We get it. You’re scared.
It terrifies you that a bunch of backward savages could steal airliners with box cutters and ram them into buildings. Hell, it scared me too at the time.
You’re absolutely terrified that at any moment some whackjob could take an ancient piece of crap rifle and shoot someone in a position of power. The idea is a little unsettling to me too.
Having a black President with a Middle-Eastern name offends your delicate racist sensibilities. OK, that one doesn’t really bug me. You’re just a bigot.
The answer isn’t to make up a boogeyman to blame for everything that goes wrong, then demand the rest of us take it seriously. The rest of us aren’t defective because we can cope with life better than you can. It also doesn’t help your case when you just parrot soundbites from other conspiracy theorists that have already been thoroughly debunked, or — even more amusingly — just dodge questions with ad hominem attacks, my personal favorite being “the government lied about X (nevermind that there’s no evidence the government did in fact lie about it), so you must be really stupid if you think they aren’t lying about Y.” Another favorite is when they start whining that I’m not being skeptical enough as they’re gleefully swallowing trivially-obvious BS that even a five year old would respond to with “WTF?!”
There’s another undercurrent to the conspiracy theorist mentality, one that says some really sad things about them. If we take their claims at face value, we’re left with the following scenarios:
Scenario One:
- Conspirators get together and plan some Terrible Thing (an assassination, terrorist attack, Hee Haw being canceled, etc).
- Terrible Thing goes off without a hitch and a suitable scapegoat is blamed, and close-minded idiots like myself look at what happened and accept that it did in fact go that way.
- Jethro, an uneducated, paranoid boob with a third-grade education, sees all the things the conspirators missed, and figures out that they had planned it from the start, and only he knows The Truth.
Scenario Two:
- Some Great Achievement is said to have happened (Apollo Moon landings, the Egyptian Pyramids, Nazca Lines, etc).
- Close-minded idiots like myself look at this Great Thing, say “wow, that’s pretty cool. Humans rock. Go humans.”
- Jethro looks at this Great Achievement and realizes that mere humans could never have done such a Great Thing on their own. From there, it logically follows that either they had outside help from a more advanced group (time travelers, aliens, time-traveling aliens, etc) or they just faked it outright.
Here’s the sad part: Jethro is clearly suffering from not just paranoid delusions and possibly schizophrenia, but also a severe inferiority complex.
- In Scenario One, this manifests as Jethro being The Only Sane Man On Earth, for only he and his like-minded friends saw the conspiracy for what it was, thereby outsmarting all of those highly-trained professionals who pulled it off. This thought almost makes up for his dead-end job and lack of respect from anyone in his life.
- In Scenario Two, it’s just Jethro subconsciously realizing he’s done nothing useful with his life, probably never will, and it bothers him that other people have, so he has to tear down their achievements to sleep at night. Of course the Egyptians had alien help — Jethro can’t figure out how to keep his trailer’s roof from leaking, so how is he supposed to accept that a bunch of people one step removed from the caves could manage one of the greatest architectural achievements of all time? Or that while Jethro can’t keep his ’82 Ford Escort running, NASA could put a man on the moon even with a mind-boggling budget and man-centuries of work? After all, if the Egyptians needed the aliens and NASA couldn’t put a man on the moon, who can blame poor Jethro for his own incompetence when you see what they couldn’t accomplish despite all their effort and resources.
- In both cases, you also have Jethro believing that unlike all the close-minded sheeple out there like myself, he knows the Truth, and is therefore so much smarter than the rest of us. That way it doesn’t matter that he’s an uneducated clod with nothing going for him — all that stuff is part of the sheeple trip, man. If the sheeple weren’t so dumb, they’d realize we’re all living in the Matrix. OPEN YOUR EYES, SHEEPLE!!!
And no, I won’t entertain arguments that start with “so, like, imagine we’re in the Matrix, man.” My response will be a simple “seek help, man,” probably delivered in a Keanu Reeves voice. Dude.
9/11 “Truth” Movement
First question: if the “Loose Change” videos are correct, and there really is this huge conspiracy by the US government, why isn’t the kid who made it dead?
Second question: If this conspiracy is real, why aren’t Troofers winding up dead in record numbers? You guys aren’t exactly quiet about your claims, and one sure way to provoke a mass-murderer is to shriek to the world that he is in fact a mass murderer.
Personally, I think that just proves that even you guys don’t believe your lies.
A lot of people swear it was a missile that hit the Pentagon. OK, fine. Show me the missile. Show me a missile in any country’s arsenal that will produce the specific damage pattern we saw at the pentagon. Here’s a hint: the only “missile” that will do that kind of damage to a building like the Pentagon is a long aluminum and titanium tube with a bunch of jet fuel in it. You know, a farking AIRLINER (or similar aircraft).
Another claim the Troofers make is that no airplane was found at the Pentagon. First off, yes there farking was. Do a gorram Google search for the Popular Mechanics rebuttal or hit the link below. Oh, right, they’re in on it too. Second, when you take aluminum, tear and smash it up, dump jet fuel and other combustibles on it, and light it on fire, you don’t tend to get a big puddle of molten aluminum. You get this screwed up powdery mess of contaminated aluminum. It looks more like gray dirt or expanding foam than it does aluminum. I worked in a foundry for a couple of years. I know all about that crap; it was part of my job to scrape it off of the pot furnaces while I was running casting presses. I’m so intimately familiar with the stuff, last time they wanted to do an MRI on me, they had to do a preliminary head X-ray to make sure I didn’t still have some inside my neck. We had a Hell of a time keeping our aluminum clean just from oxygen and other stuff in the air, and the remelts wound up with thick layers of it floating on the aluminum just from the die-lube (a wax and water solution) and oil residues on the parts being remelted. Take a bunch of demolished aluminum with paint, electrical insulation, the assorted junk that was left of the office furnishings, luggage, and people, spray it with several thousand gallons of jet fuel (a Boeing 757-200 carries 11,489 gallons fully loaded, and the crash was pretty soon after takeoff), and you end up with a blast furnace. A filthy blast furnace crammed full of all kinds of contaminants. This isn’t a good environment for getting anything recognizable back.
Short version: you aren’t going to find a lot of wreckage inside the building under these conditions. What you’re going to get are scraps and a lot of slag mixed in with the ash.
Another big claim is that the WTC was taken down via controlled demolition. Cool, that’s a positive claim. Now prove it. What, you can’t? There are zero witnesses (reliable or otherwise) that saw explosives in the WTC prior to the attack? Huh. Looks like you’ve got a problem, because the burden of proof is on you to prove that’s what happened, not on me to prove it didn’t.
Here, have some links:
Debunking the 9/11 Myths: Special Report, from Popular Mechanics
Professor Steven Dutch has three good articles on the subject: Nutty 9/11 Physics, Really Nutty 9/11 Physics, Vaporizing the World Trade Center.
National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) Federal Building and Fire Safety Investigation of the World Trade Center Disaster. These guys actually know what they’re talking about.
Politicians Behaving Badly
The vast majority of politicians are opportunistic bottom-feeders. That’s the nature of the beast. If they aren’t, they don’t stay in politics for very long or they find some other way to maintain their positions. So why are conspiracy theorists surprised when they act like opportunistic assholes?
Yes, Bush used 9/11 as an excuse to invade Iraq despite there being no real connection between Iraq and Al’Qaeda. Yes, Obama used the Deepwater Horizon incident as an excuse to push for alternative energy. Yes, FDR used Pearl Harbor as an excuse to get into the war.
Does that mean they caused 9/11, the Deepwater Horizon incident, or the attack on Pearl Harbor? Conspiracy theorists say so. Their evidence? “It was ‘too convenient’ that X happened, allowing them to do Y.” Fine. I’m all for that evidence on one condition: next time a conspiracy theorist inherits anything of significant value, we try them for the murder of whoever they inherited from, and we use the conspiracy theorists’ own evidenciary standards in that trial. After all, it was awfully convenient that their rich uncle died, thereby allowing the conspiracy theorist to inherit a pile of money and a boat. And they’ve already established the precedent that when something bad happens, it’s up to the accused to prove to the satisfaction of incompetent, ignorant, imbecilic accusers they didn’t do it (and have the accusers reject any inconvenient evidence to the contrary as being part of the conspiracy), rather than actually have trained professionals look at the evidence and reach a decision based on that.
Which conspiracy theorist wants to put his money where his mouth is first?
Birthers and the Secret Muslim Brigade
There’s a significant vocal minority out there that wants Obama out of office on the grounds that he isn’t a Real American. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, click here. They’re morons, and this has already been beaten to death by pretty much anyone who doesn’t live in a cave, so I’ll leave it there.
Then we have the idiots who believe he’s a Secret Muslim, and is setting up America to be taken over by the Muslims. The evidence basically consists of his dad being a lapsed Muslim, him going to a Muslim school as a kid (like pretty much every kid in that country did), and “OMG HIS MIDDLE NAME IS HUSSEIN!11!!” Seriously, that’s all you have? My middle and high schools were overpoweringly Catholic. Every Wednesday, half my class disappeared for several hours to do Bible study. We had prayer meetings for the team before sporting events. Yet somehow I’m not a Catholic. I’ve also known plenty of people who went to religious schools and didn’t follow their beliefs.
But that’s some pretty slim evidence. How about this then? The guy digs swineflesh. That stuff is called Musubi, and it’s delicious. If you’ve never tried it, you should. What Musubi is, basically, is Hawaiian sushi. It’s Spam rolled up in nori with some sliced scrambled eggs and rice. Last time I checked, Spam is made from pork. It’s also (see link above) something Obama eats.
Why would a Muslim enjoy this stuff?