I decided to make a pit thread on hawthorne. Makes me feel like I got off to a good start when my second thread is a personalized pit thread…
That makes a lot of sense and seems to define one of the major culprits in our arguments.
The other is just an idiot.
I had a similar argument with a couple of friends of mine. It start while we were all in a car, and I was taken off guard by it. I sputtered about it ineffectually for a few minutes, then gave up. Luckily for me, one of them wanted to convince me he was right, and sent me an email “proving” 9/11 was an inside job. The email thread between the two of us (and a few other friends who got roped in) lasted the better part of a month, and with the ability to think out my replies and research my facts, I was able to utterly destroy him over and over again. I didn’t change his mind, but I managed to convince him not to bring it up around me anymore.
The highlight was definitly when he linked to an author who spent the first half of his article trashing the “geniuses” in the engineering department at MIT for signing off on the official report without performing the following “simple” test: build a scale model of the WTC, and crash a scale model jet into it. Yeah, there’s a guy with an iron grip on the laws of physics, right there.
Heh. Where were they supposed to get “scale model” jet fuel?
Just wait til they bring the goats.
Sticking my neck out here just a tiny little bit to ask if it was a specific wiki site which you used to demonstrate your point to your friends? And that you found this site to have a lot of broken links on it, so you were, even to your own satisfaction, unable to verify the truth of the claims on it? Also, isn’t it in the nature or very purpose of wikis to allow anybody who wants to to add information to it, which can cause some veracity loss depending on who chooses to post and how well they do their research?
Otherwise, welcome to the boards!
I saw the thread title and I clicked in to see if the OP meant “the movie ‘Zeitgeist’ is trying to ruin friendships” or “the movie Zeitgeist is trying to ruin friendships”, in the sense that the general universe of movies in release these days isn’t worth getting together with a friend to go see.
There actually are model jet airplanes (last link is a YouTube video).
Wish I had $1000+ to blow on one of those suckers…
I was actually talking about the main source Zeitgeist, the movie Debunked - Introduction - Zeitgeist Exposed - Skeptic Project and how some of the sources seemed a little less then definitive. I’m trying to find one that seems off and it’s really hard right now I was much more engrossed in the entire thing before. I will definitely get back to this when I can put more time into looking into it.
I can’t necessarily find a broken link but there are many links to wikipedia on the site that you can easily find and I know it’s the nature of the beast with wikipedia that anyone can change and edit information on there but anything from wikipedia according to my friends aren’t reliable and they just throw it away and that was basically what I was frustrated with.
Basically, if I were to use wikipedia as a source, it turns into an entirely new argument about the validity of the site that piles even more of the burden of proof onto me.
I recently talked to a idiot who had the idea the the moon landings were faked.
Politely, I could argue that we are arguing about our sources. He has his source of information and I had mine. Since neither he nor I had direct knowledge of what we accepted as fact, we both relied on our sources of information.
I felt my sources were better than his.
He tried to end the discussion with saying that “It was his opinion and he was entitled to it”.
Well no asshole. Opinions are held about subjective things. Nobody has opinions about objective facts. You may have the opinion that Star Wars was a good movie or a bad movie. You dont’ get to have an opinion that it starred or did not star Harrison Ford. (that was all done digitally, there is no such person as Harrison Ford, I’ve never met him!*)
Tell your friends they are fools.
*I’ve actually have met Mr. Ford, very briefly and he was a nice guy.
Option Two! Option Two! Option Two! Its quicker, much more satisfying, and will prevent your friends from bringing up anything remotely stupid in your presence ever again.
Buddha_Clause, I feel your pain buddy. I literally lost a friend over Zeitgeist. We were pretty close for about 5 years, and then he saw that trash and it was almost like he lost his mind on the spot and hasn’t come back from it. I stayed calm, collected, and objective, pointing out logical and factual holes in it, and his arguments kept getting more and more irrational and more and more ad hom. He eventually called me something like a Bill O’Reilly loving sheep piece of shit and that was pretty much the end of our friendship. For the record I do not watch or like Bill O’Reilly. I quite loathe him in fact.
From wikipedia:
Yeah, the Federal Reserve is formally owned by its member banks. But all profits are turned over the the US Treasury.
-
So the US Treasury got us embroiled in these wars, forcing them to borrow money from… themselves.
-
This is such a fundamental point, that anybody espousing it has basically destroyed their own credibility, assuming that they can’t present convincing evidence to the contrary.
-
Show me the money.
Sorry that you had such a rough start here from that first response, Buddha. Welcome to the SDMB.
If you post in the Pit, you can almost always expect smart ass responses. It comes with the territory. Don’t let it keep you from posting and don’t take the insults too personally.
Your friends sound very impressionable. You didn’t say what age they are. Maybe it’s something they will outgrow. Sometimes there comes a point in an argument where you simply have to agree to disagree. Or do you think that being right is worth losing their friendship? That’s up to you.
One heads-up for you: A lot of propaganda and misinformation about “international banking” is introduced on the internet and through email and videos that will actually begin to talk in terms of the Jews as being those “international bankers.” The terms become used interchangeably and the literature becomes more and more anti-Semitic. Basically, it’s just the usual steaming piles of neo-Nazi, white supremeist leftovers from shit-hook rallies. You can choose to ignore that kind of crap and continue to seem intelligent or you can buy into it and lose any credibility that you might have among rational thinkers.
Buddha_Clause, have you read this site, or tried sending the link to your friends? I found it immensely helpful when a friend of my son’s encountered Zeitgeist, and “had his mind blown”. FTR, he’s a very sweet boy, and very intelligent, just young, (and was possibly high while watching the film, which is my son’s theory).
My boyfriend and I once ended up at a party with a guy who earnestly told us all about his pet 9/11 conspiracy theory, which centered around “steel doesn’t melt.”
Okay, so we were mean, but we were drunk. We started out with “how do you think they make steel?” and ended up with "that’s why they didn’t build skyscrapers until the 19th century - it took that long to dig up steel beams that were the right length. We’ve been mining steel beams for millenia, but just as a byproduct of other stuff because when you dig up one that’s six feet long and one that’s 61 and 3/16 and another one that’s only three inches, it’s hard to come up with something to build.
This is just silly. Everyone knows you can just cut the long ones to fit! 
How? Steel don’t melt! Whaddaya gotta say to that, huh? I mean, if blowing up an airplane in it isn’t enough to melt steel, do you think your office scissors can do it?
I get the impression hawthorne saw “9/11 was an elaborate, planned attack by the American Government” and “IRREFUTABLE EVIDENCE” and rather knee-jerkedly assumed the OP was himself a conspiracy theorist, when a more careful read actually shows him to dislike conspiracy theorists.
I don’t get the white elephant reference, though.
Popular Science had a good breakdown and demolition of the major conspiracy theories in their March 2005 issue, article reprinted here.
That doesn’t include the engine, as far as I can tell. That’s just the price for the airframe. Looking around elsewhere, it appears engines go for upwards of $2,500 at minimum.