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Can we stop making fun of 9/11 here?
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this post was submitted on 20 Aug 2023
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chapotraphouse
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More likely but not certain, just like the accident theory is less likely but possible. Rejecting it over probability is saying that rare things can't exist. Sometimes there's a one-in-a-million mutation, sometimes I find $100 on the ground, sometimes asteroids hit the earth and sometimes they don't. Shit happens without any higher purpose or grand conspiracy behind it.
Rejecting nearly impossible things is practical. I understand there is a technical possibility that if I drive my car into a wall, that the atoms will line up in such a way that I go right through it. But as a practical matter I operate as though that were impossible, because it might as well be. I think you are downplaying just how unlikely your scenario is. For example, you say that "people want to make [9/11] into some kind of conspiracy" but don't acknowledge that the scenario of several random accidents would require an even larger conspiracy in which the relevant parties agree on a hijacking story. You argue that people believing the vastly more likely possibility is wishful thinking, while seriously considering your almost certainly untrue scenario is the reasonable take. It seems like the reverse: you want to believe it's something other than the likely and commonly accepted story, and are therefore overly concerned with the option no one else is bothering to consider.
This is why I was confused and decided you were joking.
Wishful thinking would be 19 people coordinating 5 separate plane attacks on the same day. All of whom are conveniently just the Muslim passengers on those planes in the most Islamophobic country outside of Europe. That's empty propaganda from the same people who brought you the War on Terror.
Sure in theory you could pass right through a wall if your atoms are intact. That's a much lower probability, but you acknowledge that it's possible. You haven't tested it so you can't even tell me how likely it would be, only that rarity isn't grounds for precluding it. 9/11 however tested it and we don't know how many more planes succeeded that day. Surely those five didn't.
Random chance, normal distributions, etc do not apply to everything. It would be incorrect to show up to a football match and say "the odds of these 22 random humans playing football right now, while thousands of spectators happen to be here, are astronomically small!" Likewise, it is not like there is some random probability inherent in each passenger that they will spontaneously hijack the plane on grounds of revenge for decades of US meddling in Muslim countries... an organized attack would make it a completely non-random event.
The odds of a football game occurring are tied to the external conditions of a schedule. The odds of a plane crash occurring are tied to the external conditions of mechanics, atmosphere, and pilot error. If any of those three fail then it happens as surely as a scheduled football match. An organised attack would mean all plane crashes can potentially be attributed to that but we have clear documentation that they are caused by plenty of other things. You just ignore those potential causes in favour of the one that makes the most dramatic story.
That's what Camus called "philosophical suicide" because you're taking a leap of faith into the explanation which provides the most potential meaning to a chaotic system that lacks it. It's human nature to do so.
This is one of the worse bits I've seen you do and it's still pretty solid.
Still a work in progress. I have this beautiful vision of a Guy more infuriating than the confident flat earther.
I think the references like what I quoted elevate it so it feels less like just talking in circles. Depending on what you're going for, another (similar) technique is distracting yourself with overly-specific anecdotes that you were obviously fed by a conspiracy community or whatever media outlet would be most appropriate.
Trying to find new ways of framing it is the challenge. I like the anecdote strategy with the $100 bill and doubling down on nonsensical ways of proving random chance exists, but I need to somehow translate that into a conspiracy theory that disproves every other conspiracy theory and conspiracism in general. Rational gibberish while gaslighting them and pointing out all of the fallacies behind whatever they believe. It's a hard Guy to get right but I want to be able to do it completely deadpan any time people start talking about conspiracies or 9/11.
It just occurred to me that you could fill out the character by characterizing other events as freak accidents.
"This country was founded on that kind of slander, or do you believe the Boston Massacre wasn't caused by a rifle malfunction?"
Or freak accidents as being fabricated
"Conversely, the dude who shot Archduke Ferdinand had staked out the position but made up his excuse to try and get a lesser murder charge"
I already do that with JFK's assassination. Yes I believe Oswald was the lone gunman, yes I believe he fired three shots from the 6th floor of the Texas book depository, yes I believe two struck and killed Kennedy. However I think that was a complete freak accident. If I shot 100 times outside of my window I wouldn't hit a presidential motorcade. The odds of one passing by at that exact moment in that exact place are astronomically low. It's a tragic reminder that sometimes shit happens.