psikey, I don’t understand why this trivial detail is important, but I can understand why it’s useful to you - you’re demanding information of no importance and using its lack of availability (assuming it actually is unavailable - the building plans of the towers are public record, aren’t they?) as evidence that something is being withheld, which is evidence of a conspiracy, which is evidence of… shenanigans, I guess. I use the term to describe ill-defined but nefarious activity.
Thing is, we have no confidence that even if this information was widely disseminated tomorrow that it would make the slightest difference to you. Information on film exposure times has been available for as long as photography has existed, but that doesn’t stop the “no stars!” moon-hoax CTers.
Taking an analysis of the patterns of conspiracy belief as “guilt by association” speaks volumes, especially when part of my analysis was over people who have only one idee fixe. You have no association with people who believe large numbers of conspiracy fantasies.
You do, however, seem to have a severe problem taking a step back and talking about conspiracy belief as a concept, rather than dragging the discussion always back to your own single idee fixe.
(You also seem to have some odd idea that no physical analysis of the WTC collapse was ever performed, which is flat-out wrong. A great number of studies have been done. If only a full-scale reproduction of the towers – including the furnishings, workstations, the water in the toilets, and the human beings at their desks? – would satisfy you, you might best be prepared for disappointment.)
Before the 9/11 Committee, Popular Mechanics, the NIST report, the NOVA report, the NatGeo report, and the massive outpouring of peer-rviewed literature on the subject, this would be believable. But now? After you’ve opted to ignore all of this evidence and provide an unanswerable canard? After you’ve neglected, for 7 fucking pages, to tell us why the exact modeling matters given the existing evidence? This is why we consider you a case study in conspiracy theories. Once more, for good measure, let’s go over this particular problem.
Your issue with the “official story” is a lack of stringent evidence. Now, ignoring that, at this point, this is about as reasonable as complaining about the “lack of evidence” that Oswald could have shot JFK, let’s talk for a moment about the scientific method here. Often, we cannot get perfectly stringent evidence for the things going on, because doing so would be prohibitively expensive or just downright impossible. What happens in such a case is that the evidence we do have is examined, and the competing hypotheses are compared for adherence to evidence. The “official” hypothesis is usually the one that fits the evidence we have the best, and has no evidence speaking against it. In order to unseat it with claims of “we don’t have enough evidence”, you need to show either that the evidence is completely inadequate (which you have not, you’ve simply made demands for a very hard-to-find piece of evidence and offered no reason as to why it matters), or you need to provide a competing hypothesis and explain why it makes more sense given the evidence. You have offered no other hypothesis beyond the official hypothesis. That’s… unimpressive, to say the least.
Ah, the call of the conspiracy loon: “Just suppose every single authority in engineering/astrophysics/chemistry/etc is either wrong or in on it”. No, that’s not a fair supposition. I called you on this earlier in the thread. Of course, you haven’t listened to a thing anyone has said, so I guess I’m just talking to hear myself talk. Which I’m fine with.
HELLOO-HELLOO-HELLOO! ECHOO-ECHOO-ECHOO-ECHOO!
Yes. And yet somehow, you consider this a more likely scenario than “I’m not quite as good at physics as I think I am”? Really? Dunning-Krüger at work. You’re like the perfect case study of a “reasonable” conspiracy theorist. If you’re trying to prevent 9/11 “truthers” as anything but conspiracy theorists you’re doing a piss-poor job.
You talk about all of these sources of information as though they are so great. But the NIST said there were more that 1200 perimeter wall panels from the 9th floor to the top of each tower. How many different weights of panel were there? Did they all weigh the same amount? If there were different weights, then how many of each weight? If you watch videos of the construction of the towers you see lots of these panels being lifted into place.
But there is only one specification for the weight. It is from an engineering magazine in 1970 saying how many panels there were and that the heaviest was 22 tons. Gregory Urich did a linear interpolation but had to use 19 tons at the bottom. The distribution was not linear.
So if all of these sources are so great and definitive why don’t they discuss in a little detail what the NIST admits supported 47% of the building’s weight. The inadequacy of all of these experts would be hysterically funny if it was not so pathetic. And then you people can ignore the incompetence.
It is so similar to ignoring the Demand Side Depreciation of durable consumer goods in every country for the last 50 years. 200,000,000 cars in the US in 1995. How much did that depreciation amount to. Lots more than the cost of the towers. And repeated every year.
The culture depends on “experts” talking bullsh!t and being believed by most people.
This is a really good example of one of the primary fallacies of CT thinking. I’m just glad the young Dopers are here to witness this.
Take a complex event, find something, even something that couldn’t possibly make a difference, that is either unexplained, unknown, or just unknown to the CT person, and blow its importance up so that its being unknown is presented as evidence of the conspiracy. In this case, it’s taken to an extreme, but the same tendency can be found in just about all CTs.
Yeah, this is a waste of my time. Psik, you’re ignoring how irrelevant this weight is in the big picture and you have not ONCE explained why it would matter. Make a thread about it if you want, but the fact remains that you are absolutely, categorically, by any rational definition a conspiracy theorist. What do you think happened?
Budget Player Cadet and psikeyhacker, I posted twice that everyone was to drop the WTC arguments, giving everyone the opportunity to open a new thread while explicitly stating that ignoring my instructions would result in a Warning.
You are each hereby issued a Warning to refrain from violating Moderator instructions.
With regards to the OP, a Conspiracy Theorist, of which we have at least one shining example here, is one who harps on meaningless data; insists that it was overlooked by knowledgeable authorities; won’t provide a reason why this data is so important to him; is abysmally ignorant about the subjects to which he so vociferously argues about; refuses to learn or even listen when taught or pointed towards good educational sources, and is LOUD and PROUD about it all.
I’ve noticed a couple of types of conspiracy theories/theorists
The first type of theorists claims to know about a conspiracy through special knowledge or training - for example, “I’ve heard from a friend in the CIA that …” or “Only because I happen to be an expert in <obscure field1> and in <obscure field 2>, was I able to detect this subtle flaw in the cover story”. This kind of conspiracy theory/theorist can be entertaining and might raise some interesting questions - though usually plausibility fails when the scope of the supposed operation is noticed, or when one asks why (say) a CIA agent in charge of such a serious undertaking is chatting with his buddies about it.
The second type is more problematic - in this case, the flaws in the cover story are asserted to be totally obvious, immediately raising questions like “Why did the nearly all powerful organization that set up the conspiracy make up a cover story that is obviously bogus?,” “Why do opponents of the organization not point out these flaws?” (for example, if the moon landing is asserted to be obviously false, why didn’t the Russians or the Chinese point out these obvious flaws).
Part of the problem is the topic of this thread. It is not really about what happened on 9/11. It is about what people think of the people who do not conform to the approved thinking about 9/11.
The distribution of mass relates to the Conservation of Momentum in affecting the collapse time. That is about physics not conspiracies. Grade school physics at that. It is just that the science curriculum in this country was laid out in 1893. I am not kidding. :smack:
psikeyhackr, I’m going to back Tom up on this one and give you another warning. You have been told several times, and received a warning, to discontinue the discussion about the WTC. In fact, just FOUR posts upthread you were told again to stop it.
Continued refusal to follow a moderator’s instructions may result in the loss of your posting privileges.
So, serious question. Where’s the dividing line? By that, I mean, how much of the obsessive nature of CTers is some sort of mental/psychological dysfunction and how much is an overenthusiastic pursuit of a particular topic (like the example of stamp collectors above)?
I guess there’s a bit of both, and I understand this is a small (but vocal) minority of people, but it’d be interesting to know on which side CTers fall of this admittedly fuzzy line.
Wow.
Eric Berger would weep to know his blog was being used to spread misinformation and delusions about science, particularly delusions of potentially mentally disturbed individuals.
My personal favorite flavor of CT is the Birther crowd. There is a particular branch of them that harps incessantly on the ‘fact’ that the .pdf of the President’s birth certificate has layers and anomalies and blah, blah, blah. But none of that matters because the issuing agency has repeated confirmed the BC as certified, valid and complete. They have latched onto something that sounds so damning but is so insignificant.
It seems to me that the CTers are distinct from collectors (or fanboys) due to their belief that their obsessions have real-world significance. A stamp collector may recognize that it is very difficult to find a left-handed 3-cent magenta Fillmore first day issue, but will not follow that thought to believe that unseen forces are conspiring to keep that particular stamp from them.
It seems like there’s a fair number of moon hoaxers, for example, who have no real problems blending into society, except for their one pet theory that NASA never set men on the moon.
And while they might not cross over the line into full on Trutherism, there are a fair number of US citizens (yes, I know, we’re not the brightest bulbs) who believe the government might have had a hand in the 9/11 attacks but don’t get into mouth frothing debates over it.
Basically, are we suffering from a bit of confirmation bias here? Judging everybody who believes a piece of a conspiracy theory by the most vocal proponents of that CT, i.e. the small segment of any belief structure that might be mentally disturbed anyway?
Whenever you find corruption and subsequently criminals you will also find conspiracies. The world “Conspiracy” appear to have been engineered to emotionally represent a ridiculous explanation for something that is simply what the media has uncovered and stated.
If you’re trying to prevent 9/11 “truthers” as anything but conspiracy theorists you’re doing a piss-poor job.