Probably the greatest delusion of the 21st century is that secularism is somehow less insane around its fringes than theism.
And now that 9/11 is being remembered a decade on, it is as inevitable as night following day that the Truthers will come slithering out of their dung piles to rub our noses in their nonsense all over again.
So there is no surprise finding this gem deposited on my ‘tardbook news feed –
I am not going to embed this trash here. I watched it and it was as incoherent as it was deranged, the usual grab bag of convenience store factoids retrofitted to support a predetermined conclusion (I usually call this “reality reverse engineering”) – stock standard conspiracist drooling from a very serious and sombre narrator. Those that haven’t seen enough of this kind of memetic poison can see it here.
But what tips this over as excessive idiocy even by Truther standards is the complete inability, or refusal, to grasp physical and numerical realities. Let’s pull this apart –
- Price of gold September 2001 – $US290/troy ounce
- $US300 billion = 1034482759 troy ounces
- There are 31 grams per troy ounce
- Therefore, that is 32068965517 grams
- There are 1000 grams in a kilogram
- There are 1000 kilograms in a metric tonne
- Therefore, that is 32069 TONNES of gold
To put this into perspective, this is the equivalent of 10,700 3-tonne rental trucks, 640 semi-trailers (or 18-wheelers for Merkins), or one handymax bulk carrier.
Apparently, this quantity of gold was removed from the centre of New York, in broad daylight, in a city gripped by a state of emergency and in full lock-down and somehow spirited away to parts unknown without a single witness or anyone even noticing anything out of the ordinary.
Wow. Makes the act of smuggling 100 tonnes of nano-thermite into the WTC and painting the buildings’ entire load bearing structures with it without anyone seeing anything amiss seem positively trivial in comparison.
And not only did this gold simply “vanish”, it did so without collapsing the global metals trade (and the economy with it) and in a manner that it could all somehow be cashed in, likewise without anyone noticing. Now that’s magic. There’s no other word for it.
The sheer scale of the intellectual incoherence displayed by Truthers quashes any hope of ever reasonably debating them – in this regard they are no different from Creationists. They believe and there’s nothing you can do about it. Hitchens characteristically and acerbically describes them as the “exhaust fumes of democracy”. David Aaronovitch, in his rather excellent Voodoo Histories, describes what they peddle as “history for losers”. Both are spot on. The Truth movement is littered with human detritus – those that tailor conspiracies to personal political agendas, failed architects and engineers finding credulous audiences that grant them the thrill of finally being regarded as “intellectual authority” (something that life has cruelly denied them)1, and the whole social gamut of losers from all walks of life seeking personal actualisation by being keepers of Great and Secret truths that society is too stupid to accept.
It would be fine to simply dismiss them all as just loons with high comedic value. But you can’t. Not only do they piss on the graves of all that died on that day with their relentless fantasist delusions, but they also deflect from genuine analysis of the systemic failures on that day and the subsequent actions of those in power. Like why were the various intelligence agencies hoarding information and concealing it from each other in idiotic quests for one-upmanship, and the framing of Iraq for WMDs they simply didn’t have. The Truth movement is a spanner in the works of any genuine investigation ever proceeding unimpeded.
Parasitic, sub-normal loons inventing fairy stories out of boredom in the face of their own failures as human beings. Just like Becky actually, if you think about it.
1 – Typical are clowns like “Richard Gage, a San Francisco Bay area based architect, founded Architects & Engineers for 9/11 Truth in 2006.[7] Gage, who is a member of the American Institute of Architects, has worked as an architect for twenty years and was involved in the construction of numerous fireproof steel-frame buildings” (from the cesspit of lies). Lofty claims, however I have never been able to find any evidence of any such work. Gage appears to have done little more than a few shopping mall carparks. He now tours the US giving WTC controlled demolition demonstrations using cereal boxes and soliciting donations for the cause.
Gage used to have his own website where he bragged about his god-like engineering knowledge and experience that also had a large library of his videos, but it appears to be no more. He still frequently pops up on ae911truth.org
September 12, 2011 at 10:10 pm
Makes me feel embarrassed to be an Engineer.
September 13, 2011 at 12:50 am
nice job on the visuals/explanation for the $300 billion in gold. doesn’t take much serious thought to demolish their claims, but it’s nice to see it actually done rather than just summarily dismissed (although it ought to also be both dismissed and ridiculed, both of which you also do).
September 13, 2011 at 3:43 am
Yes, delineating the weight math and then boosting its conceptualization through visual comparisons was practically concrete. Well, it helped me understand better anyway, thanks, Franc.
September 13, 2011 at 6:48 am
To put it in perspective, that amount of gold is almost 1/5 the total amount ever mined in the history of mankind. Good work, boys.
September 13, 2011 at 5:07 pm
What, that gold? I took it. It’s under my house. I didn’t feel like spending it, so nobody noticed.It’s kinda pretty, I guess. Cue black helicopters in 3, 2, 1…
September 13, 2011 at 9:59 pm
I’d like to see an episode on the Conspiracy Skeptic Podcast about the misogynist conspiracy to oppress women. Why is it referred to as “mankind”, etc? Becky said that “straw person” was intended to be a joke. Then she paused to note that even this negative metaphor for a faulty argument was another example a male dominated society.
Really Becky? I suppose if the term was “straw woman” that would be evidence for how language marginalizes women.
About 20 yrs ago or so, the feministas made a stink that hurricanes were only given female names. I wondered if that was the reason the started to use male names. I think it gave them more names for those busy hurricane seasons where they feared they’d run out.
September 13, 2011 at 10:10 pm
I’d be content for someone to just provide an actual example of atheist misogyny (that’s not from other women). An instance of actual hatred that was endorsed and supported by the community, because that in fact is what “atheist misogyny” amounts to. It has to be hatred and it has to have support from the community – anything less will not suffice. Unsubstantiated anecdote certainly doesn’t.
Evidence Becky. We need evidence, otherwise it’s no different to yet another variant of Jewish blood libel, so beloved of ideologues everywhere.