A year ago in my first month of being in New York I volunteered as a phone-athon pledge collector. The people working there were a couple of the most extra liberal people I've ever met (and I just moved from boston). They began talking about 9/11 as if it was a conspiracy and I had to ask them if they really believed this. I was amazed to hear these arguments here in new york city, at this radio station that is right down the street from ground zero. They launched into a slightly arrogant description of a vast conspiracy to blow up buildings as if it were common knowledge. I went home amazed that people, new york people, believed this. I read this Popular Mechanics article about the myths that support these and realized they don't make sense and I was good. I didn't waste anytime looking into it and I could even shut people down when they started talking about it at parties. This is important to me, because the idiots who chase these stupid theories around are what kills democracy. If people put as much effort into what government is doing as they did into what government may have done, the whole country would be better.
Whenever I get the chance I like to see what these people think and find out how to debunk it, thinking maybe I can turn somebody towards the light at the bar or something. So after watching the southpark 9/11 episode I thought I would check out what stuff these people were saying. I started watching this little documentary and after skipping past the intollerable protest footage, and the requiste gracious footage of the planes hitting, I started watching at the part where they talk about the way the building was designed. Basically, the building is not going to get dropped all the way to the ground as fast and as clean as it did unless you cut the central beams at the core of the building. As I was trying to explain to myself that the jet fuel fire pooled at the bottom of the elevator shafts could melt the beams they showed footage of the other building that got destroyed. Tower 7 fell the same way that the others did, it just dropped, but it did not have any planes hit it. As I was mulling this over, they went on to say that there was molten metal found in this tower, similar to the molten metal found in the other two. And then they had all the testimonies of the Fire fighters and paramedics who were there, and they accounts of hearing explosions right before the building fell. And then they had an architect from the building who was surised, given that they planed the towers to withstand a plane hitting it.
And then...DAMN IT... Now I'm as crazy as the rest of them. Well not as crazy, I'm not ready to buy that its a government plot yet.
2 comments:
never discount the ability of a man to protect his ego--and his architectural firm--from legal malpractice liability. to win the contract to design and construct such a prominent and lucrative project such as anything involved in the world trade center, you (or your firm) must contractually guarantee that the building can withstand anything that could conceivably happen to it; as a result, should something happen for which you contractually guaranteed would not, you are legally liable for breach of contract--and must pay the resultant damages. the destabilization and earth shock resulting from the fall of one tower could easily compromise the structural integrity of other buildings. moreover, no building is designed to support the weight of a jumbojet inserted into its top floors--that's the reason there aren't many more floors above those in the first place.
you must always ask yourself: what purpose could there possibly be to detonating these buildings? if it weren't bin Laden et al, why did he seize the opportunity to claim it? the answers to these questions quickly lead a serious thinker into such preposterous logical inferences that two outcomes result:
1) it just offends the conscience and the imagination to allow oneself to believe it
2) (perhaps more poignantly) if you believe it, you assert "Wag the Dog" on all consequences that permit themselves to be reasonably easily rationalized through the deployment of conspiracy theory. you lose faith in everything you have ever believed in. you no longer believe anything government does or says--let alone anyone else. a considerate, thoughtful person simply cannot do this--at least not without losing all hope.
I rethought this whole thing as you can see above. The idea of a 1960's architectural firm planning for a jumbojet strike with fuel spills and fire spreading without computers, or even calculators, is ridiculous. The buildings were lucky to be able to be standing up there under there own weight. Then once the jets hit it and threw off the delicate mesh of steel trusses and columns the joints and bolts of the building began coming undone from the stresses of trying to stay up right. Of course when this proved impossible and the amazing tonnage of the upper floors began coming down on the lower floors well it looked like an explosion. And frankly, no other building that high in the air, with that much mass and potential energy has fallen, no one knows what it would look like.
However the serious thinker, and the occasional idiot, can look at these events happening and from lack of information be tricked into thinking a whole range of things. They can conjure up a list of people who may benefit from the event, and even some ways that they would go about pulling it off. They go about putting every logical idea behind the truth up for speculation and then post their theories against the idea on the internet. Now when you try to get some serious thinking done you are faced with contradicting facts about everything. For example, they say al jazeera had bin laden denying the attacks in the first week after the attacks. for the country I believe there are three outcomes:
1) the inane conclusions of false logic completely force some to not believe any non mainstream story.
2) You assume the opposite, that there is a large, unstoppable scheme for world domination, and unless you buy organic and smoke copious amounts of kind buds, they will kill your babies
3) You question both the News and the Online theorist and use your own logic to come up with ideas, and of course be prepared to listen to reasonable counter arguments.
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