Occam's Texture
You shouldn't attribute malice to something that you can account for with basic incompetence. I caught the 9/11 scholars conference on C-SPAN radio and then listened to Webster Tarpley for 2 hours on Mike Malloy. Somehow the 9/11 truth movement people have to make every connection they can no matter how tenuous the assertion.
Since it takes some time to determine whether someone has gone overboard on conspiratorial theories, I have a quick test which gives immediate results. First, find the theorist's website. Then look for HTML background that looks like this texture:I guarantee it will accurately predict tin-foil at least 99% of the time. Find a textured home page and you will find tin-foil-hat-wearers lurking nearby. Let me test my theory:
Another 9/11 textured page:
And one more on an unrelated but even more insane topic:
Why do the conspiratorially inclined go for this background texture? Occam would explain it as old farts never updating their pages beyond HTML styles circa-1996. I would prefer to think of it as an subconscious plea to shadow whatever they say with crumbled tin foil:
Yet, I still don't quite understand why WTC building #7 went down.
posted by @whut at August 03, 2006
3 Comments:
You are right about the web site phenomenom - fringe sites seem to like oversized brightly colored fonts too. Or back in the di-zay, yellow blinkers on black backround.
The horror.
However, in spite of the fact the topic of 9-11 draws conspiratorial fruitbats like rats to garbage, I think it needs to be approached without bias. Just do some simple razor work. If 9-11 were an "inside job" it would hardly be the first false flag attack in the history of the world -- just the most dramatic.
Building seven is a good place to start. Working ones way out from there, the other two buildings were struck by al-qaida linked terrorists -- but why did they fall straight down? Why not crumple? Then, refer back to building seven -- the one not struck. It fell at close to freefall speeds. It was apparently demolished. Why not the other two?
The implications are disturbing, thus it is hard to rationally evaluate. Time eases that a bit.
Luckily for me, beyond that, I have no idea what happened.
Or the banner tags :)
Why crash planes into buildings AND blow one up from the ground? According to Occam's razor, one or the other technique would have sufficed. To plan for both cedes to Bush the greatest logistical achievement in history. But from our experiences in Iraq, we know they lack any of the competence to pull this off.
I'm not sure if dieoff counts as tinfoil but its certainly got that 1997 look to it.
In partial defence of the tinfoil world, I should point out that RI doesn't exhibit any of the telltale tinfoil traits you list, even though most of its denizens must live inside tinfoil wrapped buildings.
On a related note, they seem to be somewhat atwitter this week about the "limited hang out" (like all good cults, tinfoil people have their own dialect) revelations about the war games going on that day and the Kean Commission being lied to about them.
"Why crash planes into buildings AND blow one up from the ground?"
Well - building 7 was a bit too small to crash a plane into wasn't it ? Why bother destroying it at all is the question - isn't 2 big buildings enough...
Of course, I'm sure if I looked around for a while I'd find all sorts of reasons - alas I don't really care - my opinions about the world wouldn't change regardless of what actually happened that day (though I admit I would be a little surprised if it turned out Cheney really did do it)...
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