Good to see you back. With a slightly moderated tone, you'll remain a valuable participant and a necessary opponent in these debates.
Thanks for the kind words, but I never actually left. As I read the ongoing debates, I'm forced to conclude that they serve to reinforce Mark's decision to withdraw from the fray. There is no substance to them. It's not the fault of the rationalists, who dutifully trot out the time-tested refutations of fantasist nonsense. No, the problem is with the other side. The people who peddle the inside-job snake oil are simply going through the motions. Their hearts are no longer in it.
Try to view the situation through the eyes of someone who has just stumbled upon these controversies and hasn't yet invested any emotional energy. The first thing you'll notice is that the fantasists are saying things that they couldn't possibly believe. I have been careful to label these people conspiracy
liars for precisely that reason: they profess to believe things that nobody could believe. Ace Baker is scheduled, against the advice of some people whose opinions I respect, to appear on 'Hardfire' to defend his no-plane lunacy, but the distinction here is that he is not lying. He suffers from a massive delusion, but no power on earth is capable of persuading him that the plane observed by thousands of witnesses was real.
Contrast Ace's mad but sincere position with the stance of someone pretending that a wildly implausible conspiracy used a motley assortment of mostly Saudi hijackers to catalyze a war with Iraq. You just
know that as the fantasist rants, there's a little voice in his head whispering, "But, seriously, why
wouldn't they have made a few of the hijackers Iraqis?"
It is not possible to contend that the most insanely bloated conspiracy ever imagined by humans "forgot" to connect the extravaganza that launched its plan with the ultimate goal of the plan. It's beyond silly: it's unthinkable.
The same criticism applies to the disingenuous cries for a "new" investigation made by people whose fantasies have been systematically destroyed by evidence and logic. What exactly are they asking for? If such types as the vacuous LostChild find themselves compelled to ignore the
FACT that an unprecedentedly comprehensive investigation, combining the efforts of several agencies, determined the identity of the hijackers and failed to find any traces of explosives, what could change their minds? The mountain of smoking rubble is gone. The pieces of aircraft debris are gone.
Where would they want to begin the "new" investigation? If the FBI fabricated
everything (!), how can disturbed, low-IQ adolescents expect to reveal the treachery and solve the crime?
There is a reason why fantasists never tell us who should conduct this investigation. If you involve real physicists, chemists, metallurgists, seismologists, demolition experts, fire safety specialists, pilots, avionics techs, air traffic controllers, forensic examiners, military personnel, police and fire departments, well, everybody gets the idea that you'll replicate the results of the original investigation. If you allow theologians, Marxist academics, and talk radio hosts to do the investigating, your lynch mob will hear what it wants to hear, but the rational community will continue to laugh at you.
It's 2008: Bush is leaving office in less than a year. The 9/11 fantasy movement is a senile, dying nonagenarian asking the doctor to make him young again. What outcome is likely here?
