= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
Randaly comments on Working Through the Controlled Demolition Conspiracy - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (16)
A few points:
The standard explanation is, and should be the default explanation: given that we know that there were planes that crashed into the towers, we know that OBL had "declared war on" and attacked the US previously, that the attackers had previous ties to Al-Qaeda, among their other extremely well known and studied background info, etc, we have more than enough info to establish that there was in fact a successful Al-Qaeda plot to attack the WTC, in essentially the known manner.
There is therefore no need to suppose a government plot.
So the conspiracy theorists are starting with exceedingly weak priors for their case; they also have no persuasive/effective evidence in their case's favor. I don't really feel any need to list every possible argument against the standard case and their flaws, but see eg here or here.
The priors are exceedingly week because the evidence in your comment is filtered. You did not mention e.g. this: War is an excuse to tax citizens and buy weapons from big producers, who in turn sponsor politicians -- therefore politicians have an incentive to declare wars to keep the money flowing. Also war helps to turn attention away from domestic problems. Or this: False flag operations are sometimes used to start a war.
Even including this, it may still result that WTC attacks most probably happened similarly to the official version. But making your case seem stronger than it really is, is still a sin against rationality.
Yes, but as I said, there's absolutely no evidence whatsoever that there was a government conspiracy, whereas the al-Qaeda plot has been exceedingly well documented; there's no reason to believe that government officials had a motive, whereas Osama had repeatedly stated that he would attack the US, and had done so previously. More specifically:
Remember, Bush explicitly wanted to focus on domestic policy, promised a humble foreign policy, with no nationbuilding, and criticized Clinton/Gore for running too interventionist foreign policy. It's only hindsight bias that makes us think that Bush wanted a war. It's true that Bush later changed his policy. But he wouldn't claim that he opposed war during his campaign, when he'd need donations, and then support it during his presidency, when public/congressional support mattered more.
Similarly, there honestly weren't any particularly large problems Bush needed to distract the public from; polling showed that he had 55% approval, and just 41% disapproval; this had been fairly steady, and, as a comparison, was higher than Obama's at the same point in his presidency, even though Obama won by a much larger margin.
Finally, that vastly underestimates the difficulty of keeping false-flag operations secret.
One last point is that I may have confused you about what I'm calling "priors"; I'm referring solely to the priors for the claims rysade brought up, regarding the actual mechanics of the destruction, which include the stuff I brought up in my first section above as evidence. I agree that the priors for any terrorist attack in the US being a false flag operation are somewhat higher than the posteriors given the above evidence- thus the fact that I posted the above evidence.