Its more saying that even if true, it’s irrelevant. That aside…
Maybe it’s time you left this public forum to satisfy this desire since anyone who registers on this site can post in this thread, not only those whose opinion you value.
Or I can just ignore the rest of you 
I agree that it may be irrelevant in the scope of anarcho-capitalism, and may shun intelligent people from libertarianism, which is why I myself am moving away from conspiracy theories.
But “it’s irrelevant” or “it’s counter-productive” is a different categorical statement than “it’s crackpot insane”, and if you still want to claim the latter, you better be ready to hear from us crazy folks.
I don’t have much to say about 9/11 though, just that military people were warned not to fly that day, and added with a hundred other prior-knowledge evidences, I’m convinced the government at the very least LIHOP. The physical evidence and MIHOP is always going to be debatable though. WTC7 is amazing of course, but still.
Yes, the article says there is no use arguing about it, but does entertain the possibilities posed by the “conspiracy theorists”. I personally don’t hold any stock in those conspiracies, but I definitely don’t believe the 9/11 Commission Report (aka the official conspiracy).
Good luck.
Vichy are you ever going to respond to my retort? Or am I who of those unfortunates who does not get to bath in the radiance of your enlightened state?
Vichy are you ever going to respond to my retort? Or am I who of those unfortunates who does not get to bath in the radiance of your enlightened state?
Which one?
The 9/11 Commission Report showed that the ‘official’ story was entirely correct. I’m not sure why you’re telling people to read it.
People want to believe the public has been deceived. They want to think there is a memory hole. They weren’t, and there is no need. People lie to themselves daily, compartmentalize everything in their head and forget everything as soon as their fellow monkeys stop talking about it. They’re herd animals, people need to stop acting as if their absurdity is a product of some grand scheme and realise they’re just human, all too human.
I’m not telling people to read it.
The 9/11 Comission Report leaves out some big things like who funded the attacks and why building 7 collapsed, so no, it does not show that the official conspiracy is entirely correct.
The public has been deceived and they continue to be deceived. It has nothing to do with what “people want”. It has to do with what actually happened.
And what assurance you have that you’re exempt from being fooled yourself? Or even that you’re not fooling yourself?
Well, that and these two declarations
are very telling that you may very well be doing that which you despise. Which is ok, I mean, everyone does that sometimes. Maybe, I don’t know. Lol.
This part Vichy
‘Neither are screaming and being calm, but…’
But what? You can scream and be calm. I can open my window and scream ‘Hello neighbors!’ and remain in a state of calmness. That is unless you are going to argue that by increasing the volume of my voice that I am exacerbating my voice muscles and therefore unable to remain calm, calm being defined as a state without strenious activity or worry.
‘I think one should avoid promoting obviously crazy bullshit, regardless of its political motive. Perhaps especially because of its political motives, no worse damage you can do than to argue poorly after all’
Well your sentiments on an issue are your own personal observations. Some might not consider Alex Jones crazy. Also it does not follow that because you dislike others sentiments that they are just arguing poorly.
‘You can listen to conspiracy nuts, if you want. If you have any sense of the laws of probability or social organization you will quickly realise they are both crazy and irrelevant.’
I fail to see how probability factors into political sentiments on current events. Also how are you defining ‘social organization’ ? It is one where an individual is free to voluntarily communicate with other individuals without threat or act of coerce? If that is the case I fail to see how ‘social organization’ matters because whether or not I communicated with a conspiracy nut, I would still be apart of that social organization because I am voluntarily choosing who to communicate with like every other actor. Now if ‘social organization’ means more then that, then you are going to have to go into further detail.
‘I prefer not to associate myself with anyone who believes crazy bullshit, whether it be Creationism or aliens. I’ll defend Gary North as an economist, but not as a theologian (and certainly not as a scientist, which he doesn’t even claim to be).’
Ok, but you never answered my question of why should we listen and/or follow your sentiment of not communicating with ‘conspiracy nuts.’ If you are just trying to state your ideas on the matter, well that is what you labeled ‘conspiracy nuts’ are trying to do also. Should we sever you off also? If not, why not? A perceived correctness on the matter?
My mistake, for some reason I thought you were telling people to read the report in order to lend support to your position.
@OP: There are better and worse conspiracy theories. Let’s take the assassination of JFK, for example. If you believe Oswald and Ruby were lone nut attention-seekers, you have a naive, child-like view of the world. Sure, there’s no evidence that you could take to a court of law or even really win a debate against an informed opponent credulous of the official conspiracy theory. But you’re still naive to believe that Oswald and Ruby were lone-nut attention-seeking assassins.
But the many non-official conspiracy theories surrounding JFK’s assassination vary greatly in quality. Not all such theories are created equal. Many are not even consistent with the known facts. Of those that are consistent with the known facts, many involve unrealistic assumptions or have more moving parts than the official conspiracy theory. All of these are not even candidates for consideration. But there are several reasonable theories that are consistent with the known facts, do not involve unrealistic assumptions, have fewer moving parts than the official conspiracy theory and are consistent with the long experience of history that powerful people who get assassinated are almost always killed by their enemies for the obvious reasons, not by random strangers. Don Corleone gets shot and the government says it was a random stranger homicide. Yeah, right.
Those who get it, get it. Those who don’t get it eventually end up working for those who do.
Clayton -
I’m not saying you shouldn’t communicate when them (just as I never said conspiracies don’t exist; just that some of them require too much coordination or power to be feasible for anyone to carry off). I’m saying some of them are pretty obviously ridiculous. If you think they aren’t - whatever, have fun on Prison Planet. But if you think some of them are I see no reason to give their theories a free ride in libertarian forums; since I think this is one case where the mainstream is actually quite correct - though the main stream because they just don’t believe in conspiracies (even real ones), and I would say that the ones I’m talking about are just ridiculous.
@Clayton: I’m not arguing against conspiracies generally, after all a conspiracy is just a sort of secret plan executed without or against public approval. There is nothing unlikely about that, it happens all the time. But real conspiracies are banal and trivial, and where they are big (like the Federal Reserve) they are very frequently outed quite soon. Indeed, once the law passed the Fed wasn’t even a conspiracy, that is whatever the origin of the idea it was publicly approved. But nobody cares because they accept the institutions.
@Vichy: Well, I don’t give anybody a free pass, though I do see that occur here at times. Agreeing with my conclusion doesn’t mean you’re right.
Clayton -
‘But if you think some of them are I see no reason to give their theories a free ride in libertarian forum’
Well where is this ‘free ride’?
‘If you believe Oswald and Ruby were lone nut attention-seekers, you have a naive, child-like view of the world. Sure, there’s no evidence that you could take to a court of law or even really win a debate against an informed opponent credulous of the official conspiracy theory. But you’re still naive to believe that Oswald and Ruby were lone-nut attention-seeking assassins.’
How can one combat such stunning rationalism?!
There are plenty of lone nuts.
The only thing more annoying to me than a statist is a damn creationist! Sigh OK… let’s deconstruct your claims…
If you have ever studied the science behind the creation of our universe you would find that there are many facts that can’t be explained by the theory of evolution. Such as,
“It turns out that the universe could not have been much smaller than it is in order for nuclear fusion to have occurred during the first 3 minutes after the Big Bang. Without this brief period of nucleosynthesis, the early universe would have consisted entirely of hydrogen. Likewise, the universe could not have been much larger than it is, or life would not have been possible. If the universe were just one part in 1059 larger, the universe would have collapsed before life was possible. Since there are only 1080 baryons in the universe, this means that an addition of just 1021 baryons (about the mass of a grain of sand) would have made life impossible. The universe is exactly the size it must be for life to exist at all.”
First of all, this entire thing is fallacious, and that alone is enough to discredit your entire claim and relegate it to the trash. Evolution has absolutely NOTHING to do with Cosmology or how the Universe began. Leave it to a scientifically illiterate creationist to take true, biological evolution based on variations in allele frequencies, lump it together with the Big Bang Theory as well as with any other naturalistic, non-divine attempt to explain the origin of the Universe, or anything else about science they generally don’t like and call it “Evolution.” This kind of idiocy reminds me of the statists who take every concievable socio-economic calamity or disaster, which really has government meddling and bureaucratic bungling as it’s cause, and call it “a failure of the market.” Why can’t you see how that’s the same? Besides, even if the claim presented is true factually speaking - which I doubt, based on your inability to distinguish biology from cosmology - that still wouldn’t mean that “God did it.” I would just mean that science has yet to discover the true explanation for that phenomenon, and hence, it resides in the realm of the unknown. Evolution doesn’t even attempt to explain the thing you mentioned because evolution has absolutely nothing to do with the phenomenon you described.
It don’t see why it is crazy to theorize about things that science can’t explain.
It’s not. That would constitute additional science. What is crazy is taking something that science can’t explain and then blandly asserting that some kind of god is responsible, and then calling that a theory. That’s crazy! Mere assertion does not constitute theory. Creationism as it stands is nothing more than a resort to pure freakin’ magic to explain the unknown instead of doing the responsible thing and seeking out the answer. For Creationism to count as a legitimate theory, it would have to prove, not only that a divine entity created the Universe (by the way, even if you were able to do this, that still wouldn’t disprove evolution - or weren’t you paying attention to what I said earlier?) but also how this entity went about this process of creation. And since no Creationst purports to have an answer to that, Creationism as a “theory” is worse than worthless. Tell me: How exactly does explaining something as complex as the Universe by resorting to an even more complex entity like God, whom you then claim to be absolutely unable to explain, in any way augment our total stock of knowledge? It doesn’t. The Ultimate basis of Craetionism are the ineffable whims of some transcendent God, just like the basis of Keynesianism are the machinations of some irrational, inexplicable “animal spirits.” Both “theories” fail to get to the heart of the matter, and therefore don’t really explain anything. Creationism is nothing more than biological/cosmological Keynesianism.
You basically have a greater probability that a tornado would rip through a junk yard and build a fully functioning 747, then for life to exist given these probabilities.
So? Don’t you see that proves absolutely nothing?