AE911T Tries To Debunk Judy Woods

If anyone wants insight into cognitive dissonance, you're in for a treat. AE911 has tried to debunk Judy Woods' energy weapons conspiracy theory.
They have precisely one basis of criticism and that is that their insane conspiracy theory generates marginally fewer decibels of laughter from the rest of us than Woods.' Their version - where a fictional, Roland Emmerich movie-version of the low-explosive material thermite was invisibly installed on what would've had to be thousands of building columns by the metric ton, and then ignited out of order by nonexistent people, oh and also the whole "radical Islamist" thing is a hologram - apparently pales in comparison to Judy Woods' theory that lasers from space destroyed the World Trade Center. You know, one's crazy. The other. Um.

Check out how close AE911 gets to admitting that its own theory is utter absurdity. When comparing the ability of Judy Woods' theory and their own to explaining the "collapse profile" of the Towers, this nugget drops:

In order for the core column breaks to be so straight and horizontal, DEW technology would have to have the following features:

• Be capable of a sufficiently sharp focus for it to attack all or most of the columns at a given level at the same time, but only the ends of those columns;

• Be capable of having its target level move down the building without changing the angle at which it cuts the columns;

• Be capable of having its target level move down at two-thirds of freefall acceleration (as measured by David Chandler), and perhaps other acceleration rates;

• Be capable of having multiple target levels, so that it could destroy the falling upper section of each tower while also destroying the lower section, to create the illusion that the upper section is crushing the lower section, even though that upper section is in itself being destroyed; and

• Be capable of destroying only those connections between steel columns that still form part of the buildings’ structures, leaving untouched the hundreds or thousands of steel assemblies and steel pieces that can be seen flying out of each tower in huge clouds.

In addition to all these features, Wood's alleged secret DEW technology would have to be able to pulverize most of the concrete in both Towers and Building 7, and in the case of the Twin Towers, fling 90% of the buildings' mass outside their footprints. such technology would also have to be able to account for the evidence relating to molten iron, nano-engineered energetic material, and the sights and sounds of explosions described below. Why posit sophisticated secret technology to explain these observations, when some combination of thermitic incendiaries and explosives placed throughout the buildings can explain them much more simply, without making wild assumptions?

I couldn't not laugh at that last sentence. Yes, wild assumptions. Which procurement officer was in charge of shipping in that thermite for Bush, by the way?

This is insanity at its finest. It is either deeply cynical condescension to AE911's reader(s), or mere stupidity. I can't tell. I just can't tell.

"The Weird Factor," or, spot the logical fallacy

Answers after the block. Hint: The "better name" rhymes with "shmallacy from schmincredulity." From antiwar.com, posted over at 911truth.org.

What I call the Weird Factor, for lack of a better name, seems to have become a permanent feature of our post-9/11 world, a dark and sinister leitmotif that plays in the background. On 9/11, of course, the Factor was on full display as a whole string of unusual events and unexplained phenomena were visited on us. The 9/11 Commission did little to clear these matters up, for the most part because they didn't address them. Just a few for the record: Bush reading My Pet Goat to schoolchildren after being told of the attacks, the sudden appearance of the "Israeli art students" – and their buddies, the "laughing Israelis" – in the months and weeks leading up to the attacks, and the apparent passivity of US air defenses on that fateful day.

I mean, how is it possible that the terrorists actually hit the Pentagon, the symbolic fortress of America's alleged military supremacy? After spending untold trillions on "defense" over the years, a sum that never declines in real terms, and driving ourselves into near-bankruptcy on account of it, how in the name of all that's holy did nineteen men armed with box-cutters manage to drive Don Rumsfeld stumbling into the street, literally running for his life?

The most glaring logical error the author of 911truth.org's blog post committed here is called the fallacy from incredulity. This fallacy is committed when one argues that because one is surprised by an event, that event could not have happened.

1. 9/11 was surprising to me.
: The government did it.

Could this "logic" replicate in any way, to any other situation? Of course not. The fact that something surprised you has nothing to do with whether or not that something did in fact happen. 911truth and antiwar.com require you to believe that if you think something is unlikely, it is therefore obvious that "the government" (whoever that is) was responsible. Here are a few examples of this fallacy being committed by the author of that post in just the first couple of paragraphs.

Fallacy from incredulity: People from Israel were in New York City in September of 2001. Shocking. Some of them came to the United States to go to college, and some even came as (gasp) tourists! Because the "five dancing Israelis" were such good secret agents, here they are on national television talking (and laughing) about the conspiracy theories that have been born to justify their existence in the minds of 9/11 deniers. Hey, wouldn't people cheering the deaths of Americans be people 9/11 deniers could naturally associate with? The founders of the religion of 9/11 denial did find 9/11 rather humorous, after all.

Fallacy from incredulity: "A plane hit one of the biggest buildings on the Potomac? Impossible! 2003 called, they want their arguments back."

Fallacy from incredulity:. "Having an international military presence means the Pentagon should've been armed with missile banks eager to be fired onto hijacked civilian jetliners. Because in the few minutes between the hijacking of Flight 77 and its impact into the Pentagon defense officials weren't miraculously granted the authority to rewrite American national defense rules to allow the shooting down of American civilian jetliners, the hijacking of which in every case prior to 2001 was for ransom purposes rather than suicide attack purposes, the government did 9/11."

As you can tell from my sarcastic interpretation of this author's claims, I think his assessments of the relative probabilities of certain things happening is patently false. But even if they weren't, the mere logic of the author's statements gets him laughed out the door. His only argument is that he personally thought the United States was invulnerable to terrorism, and that any deviation from his fantasy world is therefore a stochastic impossibility short of necessitating what would be by far the most elaborate hoax in history.

A conspiracy-minded blogger thinks something unlikely happened, therefore everyone who works for the US government is a terrorist. Does that statement not ring true to you? No? Congratulations, you know more about writing, rhetoric and argumentation than the editorial staff of antiwar.com.

Next up: The rest of his post!