On “conspiracy theory” and democracy — Important P.S. to “To debunkers”

I wrote “To debunkers” last night, shortly before going to bed. This morning I realize I left out something very, very important.

Time to get serious about proving “assisted collapse” of WTC buildings

Needed: More scientists and engineers. And more teamwork. And better peer review.

I just now heard about the following, on 911blogger: A Proposal for Proving Controlled Demolition in a Civil Negligence Suit Against the Security Groups Responsible for the WTC.

In my opinion, this is WAY premature. We are NOT yet anywhere near ready to prove any such thing in a court of law, not even in a civil case.

Common a priori objections by “debunkers,” including arguments from authority and the “someone would have talked” and “too many people” arguments

Every now and then I get a wave of “debunkers” visiting this blog. They’re welcome to post here; I’ve learned a lot from them. But, in the future, I would like to try to avoid certain repetitious arguments, or at least confine those particular arguments to relevant threads such as this one.

There are some a priori arguments they almost always bring up in an effort to prove that there could not have been any government complicity in the attacks of 9/11. In recent debates here, those arguments got jumbled together with other, meatier issues in comment threads.

To avoid such jumbling in the future, I’ve decided to devote this post to the more common a priori arguments. I’ll then add a rule to my comment policy requiring that, in the future, these and similar a priori arguments be discussed only in comments below this post (or other posts on these same topics), rather than jumbled together with other, more substantive discussions.

In this post I’ll also provide a brief review of my debates with “debunkers” in general, for the benefit of “debunkers” visiting this blog for the first time. Some of the discussions we’ve had here have been very worthwhile.

Engineers were surprised by the WTC collapses

Unfortunately I can’t locate the source for this right now, but I recently came across a claim, by some official-story defender, to the effect that “as soon as the planes hit the Twin Towers, every engineer in the world expected them to collapse.” Whoever made that claim, it is definitely false. Even the better-informed “debunkers” would not agree with it.

• Some quotes showing that many engineers were surprised
• What this does and does not mean