Messages in this group:
* Re: A question for the anti-"conspiracy"-theorists about 9/11
* Re: A question for the anti-"conspiracy"-theorists about9/11
* Re: A question for the anti-"conspiracy"-theorists about9/11
=========== Message 1 =========== Subject: Re: A question for the anti-"conspiracy"-theori
At around 21/8/06 8:18 pm, Seth Ackerman wrote:
>
> I apologize. It looks like I misread the spirit of your question. I'm
> all for naive questioning, I do it all the time, and I agree that it's
> often the best way to get at an answer.
>
Seth,
thank you for your kind response, and pointers.
=========== Message 2 =========== Subject: Re: A question for the anti-"conspiracy"-theori
At around 21/8/06 8:15 pm, Jordan Hayes wrote:
> The thing I really don't get about this question is that it doesn't
> seem like there's any disagreement who did it: Osama bin Laden says
> that Mohammad Atta and the rest did this.
>
But what question are you talking about? I didn't ask the question "who did it?". Did someone else introduce that into the discussion?
> In order to believe that the
> government did whatever any one of these theorists say they did, you'd
> have to believe that bin Laden is going along with it.
Which theorists? How are they related to my question?
> All these discussions about how hard it is to fly or what it takes to
> coordinate such an operation are all just an exhibition of what I
> call the "GSP Syndrome" -- the Generic Smart Person Syndrome. The GSP
> thinks about it for a minute and thinks: hey, wait: isn't this _hard_
> to do? What do I know about it? I can Google some things, I know how
> to read, I know how to form an opinion, I know how to attack things
> from logical standpoints, I know a contradiction when I see it ...
> and soon they have a whole 'theory' about what did and what didn't
> happen.
Jordan, this is what I would call responding to a personal demon syndrome! ;-) (others may refer to it as a strawman coupled with ad hominem). Your hyperbole seems to have departed from reality entirely by the time you reach "I know a contradiction when I see it..." from where you reach "a whole 'theory'". I think we (at least those of us who are not organizing) should all try, among other things, to attack things from a logical standpoint, yes? The error is not in doing that. Nor is it wrong to start from some premise, keeping in mind reductio ad absurdum. The error is in thinking that finding holes in a thesis compels one to adopt a different one (especially one of lesser explanatory power or consistency). Hence, to avoid asking questions would be IMHO an act of dispensing of the baby with the bathwater or perhaps to heed too blindly Nietzsche's caution of looking into the abyss!
> Get over it.
Very macho, Jordan, very macho. Why not the more direct "Fuck you"?
=========== Message 3 =========== Subject: Re: A question for the anti-"conspiracy"-theori
At around 22/8/06 10:38 am, Wojtek Sokolowski wrote:
>
> In this particular case, cognitive splitting occurs between
> perceptions of the attackers' skills and abilities and the difficulty
> to fly commercial jets. The enemies are often being perceived as
> dumber than they actually are - quite a common perception indeed.
> Operating a complex machinery is often perceived as more
> intellectually demanding than it actually is - a result of a common
> confusion between the skill required to build a machine and the skill
> required to operate it. It seems that learning to fly jets is
> not as difficult as many think. After all, there hundreds of
> thousands if not millions of pilots around the world.
>
This is what on the old Internet we used to call "On the Internet, if many of us agree among each other that the other guy is wrong, we can shoot down his reasoning without actually offering a counter-argument" i.e., do not acknowledge the individual or his argument, instead have a discussion about it. ;-)
Your argument above is trivially wrong. I doubt there are three hundreds of thousands of large-body jet pilots in the world, but let us assume there are some number that is significant. These guys/women go through one or more years of training and years of miles under their belt before they got into the cockpit of these planes.
In fact, we can see how quite the opposite argument can be constructed based on your confusion: if it is possible that anyone can up and fly a plane (if they have some smarts) airline pilots would be much lesser paid than they are (there are huge holes in this reasoning also).
The problem with argument from [amateur] psycho-analysis is that you have to make large assumptions of fact to make the caricature stick on the individual. For example, the idea of "enemies". Atta and gang, while no friends of mine, are not my enemies. Given this poor premise the rest of the stuff fails to trivially hold.
Having decided that I am your enemy ;-) you are perhaps erring in thinking that I am smarter than I really am. My question probably has trivial answers (some of which have already been proposed) that require much lesser acronyms and high theory.
--ravi
-- Support something better than yourself: ;-) PeTA: http://www.peta.org/ GreenPeace: http://www.greenpeace.org/ If you have nothing better to do: http://platosbeard.org/