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The Foolishness of Conspiracy Theories

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Ideas for Pakistan

Pakistanis are full of conspiracy theory ideas.  This avoids introspection.

Some people prefer socio-political explanations over the insecurity of encountering random unpredictable, or otherwise inexplicable events
Source: https://www.patheos.com/blogs/unreasonablefaith/2013/02/ten-guidelines-to-conspiracy-theories/
Staudenmaier defines conspiracy theories as a “tendency to hold specific and identifiable social groups responsible for what seem to be inexplicable aspects of the social world.” He sees conspiracy theories as a flattening of history, or a reducing of a complex institutional problem down to a simple problem of evil people.
The core of Staudenmaier’s talk is his list of ten (or so) common tropes found in conspiratorial thinking. He’s not very precise, but I’ve tried to pull them out here. Some theories will have some of these indicators, others will have other indicators, likely none will have all.
  1. Rejection of contingency.
    In the realm of their chosen conspiracy, conspiracists believe that “everything happens for a reason”
  2. False dichotomy between coincidence and conspiracy
    … and that reason is almost always tied back to the conspirators.
  3. Misunderstanding of the intentionality. “Intention gap”
    Conspiracism does not account for fallibility. It assumes that powerful will always get what they want, which implies that what they get is what they wanted to begin with.
  4. Mistaking elaborateness for complexity
    Conspiracism lacks a third dimension. Think of the standard Glenn Beck blackboard, with its names and arrows. In reality, that board would need hundreds more arrows, dotted lines, loops and squiggles to make sense of the connections that drive events.
  5. Plausibility /= probability
    Common in all pseudo-disciplines. Conspiracists often make the unconscious jump from believing something is merely possible to believing that something actually occurred. There are an infinite number of events that could happen, but that doesn’t mean they actually will.
  6. Argumentation from insinuation
    Conspiracists will often argue elliptically, leaving it to the reader to fill in their accusation. This allows the avoid stating their claims, which frequently are unsupported and appear ridiculous when stated baldly.
  7. Non-sequiturs
    Related to the above, conspiracists often throw out facts that don’t really support their argument, but sound impressive.
  8. Arguments from prejudice
    Conspiracists will sometimes class groups of people together and use common prejudices against that group as part of their argument. The obvious examples are the Jews, but Muslims, Arabs, government employees and socialists are also popular.
  9. False Concreteness
    There are things going on in social reality that are big and hard to grasp. A conspiracy theory acts as a handle, blaming some group for some diffuse complicated problem. This gives you a target to focus your ire.
  10. Telling detail or errant data
    Pseudo-disciplines often focus on the details that don’t seem to fit with the establishment narrative. Sometimes these details are real anomalies, and sometimes they are artifacts of the conspirator’s ignorance.

Source: http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a48389/9-11-conspiracy-theories/

Disproving 9 of the Biggest 9/11 Conspiracy Theories

Jet fuel. Controlled demolitions. No debris. Let’s get to the bottom of it.

An extraordinary event requires an extraordinary explanation. But for some, the idea that 19 men could commandeer four commercial airliners in a coordinated attack and use them as 400-ton missiles to destroy such massive buildings still doesn’t make sense. Even 15 years after the fact, there are still plenty who cannot believe that these symbols of American power—military, economic, and, had they not been stopped, political—were so fundamentally vulnerable to destruction. People want more, and when the official accounts aren’t satisfying, they begin to look elsewhere.
There are still plenty of 9/11 conspiracy theorists, and no matter what you tell them, they will tell you the attacks on September 11, 2001 did not happen the way our government or our media claim. Conspiracy theorists will tell you it was an inside job. They will tell you the government let it happen. They will tell you the buildings couldn’t have fallen that way, or the Air Force could have stopped the whole thing if they wanted to.
There are an untold number of theories about what really happened that day. They are the subject of a well-known documentary film, and they have spawned countless websites. Most of them are weird, and some are almost comical. But exploring these theories involves venturing into the darkest corners of our imagination, where confusion and despair bleed into reactionary paranoia, and the enduring sacrifice of the innocent people who died that day is almost cheapened by slander and suspicion.
Below are nine of the most prominent theories, as well as the evidence explaining why they simply don’t add up.
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JET FUEL CAN’T MELT STEEL BEAMS

The theory: The fuel from the planes that hit the World Trade Center could not have caused the buildings’ structural failures, because no kerosene fire burns hot enough—2,750 degrees Fahrenheit—to melt their steel frames.
The debunk: Jet fuel burns at 800 to 1,500 degrees, Popular Mechanics notes—not hot enough to melt the steel frames. But the frames did not even need to fully melt for the buildings to collapse; they just had to weaken significantly. Steel loses about half its strength at 1,100 degrees, and moreover, the fuel wasn’t the only source of fire. The combustible material inside the buildings (rugs, curtains, furniture, paper) brought the temperature up to 1,832 degrees in some places.

CONTROLLED DEMOLITIONS

The theory: An addendum to the previous theory, many theorists believe that controlled explosions, not the planes, brought down the towers. Among the evidence cited: Puffs of dust shot out horizontally as the buildings fell, and the initial damage was too widespread (particularly to lower floors) to have been caused by the jets.
The debunk: A spring 2005 report by the National Institute of Standards and Technology found that plane debris “sliced through the utility shafts at the North Tower’s core,” Popular Mechanics reports, “creating a conduit for burning jet fuel—and fiery destruction throughout the building.” The blaze exploded down the elevator shafts, disabling them and causing damage (and killing people) all the way to the lobby below, long before the towers collapsed. The puffs of dust were the result of each floor bearing down on the one below “with pulverizing force” as the buildings fell, in what is known as “pancaking.” That force caused the air between floors to shoot out with formidable speed and power, creating the bursting clouds of dust.

INSIDER TRADING

The theory: In the days leading up to September 11, a large volume of American and United Airlines stock was traded—and in many cases shorted, or bet against—by people who had prior knowledge of the attacks.

Bizarre Conspiracy Theories in Pakistan

Did you know that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of Isis, was trained by Mossad and the CIA? Were you aware that his real name isn’t Ibrahim Awwad Ibrahim Ali al-Badri al-Samarrai but Simon Elliot? Or that he’s a Jewish actor who was recruited by the Israelis to play the part of the world’s most wanted terrorist?
If the messages in my email in-box and my Twitter timeline and on my Facebook page are anything to go by, plenty of Muslims are not only willing to believe this nonsensical drivel but are super-keen to share it with their friends. The bizarre claim that NSA documents released by Edward Snowden “prove” the US and Israel are behind al-Baghdadi’s actions has gone viral.
There’s only one problem. “It’s utter BS,” Glenn Greenwald, the investigative journalist who helped break the NSA story, told me. “Snowden never said anything like that and no [NSA] documents suggest it.” Snowden’s lawyer, Ben Wizner, has called the story a hoax.
But millions of Muslims across the globe have a soft spot for such hoaxes. Conspiracy theories are rife in both Muslim-majority countries and Muslim communities here in the west. The events of 9/11 and the subsequent “war on terror” unleashed a vast array of hoaxers, hucksters and fantasists from Birmingham to Beirut.
On a visit to Iraq in 2002, I met a senior Islamic cleric who told me that Jews, not Arabs, had been responsible for the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. He loudly repeated the Middle East’s most popular and pernicious 9/11 conspiracy theory: that 4,000 Jews didn’t turn up for work on 11 September 2001 because they had been forewarned about the attacks.
There is, of course, no evidence for this outlandish and offensive claim. The truth is that more than 200 Jews, including several Israeli citizens, were killed in the attacks on the twin towers. I guess they must have missed the memo from Mossad.
Yet the denialism persists. A Pew poll in 2011, a decade after 9/11, found that a majority of respondents in countries such as Egypt, Jordan and Lebanon refused to believe that the attacks were carried out by Arab members of al-Qaeda. “There is no Muslim public in which even 30 per cent accept that Arabs conducted the attacks,” the Pew researchers noted.
This blindness isn’t peculiar to the Arab world or the Middle East. Consider Pakistan, home to many of the world’s weirdest and wackiest conspiracy theories. Some Pakistanis say the schoolgirl Malala Yousafzai is a CIA agent. Others think that the heavy floods of 2010, which killed 2,000 Pakistanis, were caused by secret US military technology. And two out of three don’t believe Osama Bin Laden was killed by US navy Seals on Pakistani soil on 2 May 2011.
Consider also Nigeria, where there was a polio outbreak in 2003 after local people boycotted the vaccine, claiming it was a western plot to infect Muslims with HIV. Then there is Indonesia, the world’s most populous Muslim-majority country, where leading politicians and journalists blamed the 2002 Bali bombings on US agents.
Why are so many of my fellow Muslims so gullible and so quick to believe bonkers conspiracy theories? How have the pedlars of paranoia amassed such influence within Muslim communities?
First, we should be fair: it’s worth noting that Muslim-majority nations have been on the receiving end of various actual conspiracies. France and Britain did secretly conspire to carve up the Middle East between them with the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916. They also conspired to attack Egypt, with Israel’s help, and thereby provoked the Suez crisis of 1956. Oh, and it turned out there weren’t any WMDs in Iraq in 2003 despite what the dossiers claimed.
I once asked the Pakistani politician Imran Khan why his fellow citizens were so keen on conspiracy theories. “They’re lied to all the time by their leaders,” he replied. “If a society is used to listening to lies all the time . . . everything becomes a conspiracy.”
The “We’ve been lied to” argument goes only so far. Scepticism may be evidence of a healthy and independent mindset; but conspiracism is a virus that feeds off insecurity and bitterness. As the former Pakistani diplomat Husain Haqqani has admitted, “the contemporary Muslim fascination for conspiracy theories” is a convenient way of “explaining the powerlessness of a community that was at one time the world’s economic, scientific, political and military leader”.
Nor is this about ignorance or illiteracy. Those who promulgate a paranoid, conspiratorial world-view within Muslim communities include the highly educated and highly qualified, the rulers as well as the ruled. A recent conspiracy theory blaming the rise of Islamic State on the US government, based on fabricated quotes from Hillary Clinton’s new memoir, was publicly endorsed by Lebanon’s foreign minister and Egypt’s culture minister.
Where will it end? When will credulous Muslims stop leaning on the conspiracy crutch? We blame sinister outside powers for all our problems – extremism, despotism, corruption and the rest – and paint ourselves as helpless victims rather than indepen­dent agents. After all, why take responsibility for our actions when it’s far easier to point the finger at the CIA/Mossad/the Jews/the Hindus/fill-in-your-villain-of-choice?
As the Egyptian intellectual Abd al-Munim Said once observed, “The biggest problem with conspiracy theories is that they keep us not only from the truth, but also from confronting our faults and problems.” They also make us look like loons. Can we give it a rest, please?

How conspiracy theorists defend themselves

Souce: https://www.metabunk.org/threads/the-usual-retorts-conspiracy-theorists%E2%80%99-top-10-misconceptions-of-debunkers.1202/

If there’s one perennial truth in the world of conspiracy theories, it’s this: nothing’s ever new. If you spend even a small amount of time pushing back against conspiracy theories, especially on the Internet, you’ll notice very quickly that conspiracy theorists often respond to you with very similar arguments, and they usually make these arguments sound like they’re making them for the first time. Conspiracy theorists often have misconceptions—both innocent and sometimes deliberate—about people who don’t share their belief systems, and especially about those who actively refute them. The purpose of this blog is to expose the reader (whether he or she is a conspiracy theorist or not) to the most popular of these misconceptions, and to address them one by one.
As I said on a previous blog that also used this “top 10 arguments” format, at CS.com we don’t stifle debate—in fact we like it. However, because so much of dialogue with conspiracy theorists involves hearing and responding to points that have been made ad infinitum previously, often for years on end, there is some value in consolidating some of conspiracy theorists’ top misconceptions about debunkers. This blog is aimed primarily at people who may be fairly new to the world of conspiracy theories, or those who’ve begun to dip a toe into the waters of critical thinking and argument and want to have some pithy comebacks when a conspiracy theorist throws one of these shopworn clichés at you. If that describes you, dig in!
The arguments that will be dealt with in this blog are the following:
1. “You don’t believe in Conspiracy Theory X, Y or Z? You must love/support/never question the government, then!”
2. “You don’t believe in conspiracy theories because you’ve been conditioned to trust the mainstream media.”
3. “Debunkers simply ignore the evidence.”
4. “Debunkers are biased.” and related “Debunkers are arrogant, always convinced they’re right.”
5. “Debunkers ignore the fact that some conspiracy theories turn out to be true.”
6. “You believe everything is a coincidence!” and related “If I’m a conspiracy theorist, you must be a coincidence theorist!”
7. “So, you don’t believe there is corruption in government/business/the world?”
8. “I’m not a conspiracy theorist! You are a conspiracy theorist!”
9. “You don’t believe in conspiracy theories because you’ve been brainwashed by vaccines/fluoridated water/RFID chips.”
10. “You debunk conspiracies because you’re a paid disinformation agent.”
Taking each one of these misconceptions in turn:
1. “You don’t believe in Conspiracy Theory X, Y or Z? You must love/support/never question the government, then!”
This is without a doubt the number one misconception that conspiracy theorists harbor about debunkers, and it’s one of their favorite comebacks. Nearly every conspiracy theorist I’ve ever talked to has deployed this argument in one form or another. 9/11 Truthers particularly love it, since most of them believe at least one government (usually the U.S.’s, but sometimes Israel’s) is responsible for the attacks, and anyone who defends what conspiracy theorists call the “official story” is automatically tarred as a mouthpiece for that evil, corrupt government.
The argument is invalid because it establishes a binary choice. Either you believe the conspiracy theory 100%, or you believe the government 100%. There is no in-between. In the mind of a conspiracy theorist, it’s not possible to question or oppose the government and also deny the validity of conspiracy theories accusing that government of wrongdoing; you’re either enlightened or you’re a shill. I find this phenomenon interesting because it illustrates the shallowness of conspiracist thinking and also, in a subtle way, the attraction conspiracy theories have for their followers. Conspiracy theorists like these theories because they separate a complicated world into black and white, good and evil, wrongdoers and the enlightened warriors. Consequently, if you aren’t willing to stand up and be counted with the enlightened warriors, you may as well cross over to the dark side. There is no gray area.
The argument also illustrates a clear presupposition of the conspiracist crowd: that the government controls and dominates the information structure, and that the government is the ultimate source of all “official stories” used to explain events that conspiracy theorists question. This is also a binary choice, dividing the information out there into two diametrically opposed camps, the “official story” and “the truth,” again brooking no possibility of information falling into any other category. Reality is that the government, at least in the western world, really doesn’t dominate the information structure, and government is rarely the ultimate source of what happened on a given event. It simply doesn’t occur to conspiracy theorists that facts proving how a particular event, such as 9/11, actually happened can be ascertained from non-governmental, non-“official” sources.
On 9/11, for instance, the government was not the source of the facts we know about that day. Thousands of people saw with their own eyes the planes strike the towers. Media outlets from all over the world—including the non-western world—extensively documented what happened. I remember on 9/11 telephone exchanges and web servers crashed repeatedly because so many people were talking about what happened. The details that emerged about what happened, especially the identity of the terrorists and their Al-Qaeda affiliations, were in most cases initially reported by non-governmental sources, and in all cases were subsequently verified by media reporting unconnected to governmental investigations. (For example, 9/11 Truthers routinely ignore the fact that Al-Jazeera, the largest news network in the Islamic world, investigated 9/11 extensively, even going so far as to interview the planeers and perpetrators on a documentary program—there’s no way the U.S. government could have had any involvement with this). Yet, to be asked the question, “Well, you must never question the government, then, do you?” means that conspiracists view an event like 9/11 as having been essentially inexplicable at the moment of its occurrence, and then a sole and unified voice of authority pronounced from on high what the expected interpretation was to be. In reality that’s not how it happened.
Debunkers question governmental actions all the time. Personally I believe the war in Iraq was a terrible mistake. I believe the PATRIOT Act should be repealed. I believe there’s a case for charging George W. Bush with war crimes. Those are my personal beliefs. Yet I am a noted and vociferous critic of 9/11 conspiracy theories. I’m not atypical either. One of the best debunkers in America, Vincent Bugliosi, who wrote the all-time best book on the Kennedy assassination which demolishes all the conspiracy theories, went so far as to write a book stating his view that George W. Bush is guilty of murder as a result of the Iraq War. So to claim that “debunkers always love the government” or “debunkers never question the government” is absurd and insulting.
2. “You don’t believe in conspiracy theories because you’ve been conditioned to trust the mainstream media.”
This is a species of what I call the Sheeple Argument. Conspiracy theorists typically have a great deal of contempt for society at large, and assume that most people are complacent zombies with no more intellectual capacity than sheep being led to an abattoir, hence the derisive term “sheeple.” The “brainwashed by mainstream media” trope is similar to the “you always trust the government” line, but goes a step further by asserting obliquely that major media outlets such as cable news channels, wire services and newspapers are also controlled by the government or the powers that be, and are little more than uncritical loudspeakers carpet-bombing the public with official pronouncements that obscure “what really happened.”
This Sheeple Argument assumes many forms. I had a conspiracy theorist tell me that I’m incapable of believing anything I didn’t see on CNN, despite the fact that I don’t even watch CNN; I had another one predict that I would eventually sign on to 9/11 Truth when the conspiracy theory was presented to me “by someone you trust.” A perennial favorite is when conspiracy theorists cite statistics like the number of people who vote for American Idol celebrities versus those who profess to care about national or international issues. (This assumes that someone who cares about international issues can’t also watch American Idol).
Like argument #1, the departure point for this belief is the assumption that people are incapable of ascertaining facts, of filtering good information from bad, or from distinguishing credible sources from non-credible ones. Both of these arguments have at the core of their reasoning the certainty that it is the identity of the speaker as opposed to the content of the message that is determinative of peoples’ beliefs. I seriously doubt this is even close to being as true as conspiracy theorists believe it is. Why, after all, do some people watch Fox News? Is it because they trust Glenn Beck so completely—or could it be because they like the content of what Glenn Beck says, and thus expect him to frequently make statements that they like and agree with? What would happen if Glenn Beck read one of Rachel Maddow’s scripts on his show by mistake? There would be a lot of complaints. To hear conspiracy theorists tell it, if Glenn Beck says something, anything, his fans believe it unquestioningly. I can’t see Fox News viewers believing Rachel Maddow talking points simply because Glenn Beck says them (or vice-versa).
The “brainwashed by mainstream media” line is also at once a sour-grapes argument, and a breathtaking hypocrisy. It’s sour-grapes because conspiracy theorists, frustrated at being unable to get respectable large-audience media outlets to endorse nuttery like 9/11 Truth, NWO, ancient astronaut or Apollo moon hoax claims, lash out and deride those media outlets as tainted and untrustworthy, thus elevating fringe media like Alex Jones or Nexus Magazine to higher status. It’s hypocritical too because conspiracy theorists will seize upon any mainstream media report that they think supports their claims, and that particular media report will be treated as an unimpeachable “smoking gun.” A famous example is the brain-crushingly stupid claim that the 9/11 hijackers are still alive (we did an article on this subject), where Exhibit A for the Truthers is invariably a BBC news article reporting on mistaken identities in the early days of the 9/11 investigations. For some reason, that BBC article is gospel truth, but yet BBC as a whole is “mainstream media” whose untrustworthy reporting is part and parcel of brainwashing the sheeple against conspiracy theories.
3. “Debunkers simply ignore the evidence.”
This argument is deployed in response to a debunker who brushes off any or all of the usually voluminous links to YouTube videos, quote mines, and links to stories on Prison Planet, Infowars or Above Top Secret in support of their conspiracy claims. Further dismissal of such “evidence” will often elicit a sad shake of the head and a statement like, “There are none so blind as those who will not see,” or some other cliché that attempts to paint the debunker as an arbitrary rejecter shooting from the hip to attack ideas he doesn’t like.
What conspiracy theorists fail to recognize, however, is that, with extremely rare exceptions, there’s nothing new under the sun. Conspiracy theorists constantly rehash, re-package and re-broadcast the same old tired theories, often genuinely unaware of how old and tired they are. 9/11 theories are especially threadbare. Almost all of the main conspiracy theories regarding 9/11 involve some sort of “controlled demolition” claim, which has been widely circulating at least since Thierry Meyssan’s 2002 book 9-11: The Big Lie, and most likely before. All of the usual bits of “evidence” pointing to a 9/11 conspiracy—squibs, Pentagon wreckage, free-fall claims, hijackers-still-alive, Willy Rodriguez, the “pull it” quote, etc.—were well-established gag lines in the 9/11 Truth movement no later than 2003. Indeed, the only significant 9/11 theory that I’m aware of that’s newer than 2005 is Dr. Judy Wood’s ludicrous assertion that Star Trek-style beam weapons blew up the World Trade Center towers. It’s all been done, and it’s all been debunked. Repeatedly.
Of what utility is it, then, that Jesse Ventura gave an interview last week where he speculates (again) that 9/11 was a “controlled demolition?” He’s not presenting anything new. Is a YouTube clip of Alex Jones warning, on last night’s show, that we’re all going to be herded into FEMA camps soon anything new? He’s been making that same claim for years. Am I ignoring “evidence” by not watching the latest David Icke video? I already know what David Icke has to say. It’s as crazy in 2010 as it was in 1991. Nothing new under the sun.
Yet, to conspiracy theorists, every new video, every new Alex Jones film, every new Infowars story is freshly-minted “proof” of a conspiracy, even though it’s just a new take on a very old theory. Many conspiracy theorists we deal with on CS.com are quite young and have only recently fallen into the paranoid fold. They probably don’t even know who Thierry Meyssan is, or that Erich von Däniken has been pushing his ancient astronaut crap since at least 1968. These days you can even run into Truthers who have never seen Loose Change because it was before their time. So when someone today repeats the claim made in Loose Change that 9/11 was done to steal gold underneath the Twin Towers, a lot of conspiracy theorists think this is genuinely new. They vomit up this “new” evidence to debunkers, and are puzzled why the brush-off is so quick.
In addition to this myopia, conspiracy theorists are prone to a technique called “slamming.” That is, they post vast multitudes of links, usually to YouTube videos, in rows as endlessly inexorable as the legions of battle droids in a Star Wars film, and insist that if you, the debunker, don’t refute every single point made in every single one of those videos, you are “ignoring the evidence.” It’s a Sisyphian game if you do manage to refute every point, because then the conspiracy theorist will say, “Oh yeah? What about these?” and then slam you again with a huge spate of links. This moving-the-goalpost behavior is very common among conspiracy theorists, but unfortunately they take debunkers’ unwillingness to sit through the same YouTube video for the 67th time this week, electing instead to go spend time with their kids, as “proof” that the debunker can’t refute the claims made in it. Thus, some especially tiresome tidbits achieve the cachet, in conspiracy circles, of being “undebunkable.”
This argument, like the last one, is also ironic. I have never seen a 9/11 Truther comprehensively refute the NIST Report, for instance. Usually it’s a hit-and-run job like “Oh, well, the NIST is part of the government, so you can’t trust it,” or “we already know that jet fuel doesn’t burn hot enough to melt steel.” So the slamming technique is ultimately hypocritical—as is argument #3.
4. “Debunkers are biased.” and related “Debunkers are arrogant, always convinced they’re right.”
The “bias” argument is fairly common, and is one usually leveled at websites such as this or other written pieces that (conspiracy theorists think) are somehow analogous to news sources. The argument goes that debunkers can’t see the truth because they’re blinded by “bias” against conspiracy theories, and that even if evidence is presented to show a particular conspiracy theory is true, they wouldn’t be able to see it because of this bias.
This argument toes the line between source/credibility arguments and what I call the epistemological objections to debunking, which quickly veer off into philosophical tangents like, “What do we really know?” and “How can we really know a particular fact is true?” Conspiracy theorists who use the bias argument start from what seems at first like a rational departure point, that everything, even conspiracy theories, must stand or fall on the strength of the evidence available to support it, and that evidence should be considered afresh in all cases. However, once you accept this rational view, the conspiracy theorist almost always starts slamming you with the same YouTube, Prison Planet, Infowars and Above Top Secret links that we saw in argument #3 and claiming that these things are evidence—and you’re right back to the “Well, how do you know Alex Jones is wrong?” discussion.
Facts have no bias. The facts of what happened on 9/11 do not care whether they point to Osama bin Laden, or to George W. Bush, or to Britney Spears. The facts of the Kennedy assassination do not care whether they finger Lee Harvey Oswald, Lyndon Johnson or the Beatles. If the facts indicated that 9/11 really was an “inside job,” as strongly as the facts in real life indicate that it was not, then the conclusion that 9/11 was an “inside job” would be every bit as inescapable as the conclusion that Osama did it is in the real world. If George W. Bush really did do 9/11, the facts would indicate that, and anyone who claimed that Osama bin Laden was really behind it would be a conspiracy theorist. But they don’t. The facts demonstrate Osama did it. Don’t blame the facts if they lead to a conclusion you don’t like.
Not all purported facts are equal, either. Many are misconceptions, distortions, mistakes, or outright lies. You may have heard that 4,000 Jews were warned to stay home on 9/11. That is not a fact; it is a lie. How do we know it’s a lie? Because there’s no evidence to support it, and there is a great deal of credible evidence to contradict it. Yet, lurking under the surface of the “you’re biased!” argument is a tacit assumption by the conspiracy theorist that if you don’t treat false claims and innuendo the same way as you do verifiable facts, you’re somehow being unfair. Bias doesn’t work that way. It never has, but this is something most conspiracy theorists have a particular difficulty understanding.
The “debunkers are arrogant” argument is not much different. If you present a fact and can legitimately back it up, it is not arrogant to assert the truth of this fact and deny that conflicting claims are factual. I use the George Washington example. I know that George Washington was the first President of the United States. If asked to, I can prove that fact is true. If there is some poor sap out there who believes for whatever reason that Calvin Coolidge was the first President of the United States, my insistence that he is wrong is not me being unfair to him. It’s asserting what is true and what is false. This isn’t arrogance. It’s reality!
—end of part 1—
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