Hard to believe an article at The Huffington Post is worthy of mentioning as a good piece but here it is. It’s by Michael Shermer about the nuts in the 9/11 twoofer movement and how he has been hounded by them after a article appeared in the magazine he edits, The Skeptic, which delved into that crazy movement:
What’s going on here? As Bill Maher discovered one day during the taping of his HBO series “Real Time,” their goal is just to be heard–in any venue at any time under any circumstances. In spring of 2005, for example, I gave a lecture at the Los Angeles Public Library, after which I was buttonholed by a documentary filmmaker with Michael Mooreish ambitions of exposing the “truth” about the 9/11 conspiracy, and he wanted to know if he could interview me. I responded, “you mean the conspiracy by Osama bin Laden and his nineteen Al-Qaeda operatives to fly planes into buildings?”
“That’s what they want you to believe,” he said.
“Who is ‘they’,” I queried.
“The government,” he whispered in hushed tones, as if “they” might actually be listening in at that very moment.
“Yeah, well, ‘the government’ is a little vague for me,” I suggested. “Who in the government wants me to believe that Al-Qaeda did it?”“The Bush administration,” was the by now predictable answer.
“But didn’t Osama and some members of Al-Qaeda not only say they did it,” I reminded him, “they gloated about what a glorious triumph it was over America and western capitalism, materialism, and secularism?”
“Oh, you’re talking about that video of Osama,” he exclaimed knowingly. “That was faked by the C.I.A. and leaked to the American press to mislead us. There has been a disinformation campaign going on ever since 9/11.”
“How do you know?” I inquired.
“Because of all the unexplained anomalies surrounding 9/11,” he answered.
“Such as?”
“Such as the fact that steel melts at a temperature of 2,777 degrees Fahrenheit, but jet fuel burns at only 1,517 degrees Fahrenheit. No melted steel, no collapsed towers.”
At this point I ended the conversation and declined to be interviewed, knowing precisely where the dialogue was going next–if I cannot explain every single minutia about the events of that fateful 11th day in September, 2001, that lack of knowledge, in his mind at least, equates to direct proof that 9/11 was orchestrated by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and the CIA in order to implement their plan for global domination and a New World Order, to be financed by G.O.D. (Gold, Oil, Drugs) and launched by a Pearl Harbor-like attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, thereby providing the justification for war. The evidence is there in the details, he explained, handing me faux dollar bill (“9-11″ replacing the “1″ and Bush supplanting Washington) choc-a-block full of web sites. Where I have heard all this before?
In the early 1990s I launched a full-scale investigation of the Holocaust deniers, initially as the cover story for Skeptic magazine and subsequently expanded into a book length treatment, Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened and Why Do They Say it? The deniers employ this tactic of anomalies-as-proof to great effect. David Irving, for example, claims that there are no holes in the roof of the gas chamber at Krema 2 at Auschwitz-Birkenau. So what? So plenty, he says. No holes in the roof of the gas chamber at Krema 2 means that the eyewitness account of SS guards climbing up on the roof and pouring Zyklon-B gas pellets through the holes and into the gas chamber below where the prisoners were herded into, means that the eyewitness account is wrong, which means that no one was gassed in Krema 2, which means that no one was gassed at Auschwitz-Birkenau, which means that no one was gassed at any prison camp, which means that no Jews anywhere were systematically exterminated by the Nazis. In short, “no holes, no Holocaust,” says David Irving, a slogan emblazoned on t-shits of his supporters at his London trial in which he sued a historian for calling him a Holocaust denier.
No holes, no Holocaust. No melted steel, no Al-Qaeda attack. The parallels are equal, and equally flawed.
I wonder what makes these people tick?
You can also watch this recent YouTube video where some twoofers start in on David Frum and his answer, take stronger medication.
Love it.
Fire can’t melt steel! Don’t you guys know anything!
The dwarves that live in the mountain halls pound it into the proper shapes for us to use!
My answer to all of that has been “the steel doesn’t have to melt”. And I explain it like this:
How much pressure do you think the floors above the impact floors put on those columns?
Ever been to a blacksmith shop?
He bends steel but he doesn’t melt it. But he does soften it.
Ever see what he uses to soften that steel?
Now, once that steel is soft, how much pressure from the floors above do you think it can withstand?
Steel melts [into liquid] at 2777, but it melts [weakens and wilts] at about 700 depending on the type. Doubt it? Ok, go fill your charcoal grill up with as many crumpled up pieces of 8 1/2×11 office paper (a single ream of 500 pages should do nicely). Now soak it with aviation fuel. Next, put a brick or a rock on the edge and close the lid (using the brick to hold the lid open a bit. Now put a half dozen 80lb bags of cement on top hold a pack of matches in your hand and before you do anything else, ask yourself, “Will my charcoal grill be the same after this?” Safely light it and see what happens. I guarantee (if you survive the inferno), the grill will melt and collapse using only jet fuel and office paper.
“I wonder what makes these people tick?”
FEAR
It’s more comforting to believe that this is all a big government/corporate conspiracy that can be changed by ranting on the web, protesting, and getting masses of people to pull a certain lever in November. It’s easier to believe that than it is to believe that there is a global death cult out there, and it’s the result of failed foreign policies and faux peace of the 1990′s; a period when it was easy to believe a few tomahawk missiles or some air strikes, and the bad guys were kept at bay. It takes more than that. It takes more than pulling a lever. It takes more than most are willing or ready to believe, and so they give in to their fear and find comfort in the lesser/lazier tale of two evils.
The whole truther thing would be laughable if it didn’t have consequences. But by refusing to accept that the montsers who are currently strapping bombs to retarded women and detonating them in an Iraqi market would dare to attempt a bolder plan in this country, they undermine the basic resolve that we as a people need to confront this enemy and prevail in the shortest possible time with the lowest cost in human life and treasure.
Stalin called such fools “useful idiots.” I think they are worse than that. And if Bush really was Hitler he would have locked them all up long ago.
I find it amazing that if Michael Moore had released his movie today, he NEVER would have gotten the Academy Award, and instead would have been labeled a truther. There is NO difference at all-except the timing.
Well, sort of. What makes these people tick is their desire to control (lead?) others through the use of fear. They first have to make you afraid and they use things such as the government being involved in 9/11 to instill the fear, then they provide you with a path … a group … a group of others with a similar fear. And that is where they really get started. They aren’t so interested in “raising awareness” as they are convincing people that this is so and then directing them to a group that has a political or social agenda. They use the fear to channel the energy. it’s the “hook” they use to guide their sheep.
crap … that’s what I get for commenting on blogs with crappy software lately!
Cross, if your registered on FA then just click the edit button next to the comment you want to edit and use the blockquote instead. Not sure where you can get blockquotes from using [quote] but blockquote is the common html.
Yeah, I generally use the blockquote tag but I had been hanging out in some phpBB forums and they use that silly syntax and it got to be habit this morning. Thanks for letting me know about the edit thing, I hadn’t noticed it before.
If steel doesn’t melt, I want to know just what kinda voodoo those guys in shipyards with cutting torches and welding machines are using.
I loved Penn and Teller’s video on the troofers that was put up months ago. Ugg, these troofer morons will drive one insane with their antics and irrationality.
That was a good one Chris.
I’d still like to hear from some Michael Moore fan as to what the difference is between fans of F911 and Truthers.
“I’d still like to hear from some Michael Moore fan as to what the difference is between fans of F911 and Truthers.”
Truthers don’t eat as many Twinkies.
Perhaps because twinkies can’t melt steel
It is good to see there is at least one thing that both the right and far left can agree on.
Actually, the portion of the left wing that believes this tripe makes them irrelevant and therefore they have eliminated themselves from any serious debate—–kinda like the UFO syndrome.
What makes them tick is far less interesting than what makes them go “cuckoo” on such a regular schedule…..
Nice for the Left to participate in cleaning up this ridiculousness now that Bush is less than a year away from leaving the Presidency.
Of course, I can see where they’d want to trivialize these guys while Bush is in office so that they don’t attach themselves to a potential Democrat President and attack them for not exposing Bush’s conspiracy if a Democrat manages to win the office.
These same voices were silent during the last two elections while tripe like this ran rampant on campuses and other indoctrination centers. So no, I won’t give them compliments for doing what they should have done 4 years ago.
jpm100,
Aside from the reason you cited for the left, finally, telling the troofers they are morons, the other reason they will go after them is risk. Which is also why leftist attacked Romney’s Mormonism and will not stand up against Islamic violence.
As a leftist stated on the Hugh Hewitt show, Mormons will not physically attack anyone for bashing them, Islamists will riot in the streets and murder at the drop of a hat (or cartoon, speech, zoning commission, arrest, and so on). The same is true for 99% of the Troofer movement. They rant and rave about some big conspiracy, but they will not kill anyone who disagrees with them, so the leftists are safe in attacking them, just as they are safe in attacking conservatives.