged the remaining three WTC buildings & the Deutsche Bank Building on Liberty Street so badly they were condemned. Meanwhile WTC7 damaged Fiterman Hall on West Broadway badly enough that it had to be destroyed and caused $1.4 billion in damages to the Verizon Building.

They were pretty close to very tall buildings as well, and there is alot of debate as to whether building 7 actually NEEDED to be demolished.

Besides, it wasn’t supposed to “look” controlled was it? But they sure did. Right down to the stuff blowing out several floors BELOW the ones collapsing all the way down.

Look at a controlled demolition, and look at buildings 1,2,&7.

Wow.

[begbert2]

@Mozart1220

@42fish

As long as we’re doing comparisons: a controlled demolition (assuming it’s done competently) doesn’t rain so much debris onto other buildings that they have to be destroyed. WTC Towers 1 & 2 took out WTC 3 & 7 and damaged the remaining three WTC buildings & the Deutsche Bank Building on Liberty Street so badly they were condemned. Meanwhile WTC7 damaged Fiterman Hall on West Broadway badly enough that it had to be destroyed and caused $1.4 billion in damages to the Verizon Building.

They were pretty close to very tall buildings as well, and there is alot of debate as to whether building 7 actually NEEDED to be demolished.

Besides, it wasn’t supposed to “look” controlled was it? But they sure did. Right down to the stuff blowing out several floors BELOW the ones collapsing all the way down.

Look at a controlled demolition, and look at buildings 1,2,&7.

Wow.

You’ve seen a controlled demolition with floors blowing out below the collapse point? As in, below the ground floor?

[Marley23]

@Mozart1220

Besides, it wasn’t supposed to “look” controlled was it? But they sure did. Right down to the stuff blowing out several floors BELOW the ones collapsing all the way down.

Look at a controlled demolition, and look at buildings 1,2,&7.

Wow.

In consecutive sentences, you just argued that it didn’t look like a controlled demolition, and that it does look like a controlled demolition.

[pikey_pete]

i just want to make one point: No one had ever run an airliner into a skyscraper before. All the theory in the world is just that, theory. Until you have an actual example of what happens when you smack a jet liner full throttle into a skyscraper, you just cant be 100% sure of what is going to happen. That being said, WTC 1 & 2 behaved just like engineering, physics ad material sciences predicted they would.