And we think they're irrelevant: 9/11 deniers to hold OKC bombing event

Next: 9/11 deniers for U.S.S. Maine truth? From 911truth:

Well documented information contradicting the patently false, official account of the Oklahoma City bombing of April, 19, 1995 as offered by the U.S. Department of Justice and the F.B.I. will be reviewed. Why should any one of us be asked to remember the deaths of the Oklahoma City bombing victims in a lie?

Guest Speakers including Pat Shannan – Independent journalist with American Free Press, Washington, DC., Wendy Painting - Graduate student at NY University – Buffalo, V.Z. Lawton – OKC bombing survivor and several others will be in attendance.

Words fail to describe (or appear on) Pat Shannan's startlingly hideous website - an amalgam of broken links ostensibly assaulting your sense of grammatical correctness with titles like "Read more about FDNY Chief of Safety Reported Bombs in WTC/Planes" (link broken) and "New Article! Bush and Republicans Continue to Make 9/11 Probe Difficult" (link, alas, also broken). Real star-studded cast you've got there. "What if... what if we threw a party and the designer of the world's ugliest website, a grad student, a living appeal to emotion, and several others showed up?"

One of the nice things about the Internet for champions of unpopular causes is that websites are easier to paint a shiny veneer on more so than, say, an ill-attended event or marketing campaign designed on a shoestring budget. Though 9/11 denial has a lucrative DVD business associated with it, apparently its big conspiracy-rehashing parties can't get much behind them, even from their peers. Another day, another conference by greedy conspiracy theorists on one of their long-refuted tokens of faith.

Please, oh please...

Dear 9/11 deniers: Please, oh please, accuse the government of complicity in the recent Teabagger suicide martyrdom. First props goes out to Killtown, which provides trenchant insights such as, "people heard a loud noise," and "jee, I heard a sort of bomb-like boom when that plane hit!"

The quotes they pull include those from a dazed man in a CBS news story who initially said the plane impact "felt like a bomb went off;" FOX News' reporting that "several witnesses are reporting they first thought it was a bomb," and an Australian news organization owned by the notorious inside trader Conrad Black quoting a nearly-victim in saying that he also thought a bomb exploded.

Two points.

One, in the Muslim world, it is common knowledge that the American and Israeli governments are responsible for everything from 9/11 to the burned toast at breakfast. The Zionists are the reason someone can't get a job, why the price of gas is so high, why its so damn hot out. 9/11 deniers' ideological allies in violent Muslim organizations were evidently so shocked at the American response to 9/11 that many have actually begun promoting 9/11 as an inside job even as al Qaeda proudly claims responsibility for it. Though most Muslims believe violence in the name of Islam is justified, many appear so horrified at the logical conclusion of their beliefs that some Muslim leaders have decided it is easier to rewrite history than to face it.

9/11 deniers must remain allied with religious extremists on this point to whatever end. They are ideologically forced, as are the Muslim fascists who rule daily life with the whip and the sword in most of the Muslim world, to concoct excuses for every indication that something bad has happened for which the West is not responsible. This is why, in large part, both have lost so much credibility so quickly (yes, sorry to cite my own work...what can I say?). It is to their own downfall to be forced into such a position, and for that us skeptics are glad.

Second: Everywhere else, your sources of information are supposedly actively working against you to suppress "the truth, remember? You guys think the media is engaged in a "blackout," remember? The mainstream media is being unfairly mean to every public official who believes evidence rather than conspiracy theories, aren't they? These insane claims against everyday journalists are yours to begin with. They're just trying to silence Rosie!

No, you can't have it both ways. Either your habitual quote-mining of the Zionist Media for ways to support your farcical worldview is valid, or everything professional journalists say is a lie. Your ridiculous personal slanders against everyone who disagrees with you can go un-punished because unlike the religious nutjobs to whom you are ideologically wed you live in a country that values free speech, but they don't go unnoticed.

Either everyone working in a media organization is a fraud, or your worldview is a fraud. Either there is no such thing as organic opposition to the United States, or your worldview is a fraud. Take your pick. This is why I'm glad the conspiracy theories have begun to burble: it brings 9/11 deniers one step closer to having to sit and ask themselves, "do I really believe this nonsense?"

"The Weird Factor," or, spot the logical fallacy

Answers after the block. Hint: The "better name" rhymes with "shmallacy from schmincredulity." From antiwar.com, posted over at 911truth.org.

What I call the Weird Factor, for lack of a better name, seems to have become a permanent feature of our post-9/11 world, a dark and sinister leitmotif that plays in the background. On 9/11, of course, the Factor was on full display as a whole string of unusual events and unexplained phenomena were visited on us. The 9/11 Commission did little to clear these matters up, for the most part because they didn't address them. Just a few for the record: Bush reading My Pet Goat to schoolchildren after being told of the attacks, the sudden appearance of the "Israeli art students" – and their buddies, the "laughing Israelis" – in the months and weeks leading up to the attacks, and the apparent passivity of US air defenses on that fateful day.

I mean, how is it possible that the terrorists actually hit the Pentagon, the symbolic fortress of America's alleged military supremacy? After spending untold trillions on "defense" over the years, a sum that never declines in real terms, and driving ourselves into near-bankruptcy on account of it, how in the name of all that's holy did nineteen men armed with box-cutters manage to drive Don Rumsfeld stumbling into the street, literally running for his life?

The most glaring logical error the author of 911truth.org's blog post committed here is called the fallacy from incredulity. This fallacy is committed when one argues that because one is surprised by an event, that event could not have happened.

1. 9/11 was surprising to me.
: The government did it.

Could this "logic" replicate in any way, to any other situation? Of course not. The fact that something surprised you has nothing to do with whether or not that something did in fact happen. 911truth and antiwar.com require you to believe that if you think something is unlikely, it is therefore obvious that "the government" (whoever that is) was responsible. Here are a few examples of this fallacy being committed by the author of that post in just the first couple of paragraphs.

Fallacy from incredulity: People from Israel were in New York City in September of 2001. Shocking. Some of them came to the United States to go to college, and some even came as (gasp) tourists! Because the "five dancing Israelis" were such good secret agents, here they are on national television talking (and laughing) about the conspiracy theories that have been born to justify their existence in the minds of 9/11 deniers. Hey, wouldn't people cheering the deaths of Americans be people 9/11 deniers could naturally associate with? The founders of the religion of 9/11 denial did find 9/11 rather humorous, after all.

Fallacy from incredulity: "A plane hit one of the biggest buildings on the Potomac? Impossible! 2003 called, they want their arguments back."

Fallacy from incredulity:. "Having an international military presence means the Pentagon should've been armed with missile banks eager to be fired onto hijacked civilian jetliners. Because in the few minutes between the hijacking of Flight 77 and its impact into the Pentagon defense officials weren't miraculously granted the authority to rewrite American national defense rules to allow the shooting down of American civilian jetliners, the hijacking of which in every case prior to 2001 was for ransom purposes rather than suicide attack purposes, the government did 9/11."

As you can tell from my sarcastic interpretation of this author's claims, I think his assessments of the relative probabilities of certain things happening is patently false. But even if they weren't, the mere logic of the author's statements gets him laughed out the door. His only argument is that he personally thought the United States was invulnerable to terrorism, and that any deviation from his fantasy world is therefore a stochastic impossibility short of necessitating what would be by far the most elaborate hoax in history.

A conspiracy-minded blogger thinks something unlikely happened, therefore everyone who works for the US government is a terrorist. Does that statement not ring true to you? No? Congratulations, you know more about writing, rhetoric and argumentation than the editorial staff of antiwar.com.

Next up: The rest of his post!

This guy loves himself. Also labels. But not his friends.

Killtown's mad about being banned on TruTV's forums. I don't know the guy or why he was, but I find his post-ban griping quite amusing.

One, his post drips with ego, as his posts do generally. This is pretty much in line with the vast cranial expansion of most 9/11 deniers, who regard themselves as "the truth seekers" who are "going deeper" to ask questions that us "sheeple" wouldn't dare ponder. Of course, that they uncritically glean answers to said questions from shoddily-made YouTube videos full of Garage Band house beats and grainy Bitmaps posted by people lacking basic grammar and critical thinking skills is beside the point. The point is, we're sheep because we get our information from people who have fancy college degrees and stable sources of income, and they're privy to mystical sources of knowledge such as only CrystalSeeker99 can provide. Apparently he was banned from TruTV because he was spamming. The response he gives himself on his personal blog is that, well, his spamming was popular and it ain't spam if a lot of people click on it. Trolling is allowed when someone as smart as me is doing it. Right.

Two, he doesn't seem to get the joke when he refers to people who dare challenge his faith as "skeptics" in a derogatory fashion. Consider his passive-aggressive anger at us blasphemous interlopers in his post:

And what's really funny is right before they banned me, I just reported two posts from skeptic trolls for -- guess? -- that's right, them starting trouble (as to be expected from your average JREF skeptic troll).

Getting banned there is harsh. They delete all of your posts. Just ask skeptic troll "Deelite." =)

Three sentences. Three usages of the phrase "skeptic troll." Cute. So do 9/11 deniers just not bother calling themselves "skeptics" or "alternative theorists" anymore, at this point? Have they just admitted that they're a religion?

It pleases me to no end to see that "skepticism" has become a sin in the denier world. There is no better way to further reduce your cult to a broken record player repeating an un-funny joke than to take a synonym for "person who thinks a lot" and use it as an insult. Right on, Killtown. You tell your frontal lobe who's boss. "Starting trouble" will sow dissent amongst the proletariat.

Third, the denier infighting is about to reach ridiculous levels. Remember when they decided that Amy Goodman was a government spook? Remember when they decided that Dylan Avery was a government spook? If you decide to take a peek over at any of these hysterical dens of woo-woo known as a 9/11 forum, you'll see what I mean. Everyone is an enemy, and everyone is scared of everyone else. Its almost not funny. Almost.

Killtown: You go, girl. Fight the man/each other/your impulse to think critically.