September 11, 2006

Numbskulls and Lunatics

James Robbins stood in his Washington D.C. office on 9/11/01, and watched a commercial jet aircraft slam into the Pentagon from his sixth floor window. He is just one of several dozen confirmed eyewitnesses. So he is understandably put out that some French clown has a bestselling book out claiming it didn't happen.

...he is so evidently at war with reality that one is tempted not to waste time with him. His ideas are obviously foolish, easily disproved, an affront to any reasoning person. It would be easy to ignore him. But that would be a mistake. This is another front in what President Bush called "the war to save civilization itself." The history of the 20th century should show that no idea is so absurd that it cannot take destructive hold and play havoc with societies, even to the point of sanctioning mass murder. Allowing the extremists to go unchallenged only encourages them. People like Lenin, Hitler, Pol Pot and other millennial criminals were just like Meyssan at one point in their careers. If they had been opposed more vigorously sooner, perhaps they never would have attained power. When such ideas are allowed to stand, they take root among the impressionable or those predisposed to think the worst. And especially now that communications technology has made it possible to give global reach to the bizarre and archive it forever, it is essential for men and women of reason resolutely to counter the delusions of the fringe element.

I was there. I saw it. That is my entire rebuttal.

And speaking of numbskulls, check out the certifiable Dylan Avery, of "Loose Change" fame, on the radio with a like-minded idiot, mocking the dead passengers and crew for having succumbed to hijackers with mere boxcutters for weapons....(or at least that's what the government said happened.) Indeed it's unclear whether they wish to contend that the story of hijackers with boxcutters is bogus, or simply to make fun of the dead people for the sin of excessive wimpiness.

These courageous studs, by contrast, say they "would have laughed in their faces." Yes, Dylan, but only if the hijackers had been able to find you cowering on the floor in the galley. One wonders about the psyche underlying the publicity-seeking and false bravado by these guys. Sounds like a little dick thing to me.

They make a huge deal of the boxcutter issue as their way of somehow (I give up) discrediting the official story of the hijackings. Is it so hard to imagine that four or five grown men could grab one or two unarmed female flight attendants from behind and slash their throats with Exacto knives, and then go do the same to a pilot and co-pilot?

Then they mock Rumsfeld for having said in early reports that the hijackers may have used "plastic knives" as weapons. Is Dylan Avery so ignorant that he has never seen, nor can imagine an Exacto knife in a plastic casing (with the same metal blades as the original)? I see them all the time. Is it too difficult for Einstein Avery to figure out that these plastic casings may have been precisely the way the hijackers were able to avoid detection at the airport? This is conspiracy theory by Beavis and Butthead.

Watch and listen to lots of YouTube video courtesy of Allah at Hot Air. It contains point-by-point refutation of the lame points made by Avery and his sidekicks, pictures of Pentagon crash bodies, aircraft debris, etc. If Avery's debate with the editors of Popular Mechanics (also on video at the Hot Air link) had been a fight, they would have stopped it. So go watch it, and pass it along.

Yes, it's silly. But Robbins is right. As long as polls say lots of people are buying into this nonsense, we have to combat it with reality at every turn. More Robbins:

...notions like this are kept alive by people who have a predisposition to believe them, those who have pre-existing grudges and will engage in whatever reality-denying behavior justifies their baseline prejudices.

(I think all this started at Ace)

UPDATE 9/12: The Editor of Popular Mechanics responds to the conspiracy loonies:

On Feb. 7, 2005, I became a member of the Bush/Halliburton/Zionist/CIA/New World Order/Illuminati conspiracy for world domination. That day, Popular Mechanics, the magazine I edit, hit newsstands with a story debunking 9/11 conspiracy theories. Within hours, the online community of 9/11 conspiracy buffs - which calls itself the "9/11 Truth Movement" - was aflame with wild fantasies about me, my staff and the article we had published. Conspiracy Web sites labeled Popular Mechanics a "CIA front organization" and compared us to Nazis and war criminals.

For a 104-year-old magazine about science, technology, home improvement and car maintenance, this was pretty extreme stuff. What had we done to provoke such outrage?

Research.


Posted by dan at September 11, 2006 10:25 PM