Quote:
Originally Posted by Bladesman87
I've never looked into flat-earthery enough to know their woo, but what's the point?
With the 9/11 nutters I can at least follow their reasoning as to why the government wants to increase control, start a few wars, etc. I have no idea what the benefit is of ****ing up everybody's maths by lying about the shape of the Earth.
"Truthers" don't share all the same ideas. I don't think the government did 9/11, but I also don't think they have made the case that AQ did- like they haven't made it at all. Within that lack of a case there is a lot of evidence which would seem to be significant which the government's conspiracy theory (accusing AQ) simply ignores. Although I don't know who carried out the attack, my guess is that neither the U.S. government proper or AQ did it.
I consider you to be an intelligent poster. Maybe you can be the first poster to make intelligent arguments in support of the government's AQ conspiracy theory in the 9/11 thread. In all those pages, I submit to you, one can count on one hand the number of decent arguments which challenge, even a little bit, the prima facie case that the buildings were controlled down.
I believe that the earth is round. I believed this when I was young because authorities told me it was thus and so. I figured they knew and that it was a matter which could be demonstrated. When I took an intro astronomy course in college we went over several ways to demonstrate that the earth is, in fact, round. Learning that was actually significant in my view. While the average person on the street believes, correctly, that the earth is round, I would guess that less than 3 in 100 could "prove" or give solid evidence of it. Same for atomic or germ theory.
But the shape of the earth, atomic theory, and germ theory all fall into a category of phenomena which are known to be experimentally verifiable. So we can believe in these ideas confidently without being able to prove them ourselves because we know that many other people can access the means to prove (or disprove) these theories, and that we could ourselves if we were so inclined.
This principle does not generally hold when it comes to crimes and their investigations. And when it comes to terrorism or other possibly paradigm shifting events it is even less true that the means to establish the truth of the claim are widely available. Sometimes the evidence is presented; sometimes it isn't. We all saw plenty of convincing evidence that OJ killed his ex-wife. That evidence wasn't made widely available for re-verification but it was presented and we can be reasonably sure it wasn't all made up. The government's case against AQ for the 9/11 attacks however, has offered no such presentations of evidence. The government's "case" is nothing but an endless string of assertions which is made to appear convincing at a casual glance when actually it is barren of substance literally everywhere.
Of course, the 9/11 episode is a mutational hot spot for all sorts of crazy, baseless theories. And people like NoQuarter, who seems to believe the earth is flat, will jump all over 9/11. Don't take the views of people like No Quarter or the citation level of the 9/11 report as definitive indicators of the truth of the government's case. I invite you to see what happens when you actually try to verify either the government's case or figure out why their case ignores so many hugely anomalous observations.