Oh, hey, my old blog comes back to haunt me. I’ve matured a bit since then, so let’s play.

Origin of “twoofer”: It’s a mashup of the then-self-described “truthers” and “woo,” an umbrella term/slang the old skeptic movement used to describe all sorts of weird beliefs, including conspiracy theories, and bad science that typically uses conspiracy theories to explain their lack of good evidence or as an excuse to not follow scientific methodology. Things like Creationism, Flat Earthism, numerous forms of “alternative medicine,” and parapsychology also fall under the umbrella of “woo,” and we’ve frequently observed that once someone gets into such a mindset about one issue, they frequently apply the same thinking to numerous other issues. This is phenomenon is known as “crank magnetism.”

I’m a leftist now, but even back then, I considered the U.S. government uncomfortably close to fascism. You don’t have to put any effort whatsoever into convincing me that George W. Bush and numerous Republicans would be willing or even eager to cause or aid a huge terrorist attack to justify dropping bombs in a region of the world. I’ve never been great at foreign politics, so if you’re throwing Saudi Arabia into the mix, that’s fine. I’m not going to give myself a crash course on their politics to argue motive when it’s largely a moot point. People in power tend to be assholes, especially since assholes are attracted to power. The first problem I have lies in the logistics of whatever alternative you’re proposing, not in the motive. You have to convince me that all parties were able to perform the operation and that they were able to do so without getting caught. Since it’s been 20 years since the attack, I would expect the amount and types of evidence to increase. Cover-ups tend to be only fleeting, frequently blowing up into their own, bigger scandals. So, if you’ve got something I haven’t seen, now’s would be a good time to introduce that. In particular to your Saudia Arabia angle, I would be looking for evidence of such communications. I’m pretty confident there were a lot of spies, sleeper agents, and so forth from other governments in the US and Saudia Arabia. If anyone with a desire to destabilize the US intercepted such a communication, I would think it’d have been circulated by now.

Another bit of the issue is that the notion of an airplane crashing into a skyscraper and bringing it down as a result really doesn’t seem far fetched to me. I’m no structural engineer, but I’ve absorbed a lot of snippets from science and engineering education and media that impressed me with the idea that building something like the World Trade Center without having it collapse under normal stresses isn’t easy. Add in a sudden large dose of kinetic energy (the impact) followed by heat softening (not melting) the steel so that it loses strength, and my natural inclination is to expect a catastrophic failure. Once the supports holding up the upper floors fail, all that mass gets abruptly added to the floors below it. I really struggle to believe that the WTC or any sky scraper could take that much dynamic stress without some kind of catastrophic failure. I’m predisposed to believe the towers collapsed from the plane crash alone because all the STEM education in my life thus far made it sound like the most plausible explanation. It’s not because I trust the government by default. I’m also inclined to distrust governments, but not to the extent that I’ll throw out a chunk of my high school and college education on such an impulse.

Additionally, it seems like an excessive amount of work to plant bombs inside a building that’s already going to be hit by a large plane. Was it really that necessary to make absolutely sure the building went down, to the point of risking the bombs being found before the attack? I find it generally simpler that Al-Queda succeeded on their own, followed by hawks and xenophobes taking the opportunity to manipulate the masses into supporting their wars. If I were a powerful asshole with that agenda, I wouldn’t risk intervening at all for fear of leaving a wealth of clues: Why add on failure points that would implicate me? Doing nothing would provide much better plausible deniability and fewer opportunities or motives for people to blow the whistle before it happened. If someone blew the whistle on inaction, at that time, you could plausibly claim the idea was too outlandish to be taken seriously until it was too late.

I can’t help but notice a certain subtext to a lot of conspiracy theories about the US doing inside jobs: There seems to be this underlying idea that America is unassailable, therefore whenever anything bad happens to the US, it must have been planned by the almighty United States. It’s the Problem of Evil, but applied to a supposedly omnicompetent nation instead of an almighty god. I simply find it easier to accept that shit can happen because no one’s completely in control. Yeah, there’s massive systemic oppression out there, but it’s run by human beings. I find it ironic that most conspiracy theorists I run into seem to take belief in an infallible state for granted and then frequently accuse me of worshiping the state for *not* believing they’re in absolute control.

You’ve apparently read a lot of assumptions about my emotional state from one comment that seem detached from the explanation I provided for that statement.

As for your anecdotes, do you know why science prefers clinical studies over anecdotes? If you don’t know the answer, you won’t be able to understand why we doubt.

Wow. You clearly don’t know anything of significance about me and yet you casually spout suspicion about me being a paid shill. You’re also posting other thought-stopping cliches popular among the true believers of quackery.

Perhaps you’d like to elaborate on your criticisms. If so, be specific.

Once you’ve gotten their emotions figured out, then you can start building logic in them.

Sorry about that. Life’s been bumpy, and I’ve picked up a psychologist along the way. Yadda, yadda, I find I might have some talent for Haiku. I’m setting up a poetry blog right now, and sorting out a new persona: Recursive Rabbit. It’ll be at recursiverabbit(roundthing)com