9/11 Trutherism and what I just can't figure out about the conspiracy crowd

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > 9/11 Trutherism and what I just can't figure out about the conspiracy crowd

asdf32: May 15, 2010; I lust for childrens' deaths. Ask me about how I don't care if my kids die.

McDowell posted:

Yup, it was a good video, addressed most of my skepticism. Thanks for posting it, Amused to Death.

Wikipedia blames the collapse on the raging fire which was allowed to spread due to complete lack of water. This caused the metal to expand (not melt) and eventually resulted in collapse

wikipedia posted:

NIST determined that diesel fuel did not play an important role, nor did the structural damage from the collapse of the Twin Towers, nor did the transfer elements (trusses, girders, and cantilever overhangs). But the lack of water to fight the fire was an important factor. The fires burned out of control during the afternoon, causing floor beams near column 79 to expand and push a key girder off its seat, triggering the floors to fail around column 79 on Floors 8 to 14. With a loss of lateral support across nine floors, column 79 buckled � pulling the east penthouse and nearby columns down with it. With the buckling of these critical columns, the collapse then progressed east-to-west across the core, ultimately overloading the perimeter support, which buckled between Floors 7 and 17, causing the remaining portion of the building above to fall downward as a single unit. The fires, fueled by office contents, along with the lack of water, were the key reasons for the collapse.[13]

# ¿ Sep 18, 2013 00:35

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# ¿ May 6, 2024 16:21

asdf32: May 15, 2010; I lust for childrens' deaths. Ask me about how I don't care if my kids die.

Main Paineframe posted:

The CIA isn't a single entity, it's a large constantly-changing organization with quite a few members. It's perfectly possible for it to be incompetent and all-powerful at the same time - for example, the CIA leadership and MKULTRA project members managed to keep a lid on the program for decades, but it was ultimately revealed when some fuckup clerk accidentally misfiled some of the super-secret documents and no one noticed when the order-to-shred was given out.

What makes a big difference is the perception people have of the act being kept secret. For example, you can keep D-Day a secret because everyone involved wants to keep it a secret and think it's right to do so. Even when it leaks those people will keep probably keep it secret. You can't keep a widespread 9/11 conspiracy a secret because it would be considered massively criminal, surprising and wrong and would spread rapidly following any leak. So while you may think some of the CIA examples you cite were completely horrible (and be right for thinking so) during the cold war, or the in the context of the War on Terrorism many other people don't. That's why the lid stays on. This, however isn't true for most of the absurd conspiracy theories.

# ¿ Oct 6, 2013 03:22

asdf32: May 15, 2010; I lust for childrens' deaths. Ask me about how I don't care if my kids die.

AddMEonFacebook posted:

No I didn't. I was freely admitting there could be other sources of contamination. My point for quarkjets was that I don't think contamination at the source would appear in 100% of homes.

IF there is bad record-keeping for where the lead pipes are, that's its own problem and I can't believe more people aren't working on that one. It really wouldn't be that hard to replace the pipes using modern technology, but the city of Chicago and America, too, is too stupid, poor, and greedy to help its own citizens.

What we get: bloated road budgets, corn and wheat subsidies, corporate welfare, private prisons and high incarcerations rate, banker bailouts, massive military spending now including surveillance.

And why do you think politics are hosed up? It's because extreme ideologues and the conspiracy crowd like you indulge mental frailties, fantasies and insecurities instead of actually identifying real problems.

So stop calling to the end of a non-existant Nazi plot, expend the mental energy necessary to actually identify problems, and call for their solution. Sometimes it's just lead pipes.

# ¿ Dec 31, 2014 15:07

asdf32: May 15, 2010; I lust for childrens' deaths. Ask me about how I don't care if my kids die.

Pook Good Mook posted:

So why hasn't he been banned yet again?

I'm also confused about this.

# ¿ Jan 2, 2015 03:55

asdf32: May 15, 2010; I lust for childrens' deaths. Ask me about how I don't care if my kids die.

Are there websites that track like infowars.com predictions and then compares them to reality? I think that would be funny.

ToxicSlurpee posted:

The military likes wacky code names. It always has.

Code names are easier to remember than random numbers. Companies often code-name products and their components with goofy movie themes and things. It works.

asdf32 fucked around with this message at 01:16 on May 10, 2015

# ¿ May 10, 2015 01:08

asdf32: May 15, 2010; I lust for childrens' deaths. Ask me about how I don't care if my kids die.

Baronjutter posted:

I was talking to my grandpa who is generally reasonable but he has some borderline fascist relatives in hungary that he gets all his euro-news from.

I had to stifle my laughing but he started talking about George Soros. I don't even know who this guy is other than the fact that reactionaries in the USA love to blame him for everything despite him being totally involved in most of the things they blame him for. I didn't know he was jewish though, that explains why so many right wing nuts latch onto him. Well apparently the entire Syrian "refugee" crisis was orchestrated by Soros. He's spent a billion dollars buying maps and supplies for the "refugees" and have given them detailed instructons, most of which are ISIS terrorists or not even syrians. He is doing this to destabilize the pure and strong Hungarian nation and it's obviously a long term jew plot to further enrich him self through the chaos. Also the refugees are going to buy all the food in europe and there will be no food left for europeans.

But seriously why are people so obsessed with this Soros guy and insert him into every conspiracy theory?

He's the Koch brother's for the right.

# ¿ Oct 16, 2015 01:07

asdf32: May 15, 2010; I lust for childrens' deaths. Ask me about how I don't care if my kids die.

KomradeX posted:

That I honestly can't say. but I think in this case its something like betting against one football team and doing all you can in order to get them to loose. I could be wrong. But thats how it always came off to me

But it's one among many ways to illegally manipulate the market and in most cases where people think such manipulation happened, it didn't really (like the financial crisis which wasn't caused by the people who took positions against the market - it was caused by years of interwoven and fundamentally unsound investment). Manipulating the market to boost a stock up and profit is probably more common, with results that are ultimately as destructive.

The main problem for shorting is the way it looks. You're profiting at other people's expense. But I'd point out that this isn't as clear a distinction as it seems. If I sell a stock and it goes up 10% tomorrow I lost [out on] 10% and the buyer won 10%. If hold the stock and it goes down 10% I lost 10% and a short seller might win it. It's not a huge difference.

# ¿ Oct 17, 2015 21:08

asdf32: May 15, 2010; I lust for childrens' deaths. Ask me about how I don't care if my kids die.

Munin posted:

The thing about shorting, and one of the ways it can have a destructive effect, is that it can destroy confidence in a company even if it is in fact finacially sound in normal circumstances.

An awful lot of finance is based on reputation and trust. A lot of people shorting a stock or currency can lead to other market actors second guessing themselves. You have people starting to think things like "With all this talk about possible weakness I probably should reduce my exposure to the country/company just to be safe." or "Hmm, there might be slightly more risk there than I thought, better ask for slightly more interest this time.". This can all happen without a shift in the underlying fundamentals. Now, if the market actors had access to perfect information this would not be happening but lol at the concept of perfectly transparent markets.

Now, for the most part that will indeed not sink a company unless there were underlying weaknesses there but it can raise their borrowing costs and put them at a greater risk of a cashflow crisis.

I don't think short sellers should be massively curbed but no one should be surprised that many people are ambivalent about them since they can seriously inconvenience the businesses their targets even if they are totally wrong.

If a ton of people have taken short positions against a stock it's supposed to hurt that company's reputation, make other market actors second guess themselves and raise that company's borrowing cost.

So you did a good job expressing all the useful purposes of short selling. Doing these things is exactly what a market is supposed to do and more specifically, short selling let's people who don't currently own a stock weigh in with a negative position on it.

# ¿ Oct 18, 2015 21:56

asdf32: May 15, 2010; I lust for childrens' deaths. Ask me about how I don't care if my kids die.

QuarkJets posted:

Because the exact opposite of that is true. In nearly every sector we've advanced way further during 1950-2000 than we did during 1900-1950. Your perception of the rate of technological advancement over the last 115 years is highly inaccurate.

That is inaccurate. Many elderly people who grew up with television, telephones, and radio have trouble adapting to smartphone use, and a lot of effort goes towards making these devices easier for them to use.

Technology has continued to advance but it's the early 20th century that invented and spread the entire idea of advancement. Even early/mid industrialization would have been fundamentally recognizable to an educated person plucked from ancient rome. The telegraph might have been a headscratcher along with a couple other things but metal and steam which dominated the times were known quantities.

The 20th century saw the invention of new things seemingly out of thin air - electricity, radio, TV the atomic bomb and actual medicines like penicillin. As importantly it widely distributed them in the form of home appliances, cars, planes and other things which by about 1950 were accessible to most people and incorporated in the fabric of everyday life.

So in terms of actual day-to-day life impact it's safe to say that there is something different about the changes someone experience over say 1890-1970 than 1950-2030.

Anecdotal one way this plays out is to observe the generational changes. My grandparents, born 1920's and earlier are far more different culturally from their children than my wife and I are from our parents who grew up in the 60's and 70's with modern expectations of middle class life (hell music from then is still popular).

# ¿ Jan 25, 2016 15:12

asdf32: May 15, 2010; I lust for childrens' deaths. Ask me about how I don't care if my kids die.

QuarkJets posted:

You're kind of a weird dude. "Life changed more in this 80-year period than in this overlapping 80-year period that also includes the future"??? Do better.

I'd say that day-to-day life impact had changed more dramatically from 1900-1950 than from say 1950-today, but only if you limit your examination to the most superficial aspects of day-to-day life. Like if you just want to look at really basic first-order poo poo then that's one thing, but if you actually look at humanity as a system then holy poo poo change is way faster today.

People in 1950 weren't capable of launching a loving space crane to Mars and successfully using it remotely. That poo poo is something that you'd read about maybe in a Ray Bradbury novel, not a newspaper. This kind of thing represents such an enormous leap in capability that it becomes difficult to even compare the state of technology between the two eras.

We can put an entire football field of 1950s computational power into our loving pockets, and this is so commonplace that we use this power to watch cat videos and send pictures of our genitalia to each other for gently caress's sake.

To the contrary, you cited something which has as much impact on my life as the Matt Damon movie.

I agree that in abstract terms technological development has kept moving. A modern Intel processor is a more impressive technical feat than the moon landing and orders of magnitude more impressive than the Model T.

But when we consider impact on day to day lives nothing compares with the advancements industrialization brought. And the last 5 decades or so just havn't changed as much in ways that matter as the 5 before that.

Caveat: this is all in reference to the first world. A more sophisticated argument might note the impact modern technology has had on globalization and by extension, the impact that's had on spreading industrialization to the developed world.

# ¿ Jan 26, 2016 01:27

asdf32: May 15, 2010; I lust for childrens' deaths. Ask me about how I don't care if my kids die.

Dirk the Average posted:

As an example, transcatheter aortic heart valve replacement surgery was deployed in the US in the last few years. You can now get a replacement aortic valve via catheter, without requiring open heart surgery. My grandmother had a pacemaker implanted via catheter. Again, no open heart surgery. Stents are being deployed to clear blocked arteries via catheter. The progress we are making is pretty amazing.

Surgeries on the abdomen aren't as high a priority simply because you don't have to break open the ribcage, but even then, laproscopic surgery is already a thing and is reducing incisions to very small 1-2cm openings.

I'm not talking hypotheticals here. This is real progress that is happening right now.

Uh huh. My father in law was literally saved by interventional radiology a few weeks ago after a massive heart attack.

But, and this is really simple, it turns out saving 63 year olds from sudden heart attacks has less impact on human health and day-to-day life in general than basic sanitation, vaccines and antibiotics that were all invented in the first half of the 20th century.

This topic is interesting because it's a basic piece of intellectual literacy in my opinion to understand that yes technology is still advancing at a rapid pace but to understand that the positive impact of that technology on human life has been waning (and to grasp the place industrialization has in history).

And, to take this in a more political direction, a lot of people mistakenly lump some of this slowdown into the economic or political category when it's actually just a basic case of technological diminishing returns.

# ¿ Jan 26, 2016 14:28

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# ¿ May 6, 2024 16:21

asdf32: May 15, 2010; I lust for childrens' deaths. Ask me about how I don't care if my kids die.

Helsing posted:

Basic computers have been around for thousands of years too. But, much like it's spurious to suggest that modern hygiene is thousands of years old, it would also be incredibly spurious to claim that some Greek curiosity from the 100 BC is comparable to modern computing.

Likewise the Greeks developed a basic steam engine and the use of wind or water as a source of energy for processing food was first developed thousands of years ago, but none of this diminishes the incredible significance of 18th century advancements in steam power.

When you evaluate technological progress you need to both look at many things: the technical details, the scientific theories explaining how the device operates, and the degree of social organization (i.e. the ancient Romans might have vaguely known about water mills but there was no reason to adopt them when human muscle power was so cheap, and besides the degree of political centralization conducive to spreading such technology was mostly absent even at the height of the Empire).

The period of the "second industrial revolution", straddling a 40-50 year period between the last quarter of the 19th century and up to the beginning of World War I, is probably the single most consequential period of technological advancement since the rise of agriculture thousands of years ago. The changes ushered in by that period are a lot more dramatic than any changes wrought by the internet or smart phones or space travel.

Some of these technologies had antecedents in the past but their rapid development and the way in which they transformed the lived every day experience of humans is incomparably greater than anything else we have evidence of in the annals of recorded history. As I said before, to even find a comparable example we likely have to go back to the first farmers -- and the industrial revolution(s) impact was felt a lot faster than the rise of agriculture, which took thousands of years to become a global phenomenon.

What else ranks?

Tools, fire, agriculture.

Next up automated dystopia/utopia and/or genetic self modification.

# ¿ Jan 27, 2016 02:40

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