There is such a thing as as a conspiracy theory that turns out to be true. We have even had threads on this. Here is a good one:
The Psychology of Conspiracy Theorists. Conspiracy theorists in general seem to have some type of mental condition where they can’t differentiate between different types of information or tie it together in a coherent way.
I will rank some conspiracy theories from best to worst in terms of probability. Please note that I don’t believe in any of these with the exception of #1.
TRUE - Iran-Contra and CIA involvement in shady plans in general - The CIA was heavily involved in Latin American affairs for decades. In short, they decided to secretly sell U.S. arms to Iran to help fund an insurgent group in Nicaragua, the Contras. The only real question was whether Reagan know about in or not.
Kennedy assassination - Highly doubtful. There was almost certainly not another gunman but Oswald could have had help or coercion planning it. His background and associates were very odd. Even more strange, Jack Ruby, a noted Mobster, killed Oswald in plain sight. There wasn’t any obvious reason to go to prison voluntarily unless Oswald knew to much about something.
TWA flight 800 - Highly doubtful - Boeing 747’s are not supposed to blow up. Jet fuel aka diesel fuel, kerosene, or home heating oil isn’t especially volatile. Conspiracy theorists say that the Navy accidentally launched a missile at it while it was departing New York. Federal investigators say that it was a center fuel tank explosion with no definitive source of ignition.
Here is where your sanity comes into question if you entertain these:
Moon landing - Batshit insane beyond repair - Thousands of people worked on the Apollo project. Millions saw the rocket launch and go into space (where did it go if not the moon). There are countless artifacts including moon rocks here now. Apollo 13 couldn’t even make it to the moon because of a systems failure. There wouldn’t be any need to fake that if it was all done one a stage. I could go on and on but three or four brain cells rubbed together should make this obvious even to an 18 month old child.
9/11 conspiracy theories - the ULTIMATE in batshit insane thinking combined with paranoid schizophrenia and more than a few drugs - It isn’t worth covering in detail but we can do some simple math. There were 4 planes that took off on 9/11 that did not return. Two of those appeared, at least on TV and a few eyewitnesses in Manhattan, to hit both towers of the WTC. That leaves us with 2 planes remaining. One definitively crashed in a field in Pennsylvania. That leaves us with one plane left. What is the most certain outcome for American Airlines Flight 77:
The flight never existed nor did its passenger or crew. Their supposed families and air traffic control conspired to make it seem real going so far as to hold fake funerals and simulate ATC communications. This was done to hide a missile attack from the military on its own headquarters.
American Airlines flight 77 was real but it wasn’t used to attack the Pentagon. It was taken to an unknown location where it sits to this day. The location and status of the passengers and crew are unknown. A missile was fired as soon as it was sufficiently camouflaged by the inbound airliner.
American Airlines 77 had a full fuel load and compared well to a missile in terms of explosive potential and very well to shear mass. It was used directly.
They are very much real although I worded it much more coherently than the real conspiracy theorists do. I really do think something with their information processing. They usually don’t acknowledge the plane much at all. When they do, they simple say that a plane couldn’t make a hole like that and their isn’t as much plane debris to satisfy them. Then, with a wave of their hands, the plane is forgotten about altogether and the move straight in figuring out who fired the missile and all the minutia associated with that. With have had long threads here about this (many of them actually) and the long they use is bizarre and mind-boggling.
Seriously? Are there any real demolition professionals who question the fall of the towers? On what grounds?
The laws of entropy tell us tall things come down…all of them, eventually. Big things come down harder. It required enormous effort to get them up in the first place. Engineers are fallible like any other humans. The towers were not over-engineered, they were built to take only so much. Buildings fall all the time, why is it hard to imagine that really big precarious ones woouldn’t come down when struck devastating blows? Read Charles Perrow’s Normal Accidents for some perspective on – not the likelihood, but the inevitability – of large-scale accidents in complex, tightly-coupled modern systems. And this was no accident.
Are even there any “demoiltion professionals” in existence with experience in demolishing skycrapers comparable in physical scale to the WTC?
I’m not 100% behind these people, but the whole thing gives me pause. I think a lot of the circumstances behind 9/11 seem suspicious and coincidental. I don’t understand how four planes could be hijacked and one even DRIVEN INTO THE PENTAGON without military personnel being aware of it, especially with how much of the government funding is directed into defense. To chalk it up to a “mistake” just doesn’t cut it for me. I also think it was rather coincidental that the area of the pentagon that the plane flew into just happened to be newly-constructed and free of any employees. These and others are just too many doubts for me to feel good about the story as it’s widely seamed together. It doesn’t mean I’m going to call “conspiracy” and rally the troops and go crazy, it just means I’m agnostic about the whole thing. This hardly qualifies me, or anyone else, as a nutjob.
Sorry, nitpick: Wikipedia says the name of the recovery boat was the Dei Gratia, not the Dea Gratis.
Also, IMHO, YMMV, etc. etc.: I can totally accept the theory that they were shipping industrial alcohol and thought they might blow up, and so launched the boat to escape.
But isn’t it kind of… convenient… that some sailor slipped on tying the knot just as a sudden squall blew up and drifted the boat away? I can’t help feeling that’s there’s something more to the story after the boat was launched.
Well, let’s consider the situation: They’re looking to get away from an explosive hazard, but want to remain near the ship, if it does remain intact. If the ship did blow up, though, there’s no more advantage to staying near the ship - in fact it becomes a hazard: it may be intact enough to sink as a hulk, and could then pull down the small boat. To say nothing of flaming debris that may be falling down around it.
So the knot may have been intended to be released, if needed. Or maybe they had a sailor in the bow of the small boat holding the painter. Either way, in the chaos and confusion on the small boat, it’s easy for me to believe someone screwed up and either loosed the knot, or let go the rope.
The convenient part, to my mind, has always been the idea that a squall came up just at the right time to turn a nuisance into a catastrophe.
No kidding. I guess it seems odd to me that a crew of experienced seamen could drift so far and couldn’t get their boat back to the Marie Celeste in time for the second gale–I think the mutiny thing, either intentional or unintentional in the panic of the moment, has some plausibility.
The two events together - faulty knot and sudden storm - don’t coincide very often, else we’d have many similar stories. But for such a confluence of events to happen once is certainly not impossible. So yeah, it’s “convenient,” but it could happen. Every now and then, remarkable coincidences do occur.
Yeah, most of them are. Dylan Avery and Alex Jones admit it. Most of them are out to make an easy buck, too. Theirry Meyssan has made millions off his 9/11 nuttery.
Umm, no. The only demolition professional who “agreed” with the 9/11 wackos was Danny Jowenko after he was shown a cherry-picked video of wtc7 falling without any other knowledge of the building or what happened to it. And even he says demolition of 1 & 2 was out of the question.
You’re right. 9/11 nuts are way worse, more offensive, and more insane.
If by “interesting, conglomerative”, you mean “full of lies, damn lies, fake names, forged credentials, and batshit insanity” then you’re exactly right.
Yes, those look like very professional websites. I’m not starting a cite-war, I was just supplying some reading material for anyone interested. You can start a new thread if you want to get into this, but I don’t have a lot of interest in debating anything, as I already said, I don’t particularly trust the accounts from either side.
My point is that a blanket statement that devalues the sanity of people interested in “conspiracy theories” is usually inaccurate.
You were supplying incredibly offensive demonstrable lies.
I’d be interested in seeing you try to defend that statement. Sane, balanced people can be temporarily inticed into believing conspiracy theories, but the people who stick with them in the face of overwhelming evidence and logic to the contrary (911 being the perfect example) are operating on a much lower level of intellectual honesty and/or sanity.
Well no it is not, not at all. Some people just make crazy stuff up and then a few nut jobs in the general public pick up on it. There is such thing as a true conspiracy theory but those about Area 51 and 9/11 mean that you aren’t qualified to be a Doper unless you have some new and powerful evidence about anything related.
I truly and honestly believe this is a mental defect and I have seen it in several people that I have known. They disregard obvious facts and dive straight into tiny details that have little relevance. For the moon landings, this would mean ignoring the enormous Saturn V rockets that thousands of people worked on and instead focusing on tiny details of astronaut shadows on the moon.
For 9/11, it seems that they have no trouble ignoring 1 out of 4 airliners altogether as if it didn’t exist. The other theory that deserves a nut job award is that the planes flew into the World Trade Centers did it mainly as a diversion yo allow the government detonation of the towers, It doesn’t seem to matter that the towers came down at different times, the engineering worked out perfectly, or how such a thing could even be coordinated.
Let me ask you this in all honesty. Do you think there was a missile attack on the Pentagon on 9/11? Some people say there was although we have an entire airplane tracked to the area that simply disappeared. Do you think that a missile could have taken the place of that airliner somehow?
You appear to be a whack job of global proportions. Why do you give equal credit to to things that are obviously crazy as opposed to the obvious and scientific answer.? I would love it if you could explain your (anti) logic and why you think it would have a whisper or truth especially in terms of 9/11.
Calling me a “whack job of global proportions” is overstepping the boundaries of this forum, IMHO- if you’d like to pit me, then pit me. Otherwise, please try to remain civil. I don’t think that a missile hit the pentagon nor do I think that the planes were a distraction. I never claimed to give “equal credit” to all crackpot 9/11 theories.
Like I said before, the things that bother me are the coincidences, such as the ability of the pentagon to be unaware of the plane coming directly into it and/or unable to stop it (?) AND the fact that it just happened to hit a completely vacant section of the structure so that no government officials, nor important files/computers/information, were harmed. Or that Rumsfeld happened to be unavailable the morning of the incident when, just months ago, the procedure for air defense was altered to terminate with him alone. Things like that, they seem almost too convenient. I’m not going crazy about it, but it’s unsettling to me. I’m hardly a “conspiracy theorist” but I do reserve the right to question, regardless of YOUR opinion of me.
My original post was a valid reply to the OP, who asked why, if everyone knows what happened in 9/11, are there so many conspiracy theories about it? I said that not everyone is content with the popular knowledge of “what happened” and I happen to be one of them. I didn’t come into this thread to engage in a debate about either 9/11 or my sanity.
If the conspirators wanted to avoid causing damage to anything vital at the Pentagon, wouldn’t it have been a lot easier to just attack a target other than the Pentagon?
You keep saying you don’t want to debate this, and then you keep throwing out more arguments.
First off, do you understand what the Pentagon is? It’s an office building, basically. Not a fortress, not really. As such, before 9/11 the threats for the building were basically the same threats that anyone would assume for security of any large office building. The focus was preventing unauthorized access to the building. Which would be taken care of with guards with small arms.
Do you realize that the Pentagon used to be under the flight path to and from one of the DC airports? (I think it was Reagan, but it may have been one of the others.) So, every day multiple aircraft were flying directly towards the building. Was the Pentagon staff supposed to be alarming every time one of those planes came in to land, or to take off?
And just how was the Pentagon supposed to deal with an large aircraft coming directly towards it? First off, can you imagine the shit storm, pre-9/11, that would have happened if the Pentagon had asked for permission to keep live SAMs around it? Remember how busy a transit hub the Washington DC area is. Even if the Pentagon had had AAW systems in place, when should they have tried to use them? By being on flight paths for legitimate air travel, how do you differentiate between an attack, and a Heavy that’s coming in a little low? FTM most AAW munitions work not by turning the aircraft into a hail of fragments, but by doing just enough damage to make sure the aircraft is uncontrollable. So, if they had fired a SAM at the aircraft, and hit (not guaranteed at such short range) they’d still have a plane-shaped rock falling in pretty much the same trajectory.
I’m sorry, but your continued defense of these positions do not seem reasonable. Instead, they seem to be deliberate, willful ignorance.
