And this is getting back to the crux of the matter, which I have pushed Tony on repeatedly and gotten no answer. Tony, even if you somehow disproved NIST, "arsonists did it" does not become the default hypothesis. You have absolutely no affirmative evidence proving arson, all you have is implication and innuendo supposedly disproving the "official story".
I asked something similar to this several times and as far as I can tell from reading back on the thread he's consciously avoiding anything that has a hairs' mention of "CD" as a discussion. For this exchange over the last 20 pages his entire MO has been to cast doubt on the NIST report and cast people who doubt what he's deemed "fatal" to the WTC7 NIST report as partisan. Hell if you explain to him why arson for example is untenable, it gets ignored and he casts your unwillingness to give credence to his assertions as blind faith. It's basically avoiding the more controversial explanations in order to sound like the theory somehow has a bearing on the discussion and has more implied impact. I don't see how it does, but I stopped trying to wrap my head around it.
His two base assertions are:
- NIST omitted certain details, rendering the "col 79 collapse initiation mechanism" invalid
- Fire must have been started by some something other than the collapse of the buildings
The extent of the argument he feels is important is that the above invalidates the NIST
and they need to do some new investigation and analysis. But when pressed about where the discussion goes if one accepts this, he concludes his assertions are "set in stone" and moves to some other "detail" to continue shrouding the report with doubt so as to avoid directly stating a position he's been pretty open about in the past.
He's treating his assertions as unfalsifiable, and as long as that's the case, no amount of correcting will resolve the exchange. At the end of the day he will continue to claim the NIST is "wrong" and people should be JAQ'ing off. That people should be "questioning" the NIST's legitimacy without him having to say a word about any other conclusion he would support.
This is the same thing as the missing jolt, there are fatal assumptions in his argument, but as long as he can keep the discussion aimed at perceived important details he can keep the gears turning without worrying about his fatal premise being challenged, and when it does get challenged.... he ignores it. That's been sort of a trend for several years already.
Another probability is he generally doesn't care that skeptics reject "CD". If he can cast enough of an impression about his critics being partisan in the discussion he might be able to turn that against them to claim that such partisanship is the driving reason behind lack of acceptance of "CD" as opposed to lack of evidence. Seen enough of that in the past with other posters pushing the idea.
Another way of putting this is:
If we weren't feeding this cycle of evasion, this thread might have been spared from 20 pages of wasted discussion time. And this kind of explanation kind of states the obvious. Not that I'm really qualified to act as the critic for that seeing as I've contributed to it too.
