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1stPalladin wrote:I must congratulate everyone on how civilized thery are being to the original poster. I got back from deployment in November 2001 and went to see my family in Missouri. One of my sisters asked where I was when the Towers were attacked. She then told me her theory that it "was the Jews." I walked away from the discussion and haven't talked to her since.

America is firmly pro-Israel. If the Mossad wanted to stage a terrorist attack to shift world opinion in their favor they would aim for an undecided European country. Of course the Mossad isn't in the business of commiting mass murder against civilian targets.

Or does she mean some sort of secret planet wide conspiracy of Jews doing sinister things for some unknowable purpose that only makes sense in the context of H P Lovecraft?

I think my idiot, bigotted sister meant it in the Elders of Zion mindset - that any evil afoot in the world is due to the Messiah killers.

darksoul wrote:

JBG wrote:

Simon_Jester wrote:OK, granted. It's a bad thing compared to them giving up on nuclear weapon design in disgust.

On the other hand, it's not necessarily a bad thing compared to what they'd come up with on their own, assuming they even have any nuclear physicists of their own.

I think that Stuart meant that it was "unfortunate" for Khan's customers. That is the way that I read it but perhaps I am more used to the classic British habit of wry understatement or belittling by subtle sarcasm.

I agree.

I dont agree with the conspiracy theorists view. That people is useful. Otherwise, if there is a conspiracy somewhere, who would spot it? ...

Since this hijacking post was in part a response to me, I feel obliged to pitch in with the following.

Darksoul, ignoring your absurd and foolish lunacy about the 9/11 attacks, I do not see how there is any "conspiracy theory" involved in my argument.

As far as I'm concerned, "the weapon is unreliable" is always good news about any weapon used by my enemy. That is not a conspiracy theory on my part; you don't need to believe in conspiracies to prefer that the weapon pointed at you be unreliable.

DeRogue wrote:

darksoul wrote:I believe the 9/11 is an inside job, because it could be.

Using this logic, I believe you are a sentient Galapagos Iguana, because you could be.

I take exception to this proposition, because I am not yet convinced that he is sentient. So far, he has not passed the Turing Test in my eyes.

Dalton wrote:

Ryan Thunder wrote:His argument is so asinine that it's self-evidently wrong to anybody with more than two braincells.

Your title is well-earned. Do you know what an Ad Hominem attack is?

Dalton, I'm not sure I understand. Did Ryan actually deliver an ad hominem against darksoul? Or did he just say darksoul's argument was dumb? I mean, calling an argument dumb may be a pointless +1 post, but I wouldn't think it an ad hominem, because it does not attack the speaker- only the speaker's words.

Simon, read his first post in this thread. That's the ad hominem.

1stPalladin wrote:I must congratulate everyone on how civilized thery are being to the original poster. I got back from deployment in November 2001 and went to see my family in Missouri. One of my sisters asked where I was when the Towers were attacked. She then told me her theory that it "was the Jews." I walked away from the discussion and haven't talked to her since.

That's messed up. I can't imagine how you must have felt; coming home to something like that.
I don't think you're wrong for having not spoken to her since, though. I probably would take a similar course of action if I were in that position too.

Dalton wrote:Simon, read his first post in this thread. That's the ad hominem.

Would my post count as ad hominem too? I (tried to) provide some sort of actual argument as well, but I'm not sure. Specific logical fallacy terms and definitions are pretty new to me.

MGlBlaze wrote:Would my post count as ad hominem too? I (tried to) provide some sort of actual argument as well, but I'm not sure. Specific logical fallacy terms and definitions are pretty new to me.

This might help: http://bbs.stardestroyer.net/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=6634

It's at the bottom of the Announcements forum.

Dalton wrote:

Ryan Thunder wrote:His argument is so asinine that it's self-evidently wrong to anybody with more than two braincells.

Your title is well-earned. Do you know what an Ad Hominem attack is?

Yes. If its not sufficiently obvious that he's full of shit, I'm more than happy to apologize.

Ryan Thunder wrote:

Dalton wrote:

Ryan Thunder wrote:His argument is so asinine that it's self-evidently wrong to anybody with more than two braincells.

Your title is well-earned. Do you know what an Ad Hominem attack is?

Yes. If its not sufficiently obvious that he's full of shit, I'm more than happy to apologize.

You should have no problem picking apart his arguments. Instead, you chose to call him an imbecile and state that it was "obvious" and "self-evident" why his argument was wrong instead of, you know, proving it.

MGlBlaze wrote:

Dalton wrote:Simon, read his first post in this thread. That's the ad hominem.

Would my post count as ad hominem too? I (tried to) provide some sort of actual argument as well, but I'm not sure. Specific logical fallacy terms and definitions are pretty new to me.

Nah, you're cool. You actually attempted to argue and called the OP out for logical fallacies.

I wonder if darksoul will "mysteriously" forget to reply now

darksoul wrote: you are missing the point here. I'm not obligated to be fair, I don't hold public office nor my opinion has any weight more than that of that of a single individual, so I can think whatever i want and it doesn't affect the outcome.

Actually, no, you are obligated to review your opinions and stances, because believing uninformed, retarded crap leads to things like the vaccine scare, homeopathy and GM foods hysteria which in turn can mean children dying of mumps and starving people being denied grain shipments because they're genetically modified.

Retarded mobs pressuring even more retarded politicians to do retarded shit are consisted of individual idiots who can't be arsed to do even the most cursory research about a topic they fervently and througoughly advocate.

Not to mention various snake oil salesmen and skilled manipulators rely on people like you to make a living and peddle bullshit in order to suck the money away from you, and your children (who you will, without a doubt, instill with the same rigorous, skeptical mindset as you yourself hold) will also be convicted to forever being prey to such unscrupulous individuals. These frausters and quacks will then use your money to fund ad campaigns and websites convincing even more people who don't know better to support them and abandon conventional medicine in favor of untested quackery, perpetuating a cycle which should've been eradicated centuries ago!

Your stance displays intellectual laziness which is the root cause of most of the world's problems. It's people who think intellect and informed opinions don't matter any more than gut instinct and "common sense", education is overrated and all studies are lies made to advance one agenda or another, who are ready to inflict or tacitly support others inflicting misery and suffering, because they're too fucking obtuse to learn to know better.

Dalton wrote:Simon, read his first post in this thread. That's the ad hominem.

I see. It's certainly a better fit than the post I mistakenly thought you were responding to was. I will say no more.

cosmicalstorm wrote:I wonder if darksoul will "mysteriously" forget to reply now

That is a given. I really did want to see what "evidence" darksoul would use to back his claim. I'm pretty sure whatever it is has been debunked countless times already, not that would matter to a twoofer.

It might also be a given that a good conspiracy is impossible to uncover, or prove. Sometimes, there is nothing but a gut feeling. I can agree to the existance of the feeling, because I get that too, sometimes. It won't stand in any sort of debate though.

Compromise!

CSJM wrote:It might also be a given that a good conspiracy is impossible to uncover, or prove. Sometimes, there is nothing but a gut feeling. I can agree to the existance of the feeling, because I get that too, sometimes. It won't stand in any sort of debate though.

The problem with this is that it leaves us with no way to spot real conspiracies.

See, if we could find any significant cracks in the general conclusions about 9/11, ones that actually made sense, that implied that a conspiracy might somehow be less probable than what all the many, many reports on the attack say happened... that would be one thing.

But instead all we ever get is "doesn't it seem fishy to you?" In cases where no, it does not seem fishy to me. At which point we have to compare the probability that these people are right with the probability that they are crazy, given human beings' known penchant for imagining invisible secret forces acting on their lives that aren't there.

Why is the 9/11 conspiracy any more plausible, or due any more credence, than the existence of Zeus? Or, to pick a less blatantly supernatural one, the existence of Atlantis? Or the kingdom of Prester John?

darksoul's argument is a massive appeal to probability fallacy. It's a particularly nasty fallacy because —given the appropriate assumptions— it's actually true. The reason why it's a fallacy is because more often than not the assumptions that assure its truth are not satisfied, but very few people even know what those necessary assumptions are.

There's also the point that so-called "grand conspiracies" are inoculated against reason: evidence against the conspiracy is evidence for the conspiracy — any evidence that Al Quaeda were solely responsible for the attacks is planted; absence of a paper trail is evidence how deep the conspiracy goes. That sort of thing. Highly annoying, and entirely predictible.

Conspiracy nuts want to feel special, but the ironic thing is that they are anything but. They belong to a bland, uninteresting group of people who hold beliefs only because they make them feel good or special, right there with the superstitious and religious.

CSJM wrote:It might also be a given that a good conspiracy is impossible to uncover, or prove. Sometimes, there is nothing but a gut feeling. I can agree to the existance of the feeling, because I get that too, sometimes. It won't stand in any sort of debate though.

A good conspiracy is always small and uncredibly non-grand. A grand, sweeping conspiracy will eventually have to, you know, do shit to implement its plans, at which point it inevitably becomes a matter of time before it's uncovered. The Manhattan Project was infiltrated by Soviet intelligence because some scientists working at Los Alamos felt remorse at what they were doing (and they didn't actually participate in murder!). How long do you think all the demolitions people, structural engineers, firefighters, soldiers etc. would stay silent?

If one nosy reporter can uncover a plot with the potential to start a nuclear war by the CIA, it tells you a lot about the ability of the US Government to keep a secret. The Glomar Explorer case is actually an excellent counterargument against 9/11 being a plot: it also required huge amounts of people to attempt to build a ship entirely in secret, just as it would to secretly rig the towers for demolition. An one reporter snooping around managed to bring the thing into the light of day.

The idea that a "bureaucratic mishap" was a sensible way to pull off a conspiracy is completely laughable, of course. What, the conspiracy planned the 2001 attacks as justification for Afghanistan and Iraq all the way back when the tower was being designed?

If they have that sort of magical power, they could've just summoned a demon to topple the towers and be done with it.

What, they don't do scheduled maintenance on the towers? I'm sure this kind of thing has to be at least yearly inspected to make sure it's still there as the tower's structure bends with the winds. If it isn't, then your engineers are way more self-confident than our russian ones.

So...the "bureaucratic mishap" really means "stripping the fireproofing off several levels of steel supports"? Remember, they had no way to ensure a precise strike by the airplanes, unless you want to add another layer to the conspiracy (fake airplanes), so they'd have to strip the fireproofing not from one precisely selected steel beam, but from many, across several levels.

So it's basically the same thing as controlled demolition, except with less explosives. You'd still need the thoroughly loyal construction crews and engineers and need to fake paperwork and risk some snot-nosed kid or city inspector digging the papers out and going WTF and running to the press.

Less contrived ideas, more bureaucracy. Routine inspection happens, one man responsible for it sends out order - fireproofing on floors X through Y deteriorated, tear it down and replace. Clueless workers arrive, tear down the fireproofing. A bureaucratical mishap ensures misshipment of fireproofing materials, resulting in a lack, resulting in inadequate fireproofing that's overlooked because of "as if a fire could really harm this thing, let's get out of here". Done several months before a planned attack ensures that enough flammables are present on underprotected levels of the buildings to weaken supports enough to cause a massive collapse.

End count of people directly responsible - one man with the superfluous order to replace fireproofing, a few guys handling material shipments, plus whoever examined the replaced fireproofing - possibly the same man as before. Plus whatever higher-ups that planned it.

That still stretches the limits of believability, I know, but it's ever so slightly within them, just enough to not consider it as utterly implausible as rigging both towers and WTC 7 to explode.

There's no way one man could file a fictional work order, sign off on the post-work inspection, sabotage delivery of fireproofing materials and then make all the paperwork magically disappear and stay gone for ten years. What, you think the NIST didn't check works orders when making their gigantic reports and simulations? Why couldn't conspiracy theorists reach any member of the crews which stripped the fireproofing?

And, again, it couldn't be done in a single run, since there was no way to make sure the fire would burn hot enough at the precise spots where you tore the fireproofing down, unless you also post that the planes were faked and replaced with cruise missiles.

If you wanted to minimize the number of people involved, bombing the towers is the way to go, since literally everything can be prepared through intermediaries who just need some intel kicked their way.

CSJM wrote:It might also be a given that a good conspiracy is impossible to uncover, or prove. Sometimes, there is nothing but a gut feeling. I can agree to the existance of the feeling, because I get that too, sometimes. It won't stand in any sort of debate though.

Unfortunately, gut feelings are pretty useless in this case. The entire 9/11 Truther Movement is just a loose association of random idiots who have the same "gut feeling". My "gut feeling" about the whole thing is that the US government (or any other human organization) has nowhere near the level of competence or foresight required to pull off such a conspiracy.

Really, 9/11 conspiracy theorists strike me as people who have never really tried to actually accomplish anything significantly difficult or complicated, and as such, they have a very distorted understanding of what's actually probable. Anyone who has been involved in coordinating, constructing, or implementing a large project will immediately appreciate how easy it is to fuck things up, and how generally incompetent so many people are. Real-life projects are hampered by budget constraints, funding problems, political shenanigans, bad planning, unforeseen circumstances, bad luck, and massive doses of human error and incompetence. And yet, conspiracy theorists somehow see omnipotent, super-competent shadowy agents behind every corner.

CSJM wrote:Less contrived ideas, more bureaucracy. Routine inspection happens, one man responsible for it sends out order - fireproofing on floors X through Y deteriorated, tear it down and replace. Clueless workers arrive, tear down the fireproofing. A bureaucratical mishap ensures misshipment of fireproofing materials, resulting in a lack, resulting in inadequate fireproofing that's overlooked because of "as if a fire could really harm this thing, let's get out of here". Done several months before a planned attack ensures that enough flammables are present on underprotected levels of the buildings to weaken supports enough to cause a massive collapse.

End count of people directly responsible - one man with the superfluous order to replace fireproofing, a few guys handling material shipments, plus whoever examined the replaced fireproofing - possibly the same man as before. Plus whatever higher-ups that planned it.

That still stretches the limits of believability, I know, but it's ever so slightly within them, just enough to not consider it as utterly implausible as rigging both towers and WTC 7 to explode.

And what about these "clueless workers"? How come none of them have come forward talking about how it's odd that just a few months ago they were hired to do work on the very floors that were hit by the planes?

All conspiracy theories implicitly require that everyone involved in the Conspiracy remains quiet for the rest of their lives. The size of the conspiracy doesn't have to have a limit as far as they are concerned. The conspiracy can literally be as big as the most world-changing event in human history, inevitably requiring the contributions of at least many thousands of people to succeed. 100% of whom will stay quiet about it for the rest of their lives. Absolutely quiet on a an issue that directly led to any kind of horrific outcome for many, many more people.

This line of thinking literally concludes that society is basically made up of nothing but sociopaths. That the only people in the world with any moral or social obligations our are intrepid, basement dwelling internet researchers.

I mean hey, why admit *you* are the one with problems when you can just accuse everyone ELSE of having problems?