I am “happy to take it as fact” until I find something contradictory. When that happens, I generally make note of both sources and look for more authoritative information. If you have a better methodology, I am open to suggestions.
So your standard of accepting something as evidence is “a ‘mainstream source’ asserted it and I haven’t seen someone contradict it”. That seems like you are setting the bar quite low. Especially because we have seen that your claim about the hijackers not being on the passenger manifest was quickly debunked (or at least, contradicted, which is what prompts you to abandon your belief and look for more authoritative information) by simple googling. Maybe you should, at minimum, try googling all your beliefs and seeing if there is some contradictory information out there.
I wasn’t intending to be snide; I apologize if it came across that way. I meant it sincerely: Jack found an error in my work, which I have since corrected. I see this as a good thing, and a vital part of the process of successive approximation towards the truth.
I suggest that a better way to convey that might have been “Sorry, I was wrong” rather than “You win a cookie!” When I am making a sincere apology, I find that the phrase “You win a cookie!” can often be misconstrued.
The idea that this is unlikely is one I have seen repeatedly, and it makes sense to me: if someone came at me with a box-cutter, I’d be tempted to laugh at them even if I wasn’t responsible for a plane-load of passengers—and I’ve never been good at physical combat. Furthermore, the “Pilots for 9/11 Truth” site—which is operated by licensed pilots (it has a page listing its members by name and experience) -- backs up this statement.
A box-cutter is a kind of sharp knife. A determined person with a sharp knife can kill you. An 11-year-old girl can inflict fatal injuries with a box-cutter—do you really think that five burly fanatics couldn’t achieve the same thing on one adult? All the paragraph above establishes is that you—and maybe some licensed pilots—have an underdeveloped sense of the danger posed by knives.
I propose an experiment—you and a friend can prepare for a year, then I and nine heavyset friends will come at you with box-cutters (you will be unarmed). If we can’t make you stop laughing off our attack, then I’ll concede you are right. Deal?
Let’s go into more details with this “plane manoeuvre” thing.
(I suppose one might argue that he overshot and had to turn around; not being skilled, he didn’t realize how dangerous this was… so he missed that badly on the first attempt, and yet he was skillful enough to bullseye on the second attempt, skimming barely 10 feet above the ground without even grazing it?)
Well, what we should really ask is “given that we a plane made a difficult manoeuvre to hit the better-protected side of the Pentagon, how much more likely does that make a conspiracy than other possible explanations?”
Here are some possible explanations of the observed event:
The hijacker aimed at the less defended side, overshot, made a desperate turn back and got lucky.
The hijacker wanted to fake out possible air defences, so had planned a sudden turn which he had rehearsed dozens of times in Microsoft Flight Simulator. Coincidentally, the side he crashed into was better protected.
The hijacker was originally tasked to hit a different landmark, got lost, spotted the Pentagon, made a risky turn and got lucky. Coincidentally, the side he crashed into was better protected.
A conspiracy took control of four airliners. The plan was to crash two of them into the WTC, killing thousands of civilians, one into a field, and one into the Pentagon. The conspirators decided that hitting part of the Pentagon that hadn’t yet been renovated with sprinklers and steel bars was going a bit too far, so they made the relevant plane do a drastic manoeuvre to hit the best-protected side. There was an unspecified reason they didn’t just approach from the best-protected side to start with.
A conspiracy aimed to hit the less defended side of the Pentagon, but a bug in the remote override software caused the plane to hit the most defended side.
etc.
Putting the rest of the truther evidence aside, do the conspiracy explanations stand out as more likely than the non-conspiracy explanations?
...which, as I have said elsewhere, is this: 9/11 “Truthers” may be wrong, but they are (mostly) not crazy. They have some very good arguments which deserve serious consideration.
Maybe each of their arguments have been successfully knocked down, somewhere—but I have yet to see any source which does so. All I’ve been able to find are straw man attacks and curiosity-stoppers.
Well, in this thread alone, you have seen Jack knock down one of your arguments (hijackers not on manifest) to your own satisfaction. And yet you already seem to have forgotten that. Since you’ve already conceded a point, it’s not true that the only opposition is “straw-man attacks and curiosity-stoppers”. Do you think my point about alternate Pentagon scenarios is a straw man or a curiosity stopper? Is it possible that anyone arguing against you is playing whack-a-mole, and once they debunk argument A you will introduce unrelated argument B, and once they debunk that you will bring up argument C, and then once they debunk that you will retreat back to A again?
There’s a third problem here—the truthers as a whole aren’t arguing for a single coherent account of what really happened. True, you have outlined a detailed position (which has already changed during this thread because someone was able to use Google and consequently win a cookie), but you are actually defending the far fuzzier proposition that truthers have “some very good arguments which deserve serious consideration”. This puts the burden on the debunkers, because even if someone shows that one argument is wrong, that doesn’t preclude the existence of some good arguments somewhere out there. It also frees up truthers to pile on as many “anomalies” as possible, even if these are contradictory.
For example, you assert that it’s suspicious that the buildings were “completely pulverized”, and also that it’s suspicious that some physical evidence—the passports—survived the collapse of the buildings. (And this level of suspicion is based purely on your intuition about some very extreme physical events which are outside of everyday experience. Maybe it’s completely normal for small objects to be ejected intact from airliners which hit skyscrapers—have you done simulations or experiments which show otherwise?)
Anyway, this is all off-topic. I think you should do a post where you outline the top three truther arguments which deserve serious consideration.
So your standard of accepting something as evidence is “a ‘mainstream source’ asserted it and I haven’t seen someone contradict it”. That seems like you are setting the bar quite low. Especially because we have seen that your claim about the hijackers not being on the passenger manifest was quickly debunked (or at least, contradicted, which is what prompts you to abandon your belief and look for more authoritative information) by simple googling. Maybe you should, at minimum, try googling all your beliefs and seeing if there is some contradictory information out there.
I suggest that a better way to convey that might have been “Sorry, I was wrong” rather than “You win a cookie!” When I am making a sincere apology, I find that the phrase “You win a cookie!” can often be misconstrued.
A box-cutter is a kind of sharp knife. A determined person with a sharp knife can kill you. An 11-year-old girl can inflict fatal injuries with a box-cutter—do you really think that five burly fanatics couldn’t achieve the same thing on one adult? All the paragraph above establishes is that you—and maybe some licensed pilots—have an underdeveloped sense of the danger posed by knives.
I propose an experiment—you and a friend can prepare for a year, then I and nine heavyset friends will come at you with box-cutters (you will be unarmed). If we can’t make you stop laughing off our attack, then I’ll concede you are right. Deal?
Let’s go into more details with this “plane manoeuvre” thing.
Well, what we should really ask is “given that we a plane made a difficult manoeuvre to hit the better-protected side of the Pentagon, how much more likely does that make a conspiracy than other possible explanations?”
Here are some possible explanations of the observed event:
The hijacker aimed at the less defended side, overshot, made a desperate turn back and got lucky.
The hijacker wanted to fake out possible air defences, so had planned a sudden turn which he had rehearsed dozens of times in Microsoft Flight Simulator. Coincidentally, the side he crashed into was better protected.
The hijacker was originally tasked to hit a different landmark, got lost, spotted the Pentagon, made a risky turn and got lucky. Coincidentally, the side he crashed into was better protected.
A conspiracy took control of four airliners. The plan was to crash two of them into the WTC, killing thousands of civilians, one into a field, and one into the Pentagon. The conspirators decided that hitting part of the Pentagon that hadn’t yet been renovated with sprinklers and steel bars was going a bit too far, so they made the relevant plane do a drastic manoeuvre to hit the best-protected side. There was an unspecified reason they didn’t just approach from the best-protected side to start with.
A conspiracy aimed to hit the less defended side of the Pentagon, but a bug in the remote override software caused the plane to hit the most defended side.
etc.
Putting the rest of the truther evidence aside, do the conspiracy explanations stand out as more likely than the non-conspiracy explanations?
Well, in this thread alone, you have seen Jack knock down one of your arguments (hijackers not on manifest) to your own satisfaction. And yet you already seem to have forgotten that. Since you’ve already conceded a point, it’s not true that the only opposition is “straw-man attacks and curiosity-stoppers”. Do you think my point about alternate Pentagon scenarios is a straw man or a curiosity stopper? Is it possible that anyone arguing against you is playing whack-a-mole, and once they debunk argument A you will introduce unrelated argument B, and once they debunk that you will bring up argument C, and then once they debunk that you will retreat back to A again?
There’s a third problem here—the truthers as a whole aren’t arguing for a single coherent account of what really happened. True, you have outlined a detailed position (which has already changed during this thread because someone was able to use Google and consequently win a cookie), but you are actually defending the far fuzzier proposition that truthers have “some very good arguments which deserve serious consideration”. This puts the burden on the debunkers, because even if someone shows that one argument is wrong, that doesn’t preclude the existence of some good arguments somewhere out there. It also frees up truthers to pile on as many “anomalies” as possible, even if these are contradictory.
For example, you assert that it’s suspicious that the buildings were “completely pulverized”, and also that it’s suspicious that some physical evidence—the passports—survived the collapse of the buildings. (And this level of suspicion is based purely on your intuition about some very extreme physical events which are outside of everyday experience. Maybe it’s completely normal for small objects to be ejected intact from airliners which hit skyscrapers—have you done simulations or experiments which show otherwise?)
Anyway, this is all off-topic. I think you should do a post where you outline the top three truther arguments which deserve serious consideration.