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twistedmentat posted:Aluminum melts at a very low temprature in comparison to steel, and there was a shitton of aluminum in the WTC. Not just in the structure, but things made out of aluminum. Also, softened steel under tens of thousands of tonnes of debris and lots of heat for extended periods could easily force it to 'flow' like a sped up version of those experiments which make bitumen drop like water (only incredibly slowly).
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Sep 22, 2013 14:55
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gradenko_2000 posted:Anyone have any good sources to share about birther-ism? I think it pretty much also qualifies as a conspiracy theory considering the massive amount of mental gymnastics one has to go through to convince oneself that they're after Obama's birth records because there's legit shadowy stuff about that guy and nope, it's not about anything else, honest. One thing that people always seem to miss about the birthers, is that it's not just racist, it's also sexist. No matter where Obama was born, his mother was a US citizen, therefore he is a US citizen. But birthers always focus on his father's nationality because, in their twisted view, it's the man who determines nationality and the woman is simply irrelevant. But given the shitstorm of bigotry that is the birther movement, it's easy to miss that one extra lumpy turd. Birthers go into their argument assuming Obama cannot be a true American because he's black and create their narrative based on that. No evidence can ever convince them, because Obama will always be black and therefore will never be a true American  And that's the basic difference between a skeptic and a conspiracy theorist. One says, 'extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence' while the other will never accept anything that discounts their worldview and twists existing evidence to try and bolster their cause.
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Sep 23, 2013 07:43
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Execu-speak posted:I've seen that but it's a bit out of date, he's been ranting about how apparently actual fragments of it were found, tested and confirmed as in the latest loose change 'documentary' an American coup. I've heard the thermite argument so many times and it makes absolutely no sense. Everyone remembers what it looked like when the towers fell, compare it to what thermite actually looks like when it goes off: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdCsbZf1_Ng&t=137s This is the poo poo that was supposed to be placed everywhere throughout the WTC - and yet there's not a single shot of molten metal spraying everywhere.
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Sep 27, 2013 14:58
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And then you patiently explain that the only difference between thermite and nanothermite is that one is a fine powder and the other is a very fine powder. There is literally no other difference. But the "nano" makes it magical or something.
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Sep 28, 2013 14:33
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duck monster posted:Actually while talking with some friends about this topic, it was pointed out to me a lot of people in australia do buy into the whole vast-left-wing-conspiracy climate change denialist gibberish, and theres a fair bit of the hippy vaccine denialist and what not sorts of things. Just this morning I turned on the TV when I was making breakfast and one of the inane morning talk/news shows had "The vaccine controversy" covering half the bloody screen.
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Nov 26, 2013 04:27
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From (of all places) the picture thread over in Entertainment WeakleyYO MAMA HEAD posted:
That's right, even world famous rock starts are part of the lizardman conspiracy.
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Nov 27, 2013 03:33
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Jazerus posted:I do think that D&D shits on people who are "asking questions" a little excessively sometimes. I think there's a definite spectrum between asking a question and "just asking questions" where people, both those asking and those responding, can be easily mistaken as to which side the question falls on. Genuine questions, like "I've seen so many photos from the bombing, but none seem to show the bombs being placed. Is it likely that there are any photos like that and would law enforcement have a reason not to release them?" are a lot different from the faux-socratic "I've never seen them actually placing the bombs, law enforcement must be deliberately hiding those images. It's very suspicious and makes you think, hmmm?" The "just asking questions" is never about the information, it's always designed to turn discussion to a preconceived conclusion of some sort. But some people will still, with all honesty, ask these sorts of questions because they're unaware of their own bias. I think we should, at the very least, make the person aware of what they're doing before jumping up and down on their heads. Megillah Gorilla fucked around with this message at 05:19 on Nov 28, 2013 |
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Nov 28, 2013 05:16
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I for one miss all the lovely, blurry UFO footage and marvel how aliens seem to have stopped visiting our planet coincidentally at the same time as everyone carrying phones able to take pictures and movies became a thing. You'd think there'd be more 
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Dec 29, 2013 09:54
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The "Let's mock the South" thread in GBS has thrown up a few up these people.Rhesus Pieces posted:SnowedOutAtlanta on FB is a goldmine: It's been a while since I read something that literally made me say out loud, "Are you loving retarded?"
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Jan 31, 2014 14:30
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twistedmentat posted:If 9/11 had not happened, I'm sure Bush and his clown car of neocons would have found some reason to go into Iraq. I've always felt it was the opposite. Up until 9/11, Bush was a complete nothing of a president. He spent half his time on holiday at his 'ranch' and the rest of the time he just seemed to be half-arsing it as much as he had done when his daddy gave him all those companies to run into the ground. I got the impression that little Bush Jnr. was the first person in history to become president of the US just because it would look good on his resume. And because daddy told him to. All the evil people under him, of course, had all their schemes and plans and, maybe if 9/11 had never happened, Cheney would have gone on to be president and I can't think beyond that because it's such an absolutely horrible thought.
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Mar 23, 2014 06:26
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EDIT - goddamn, wrong thread. Too many tabs open - again.
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Mar 30, 2014 14:13
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Just remind him how, before the US pissed away all the goodwill, pretty much the entire goddamn world was standing behind them and ready to take military action. Poor old Bin Laden suddenly found himself facing, not a proportional response, but the full scale invasion of the country where he had his entire base of operations by dozens of countries all with the sole goal of hunting him down and putting an end to his bullshit. Of course, it looked a lot easier on paper.
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Apr 2, 2014 13:55
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Install Windows posted:When I was a kid I went to visit a relative who worked in the South Tower (this was about 1997 or so, and they moved buildings entirely long before 9/11). On their particular floor somewhere in the 60s or so, you could seriously see clear across the whole floor, on all sides around the elevator/stair core. I found this image which really helps drive home the point.  Shbobdb posted:So, what you are saying is that if you want to take a stand against injustice you have to submit yourself to that injustice? How the gently caress does that make sense? Snowden revealed the atrocities of a government which disappears people and tortures them for years and people wonder why he ran for it? Manning's failure was in trusting a hacker who led her on, actively deceived her and then turned her in the first opportunity to make himself famous. Does an accidental martyr still count under the Grouchy Smurf rules of puritanical self immolation?
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Apr 4, 2014 04:44
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fermun posted:Louie Gohmert. He's well known as a guy who says stupid poo poo, just today he said the immigration refugee crisis that is going on right now could be solved if border state governors started their own army and navy and just killed the kids. He also picked his congressional office because it has a ledge wide enough that he can put a smoker on it and have freshly cooked brisket. Wonderful. He's taking a page out of Tony Abbott's book. Just what the world needs.
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Jul 15, 2014 05:32
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Speaking of MH17, why not turn to Sky News and watch their on-site reporter opening up victims' luggage and rummaging through it on air?
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Jul 21, 2014 05:32
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razorrozar posted:As I recall, someone wanted to do a Roman flavored D&D (game, not forum) campaign, and Strudel Man wanted to play a warforged character, which are basically magic robots. And I always thought it was a childish rebuttal of a discussion of Hero of Alexandria's autonomous, mobile puppet machines which could wheel themselves onto a stage, open their curtain and show an entire play using mechanical puppets without any human intervention. Rather disappointed now. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yYGqISsfB0
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Jul 28, 2014 18:08
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blowfish posted:
I remember when I was a kid, watching Tom Baker's Doctor Who and he was having an argument with Davros, creator of the Daleks. He gave the Davros the following statement: "All elephants are pink. Nellie is an elephant. Therefore Nellie is pink." Davros agreed that this was perfectly logical, to which the Doctor responded, "No it's stupid. Everybody knows elephants aren't pink!"
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Nov 25, 2014 04:58
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Please tell us more about pink elephants flying into the World Trade Centre.
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Nov 25, 2014 06:22
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AddMEonFacebook posted:Fluoride strawmen! Hey man, I really enjoyed your work when you were pushing the "logic" tree 9/11 conspiracy thing, because there really are a lot of people in the world who are that stupid. But this last page and a half has been some pretty weak sauce trolling. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that your trolling is a bad thing in and of itself. It's always useful for normal, non-crazy people to get the feel for debating with someone who is completely out of his tree. And I'm sure more than a few of the 'drink their own pee' set would react in just the manner you pretended to over the last page and a half. Yes, it was great right up until the point you started wishing people dead. That's just tacky. C'mon, you're better at this than that. I, for one, would like to hear more about the horrors of electronegativity 
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Dec 28, 2014 14:01
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I just skipped the last 10 pages, did I miss anything beyond the troll?
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Dec 30, 2014 14:12
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AddMEonFacebook posted:I'm literally nuts
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Jan 2, 2015 03:29
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Lightning Jim posted:That looks similar to a website I had that used these kind of soundwave sound patterns as an exmaple of vibrations at higher dimensional levels Ah, I remember when everything mystic was "vibration". Before that it was crystals and harmonics. After came magnets, dimensions and, of course, quantum. We've come so far I wonder if there's an interocitor hiding inside the great pyramid.  Firefox recognises interocitor as a word now. Just FYI.
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Feb 6, 2015 14:53
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The Smurfs was a documentary. Seriously Firefox - you recognize interocitor, but not Smurfs?
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Feb 6, 2015 15:27
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The first time I saw that video, it was presented without any fanfare in one of the youtube threads and, yes, I thought it was fake as hell. The plane just falls out of the sky, slow as all hell, and without any fanfare. No flames, no smoke, no contrails, no sound. Just this massive object falling in a way that seems impossible. Then it hit the van and you realise, oh poo poo, it was real. And it really does look fake because Hollywood has spent decades making things 'more real than real' and these are the sort of events we simply don't have any experience in judging. Laypeople are simply incapable of knowing what an incident like this should look like, no matter how well versed in the subject they might pretend to be on the internet. I remember when collision physics in games first started and everyone went on about how they looked fake as hell. Now you can find car accident dash cams footage on youtube by the thousands and, it turns out, people really do ragdoll like a toy when struck by a car.
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Feb 8, 2015 05:37
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Fiat bandages.
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Feb 9, 2015 13:01
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Smoothrich posted:I don't think most 9/11 truthers even think Al-Qaeda and ISIS are real and can't begin to fathom the world and its people outside America in the first place. I once got into an argument with a truther on another forum who came out with the idea that it must have been someone else because the Middle East had no reason to hate the US that much. I think that was the point I learned to let it go, that these people are beyond reason and live in their own little world.
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May 23, 2015 15:32
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I actually wouldn't be surprised if it turned out to be the case.
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Jun 4, 2015 06:08
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So all the micro fossils we find in it are just a massive coincidence?
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Aug 16, 2015 15:04
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Nolanar posted:Someone linked this over in the pseudoscience thread, but it fits in perfectly here too: The ConspiraSea cruise! Yes, that's the real name, and it appears to be a real thing. Guest speakers include a bunch of loving nutjobs. The main name that jumped out at me is Andrew Wakefield, of fake vaccine study fame. This is actually GREAT news. Seriously. Now, every time someone I know tries to quote that hack's work, I can tell them where he is now. I was going to say "right where he belongs", but where he belongs is in prison. But I'm happy to take this.
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Sep 2, 2015 07:03
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blowfish posted:racism already had a definition other than "bigotry in general, especially when the bigot happens to be powerful" and just redefining racism is more confusing than just saying that both powerful bigots in general and also racists are bad. I think you underestimate the allure of the warm fuzziness of moral superiority which comes from vigorously arguing past someone when you're both using the same words but with different definitions.
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Sep 5, 2015 05:16
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chitoryu12 posted:And since women and children were loaded on lifeboats first, some were seen demanding their men hand over their wallets first. As horrible as that sounds, we need to remember that 1912 was a very different world. A woman and child arriving in a foreign land with no husband, no possessions, and no money would be expected to slowly starve to death on the street.
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Sep 12, 2015 05:06
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boom boom boom posted:I like when they say that the WTC was built to withstand a plane impact, and then some time later will say that no steel building has ever collapsed because of a fire. That reminds me of the Granville railway disaster in Australia in the 70s where a city commuter train ran off the rails around a bend and hit a bridge which collapsed on top of it. 83 people died and 210 were injured. The coroner found that the train was going above the local speed limit around a bend, but the railway argued that it was still below the speed allowed for that angle of bend under the standard. The coroner found that the wheels of the train were extraordinarily worn, but the railway argued that they angle of wear was still less than what was allowed under the standard. The coroner also found that the rails the train was travelling on were extraordinarily worn, but the railway argued again that the wear was still less than what was allowed under the standard. The railway argued that they did nothing wrong and that it must have been a freak accident. So the coroner asked, "What happens when a train with very worn wheels travels along a very worn track at very high speed?" The railway replied that no-one had ever checked. Each railway performance standard was tested with everything else in perfect working order  So, like 9/11 truthers "this particular fact makes no sense, just as long as you ignore all these other facts" 
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Sep 14, 2015 16:01
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twistedmentat posted:
Ha, that image is almost exactly what Armyman25 was arguing.
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Sep 20, 2015 05:59
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boom boom boom posted:This really sounds like you're describing a Judge Dredd story arc. That's what I said in the Dildo Rancher Standoff thread, it's all the talk about SovCits. Asehujiko posted:...also that said government forged the Rosetta Stone to hide the fact that the Egyptian Pharaohs were the most enlightened beings to ever exist and it's the fake stone causing all hieroglyphs to be incorrectly translated to be about wars and massacres and poo poo instead of guides to enlightenment. I love poo poo like this because it is just so obviously stupid at even the most facile level. The Rosetta Stone isn't some Ovaltine Decoder Ring, it's just a proclamation which happened to be written in three different languages, ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, ancient Greek and Demotic script. No-one knew how to read hieroglyphs, but scholars did know how to read Greek and Demotic. When they examined the stone and saw that the languages they could read said the same things, they realised that the hieroglyphs must also say the same thing and everything went from there. So it follows that if the Egyptian hieroglyphs are mistranslated, then so must be everything ever written in Demotic script and ancient Greek.
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Jan 18, 2016 06:31
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LeftistMuslimObama posted:I feel like the gangstalking concept could make for a really compelling psychological horror movie. Everyday life through that lens would be terrifying. Like the Truman Show, but with a smaller budget.
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Feb 3, 2016 13:48
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Would you call them, Pictures?
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May 2, 2016 14:05
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quote:numerology Quick joke: Two mathematicians are sitting on a bench and one turns to the other and says, "I used to believe that correlation implied causation. But I've recently completed a course on statistics and now I longer believe that." The other mathematician replies, "Sound like the course really helped." The first one looks at him and says, "Not necessarily." Megillah Gorilla fucked around with this message at 15:13 on Jul 10, 2016 |
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Jul 10, 2016 15:11
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Pizza truthers ITT. It's loving insane that this, of all things, has exploded like this. I've been reading it since it took off and am still trying to get my head around it.
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Nov 24, 2016 05:41
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Oh, I thought your summary was pretty spot on. I meant Irom.
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Nov 24, 2016 06:45
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I was a member of the Australian Skeptics for nearly 20 years but things took a really unfun turn to the right and it stopped being a useful resource run by scientists, medical professionals and well educated, interesting lay people and turned into an echo chamber for horrible people who couldn't tell the difference between a convincing argument based on evidence and being an arrogant piece of poo poo with their head up their arse. There was a running argument in their journal for years one how cigarettes don't cause cancer and the publishers allowed it because the people arguing that stupidity were their friends and they actively quashed counterarguments not only by MDs but even some goddamn actual epidemiologists with decades of experience in the field. I hope things have gotten better, because drat, that was embarrassing. Wanted to show a friend who was worried about vaccinating her kids an issue with an article by a retired nurse who had spent her life in the third world vaccinating children, but I couldn't because the article right after it was smug self congratulating bullshit about "correlation does not imply causation" wrt cigarettes.
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Jan 19, 2017 14:51
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