People who overestimate their political knowledge are more likely to believe conspiracy theories

It's all yours!

 

Nah, I can't match you for interest in and reading on 9/11 or Paddock. Probably because I don't believe there is a conspiracy I need to educate myself on in the first place. On Trump, I do see some credible chance there is a conspiracy and, perhaps not coincidentally, I do more reading on that subject. Maybe I even overestimate my understanding about it.

 

Admit it: I was right when I said you never saw anything fall like the twin towers.

 

No. Do you think Sandy Hook was part of a conspiracy?

My ignore function needs to know.

On those other topics you have described a pattern of very carefully selecting evidence that supports your (or some blog's) cynicism.

 

B-Bob: I don't need to prove innocence; you need to prove guilt. Go for it.

P.S. I can also read B-Bob's mind, and he never saw anything fall like the twin towers in his entire life.

 

Same to you, Rashmon. You never saw anything fall like the twin towers either.
I'm a mind reader!
Not one poster in here saw anything like that in their entire life. Tell me if I'm wrong.

 

Sure, that's probably true.

 

The real mystery is how they get it to reform so quickly and why can't they get it to remain intact?

 

How about Derek Fisher? That guy flopped more than any man-made structure I can think of.

 

It's because gravity alone is not enough to cause that kind of event. As long as gravity remains constant, you will not see anything fall like that in nature. My "magic" is that I know how gravity works on Earth. And it doesn't do that thing you saw on 9/11. Not one poster in here has ever seen anything do that, except KingCheetah and Rashmon, who saw buildings be demolished with the aid of external forces (explosives) and Derek Fisher flopping.

Let's double down more: you cannot replicate that process and make a model fall like that, such as, say, a model building made of toothpicks or glass or paper or steel or gold or whatever you want. Try stacking three soda cans and knock out the middle one. You think the top one is going to fall and crush the bottom one and also become totally demolished itself? Absurd.

We can even do some high school physics if you like. Say that the top of the building has a force of 1, and the bottom of the building has a force of -1 at the absolute minimum: you can calculate how much time it takes--at an absolute minimum--for that top force to move through the bottom force and reach the ground, given some acceleration caused by falling through a floor or two of empty space where the planes hit. And the answer is way more than 12 seconds; it's like 42 or 43 seconds at the absolute impossible minimum.

 

Nah. I don't have the engineering background to have an intelligent interpretation of what is reasonable or unreasonable in the collapse of the tower. Maybe it's unreasonable, but I won't be persuaded because I know I don't know enough, nor is there really any time- and effort-efficient way for me to gain sufficient knowledge to have a sufficiently educated opinion. So this is a blind alley of an argument for me. I suppose the article in the OP is relevant here -- people get themselves into trouble when they overestimate their own knowledge. I don't know your situation. You may be a leading expert on demolitions for all I know. But for me, I'll take the lesson to be humble about the limits of my expertise.

 

I was not at all happy when my opinion on 9/11 changed. It was really not a happy development in my life. So I don't want to go overboard pushing this on people. But I am concerned for America and our society, us, and the people who were killed!

No offense meant, but I don't find your "Who am I to say?" argument to be true. You only post on things you are an expert on? I simply don't believe that. And you can't do high school physics?

You already agreed that this collapse you saw on 9/11 was something like you never saw in your whole life, I mean the physical process of it. What makes it so very unique?

Saying "I don't have time to go into it, so I'll just accept what they are telling me" is not really even an argument.

 

King Cheetah has done the board a valuable service with this thread.

Thank you!

 

While we likely agree on many political issues and about the Rockets and possibly even some "conspiratorial" governmental shenanigans you are making yourself look foolish with the 9/11 nonsense. I hope you can un-crack the case though.

 

I certainly have opinions on all sorts of things I'm not expert on, as you can see from 20 years posting on this bbs. But being a blowhard on messy political arguments is very different from being a blowhard about a very concrete question of physics and engineering. Staying at a Holiday Inn Express is not a sufficient credential to call bullshit on all the qualified people who have studied this event and given an explanation. So yeah, it's an argument and a bit of wisdom to boot. You haven't scoped out your whole argument here, but truthers want me to believe that the president or others in the government, abetted after the fact by the 9/11 commission, committed an atrocity in NYC to sell a war. And, I'm supposed to rely on my amateur knowledge about how things fall down to buy that? I should accept this incredible claim and the linchpin is knowing how a building should behave when it gets hit by a 747? No, like I said, this is a blind alley of an argument. Please tell me you have more than this to go on.

 

So you want me to prove the Sandy Hook massacre happened? I know people who survived it, saw Lanza in the hallway.

And you know why you'd "never" seen a collapse like the Twin Towers: because your sample size for accidentally collapsing buildings is infinitesimal and you never lit one of that size and structure w a plane full of jet fuel.

[edited for civility after more rude version that was useless if not unwarranted. Apologies to @sirbaihu , but I have a special nerve for the Danbury, CT, community, having seen what's happened to it in the aftermath, with all kinds of kooks torturing them about their made-up dead kids, etc. Almost as horrible as the massacre itself, if that makes any sense.]