“Truthers” and other abominations against Reason.

Since I seem to be on a minor run of posts before I’m temporarily exiled, I could hardly leave this one alone.

At a party I attended this past weekend, I made the error of saying out loud that I would be happy to punch in the head the next person who seriously tried to tell me that 9/11 was a Bush/Jewish conspiracy.

I do in fact possess the restraint to NOT follow my (in this case justified) impulses, but this restraint was soon sorely pressed. As much as I like a vigorous debate, I CANNOT STAND people who say stuff they can’t back up, and swear in the face of all evidence that “something else” caused it.

So, I have now been informed that it is “impossible” for the WTC towers to have fallen as they most obviously DID on live TV feeds to hundreds of millions of people. I guess I’m just a brainless dupe of the NeoCon/Zionist conspiracy to have believed my own eyes.

It seems as time goes on and memories fade it becomes easier for people to think that the simplest explanation cannot possibly be true, even if the options are illogical and nonsensical. I will admit that I have overestimated the scruples of those in the US government in the past (CIA-US Air Force running drugs into the US to finance the Contras for example), but I have yet to see any convincing evidence that anyone other than a bunch of disaffected Muslims who by cruisemissling (new verb) hijacked planes into them, took those buildings down.

This covers ground I and many others have been over before but I do feel an urge to violence when I’m fed a pile of uncorroborated hogwash. Taking as an example the bit about 7 or so of the suspected hijackers being “still alive”, if that is in fact the case, there are still 12 or so that were properly identified and correspondingly confirmed killed in the perpetration of a crime, as mass-murder is generally classed. Some misidentified Arabs (or guys with the same name that they dug up after the fact) suggest to me a lack of a clear trail on people who don’t even exist as DNA samples anymore, not a bloody FBI/CIA/Mossad/ad nauseum plot.

The big thing is sources and evidence. Sources are great; having any at all is better (in most cases) than not, but said sources must be considered. In this vein, I rudely dismissed Truther boy’s emphatic insistence that his source was “the UN”, as I think the UN isn’t worth the gelignite to blow it to hell. This of course is a broad generalization, but when I hear something palpably absurd, I can trot it out.

What particularly set me off was this guy’s assertion (swearing on the UN) that 50,000 Iraqi civilians were killed on the infamous “Highway of Death” in 1991. This is a preposterous number, when you figure that the accepted figure for deaths in the firestorm generated by the bombing raids on Hamburg in 1943 is 45,000.

Note that Hamburg was a saturation bombing raid on a densely populated city with the intent of causing a firestorm and destroying the city, versus a bunch of aircraft and various vehicles shooting up a MILITARY exodus from an occupied country along a deserted stretch of highway. I would have been at least partly satisfied if he could have even explained to me where 50,000 civilians could have come from to be there to be killed in the first place, but even this minimal proof was beyond him.

This is the general quality of our opposition folks, but there are a lot of them. Being the voice of reason is hard work if you’re to do it right, and even then often you’re wasting your time because they’ve already made up their minds. I don’t have to convince everyone that I’m right (after all, none of us are infallible), but I’ll be content if I can at least make them THINK. Sometimes it seems that’s asking a bit much.