The author of the piece complains that Goertzel "lumps the 9/11 Truth movement in with the “faked Moon landing,” and “AIDS was a government plot to kill gay people." Frankly, this is a point so banal, so obvious and so plainly true that to deny it is an insult to your readers. We've commented on this recently. No 9/11 denier, I don't think, believes in only one unproven (or in this case unprovable) conspiracy theory, and to say that 9/11 denial is being "lumped in" with other theories is to disingenuously deny a key aspect of the conspiracy mindset. As we've also noted before, the 9/11 denier mindset makes it impossible to parse conspiracy theories. This is a point both Goertzel and Shermer have made, implicitly - the intellectual path to arriving at 9/11 denial leads with equal cognitive discrimination and evidential accuracy to every conspiracy theory.
Oh, and the author complains that Goertzel supposedly engages in "ad hominem" attacks - lawl.
My favorite part of the ae911truth piece is the hysterical pedantry required to argue against one of Goertzel's main points. To be fair, its a point we have to make all the goddamn time: That the 9/11 denier's argument against "molten steel" is essentially fraudulent because the claim that any steel melted on 9/11 is nowhere to be found in the investigation into what happened on 9/11. Here, claims ae911truth.org, was Goertzel's mistake: He said "no one" instead of "no one on the investigation" made that claim. Which is obvious, of course, if you're in any way intellectually honest.
Perhaps Mr. Goertzel should have done some actual skeptical inquiry of his own. If he had, he surely would have found numerous quotes making precisely the false claim that office and jet fuel fires can melt structural steel:
Stanford University Professor Steven Block: “The intense heat could have melted the buildings’ cores, allowing for the collapses, he suggested.” [Not part of the investigation.]
Structural engineer Chris Wise: “It was the fire that killed the buildings. There’s nothing on earth that could survive those temperatures with that amount of fuel burning. The columns would have melted, the floors would have melted and eventually they would have collapsed one on top of each other.” [Not part of the investigation.]
Engineer Hyman Brown: “Structural steel is fireproofed to last between one and two hours, which it did, and then steel melts.”
Structural engineer Richard Ebeltoft: “Richard Ebeltoft, a structural engineer and University of Arizona architecture lecturer, speculated that flames fueled by thousands of gallons of aviation fuel melted the building’s [sic] steel supports.” [Referenced by 9/11 Commission - but not regarding this admitted "speculation."]
NewScientist.com: “Eventually raging fires melted the supporting steel struts, but the time delay allowed hundreds of people to escape.” [Written one day after 9/11 by non-experts in the period before any empirical evidence was available.]
Editor's comments on the inanity of this point in bold, obviously.
The piece reads like a sloppy press release about the sloppy research done by groups like ae911truth - for example, the author of the ae911t piece complains that Goertzel didn't fall for 9/11 deniers' fraudulent rendition of statements made by firefighters about "explosions" and "molten steel." He probably didn't mention them because 9/11 deniers have lied about them. And as a sociologist, Goertzel probably also knows how useless eyewitness testimony is, anyway.
And Jim Cirile concludes with the line, "Let’s turn this feeble smack-down into an effective opportunity." You've got a long way to go, kids.
