Yes, it is OK to be racist in that case, as you are not discriminating against the candidate because of “his/her” race, but because you have a belief in the inferiorisness of that race, what so ever it should be!

In my opinion, and it is never wrong, you can take any action you wish for, or against, a person for racist reasons as long as you do not harm the individual.

However, you may have a different valuable, to you, opinion!

But, I am not a BIGOT, as bigots do not consider whether or not the other partys position is correct, I will agree that what-so-ever you believe may , indeed, be an accurate position to take!

Now I wonder how often “Truthers” consider that they may have been dreamt into existence with deliberation on the part of the White House. What other possible outcome could that initial announcement have led to? The 9/11 conspiracy theories are now self-discrediting by dint of their existence. Sort of like how when the homeless person on the streetcorner rants about the CIA, they seem hopelessly mad. They seem crazy in exactly the way a victim of an MK Ultra experiment would seem crazy.

You forgot that he is a foreigner, too…

Think of it this way: if the crazy conspiracy theories put forth by Truthers are so damn fascinating to so many, than how could they be suppressed if true? This in a world where any tiny bit of information, sex or money gossip, tidbits about our friends, etc., gets disseminated faster than the speed of light. Oh, and in the age of the Internet. I mean, really.

Then find the clause and quote it. Otherwise, you’re just blithering.

Taking an Occam’s Razor approach – supposing, for instance, remote control (or computer control) devices installed in the planes, I don’t think there need be more than 100 active conspirators, and maybe a lot less.

Most of the rest would be controlled with selective information, they would think they are doing right.

But why would any of the conspirators come forward, anyway?

Knowing they would be financially ruined and imperil their families, and probably ignore by the media as wackos, what would they have to gain?

I mean, the CIA has been pulling all kinds of shit for 50 years, killing all kinds of people. If you read what they did in, say, Guatemala or Indonesia, it was some really cruel and heartless stuff. Much greater loss of life than 9/11.

But how many CIA agents have come forward to confess to playing a part in it?

Hofstadter is advocating no such thing as the objective view of history, only that some viewpoints can be verified while others will forever remain subjective, as they are not bound by rationality. I’m guessing you’re all in favor of including the irrational viewpoint in the debate, what with quoting a surrealist painter in a matter dealing entirely with geopolitics and terrorism.

The problem, as Arthur and Hofstadter both point out, is that this line of attack creates a recursive loop in argumentation, a double bind where nothing is verifiable because we’ve decided to question the validity of verification. There’s no winning or loosing an argument when we’ve erased all boundaries. It’s become an exercise in creative embellishment, like a surrealist after dinner game. Which again is the whole problem. Truthers want us to play Exquisite corpse and take the resulting word salad seriously, as if it could somehow illuminate something we don’t already know to be sad, tragic and absurd.

I am not sure that makes sense though. FAE calculations, ok, but I think those assume “aerosolized” i.e. carburettor type mixing, through the whole volume? What’s the mechanism for that, and wouldn’t the elevator car block the shaft somewhere?

Also, there are two sets of impact times, one based on seismic data, the other on FAA records. The page here has info on that, with some from Rodriguez:

“Just seconds later there was another explosion way above which made the building oscillate momentarily.”

Second: It’s interesting that when someone disagrees with the so-called truthers, then they are “sheep” and only able to see the world in black and white, only able to see the one (official) version of things and pretty much believe anything that the government says. There’s no room in this mindset for believing that those who choose not to follow the truthers still do not necessarily believe the official story either. Or more to the point, that not buying the truthers’ belief system automatically aligns you with Bush and Cheney. In other words, no grey areas here. You’re either with the truthers or you’re with Bush et al. And of course, being against the truthers means you’re against any sort of dissent. Because the world is that simple.

I can’t speak for anyone else, but what seems to be lacking in what truthers believe is an acceptance that, Hey, I may be wrong in this. I believe something weird is going on but I am open to evidence that this was not an inside job in the way truthers maintain it is.

I followed last week’s discussion and I’ve come to the conclusion that short of going back in time and and sitting the truthers in one of the planes, the vast majority of truthers will never accept any evidence which contradicts their point-of-view. I suspect that there’s something comforting in this belief, that the world is insane and they are the last sane men. It’s actually egomaniacal if you think about it.

structural engineers, architects, scientists.
Very specific… thanks for dispelling my fear that it is just a bunch of random people.

There is just as many “professional opinions” on the side of the official story. Have they all been paid off, too?

You dare to label these people as truthers and mock them? Most have devoted their careers, their lives to public service.
So? They got paid for their work by the taxpayer. Public service is not automatic means for respect.

Why are most of those people retired? Because if you are in mid-career you do not want to be labelled as kooks, fired and mocked by the likes of you.
Or maybe they seek the quasi-fame they once held as public figures? Maybe, in their old age, their minds are not what they once were. It rare and against the law to get fired for your particular beliefs on a subject, as long as that subject is not illegal – so this argument is preposterous.

Those people aren’t “truthers,” they are your fellow citizens who felt it was their duty to speak out.
They are not my fellow citizens, thankyou very much. Also they chose a stupid topic to waste their time on.

How dare you mock them?
um… free speech ring a bell?

I thought you might enjoy this CBC feature on Flight 93 hijacker Ziad Jarrah, which is based on interviews with his family members and his girlfriend and includes video of some of those interviews. http://www.cbc.ca/fifth/thepilot/story.html

And this Time article, based on interviews with Mohamed Atta’s family and childhood friends, which also references earlier media interviews with his father: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1101011008-176917,00.html

I’m guessing a destroyed machine shop and a crumpled fire door.

I see absolutely nothing inconsistent about that. Unless you can specifically point out why that wouldn’t be possible, I think you should think about accepting that as possible under the “official story.”

Look, for instance, at all the neocons who still claim that Iraq definitely had WMDs, all stashed off in Syria somewhere. No amount of evidence could supplant that.

This article highlights why the ruse would be so successful with intelligent, educated people. Three things can be said about the 9/11 truth movement:

1) It has been represented, at least to some degree, by people with wild theories about how the world works, that are completely contrary to what is popularly understood (for instance, the banking families orchestrated all wars of the 20th century and funded all sides, etc.)

2) It has been used by some (a small minority) with virulently anti-semetic leanings to support their case.

3) Many (at lesat 80%) of the theories presented were outrageous and preposterous (for instance, the “no planes” theory expressed by one of the few 9/11 truthers allowed to go on nationwide television, Morgan Reynolds), or simply wrong and factually disprovable.

As a result repeated exposure to these three factors, many rational intelligent come to emotionally associate any sort of “9/11 truther” as a dangerous nutjob, who thinks the world is controlled by either Jews or reptiles.

To even consider the ideas is to duck to the same level as people we find anathema. It becomes impossible. We shun those otherwise respectable people who have ducked to the level of these paranoid folks and actually believe this nonsense, who reject the scientific consensus.

And yet, what is the scientific consensus? What is the evidence we base our certainty on? In terms of the collapse of the WTC, it seems to be based on ONE single government study, that didn’t examine the debris at all, relying instead on a single computer model demonstrating, after fiddling with the variables, that a collapse was conveivably possible.

Thus, articles like this: That seek to debunk “9/11″ not by addressing any of the arguments made (although Arthur did a couple times in the comments), but rather by making broad characterizations and associations about those who give credence to these theories.

The range of debate on 9/11 ought to be from “Is the administration covering up it’s gross incompetence” to “did the government do it?”

It’s interesting to note, that on this site, which probably draws an above average intelligence readership, there are very few actual “theories” about what happened or who did it. There are a lot of questions and presentations of evidence that doesn’t seem to sync with the official story, and earnest refutations of those bits of evidence. This is generally what a debate like this ought to look like.

For me, the official 9/11 story is possible. But it’s just hugely unlikely. Million to one odds unlikely. There are just too many long, long shots and first hand accounts that just don’t square with the official story-Barry Jennings is another compelling one of these. There simply must be a more plausible explanation than what we are asked to believe.

No, I think you probably could find 10 people willing to commit mass murder for money, but I think it far less likely that those people would have the demolition skills necessary to to secretly wire an occupied building for implosion demolition when the actual people who do such demolitions professionally need to put the explosives directly on the steel structure of the building, remove as much of the building structure as possible prior to the demolition, and have never deliberately collapsed a structure from the top down. And those demolitions fail at a significant rate even with unfettered access to the structure. Evil supermen with mad, unprecedented demolition skills are also a bit hard to swallow.

It seems far more plausible to me that the events occurred largely as the standard explanation would have them, and that this wildly chaotic situation produced a number of strange events that will forever remain unexplained because we do not have a complete picture of all of the details of the tragedy, and never will.

And if we do indeed live in the twilight zone and there is a conspiracy capable of secretly pulling this off, is it reasonable that any amount of investigation will uncover it, barring some member of the conspiracy coming forward?

It’s probably hundreds, not thousands? And, try doing a search on “patriot act”, or “gag order”, ? Didn’t the patriot act include a clause about not even being able to state that you had received notice?

Any conspiracy involving thousands (or even just hundreds) of people has only two possibilities:

1) The vast number of people involved had no idea they were part of a plot to murder thousands of their fellow countrymen.

The problem here is that even if it was possible to keep the overall plan secret during the setup, it would be impossible to keep people from figuring out what had happened after the plan had been carried out. Don’t you think that the demolitions experts who set the explosives in the WTC would put two and two together after the towers fell?

2) Thousands (or at least hundreds) of people knowingly took part in the murder of thousands of their countrymen.

Think about how difficult it would be to find one person willing to murder thousands of civilians. Now multiply that difficulty by several orders of magnitude. Keep in mind that there’s a good chance that any one conspirator could turn your offer down- or take the offer and blab anyway. You’d need an army of ultra-loyal sociopaths with zero margin for error.

Oh, but you say- trained military professionals would do it and keep the secret forever out of blind loyalty to their superiors. Bullshit. When G.W. Bush assembled his cabinet his main criteria was loyalty, and most of his former confidants have now written tell-all books explaining what a shitty President he was to the 1% of Americans who didn’t already know.

It’s true that the “Patriot Act” has some power to suppress speech, but that doesn’t mean it could keep something of this magnitude secret. For one thing it didn’t become law until AFTER 9/11. For another, it may surprise you that people tend to violate laws they find unjust. Librarians have stood up to the Patriot Act out of principle, don’t you think someone who swore an oath to defend the Constitution might be persuaded to speak out against a mass murder perpetrated against his peers?

Most of the “truthers” I have heard wouldn’t dream of accusing Obama of being a Hitler. They are far more likely to crank up a Two Minutes Hate directed at Cheney, Bush and Rumsfeld, when not explaining why burning jet fuel can’t damage steel girders.

Suggest you check the original petition found at 911truth.org (this is the petition which Van Jones decided didn’t reflect his views any more). I find at least 25 signers who I know by name or their self-described affiliations to be dyed in the wool leftists. There are a couple of libertarians and a couple of former bureaucrats in Republican administrations, but no one I can see who is clearly identified with a extreme right wing cause.

In many ways, the work you are doing does a valuable service to critique some of the excesses of the 9/11 truth movement, and I thank you for it.

I’m glad you have at least read the Mike Pecararo interview.

I can assure you that it was not some dazed flashback or cobbled together testimony; because it is corroborated by a number of other sources, some of whom I named in #69 above. Here is a raw interview with a veteran fire fighter John Schroder that corroborates at least the unexplained destruction of the lobby:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DBb00PQR1zo

So, the question is, why was the lobby and basement badly damaged? There are two possible answers: 1) Jet fuel pouring down the elevator shaft 2) Some sort of explosive that went off, perhaps unintentionally and early.

To me, 1) begs incredulity. I mean, a jet carries a lot of fuel, bug how much, exactly? We already have a lot of fuel consumed in a huge fireball, enough fuel to weaken the structure of the trusses and create the pancaking, and now we also have a quantity of fuel sufficient to fall down 1000 feet and utterly destroy parking garages, disappear 50 ton machinery, turn fire doors into aluminun foil and completely destroy the lobby, knocking marble off the walls? Really?

Where I differ from you is my assessment if 2) is indeed true. Yes, it absolutely devastates the official line. It blows a cannon hole in the side of it. If we have been “investigating” it for eight years and haven’t figured out there was a huge bomb that went off in the basement, well, remind me not to hire these same guys to do a house inspection.

If an undiscovered bomb in the basement doesn’t utterly shatter your faith in the official “investigation”, then nothing possibly could.

Appiah gives I think the best analysis of race-based thinking when he distinguishes between racialism, intrinsic racism, and extrinsic racism. Racialism is the belief that folks can inherit unique traits and tendencies that go beyond morphology/phenotype which allows us to divide our species into races. Extrinsic racism refers to the act of making a moral distinction between members of different races because they inherit moral or immoral qualities that warrant differential treatment: e.g. that Jews are just naturally avaricious, blacks are lascivious, or whites are innovative. The positivity or negativity of these qualities (e.g. that avaricious = bad) is generally not contested by contemporary cultures. Intrinsic racism is the belief that each race has a different moral status quite apart from their unique characteristics (in the Caribbean this was often defined as: white > mulatto > black) and that we should discriminate as such.

If you want to read a more interesting and contextualized rebuttal of your ‘common sense’ view of race relations, see: Lawrence, Errol. “Just Plain Common Sense: The ‘Roots’ of Racism.” The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in in 70s Britain. Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, London: Hutchinson, 1982. pp. 47-94.

kthanxbye

Truthers believe there is a massive conspiracy. It seems unreasonable that not one of the thousands purportedly involved has made so much as a peep about their involvement, even anonymously. You assert that this is because they have either “taken an oath” or because there was compartmentalization within the conspiracy that would prevent those involved from being aware they were involved. My response is that 1) the oaths taken by the military would tend to drive someone to blow the whistle, not perpetuate the conspiracy, and that 2) even if there was compartmentalization someone secretly tasked with one of the myriad activities required to pull off this very complicated deception is unlikely to be so stupid as to not connect the dots and realize they were a part of this crime, and these people would be even more likely to say something about what they had been asked to do since they were not privy to the whole conspiracy in the first place.

But they refuse to hear the reports of the same FDNY crews who directly saw the massive damage to WTC7. Who saw and measured the leaning and bulging of the building using surveying equipment. The hundreds do people who looked up and saw a large passenger jet fly full speed into the pentagon.

FYI. Explosions are common in large building fires, Back drafts or smoke explosions can happen and firemen know this, so when the say they hear explosions it may not mean they think they are from explosives.

Keith, with this you’ve just summed up the current state of debate in the world with this statement:

The problem, as Arthur and Hofstadter both point out, is that this line of attack creates a recursive loop in argumentation, a double bind where nothing is verifiable because we’ve decided to question the validity of verification. There’s no winning or loosing an argument when we’ve erased all boundaries. It’s become an exercise in creative embellishment, like a surrealist after dinner game.

This approach seems to be applied everything from Health Care reform, to H1N1 Vaccines, and Global Warming.

Not quite. Another important distinction would have been that the sprinkler system in the buildings would have been crippled by the attack. In a standard office fire one usually assumes that the fire safety system is in operation. The fire is then easier to tame.