HELP! My friend turned out to be a "Truther"

[Crossroads Inc.]

first things first, I do not think he is too far gone...
He is a fairly bright lad, and does not seem into any other Conspiracies.
He knows we landed on the moon and that there are no flying saucers in Area 51.
However he had both an Aunt and Nephew killed in 9/11 and has an emotional tie to the incident.

The problem seems ot be he is easily taken in by "Flashy" Productions, the hip music showing sound clips of dozens of people going "It looked just liek a regular demotion!" and" I hear an explosion, and then boom! boom! boom! just like squibs going off!" and of course" I was on Engine=9! and I swear it was just like a building implosion!"

Some of the things he has quoted thus far:
"Well the 9/11 report said the planes at the pentagon and PA were "Vaporized" and everyone knows that is just impossible!" or..
"The buildings were made to withstand being hit by a plane! but they still fell down!" or..
"Tell me how some thugs living in a cave could organize something so huge!!!"

Again, I do not think he is too far gone... I told him the story of the "Glomar Explorer" Which is THEE Story to tell to disprove conspiracies.
He seemed to actually consider it and said "It does seem very hard to think anyone could keep it all a secret" but came back quickly with "Still there is so much 'evidence' out there...

The problem is he tends to hang out in circles where this stuff is talked about.
How can I best Inoculate him with a dose of logical reasoning?

[Stark]

If he's appealling to incredulity and has a personal attachment to the event, isn't it most likely he's just displacing his fear and grief and needs counselling more than logical discussion?

[Darth Wong]

You have to realize that when someone believes in stupid shit, he is almost certainly not alone: he has peers, friends, and/or relatives who agree with him and create credibility in his mind for these ideas.

In other words, you're not just arguing with him: you are arguing with the respect he has for these other people in his life who take these ideas very seriously. The ideas he's promoting cannot be stupid or dishonest, because that would imply that these people (who he likes and respects) may also be stupid or dishonest.

Whatever may come out of someone's mouth, the true reasoning behind a lot of peoples' beliefs is "I know people who I respect and who believe this, so it can't possibly be fraudulent or stupid". And how do you argue with that?

[Crossroads Inc.]

You have to realize that when someone believes in stupid shit, he is almost certainly not alone: he has peers, friends, and/or relatives who agree with him and create credibility in his mind for these ideas.

In other words, you're not just arguing with him: you are arguing with the respect he has for these other people in his life who take these ideas very seriously. The ideas he's promoting cannot be stupid or dishonest, because that would imply that these people (who he likes and respects) may also be stupid or dishonest.

Whatever may come out of someone's mouth, the true reasoning behind a lot of peoples' beliefs is "I know people who I respect and who believe this, so it can't possibly be fraudulent or stupid". And how do you argue with that?

I think that is the real answer.. His family is sort of... 'Messed up'
He is a fairly Liberal and easy going gay guy, but he comes from a somewhat "Redneck" German family with ties to neo nazies and is often full of drama.
That he also cites the loss of his Aunt and Nephew leads to real emotional issues. I really don't know how much he believes these things, more then he feels he "Has" to believe them.

[Zaune]

"Tell me how some thugs living in a cave could organize something so huge!!!"

That's probably the best angle of attack, because the alternative is believing that George W. Bush masterminded the whole thing.

[Grumman]

"Tell me how some thugs living in a cave could organize something so huge!!!"

"It wasn't huge. It was nineteen guys buying plane tickets and then seizing control of the vehicle long enough to point it at something. And even then, a quarter of them failed."

[Formless]

"Tell me how some thugs living in a cave could organize something so huge!!!"

That's probably the best angle of attack, because the alternative is believing that George W. Bush masterminded the whole thing.

Don't be an idiot. Whatever stereotypes of Truthers you have, you need to drop them before you can actually make headway (which is probably a lost cause in any case). Probably no Truther out there believes that Bush Jr. singlehandedly masterminded 9/11/01. He may be an idiot, but even he knew how to delegate tasks to people more competent than him. He did manage to go to war, after all, on the premise of a lie no less.

Speaking from experience, and as someone whose father falls between camp numbers two and four, Truthers fall into several camps regarding who they think is the mastermind:

1. One camp believes it was the Bush administration as a whole, and can use the counterargument I provided above if they are inclined. The Achilles Heel of this camp is "what did the Bush administration get out of blowing up a couple office buildings?" and "if they did it to get into Iraq, why did they need to come up with a half-assed lie about Saddam stashing WMD's in the back of his fridge or some horseshit like that?" Of course, don't expect them to answer honestly or intelligently; at best they just change camps, usually turning into camp #2.
2. More general than the first, there is the "overarching US government conspiracy" camp. This subgroup can easily retort that the planning of the attack would realistically (for a certain value of realism) have happened years before Bush even took office-- that is, it wasn't Bush's plan to begin with he just rolled with it. This camp can get annoying to argue with fast, trust me. On the one hand they can seem to have a better understanding of how big an undertaking such a carefully planned attack is. On the other, the exact motive for the US govt. is as vague and incomprehensible as they need it to be to frustrate you.
3. A third camp, probably the majority of Truthers, don't claim to know who actually did it, just that someone did it, and we aren't being told the truth about how they did it. They cling to a vacuous mindset of pseudo-religious paranoia/faith, and won't be persuaded by arguments about Bush's incompetence either. Or, really, by logic at all for exactly the same reasons that most religious people don't respond to logic. For most of them its all gut intuition and social reinforcement. Depending on how weakly they feel the need to cling to the conspiracy story, just asking whodunnit can introduce doubt into their minds. But that's if you are lucky. The rest are basically as Mike describes.
4. Yet another camp believes it was a Zionist Conspiracy headed by Israel, possibly but not necessarily with US cooperation. This camp is quite popular in the middle east (where Israel isn't too popular, ever noticed?), and obviously doesn't give two fucks how stupid Bush was. He isn't a factor at all in their theory, unless they feel like it 'cause fuck the US. Hell, I've seen it claimed that Bush's stupidity is just a smokescreen, a red herring to keep people from realizing he had nothing to do with it in the first place. How exactly Israel could manage a conventional demolition of any US building without US cooperation is beyond me. Anti-semitism may or may not play a role in these people's thinking. See also the myth that 1000(~) Jews were warned not to show up to work that day.
5. And lastly you have the generic crazies who just bolt the event onto a timeline of other events (Roswell, Kennedy, Apollo, etc.) and link it all back to Masons acting on the behalf of aliens. Or some crazy shit like that. Don't even bother talking to these people unless you are sure they are being properly medicated. Note that meth and/or cocaine doesn't count.

All of these camps are frustrating to deal with in their own rights, and save for #3, most are probably too attached to their ideas to give them up so easily. And #3 is just too intellectually lazy to argue with in general. That's why I stopped even trying.

So yeah. I'm betting Crossroad's friend is camp #3, due to the fact that he's mostly just spouting off memes and ignorance. There is nothing coherent to his ideas, no central theme or organization behind the attacks that he has indicated. Just a viral video playlist running in his head. Throw on top of that the personal attachment to real victims of the attack, and its probably something he wants to believe for psychological reasons.

[Channel72]

More general than the first, there is the "overarching US government conspiracy" camp. This subgroup can easily retort that the planning of the attack would realistically (for a certain value of realism) have happened years before Bush even took office-- that is, it wasn't Bush's plan to begin with he just rolled with it. This camp can get annoying to argue with fast, trust me. On the one hand they can seem to have a better understanding of how big an undertaking such a carefully planned attack is. On the other, the exact motive for the US govt. is as vague and incomprehensible as they need it to be to frustrate you.

The motive for #2, or any of the above really, is usually something like "invade Iraq, take control of oil supply, Haliburton, etc."

Now that it's been 10 years since the Iraq war, and the US is still struggling with energy problems while Obama is dancing on Bin Laden's grave, maybe we can try and give Truthers a little perspective. What exactly was the master plan? Blow up the World Trade Center, invade Iraq, install a crappy, dysfunctional government which is slightly US friendly, add $10 trillion to the national debt, and then leave? The only people who really benefited directly from the war were various private companies and contractors, which really only works as a motivation for #1, which means that Bush and co. must have been planning the attack when Bush was governor of Texas. It's also hilarious how in Truther mythology, the hyper-competent Bush administration flawlessly executed this grand conspiracy, but then when it came to the actual Iraq war, it turned into a ten year quagmire highlighted by no WMDs and various public scandals (Valerie Plame, Harriet Miers, etc.)

[Kamakazie Sith]

"Well the 9/11 report said the planes at the pentagon and PA were "Vaporized" and everyone knows that is just impossible!" or..

First of all the report makes no such claim. A search using the terms "Plane Debris WTC" should lead you to a number of pictures of debris from the WTC attacks. You can find the NIST report Here

"The buildings were made to withstand being hit by a plane! but they still fell down!" or..

They did survive the impact. Long enough for many people to escape. What they didn't survive was the subsequent fires. Leslie Robertson, lead structural engineer of WTC, said "To the best of our knowledge, little was known about the effects of a fire from such an aircraft, and no designs were prepared for that circumstance. Indeed, at that time, no fireproofing systems were available to control the effects of such fires." and went on to say "robustness of the towers was exemplary" --- "the fact that the structures stood long enough for tens of thousands to escape is a tribute to the many talented men and women who spent endless hours toiling over the design and construction of the project."

Source

"Tell me how some thugs living in a cave could organize something so huge!!!"

That's not even worth responding to.

Some other links that I found useful. They are old and some of their references are out of date. Source

[PeZook]

You could start by correcting his misconception about the attacks being organized by a "bunch of thugs living in caves", which is essentially a racist and disdainful image of "the terrorist" which was never true, a sort of example of the fascist concept of the strong-weak enemy promoted by a lot of people.

Of course, the problem is that if you really want your guy to drop this nonsense, which I actually think is quite possible, you have to just be patient and avoid condescension. If he feels uncomfortable talking to you about it, he'll just run to his support circle who will reaffirm his beliefs, and never bring the topic up again in your company.

Plus there's the emotional issues, grief etc.

[Surlethe]

You could start by correcting his misconception about the attacks being organized by a "bunch of thugs living in caves", which is essentially a racist and disdainful image of "the terrorist" which was never true, a sort of example of the fascist concept of the strong-weak enemy promoted by a lot of people.

Yeah - for example, Bin Laden was a college-educated engineer. How would that jive with the "thugs in caves" image?

Of course, the problem is that if you really want your guy to drop this nonsense, which I actually think is quite possible, you have to just be patient and avoid condescension. If he feels uncomfortable talking to you about it, he'll just run to his support circle who will reaffirm his beliefs, and never bring the topic up again in your company.

Having deconverted creationists before, this is exactly what you have to do, except x100, since creationism is much more central to evangelical religious identity than trutherism is to most Truthers' political identities.

[Isolder74]

You could start by correcting his misconception about the attacks being organized by a "bunch of thugs living in caves", which is essentially a racist and disdainful image of "the terrorist" which was never true, a sort of example of the fascist concept of the strong-weak enemy promoted by a lot of people.

Of course, the problem is that if you really want your guy to drop this nonsense, which I actually think is quite possible, you have to just be patient and avoid condescension. If he feels uncomfortable talking to you about it, he'll just run to his support circle who will reaffirm his beliefs, and never bring the topic up again in your company.

Plus there's the emotional issues, grief etc.

To make it more morose of an argument it doesn't even reflect the truth of the situation with the leaders of Al'Quead in the first place. They were not living in caves in the mansions provided to them by the sympathetic Taliban Government. Bin Ladin WASN'T living in caves and neither was the rest of them either. They were highly educated thugs living in the lap of luxury!

All that argument does in imply that Arabs are uneducated morons that only know how to travel by riding on camels!

[PeZook]

All that argument does in imply that Arabs are uneducated morons that only know how to travel by riding on camels!

Well, the purpose is to dishonestly advance the argument that terrorizers were unable to pull it off, by appealing to a completely untrue image of complete and utter savages. It's a neat rhethorical trick, because the basic premise is untrue, but treated as if it is obvious and self-evident.

There are some powerful people for who it is politically expedient to promote that image and present it to the public, possibly because fighting uncultured, primitive and savage barbarians in order to Protect Civilization is a pretty nice, scary image. Also makes people feel all righteous about the things their armies are doing to the Other People.

Either way, unless Crossroad's guy is some frothing at the mouth fanatic, it should be easy to explain this to him clearly and concisely (and remember, condescencion is probably doing you more harm than good if your goal is to make him drop this). Also, the attack was a small, compartmentalized operation with limited goals. It did not require as many resources as doing a controlled demolition and making it LOOK like a terrorist plane attack...practically by definition.

There were plenty of real false-flag operations, and they ALWAYS take more resources than just doing it for real would. Take the Gleiwitz Radio provocation - it would've been trivial for Poles to actually send actual soldiers to attack the station, because they already had armed soldiers ready to follow orders.

It was far more difficult to arrange a provocation, fabricate all the evidence that would be left naturally at the site (like the corpse of an arrestee, dressed as a saboteur and given gunshot wounds) and then keep it all secret long enough for the truth not to matter when it leaks out.

IE. the Germas had to do the exact same thing as the Poles would have to do (send people to seize the station) but add extra steps to make it look like the Poles did it. So really, the fact people with scarce resources managed to do something that an organization with lots of resources would be unable to fake is no big deal.

[ryacko]

I think the easiest way to explain the collapse of the twin towers and WTC 7 is simple: buildings aren't designed to be on fire for over an hour. No need to explain other details, because if a person is refusing to acknowledge common sense, they won't acknowledge anything else.


Also, how old is your friend?

[madd0ct0r]

um, ryacko, that's not actually true. Buildings are designed to stay upright, whilst on fire, for a certain period of time ( defined by the evacuation needs).
That's why you'll often see sprayed concrete covering steel beams. The concrete is there to give X minutes fire resistance, not to carry any load.

The towers were built in the 80s, when our knowledge of fire engineering was a lot less, but for the towers themselves, the best fire engineer in the world wouldn't have been able to predict the result of massive structual damage, followed by an intense fire fueled by gallons and gallons of jet fuel

The jet fuel is the important difference to a usual office fire.

[ryacko]

Somehow I figured op's friend to be a teenager, and it would be best not to assault him with anything more complex then any rational high schooler has to acknowledge: Fire not good for building. Fire not good at all.

Contradicting his friend about whether or not the buildings were meant to handle a plane crash would lead to a lengthy side discussion. It is best to determine whether or not his friend actually believes in the conspiracy theory as a religion, or simply as confusion.

There was a time that I believe in aliens. But alas I was young.

[LaCroix]

um, ryacko, that's not actually true. Buildings are designed to stay upright, whilst on fire, for a certain period of time ( defined by the evacuation needs).
That's why you'll often see sprayed concrete covering steel beams. The concrete is there to give X minutes fire resistance, not to carry any load.

The towers were built in the 80s, when our knowledge of fire engineering was a lot less, but for the towers themselves, the best fire engineer in the world wouldn't have been able to predict the result of massive structual damage, followed by an intense fire fueled by gallons and gallons of jet fuel

The jet fuel is the important difference to a usual office fire.

Actually, the jet fuel is only significant due to the mass of propellant.

Steel is loosing almost all it's strength once it is heated past 500-600°C , which is easily in range for any fire. A simple camp fire is enough to make a huge I-beam a pool noodle. If you substituted the volume of jet fuel with the same volume of wood burning, it would have made not much difference in the end result, only the time span were a bit shorter.

But rest assured that the Truthers would still bitch and moan "controlled demolition", even if the building had held up for twice as long...

[PeZook]

The thing about jet fuel was that it flows, so it ignited a lot of fires all over the tower - almost exactly the same thing happened during that B-26 crash, AND the impact knocked off fireproofing in many spots, becaus the aircraft were really, really big.

Lots of people underestimate what sort of energy is involved in an impact like this, because you know, planes are common and familiarity breeds contempt and it doesn't feel very energetic when flying them etc - but it's not at all unlike hitting the building with a missile.

Also in reality, "temperature of the fire" is a meaningless concept: what counts is the rate at which they heat the environment vs. the rate at which heat can be removed. So theoretically you could heat up steel to 1200 degrees using candles, if only you could do it inside a perfectly insulating box that let no heat escape. So it doesn't matter that office supplies only burn at a few hundred degrees, if the heat can't escape quickly enough, they are adding energy into inferno.

Lots of people also said they heard bang, "almost like explosions" etc. which is what truthers use as proof of controlled demolition, but this is also something people don't instinctively get: a huge structure failing WILL sound like an explosion, because it's releasing its potential energy. Which, in the case of the WTC, is enormous: the first tower might've as well had an aircraft carrier dropped on it when the damaged part began to drop.

[LaCroix]

The thing about jet fuel was that it flows, so it ignited a lot of fires all over the tower - almost exactly the same thing happened during that B-26 crash, AND the impact knocked off fireproofing in many spots, becaus the aircraft were really, really big.

Lots of people underestimate what sort of energy is involved in an impact like this, because you know, planes are common and familiarity breeds contempt and it doesn't feel very energetic when flying them etc - but it's not at all unlike hitting the building with a missile.

Also in reality, "temperature of the fire" is a meaningless concept: what counts is the rate at which they heat the environment vs. the rate at which heat can be removed. So theoretically you could heat up steel to 1200 degrees using candles, if only you could do it inside a perfectly insulating box that let no heat escape. So it doesn't matter that office supplies only burn at a few hundred degrees, if the heat can't escape quickly enough, they are adding energy into inferno.

Lots of people also said they heard bang, "almost like explosions" etc. which is what truthers use as proof of controlled demolition, but this is also something people don't instinctively get: a huge structure failing WILL sound like an explosion, because it's releasing its potential energy. Which, in the case of the WTC, is enormous: the first tower might've as well had an aircraft carrier dropped on it when the damaged part began to drop.

True, but that's what I wanted to imply - you only needed enough fire, not some ultra-mega super hot mega-thermite flame that melts through steel. Add enough heat, and steel will fail. Once one section fails, the rest will follow quickly.

The bangs could also be explained by the expanding/deforming beams fracturing the concrete they were embedded in. Such would result in huge slabs "exploding" into the inside of the building, which would sound and look almost exactly like an explosive going off.

Of course, this would happen shortly before the structure fails completely.

[PeZook]

Even just the mostly undamaged beams snapping under pressure (by the hundreds) could give out a very similar sound or series of sounds. After all, explosives don't sound like explosives because of some magical quality they possess...

[Darth Wong]

Steel is loosing almost all it's strength once it is heated past 500-600°C , which is easily in range for any fire.

Don't overstate your case, because that statement above is not correct. Steel becomes weaker at 900K, but it does not lose "almost all its strength". The problem is that it's under enormous load, and the strength decrease, while not as catastrophic as you describe, can still be enough to push the steel past the safety margin used in the engineering of the structure.

Part of the problem with "9/11 Truthers" is that they lack sufficient appreciation for what a spectacular feat of engineering it is to keep one of these monster buildings standing in the first place. That's one of the reasons that laypeople are so much more incredulous than actual licensed engineers at the idea that the building could fall down from an unexpected type of damage.

[TheFeniX]

Part of the problem with "9/11 Truthers" is that they lack sufficient appreciation for what a spectacular feat of engineering it is to keep one of these monster buildings standing in the first place. That's one of the reasons that laypeople are so much more incredulous than actual licensed engineers at the idea that the building could fall down from an unexpected type of damage.

It's usually not even that. I was arguing with one "interesting" person who claimed controlled demolition because "the building was just standing, then it collapsed" ignoring a report I posted where an engineer talked about how once one floor gave way, the lower floors now had to deal with the entire top part of the building falling onto the bottom half, which started a cascade effect. I made the comment "makes sense since buildings, by design, are mostly empty space" to which he replied "Buildings are mostly empty? How naive are you?"

[Darth Wong]

Part of the problem with "9/11 Truthers" is that they lack sufficient appreciation for what a spectacular feat of engineering it is to keep one of these monster buildings standing in the first place. That's one of the reasons that laypeople are so much more incredulous than actual licensed engineers at the idea that the building could fall down from an unexpected type of damage.

It's usually not even that. I was arguing with one "interesting" person who claimed controlled demolition because "the building was just standing, then it collapsed" ignoring a report I posted where an engineer talked about how once one floor gave way, the lower floors now had to deal with the entire top part of the building falling onto the bottom half, which started a cascade effect. I made the comment "makes sense since buildings, by design, are mostly empty space" to which he replied "Buildings are mostly empty? How naive are you?"

Well in that case, he's simply a garden-variety imbecile with false confidence.

[Azazal]

Little late to the party here, however there is a ton of useful links and data here - http://forums.randi.org/local_links.php?catid=18 for debunking truthers. Pretty much every argument truthers have raised has been thoroughly torn apart and documented as to why is was a horrible, wrong, or just plain bat shit insane idea.

If you have some free time, plenty of truther claims and their debunking can be read in the 9/11 sub forum http://forums.randi.org/forumdisplay.php?f=64

[Channel72]

Aside from conspiracy nuts, many "Truthers" tend to operate under the assumption that as long as there's a discernable motive (however vague or half-baked), they're justified in believing that the US government orchestrated the attacks. The idea that the Bush administration orchestrated the attacks as an excuse to invade Iraq and take control of the world's oil supply while restructuring the Middle East as part of the "New American Century" and all that, is just too compelling to ignore for these "Truthers".

Also, the "Truther" movement probably gets a lot of mileage out of the fact that the Bush administration probably did conspire illicitly to invade Iraq. Rumsfeld and other neocons were calling for regime change in Iraq long before 9/11. Except rather than orchestrating 9/11, the Bush administration simply took advantage of it. And rather than taking control of Iraq's oil supply and restructuring the Mideast as an American friendly region, they just plunged the US into debt and managed to piss off the Mideast even more, while deposing many of the US-friendly secular dictators and replacing them with democratically elected Muslim fanatics. In fact, if the neocons had some grand scheme to fake some kind of major terrorist attack so he could take over Iraq and restructure the Mideast, the only part of that plan they pulled off competently was blowing up downtown Manhattan. Everything after that was a complete and utter debacle, and the only thing that actually benefited the Bush administration in any way was increased revenues for various US private construction/energy/mercenary companies.