I don’t doubt you. There has to be some out there like the monkeys on typewriters reproducing Shakespeare but I have never seen it personally. I don’t think anyone on this board has ever gotten a conspiracy theorist to budge even an inch. They tend to double or triple down with more insanity before they concede anything. Do you have any good cites from a reformed theorist? They may be the ones most able to help those remaining.
Shagnasty’s post is my experience. In Banquet Bear’s, just how many are “plenty” when it comes to reformed CTs anyway?
Out of curiosity, what questions are these? Almost every 9/11 CT question I can think of has been thoroughly debunked.
There aren’t any questions that have not been debunked. Only people “just askin’ questions” insist there still are.
Let us know how you make out with the passenger information. Since you have information that you feel answers the question satisfactorily, your relative should drop the claim like a hot potato, and thank you for helping him get his facts straight.
Apparently some of the metadata for the obituary photo the AP/CNN used for Mark Bingham (one of the guys on Flight 93) had a creation date of 8/30/2001, which is “proof” that the obits were being written up before 9/11, because part of the whole conspiracy would be creating fake heroes and legends to help prod the country to war (or something).
Googling around a bit turned up that the metadata does show a creation date of 8/30/2001, but also with a time of exactly midnight. An obituary photo of another victim (from the Pentagon) had a metadata of 2/5/2000, also at exactly midnight. So the real explanation is likely that some sort of bug in the metadata set the dates wrong, rather than it being evidence that the photo was created/uploaded just a few days before 9/11.
What questions, Bones?
I budged an inch thanks to this board. I was fully convinced that Oswald could not have shot, reloaded, reacquired the target, shot, reloaded, reacquired the target, and shot, hitting the target with two of three shots, all while using the scope. However, during a discussion here, I realized/remembered that his scope’s mounts were off to the side, leaving his iron sights available, and concluded that he only used the scope for the first shot, which missed. With the iron sights even I could make the second and third shots because Kennedy was right there in front of him.
The Magic Bullet? We have to agree to disagree, but did you know that people think you’re weird if you eat your lunch at your desk while going through the Zapruder film frame by frame? 
…CT’s are not required to register, so there is not a GQ answer to your question. But there are at least ten over on the Randi Forums that I know of. And some were very hardcore believers in the 9/11 Conspiracy. It takes time, repetition of the material, and they need to come to the realization themselves. It can’t be forced on them. Typically they argue tooth and nail for as long as they can, take a break from the boards, and then return very very apologetic.
Good for you and I mean that honestly. A change of heart to rationality is very rare in my experience. You know what else could have given you personally influential evidence? Just go to Dealey Plaza in Dallas yourself and see the scene of the assassination. It becomes immediately obvious to anyone that goes there why the multiple shooter theories are wrong. The area is vastly smaller than most people imagine.
Dallas a huge city today but Dealey plaza looked just like most main streets in small town USA back then (and mostly still does). The Texas school book depository is a rather small building. The distances involved are so small that any semi-skilled amateur could have pulled it off. The conspiracy theories make the “landmarks” more significant than they really are as well. The Grassy knoll? That sounds like a large place that other conspirators could hide out sniper style without being detected. In reality, it is just a small patch of slightly raised grass on the other side of the street. The small area where the assassination occurred is overwhelming in its underwhelmingness in scale. There is literally no where else for other shooters to be without being noticed instantly by the parade crowd. You can’t hide any other rifles and shoot from the ground and no one ever claimed that any of the shots were fired by anything other than rifles.
My point to all of that is that conspiracy theorists like to spin these wild scenarios in their head without doing even the most basic fact checking that would squash their overactive imaginations.
Oh, I’ve been there and it’s tiny-ish. However, I’ve shot with a scope and my fixation was on its difficulty; I needed to be jerked away from that. CTers are human and we all sometimes suffer from target fixation to the exclusion of all other input, and even some CTers can respond favorably to a dopeslap of reality. Sadly, most don’t and just tighten their blinders further.
That is a really positive story in all seriousness. I didn’t think we had any good examples but you are one.
Exactly. Do they honesty think that everybody goes through the trouble to keep the date/time feature on their dedicated camera accurate especially back then? They weren’t connected to any time-syncing network. You could take a black and white picture that the meta-data says was taken in 1865 with people talking on cell phones but that doesn’t prove anything about the Lincoln assassination.
I can make or manipulate one of those right now because it is just an insecure tag that wast implemented for user convenience for sorting photos. To use an old example, most people never could program their VCRs to keep a consistently accurate time and date and that was a running joke during the 1980’s. The 90’s and early 2000’s weren’t much better. Those devices would take any semi-reasonable date and time you told them and it was almost always done manually through bad user interfaces that most people didn’t bother with because it wasn’t that important. Having a date/time stamp on any given photo that doesn’t match reality is no indication of any type of conspiracy. It just means that the average consumer is really bad at managing newer technology.
I’d never heard of the suggestion that engineers are over represented in CT’s before. But now that I think about it, the only CT’er I know is an engineer.
Interestingly, I find engineers over-represented as “armchair” lawyers also. They are smart enough to get 90% of the way to the right answer to a legal problem, plus they have a lot of confidence in their own intellect, plus they tend to sneer at lawyers who they regard as not having sufficient practical nous to be as capable as they are.
I suspect something similar happens with CT’s. Some engineers are smart enough to be able to pick up apparent anomalies in photographs, videos etc, are proud of their ability to do so, too confident to listen to people telling them they are wrong, and are sneering of others who supposedly don’t have the practical nous the engineer has used to figure out “the real story”.
I should say that there are plenty of very smart non-CT engineers. Some of my best friends are engineers, honest!
Engineers also have a deserved reputation for being creationists.
I think there is a difference between those that saw “loose change” and need some pointing in the right direction and those that REALLY want to believe. Some people really are just asking questions - they are dumb questions - as anyone with half a brain could work it out on their own, but they haven’t yet realized the total amount of BS on the web.
I’ve had some CT 9/11 “friends” as well - I think it’s a little important to “mock” them. I remember one who was British thought it was weird that there was no video of the plane that hit the pentagon (I think there now may be a still shot, but I think back then - well at the time we believed there wasn’t - right or wrong). So yes - that seems “odd” you’d think their’d be video, but what does that prove? There was video of the one in New York - so, what? They/we used a remote control plane in New York and then apparently ran out of credit and had to go with straight controlled demolition for the pentagon?
All i said was something like:
Me: “Ok - so you’re saying a plane might not be responsible for the damage to the pentagon?”
Him: “I just think it’s weird there is no video - I don’t know”
Me: “Then where is the plane that took off?”
Him: “Hmmm, I haven’t figured that one out yet”
I think he realized it was stupid then, and yes I am aware of the “explanation” or answer to my question, but I don’t think my friend was stupid enough to believe that - he saw something that seemed odd “no video” and his brain just jumped to considering “must be conspiracy”
I, unlike others, didn’t know anyone personally, but did know who Ted Olson was, and not only him, the thousands of others mentioned, their friends that mourned them on Facebook, companies affected, and what not. What is the total number of people that would need to be involved?
I still have hope for your friend - come back and tell us it worked.
Cause I want to believe.
I can’t say anything about the proportion of engineers as CTs, but I know precious few engineers, and all if not most of the CTs I’ve known have been nonengineers. So they come from all walks of life.
I won’t see my “relative by marriage” for a few days, but I will let you know if I have any success.
The “questions” I alluded to earlier were ones which he had previously brought up in similar encounters; the one that sticks in my mind was his assertion that many of the passers by said they heard no sound of an incoming jet prior to the towers being struck. Whether he was correct or not I have no idea , and tbh I don’t really care … AFAIAC, the sheer volume of people who would have to have been involved in such an atrocity and who would have had to remain silent is proof positive that the CTers are wildly mistaken.
You do know that the news networks were transmitting live after the first plane hit, hundred of thousands if not millions of people saw the second plane hit on or right after it occurred - I don’t think any of the the stations had their cameras pointed at that exact location at the time, but the phone call I got from my dad was something like “so I’m watching this thinking maybe it might be an accident - and the second plane hits”
Come to think of it they didn’t have the cameras live - but there is plenty of video, and plenty of New Yorkers that saw it, and like a plane size hole in the building.
You can’t credibly argue a plane didn’t attack the twin towers - for that matter - you can’t argue any of this about all four, but even a child could tell a plane hit that building.