Well, I’ve never met Ted Olson. Maybe he’s made up, too. Have you met any of the families of the victims? How do you know they are real? It’s just pixels on a screen. Could be all fiction.
I’ve never seen Frasier. Maybe it doesn’t exist? I just have your word it exists. Come to think of it, I’ve never met any of you all, either. Hmmm…
You know, I never saw the WTC in person, either. Maybe it never existed? Can you prove to me it did?
Hey, I’m Just Asking Questions!
(no, I’m not really. it’s a joke, son. But the mindset of CTers continually amazes me.)
Also made into a pretty good movie starring Kris Kristoffersen and Cheryl Ladd (co-incidentally, written by John Varley)
(What was it in the news from a while ago that when people think they remember the news item they are actually remembering details from the fictionalized Hollywood account?)
It’s easier and less stressful not to go back to him with ‘facts’ or ‘cites’, he’ll just dispute them and it’ll go around in circles. Just drop it and consider it a topic that you don’t bring up around him anymore.
In the future, I’ve found, when you notice that kind of thing happening, just say, nicely, “I hadn’t heard that” and start working on changing the subject. It acknowledges them, it keeps them from getting defensive and turning the conversation into an argument or bickering match and you don’t lose your mind.
What kind of conspiracy does it take to make up fictitious employees, friends and loved ones that either never existed or disappeared on their own because they were somehow in on the plot? The answer is no possible one because that is batshit insane just like the people throwing out these imbecilic ideas to get attention. There is no way that any non-clinically insane person can actually believe what they are claiming.
There is one of two things going on:
Conspiracy theorists really are clinically insane and need to be institutionalized for their own sake and for the safety of others.
They are just world-class trolls and assholes that do not really believe what they are saying but just like to use very primitive and unsophisticated debate techniques to make the point that it is difficult to really prove anything under philosophical rules but in the worst possible way. In that case, I like the idea of just breaking their nose and claiming that no crime occurred because they can’t prove that anything they witnessed ever occurred at all according to their own rules.
My sister had a friend and co-worker who died in the twin towers on 9/11.
Personally l would cease all contact (and actually have done so, with one person) with a wilfully ignorant conspiracy theorist. I know; that is an oxymoron. But someone ignorant enough to buy into these wackadoodle theories is never going to be rational enough to be convinced by logic and truth.
My uncle was about 15 minutes away from a meeting at the pentagon.
CT baffles me. What is the point of denying that the victims existed? Because if "no one " was really hurt, then the rest of the nonsense is ok to fantasize about?
Well, he is actually fairly intelligent in other respects (he is a qualified mechanical engineer) and is also married to a family member, so I cannot really regard him as a “creep”.
My response to him whenever this subject arises is the Occam’s Razor approach … I don’t debate the facts, I just say that if it was in fact a government conspiracy so many people would have had to be involved that someone would have blown the whistle by now.
You could also just tell him that you are concerned about his mental state because there is a very real issue there. The initial claim was that he didn’t believe any passengers were on the flights because there have been no obituaries or memorials for them. That is flat-out and obviously false to anyone that hasn’t been in a persistent vegetative state for the past 14 years. There have been tons of them and we just provided some here. Of course, we used exotic tools like Google that can take seconds to find and not everyone has those kinds of resources at their disposal but even a fuzzy and fading memory should still have a few snippets of the same type of information tucked away somewhere next to the Kennedy assassination trivia.
I live in the Boston area where the WTC planes took off. Does he really not think there are literally thousands of people or more that were friends with, worked with or were related to the combined groups of people on the planes. Almost everyone in this area is two degrees of separation away or less from one or more of them. That is why it is so offensive. He is dismissing a painful experience that someone still lives with by saying it never happened and the person may have never existed. Don’t you think that would piss people off?
Next time something bad happens to him, why don’t you do the same thing. When his dog dies, get everyone in the family to claim that he never had one. If he loses his job, insist that you are convinced he never worked there in the first place. That is the exact same thing he is doing to other people and it isn’t funny even as an intellectual prank.
Like I said, the only other option besides a true mental disorder is willfully being provocative to make some type of other point for some unknown motive. I can’t say which alternative is better. The outlook for both is dire unless the whole thing was a poorly planned joke and he has a true change of heart.
Don’t think your family member by marriage is unique either unfortunately. We get them here as posters way too often and I don’t think there has ever been a successful conversion to rationality. My academic background is in behavioral neuroscience and I am somewhat fascinated (but more irritated) by the disorder. It doesn’t match most traditional diagnoses except for some aspects of paranoid schizophrenia but it doesn’t usually fit that either.
Male engineers, applied physicists and other mathy types seem most prone to it for some reason just based on my informal experience with them. As far as I can tell, most of them really do believe it. Maybe psychiatry and neuroscience will advance enough so that we can finally understand what is going wrong in the conspiracy theorist mind. I haven’t heard a really good explanation so far. It is like the Far Side cartoon where the patient is laying on the couch and the doctor has written “Just plain nuts!” on his notepad.
I’ve seen guesses that CT belief seems to be a kind of means of control over their life - in a crazy world, they Know Something Important and few others know The Truth.
I’ve also noticed, based on professional experience, that a large proportion of tax protesters (the type that make bizarre constitutional arguments) are also male engineers. I’ve long been fascinated by this connection.