the conspiracy theorists are starting with exceedingly weak priors for their case
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 hindsi
I hope I'm not breaking any taboos here. It's been a while since I've come onto the discussion section and I admit I'm not too up to date on the topics.
I'm having difficulty responding to someone who is convinced that 7WTC was brought down by controlled demolition on September 11th, 2001. They're referencing the controlled-looking destruction of 7WTC and various other incriminating looking things. Thermite and thermite waste products seem to come up a lot.
Now, I have definitely noticed I'm confused here. While I hold the opinion that the towers went down because of the planes/fires (i.e. the standard explanation) I have difficulty seeing how the falsity of controlled demolition is the slam-dunk folks seem to think it is. Could somebody walk me through this?
[EDIT: About a million edits later, I have finally worked through the problem with my link: I needed it to be in HTML and not in the comment format.]