The JREF/ISF debunking crowd certainly doesn't help with its tough-on-truthers style, but that cannot be the reason you insist your mission is that of the anthropologist, recording "debunking subculture memes" and insisting you are merely documenting things that to any casual observer are so forlorn, the real motives emerge between the lines despite the pretense.
Frankly I find that to be the real puzzle - why your motivation is given such a pass. The bottom line is that a few folks hurt your feelings, didn't they? Someone owes you an apology, don't they? Probably Ryan Mackey does, doesn't he? It seems the list of folks that ought to address your grievances is the same you constantly cite under the guise of some "meme" they allegedly got wrong, "memes" so trivial they cannot possibly warrant the deep anthropological mission of debunking-subculture-meme-documenter you pretend to be on.
I propose an M_T apology thread. I think it will help everyone.
Actually, the history behind all this is rather amusing. It's all rooted in, believe it or not, the Truth Movement's reaction to NIST NCSTAR.
For obvious reasons, debunkers referred often to NSCTAR when addressing various Truther claims about the collapse of the two towers. The reports were generated by numerous collaborating experts and peer-reviewed, and thus legitimately authoritative. Attacking the credibility of NCSTAR therefore became one of the Truth Movement's top priorities.
One point of attack was that NCSTAR initially did not address the mechanics or energetics of progressive collapse once initiated. (I made the analogy, on several occasions, of a report explaining how a dam broke, omitting any explanation of why the water then poured downhill and leveled buildings downstream.) Instead, it simply stated that continued progressive collapse, once initiated, was inevitable.
Truthers frequently attempted to represent that "omission" as a substantial failure of NIST's duty to investigate the engineering basis for the events. The counter to that argument is that progressive collapse continuing once initiated in a tall structure is not a point that was ever in serious dispute in the engineering community. Ah, but what's the evidence for that? Where are the peer reviewed papers saying so?
That's where Bazant and Zhou's original progressive collapse paper, "BZ," came in. As a limiting case ("best case for collapse arresting") model, it shows that the structure cannot absorb the energy necessary to arrest collapse, and so the progressive collapse proceeds to the ground. All the details of that analysis, such upper and lower "blocks" and "crush-down" and "crush-up," are artifacts of the particular limiting case model. They may or may not apply to the real events, because the real events did not conform to the limiting case; for example, all the columns did not absorb the maximum amount of energy by bending at multiple hinges; instead, they absorbed almost no energy because the connections between the floors and the columns sheared away and the columns ended up breaking apart at their column-on-column welds instead. What does apply to the real case is the demonstrated impossibility of collapse arrest even given the best-case-for-collapse-arrest assumptions.
And that's the entire extent of the relevance of any of Bazant's work to 9/11 conspiracists or their conspiracy theories. (That is, to the topics of this sub forum.) Even if Bazant's calculations in BZ were shown to be wrong, which no Truther has even attempted let alone succeeded at showing, the only effect on 9/11 Truth would be to slightly weaken the debunkers' argument that progressive collapse is a known and expected phenomenon given the conditions existing on 9/11, which in turn would strengthen (to a trivially slight degree) the Truther contention that NCSTAR was negligently incomplete.
Nonetheless, discrediting Bazant by any means possible became the obsession of a portion of the Truth Movement. Such was the intensity of the Truthers' ideological hatred of NCSTAR that even that echo of its echo continues to smolder here and there, including on this thread.
So, if ROOSD is "a better model" than BZ's (which it is in some ways as a math-free casual explanation, and isn't in others) then that means BZ is "wrong," which means that progressive collapse is suspicious, which means that NCSTAR is incomplete, which means... I forget, something about 9/11 and indoor employment that no one even admits to believing any more.
All the better if ROOSD is not only the better model, but one that debunkers never thought of themselves because they were too busy misunderstanding, misrepresenting, and worshipping Bazant's papers. (The latter of which, it seems to now be coming out, were not relevant to 9/11 conspiracy theories in any way, and therefore were rarely mentioned or even read by most debunkers until Major_Tom started asking probing questions about them as part of his ongoing attempts to discredit Bazant.)
The really interesting thing is the success Major_Tom had with his own meme of debunkers misunderstanding, misrepresenting, and idolatrously venerating Bazant's papers, getting even claimed non-conspiracy-theorists to repeat it frequently, apparently in the interest of seeming fair and balanced. If one really were interested in the sociology or memetics of this subforum, it might be more interesting to focus on that, or at least include it.
The alleged non-authority who contradicts the authority is themselves not an authority, or a lesser authority.
), pictured a top block "surfing" on the rubble layer; the rubble is what crushed the "lower block" in Bazant's model, and the "upper block" rides on it safely. But what if columns don't cooperate and refuse to be crushed by the rubble layer, and the blocks poke into each other?
