Why do people dismiss 9/11 conspiracy theories so easily?

I wouldn't have believed it, either, if I hadn't seen copies of official government documents detailing exactly that.

I remember a Cracked article remarking that the Operation Northwoods documents are like porn for conspiracy theorists.

I'd believe that the US blew up the Maine.

No so certain on Pearl Harbor. It was a giant percentage of the American fleet. A huge chunk of the Japanese front was a giant gradual retreat so they could repair those losses. It seems like a pretty bad military decision. Now, provoking the Japanese? That I could probably believe (and think justified).

Not posted yet?

I don't think we blew up that Maine, for a few reasons. The main one is that it was our second best ship at the time. I'd be like destroying two or three Nimitz class carriers as a reaons to fight China.

That is true. But you have to admit the timing was pretty suspicious.

Gah, darn it, now you guys have depressed me right before bedtime. I have a lot of trouble buying conspiracy theories. I have too much belief in human stupidity, and even moreso when you've got groups of people together. Considering such ideas is different from trying to implement them, and way different from implementing them successfully.

What depressed you? Even the Maine was a long time ago, and Spain deserved to lose its empire by basically any moral standard.

I was certain I'd already linked this in the thread, but I guess I didn't.

edited 2nd Nov '11 7:36:30 PM by feotakahari

@Ultrayellow

I read it from the beginning. Depressing. But off topic! Point is, I don't find the conspiracy theories particularly believable when there's so much chance and stupidity to make them go wrong.

edited 2nd Nov '11 7:38:00 PM by Clevomon

I offer water gate as proof these things can't happen without someone telling.

Really late to the party here, but I was editing a page that was talking about coverage of the attacks in the media in the weeks after the attacks, and found this while searching. As I had also seen some videos of the attacks while remembering the attack (and saw a number of videos from a large docket of videos that were released under the Freedom of Information Act some time back) a month ago, I did want to weigh in.

People dismiss 9/11 conspiracy theories easily, not only because most of the arguments devolve into the "truther" screaming at the other person or using all-caps/insults to justify their position, but also because they have no idea just what version of the "conspiracy" is the agreed-upon one. I have seen "truthers" simultaneously bat around things like "the media edited all videos of the airliners hitting the towers with CGI", "the planes were remote-guided" and "all of the people who saw the attacks were actors that were covering up for the real motive".

I thought that the FOIA releases that I saw would have helped resolve the issue once and for all (as they include many amateur videos and chopper cameras that show the exact same thing with the various impact angles), but this has done nothing but intensify the debate.

The notion that a government could pull off an operation that includes thousands of co-conspirators, including plane pilots, the civilians on the airplanes, people in the towers, the tens of thousands of people who either saw or recorded video of the attacks or the firefighters who went through the wreckage is just too absurd to consider. Not only that, but "truthers" apparently refuse to believe that the buildings essentially caved on themselves, and instead choose to argue about whether a certain color of smoke constitutes something called "nano-thermite" or not.

It's a sad situation.

As far as I can tell most of these theories only exist because "this is what the government said happened, so it must have actually happened differently".

For the same reason people dismiss Holocaust, climate denier, and Birther conspiracies. They're stupid and most people have heard their arguments a million times and the reasons they don't hold up to scrutiny. To be honest at this point I've dealt with enough of these people that I'm sick of explaining the holes in their theories and would rather say "You're wrong" and leave it at that.

I don't see why people feel the need to make up these theories anyway. Everyone seems so desperate to "prove" that NASA never landed on the Moon, for example.

I think it might be the idea that the government can't possibly have good intentions, so everything they did that was good must have been faked, and everything bad must have been the fault of the government.

And concerning the moon-landing. With a good enough telescope, you can see the flag. Also, if it had been faked, the Soviet Union would have come out screaming about it. It's not like the moon is hard to see.

edited 3rd Nov '13 8:20:36 AM by Zendervai

Yeah, that never made sense to me. What does that do for us other than giving us a way to one-up the Russians?

I did once have a person say that the Soviets never said anything because they were working with the US for some reason. I laughed and called the person an idiot who had no clue about historical matters.

It's not so much bad intentions as it is having intentions in the first place.

Or, to put it more clearly, the level of power and size that the U.S. national government operates on is so great that there's no way that they could be incompetent. If something happens, they wanted it to happen. Every time. All the time.

This is why you get the really ridiculous theories (like the Bush administration having "seeded" Hurricane Katrina), just because of that.

edited 3rd Nov '13 8:33:34 AM by TotemicHero

Really? Why on earth would the government want to create disasters? It's throwing money away. It's still not as bad as that insane flat-earth society thing where it requires you to believe that pretty much all modern technology is a sham.

And this is the government that recently managed to cripple itself. Yes, that sounds really competent. Admittedly there are some real conspiracies, but they tend to be "Didn't really think about what we'd actually do with this", and they tend to be noticeably smaller in scale.

edited 3rd Nov '13 8:37:49 AM by Zendervai

Modern technology... a sham.

???

The idea is that the earth is flat, and the sky is a solid object maybe a couple dozen kilometers up. I should rephrase. Modern telecommunications technology is a sham. The basic thought process seems to be that the round Earth is an attempt to disprove Jesus because he ascended up into heaven. Discounting the fact that ascending down would require a shovel.

Zendervai: There are also people that think Obama made Hurricane Sandy. Evidently it was because he wanted to score political points by having a good response to a disaster right before the election.

Ascending up doesn't have to mean he physically rose into the sky. He could have just traveled to another dimension or something.

edit: Wait, how does the Earth being round prevent him from going up? He could have just flown into space.

edited 3rd Nov '13 8:43:07 AM by Kostya

The main Katrina conspiracy theory I've heard is that Bush had the military (or the FBI or the NSA or the CIA or FEMA or the USPS or some other government agency) weaken or blow up levees so that black people would get flooded because Republicans are genocidally racist cartoon supervillains reasons.

As for 9/11, the conspiracy collapses under its own weight. No government could pull the usual theory plan off without getting caught.

There's also an amusing deficit of evil on the US government's part in these conspiracy theories: they are prepared to crush and incinerate 3500 of their own citizens and cause billions of dollars of property destruction in the nation's first city...but they're happy to let people point it out on the internet. Yeah right.

Because heaven is always above you, no matter where you are standing.

I'm generally dismissive of most conspiracy theories because they rely on the "no incompetence allowed" belief. Pearl Harbor is the only one that has any justification for me. (There's way too much odd circumstantial evidence, coupled with the fact that everyone who was not Admiral Kimmel would have to be drinking from the Idiot Ball kool-aid for it to not be planned in some way.) Even then I don't believe it was completely deliberate.

The key phrase is "THEY don't want you to know." It turns off all critical thinking. It really is amazing. My mother believes in everything from UFOs to spontaneous combustion. All the Discovery Channel narrator has to say is, "Scientists refuse to look at the evidence", and she believes it. My old boss knew that Gerald Ford was involved in Kennedy's shooting, Nixon's impeachment, and dozens of other plots culminating in being in handed the Presidency like some trophy.

I personally think 9/11, like Pearl Harbor, was the result of intentionally lax security. FDR needed a spur to enter WWII, and Bush was a little too fixated on lurid conservative fantasies of taking democracy apart. FDR sabotaged Japan's imperial designs, a game the Japanese were late to joining, now told, "Sorry, we took all the pieces, you don't get any." Bush let the country get flushed down the drain while he sat in a dark room plotting a second Iraq War. What a big baby.

On the other hand, the Truther movement relies on one premise: that everyone is in on the conspiracy to some degree. This alone is pretty paranoid. What happens if one person leaks the plot? The NSA alone is a pretty leaky place, and no one's getting murdered.

That's mostly it. Half-truths like Bush's complacency combined with wingnut paranoia. After all, our government is capable of wild, selfish acts of violence. And life is pretty cheap in the states. Everyone's afraid of being killed by police or roving gangs or terrorists, then being forgotten a week later by a jaded media. To an impressionable mind, orchestrating a false flag attack on Manhattan isn't too far fetched.

edited 3rd Nov '13 10:17:15 AM by johnnyfog