Brooker on 9/11 conspiracies

noel emits

a wonderful wooden reason
How much did the 'cave dwelling arabs' have to orchestrate, though? Learn to fly a plane(roughly, without having to be able to do the difficult bits ie take off, land, or give people a safe and comfortable ride) and then get onto some planes with some weapons. It's not quite the same as rigging some of the largest and most densely used buildings in the world for a controlled demolition without any of the people who work in them or are responsible for their security noticing anything out of the ordinary, making a few hundred people disappear, faking up phone calls from those people to their loved ones accurately enough to fool everyone who knew them, flying a couple of things that look a great deal like 747s into the side of the buildings, setting up fake evidence to point to the aforementioned arabs in caves (including videos where they take credit for it) and then rigging a series of internal enquiries, all in order to invade a country which is basically pretty useless. Yet apparently the people who did all that couldn't be bothered to plant some WMDs to justify the subsequent invasion of a significantly more valuable country.
Who says they didn't do it? But you're almost making a case for the involvement or complicity of other parties yourself.
As for 'controlled demolition',
I quite enjoyed reading this, largely because I've recently been getting bored enough to argue with Parson (formerly of this parish and "this highly energetic state doubles as cloaking device but the primary function would be the ability to travel at high speeds without the problem of mass due to the mass being so highly energized it loses not only visual detection but mass too" fame) on the dubstepforum, and have been dealing with a lot of the attitudes that CB is slating.
Well come on...
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
The point about scale - and why I mention that, is that pointing at theories about 'massive conspiracies' when you are yourself talking about a 'small' conspiracy is tautological (of course ridiculous theories are ridiculous), fallacious and a straw man.

I'm not sure I get you. Let's consider the two putative 'conspiracies' here: the one organised by ObL to attack the WTC and Pentagon, and the rival one, i.e. it was an inside job by the US government. They're two fundamentally different kinds of conspiracy (leaving aside the disparity between the number of conspirators each one would require), in that the terrorists who committed 9/11 claimed responsibility - of course they did, that was the whole point, to give the Great Satan a bloody nose and let the world know that they, acting (so they'd like to think) on behalf on Islam, had struck the first blow in a global jihad. Whereas the people claiming it was an inside job are obviously not the people who actually did it. Bin Laden claims his organisation committed the attacks, and the leaders of the US agree with him. On that note, they're in perfect accord. So there's a notable asymmetry between these two 'conspiracies'.

Edit: Slothrop, I believe Parson's flying saucers are massless and invisible because they are highly quantumized. :rolleyes:
 

john eden

male pale and stale
The point about scale - and why I mention that, is that pointing at theories about 'massive conspiracies' when you are yourself talking about a 'small' conspiracy is tautological (of course ridiculous theories are ridiculous), fallacious and a straw man.

I'm not clear what your position is, Noel, so perhaps I will tell you mine and we can see how it goes:

1) A bunch of islamic extremists hijacked 4 planes and flew two of them into the twin towers (one each) and one into the pentagon.

2) This caused the twin towers to collapse and a big dent in the pentagon. Lots of people died.

3) There is a discussion to be had about the background to this, including american foreign policy, training of OBL, etc.
 

noel emits

a wonderful wooden reason
No the point is - and I've heard and seen this - people say it would take hundreds of people to carry out those attacks (massive conspiracy) at the same time as saying that 19 people did it. It's just a silly position. It doesn't matter who you think did it, or why.
 
Last edited:

noel emits

a wonderful wooden reason
it was an inside job by the US government.
That's an overly simplistic straw man. What's meant by US government? Really you can stop there if you think that's as far as any thinking or investigation around this goes.
...the terrorists who committed 9/11 claimed responsibility - of course they did, that was the whole point, to give the Great Satan a bloody nose and let the world know that they, acting (so they'd like to think) on behalf on Islam, had struck the first blow in a global jihad... Bin Laden claims his organisation committed the attacks, and the leaders of the US agree with him. On that note, they're in perfect accord. So there's a notable asymmetry between these two 'conspiracies'.
Well if you take it all as read and at face value, then you take it all as read and at face value. I mean that all may well be the case, but there are also reasons to think there is more to it than that.
 

john eden

male pale and stale
No the point is - and I've heard and seen this - people say it would take hundreds of people to carry out those attacks (massive conspiracy) at the same time as saying that 19 people did it. It's just a silly position. It doesn't matter who you think did it.

I get what you are saying but that assumes that governments are able to organise themselves in the same way as terrorists.

Which kind of ignores one of the main fuctions of govts, which is to preserve bureaucracy.

Plus it is entirely different organising an attack on foreigh soil than against your "own" people. Rightly or wrongly people object to one more than the other.
 

noel emits

a wonderful wooden reason
Isn't Al Qaeda also a well funded, large scale organisation?
Yes, apparently. So it's interesting the 9/11 commission has said it's wasn't interested in looking at where the funding was coming from, or the involvement of Pakistani secret service etc.
 

noel emits

a wonderful wooden reason
Incidentally, I think it is important who did it.
Yes absolutely. Just not form the point of that logical fallacy that some people seem to hold. That's all.

More specific?

I'm saying this:

Imagine the paperwork. Imagine the level of planning, recruitment, coordination, control, and unbelievable nerve required to pull off a conspiracy of that magnitude. Really picture it in detail. At the very least you're talking about hiring hundreds of civil servants cold-hearted enough to turn a blind eye to the murder of thousands of their fellow countrymen. If you were dealing with faultless, emotionless robots - maybe. But this almighty conspiracy was presumably hatched and executed by fallible humans. And if there's one thing we know about humans, it's that our inherent unreliability will always derail the simplest of schemes.

Is silly and a mis-characterisation of why some people think there are questions that still need to be answered about the whole thing.
 

john eden

male pale and stale
No the point is - and I've heard and seen this - people say it would take hundreds of people to carry out those attacks (massive conspiracy) at the same time as saying that 19 people did it. It's just a silly position. It doesn't matter who you think did it, or why.

You are attaching the view that it doesn't matter to the silly position, rather than that being your own view?

EDIT -sorry, no - I think you mean that regardless who did it the numbers game is a silly one.

Bit of confusing phrasing, or reading, there.
 
Last edited:

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
No the point is - and I've heard and seen this - people say it would take hundreds of people to carry out those attacks (massive conspiracy) at the same time as saying that 19 people did it. It's just a silly position. It doesn't matter who you think did it, or why.

But that's still completely missing the point. Let's say al-Qa'eda committed the attacks: all they had to do was orchestrate and execute the attacks themselves. That's it, job done lads, back to the cave for a celebratory coffee. If the US government - or some esoteric wing of it, if you prefer, since there's obviously no reason to believe the vice-governor of Ohio had much to do with 9/11 - it would have had to plan the attack (maintaining absolute secrecy the whole time), fabricate a plausible cover story (maintaining absolute secrecy the whole time), carry the attack out (maintaining absolute secrecy the whole time) and then prevent anyone involved in it breaking silence for the next seven years, and presumably for ever. It's a entirely different proposition.

Although I take your point that there are positions in between the 'official story' and the US-govt-did-the-whole-thing story.
 
Last edited:

noel emits

a wonderful wooden reason
But that's still completely missing the point. Let's say al-Qa'eda committed the attacks: all they had to do was orchestrate and execute the attacks themselves. That's it, job done lads, back to the cave for a celebratory coffee. If the US government - or some esoteric wing of it, if you prefer, since there's obviously no reason to believe the vice-governor of Ohio had much to do with 9/11 - it would have had to plan the attack (maintaining absolute secrecy the whole time), fabricate a plausible cover story (maintaining absolute secrecy the whole time), carry the attack out (maintaining absolute secrecy the whole time) and then prevent anyone involved in it breaking silence for the next seven years, and presumably for ever. It's a entirely different proposition.
I know what you're saying - that it would be harder to do as an 'inside job'*, but that doesn't mean it would in theory need huge amounts of participants or bureaucrats or something absurd like that which is how Brooker, and others when talking pejoratively and condescendingly about 'conspiracy theorists' paint it. But I'm not talking about the specific mechanics of the thing - just that - how the article is based on absurd notions about what the discussion is.

* Which also is not necessarily the discussion or what things point to, at least not in such a straightforward sense.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
So noel, if you're not saying it was actually committed by (some branch of) the government, then to what extent are you implicating them? If we're not being told the whole truth, what is it you think we're not being told?
The main potential accusations I can think of are:
- inadequate follow-up of possible evidence something 'big' was about to go down
- ignoring an explicit warning or leak about attacks on the WTC/Pentagon (simply believing it was too far-fetched, perhaps)
- advanced knowledge it really was going to happen, but doing nothing to stop it
in order of increasing guilt on the part of the American government.
 

noel emits

a wonderful wooden reason
How many times do I have to say that my issue is with the article? It's quite simple - I just think that it piles absurdities on top of fallacies in attempting to paint a picture of the position of those who are not wholly credulous about the official line on those events and/or whether it represents the whole truth. It's stupid and offensive and done under the depressingly middlebrow guise of being 'sophisticated and not interested in all that nonsense'. I can't believe I have to type this many words to explain that.
 

Mr. Tea

Let's Talk About Ceps
How many times do I have to say that my issue is with the article? It's quite simple - I just think that it piles absurdities on top of fallacies in attempting to paint a picture of the position of those who are not wholly credulous about the official line on those events and/or whether it represents the whole truth. It's stupid and offensive and done under the depressingly middlebrow guise of being 'sophisticated and not interested in all that nonsense'. I can't believe I have to type this many words to explain that.

Well that's not quite fair, because it's clear that you also have a issues with what Slothrop, Eden and I have been saying in this thread, and have at times sounded like you support one or other of the various 9/11 conspiracy theories in circulatoin. Especially when you say stuff like:
noel emits said:
according to ever-so-rational and right-thinking Brooker it is that there wasn't a 'conspiracy'. Except that of course there was.
I'm just asking you what sort of conspiracy you're talking about.
 
Top