what made the "debunker" out of you

Combination of factors, including an inquiring mind, an intense desire to read, etc.

What I think tipped me into full-on debunker was the book Why Smart People Believe Weird Things by Dr. Michael Shermer. After that, I was pretty much set in my ways as a "debunker," though I've had a skeptical mind since I was a young whipper-snapper.
 
Ghosts. Loved ghosts when I was a kid, then started to wonder why it was that this (supposedly) amazing phenomena; something capable of turning on it's head everything we understand about physics, life and religion, was just treated as a quirky little sidenote to our everyday lives. I never met anyone who I believed had actually seen a ghost (though I have no doubt that they did believe it) but I did see alot of people who really wanted to believe without actually needing to change anything about their lives in the process.

Then we had good ol' Uri Geller, the man with the (supposed) ability to cause objects to miraculously bend or even (supposedly) fuse together (given his penchant for making broken clocks start working again) and yet ...what do we want of him? The ability to conduct surgery without having to cut open the patient? Nope. Chatshows.

The 911 ct exhibits all of the same 'red flags':

1. a fanatical desire to believe on the part of the proponents

2. a total lack of commitment to actually doing something that might mean changing your life (with the exception of the video makers and book writers, of course, who certainly do see a chance to change their lives..... ;) )

3. a refusal to see the more mundane, boring explanation for the phenomena

4. a willingness to pay to be told what they want to hear
 
Earlier this year I was surfing the net and somehow stumbled upon the air phones in Flight 77 issue. Since I work for AA you can imagine my reaction when I saw a page from our maintenance manual being used in an incredibly dishonest way. What bothered me more is that there was some idiot at the company I work for who gave it to those who shall remain unnamed.

Needless to say I decided enough was enough and gave an explanation about that maintenance page along with the supporting documentation. Something the other side failed to do, and has yet to do for that matter. My only regret was not going all in from the get go. Looking back I was a little overly cautious.

The funny thing is before this I had viewed the 9-11 Truth movement with a combination of disdain and amusement. That whole episode opened my eyes to the level of dishonesty and ignorance these people are capable of.
 
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Because of my background in history, I'd had some passing exposure to conspiracy theories such as Pearl Harbor LIHOP, Holocaust denial, and JFK, but I had never really paid that much attention to them. I knew the Pearl Harbor and Holocaust ones were all wet, because of my in-depth knowledge of World War II, but I thought there might be something to some of the others.

Then, in the fall of 2002, I came across an article about Bart Sibrel's getting punched by Buzz Aldrin. Up until that time I had assumed that moon-hoax claims were just invented by the editors of the Weekly World News to sell papers, and were only believed by severely disturbed individuals such as flat-earthers. I was both intrigued and concerned, so I started doing some investigation online, reading Clavius and corresponding with Jay Windley, and lurking on badastronomy.com (now BAUTforum.com).

Then, on February 1, 2003, I was told by a friend's cousin, who teaches high-school history, that he sometimes has students ask him if the moon landings were faked. That was the wrong day for me to hear that, as it's the day that the space shuttle Columbia was lost. :mad: That's when I decided to become a debunker, in order to combat such distortions of history.
 
In the first few days after 9-11 I found myself overcome with depression, but having experienced a fair amount of grief in my life I thought it would lift by the weekend. However, watching the services at the National Cathedral on Saturday did not help and I began to actually fear for my own mental health. So that Sunday, I decided to spend a few hours finding out everything I could about Flight 93, since that was the only arguably uplifting part about 9-11 that I could see at the time. I discovered that Todd Beamer lived very close to my sister and my father. Jeremy Glick grew up in Upper Saddle River, which was two towns from my hometown, and which we shared a high school with, so I wondered for a moment whether he and I had graduated from the same school. On a whim I sent off an email to my sister on this speculation. She wrote back fairly quickly that no, Glick had not gone to Northern Highlands, because her husband had worked with Glick's dad and she remembered a company picnic where the topic had come up, and the Glicks had all gone to private schools. Glick was also a big comic book fan as a kid, as was I (still am), and his personal favorite was Green Lantern, one of my favorite characters. Lou Nacke had a tattoo of the Superman insignia

And as I discovered these silly little ties between the heroes of Flight 93 and myself, I found my depression lifting. So ever since then, I've felt like there was a little bond there, and I've continued to pay attention to Flight 93-related stuff; read the Jere Longman book, watched the A&E movie, etc. So when United 93 was coming out last year I was looking for reviews of the film over at the Huffington Post, where some of the celeb bloggers had been invited to the Tribeca Premiere. And in the comments section, a whole bunch of Loosers were saying that we shouldn't watch United 93, that it was government propaganda, that we had to see this film Loose Change, which blew the lid off 9-11.

I had been vaguely familiar with 9-11 conspiracy theories before this; back in 2002 I had bashed some of the kooks on the various usenet talk newsgroups, and I read the Popular Mechanics debunking article when it came out in 2005. But this was my first real exposure to the fully-blown theories. Most of it just mildly annoyed me, but when they got to Flight 93 and the phone calls being faked I hit the ceiling. So I put up a quick post about what a nutty film this was. James B (whom I had interacted with on a couple other stories) contacted me a few days later and suggested that we put together a blog debunking Loose Change.
 
My basic dislike for Conspiracy theories. I have a BA in HIstory (with enough credits for a masters Degree...all I have to do is find the time to write the freaking thesis..not easy when you work full time for a living) and the fact is almost all massive conspiracy theories simply do no stand up in the light of facts.
And as if were not enough,the Truthers are loony even by the standards for Conspiracy Theorists.
 
fraud/bad deals; paying out money and loosing 6,000 dollars for insurance that eats up money, before you get the payout in 20 years! I could make money but why pay out the 6k when you could do better investing yourself! Being ripped off will make you smarter; if you catch the fraud

Charlie Sheen said there was this fantastic maneuver the terrorist did. He was pushing a fraud. I looked around and found there are other stupid people who fall for the fraud of 9/11. Thanks to Charlie being dumb on 9/11, I found 9/11 truth was dumber.
 
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For me it was the Apollo hoax....I grew up within earshot of the Kennedy Space Center, and I could literally see and hear shuttle launches from my backyard. Therefore, when I first learned about that fake moon landing theory, it became a personal issue for me.

I knew in my heart that the landings really happened, but I didn't have all of the information to back that up in front of CT'ers. After doing my research, the "official" side of the story makes perfect sense compared to the garbled mess that is the "moon hoax".

The same thing happened with 9/11. I didn't really learn that there was a conspiracy theory until about 2 years ago, when I heard AJ on Coast to Coast. I dismissed it right away due to the fact that such a theory is logistically and practically impossible, but conducting further research solidified my position.
 
For me, it was massive quantities of this:

OldeEnglish.jpg
 
Gravy said:
For me, it was massive quantities of this:

[qimg]http://wtc7lies.googlepages.com/OldeEnglish.jpg[/qimg]
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Good thing you went that route. If it had been St. Ides you might be Dylan's co-producer today.
sweatdrop.gif
 
For me it was reading the book Michelle Remembers, which allegedly, started all that daycare kerfuffle mentioned upthread. The author was local and the book had a local setting, which basically means everybody in town read it, and believed it.

We had a Michelle Remembers day ( in 1980 IIRC ) where we drove around looking for locations mentioned in the book, which was actually pretty easy seeing as the book had a section of photographs in it. We got to the cemetery where the author describes a ritual involving several adults and a few children taking place in a mausoleum, or crypt, got out of the car, walked up to it and my first thought was "Cowspoo!!!" you couldn't fit anymore than three adults in this thing standing shoulder to shoulder, much less have a ritual circle.

Of course there were people claiming to have first hand experience woo woo with devil worshipers seeing as how the author had labelled this place the second largest devil worshiping city in the world ( behind Geneva, Switzerland )

I never really thought of the Paul is dead thing as a CT but I never really cared, all I knew is that someone, be he a former Beetle or not was torturing me with Wings at that point.

I never gave any time to the Bruce Lee and Elvis are still alive theories, as they always struck me as 'why bother?" just go buy an island somewhere and disappear if you really want to.. Michael Jackson, take note, and please take Britney Spears with you.

Cue circa 1995, when I'm sitting in a pizza joint, waiting for my pizza and I picked up a pamphlet informing me about chemtrails and how the government was trying to turn me into a mindless consumer robot. Hummm I said, that actually doesn't sound too bad, I wonder if I could spend all my credit and use it as a defence at my bankruptcy trial ? I tried to run it down the hard way ( no internet, but trips to the airport and military bases ) and all people did was laugh at me. Especially when I suggested a better way to distribute "the stuff" was to mix it into automotive fuel.

I'm not really a debunker per se, as I lack the technical knowledge to present much of a case, but I do have a strong aversion to being lied to.
 
I had a friend who ended up becoming a truther. He brought up a few things, and I simply found the notions absurd. However, as he was a friend, and someone who I felt was a good honest person, I had to look into the allegations for myself, rather than label them ridiculous and toss them immediately.

As with all things I am skeptical of, I know to go to "Hoax Sites" or to look up said issue with the word "hoax" or "conspiracy" in the search terms. This lead me to 9/11myths. Then my brother, who also did not believe any of the truther theories, told me about SLC blog, and from there to the JREF forum I came.

TAM:)
 
For me, at least what got me into conspiracy theories in general, were some of the outrageous claims regarding 9-11 on other boards I used to frequent, usually accompanied by links to Loose Change or some other conspiracy website. The main ones are now old diatribes such as, Fire can't melt Steel or any number of the anti-Jewish (Israeli, Zionist etc) rants that some of these folks seem to favor.

One poster named Swiftfox on one board was completely convinced that the steel needed to melt for the buildings to fall, and that the fires weren't hot enough for that to happen. After I had pretty much laid that to rest (or so I thought) he went into about a million various points of other minutiae, much of which I could see on the surface was just plain crap, and certainly not related in any discernible way. But, I felt that I needed sources for a rebuttal, rather than allow such rubbish to go uncontested or just post my own opinion (that it was all just crap). Some very basic Google searches led to Maddox's page on the 9-11 conspiracies, which led me to the ScrewLooseChange blog and this forum.

I had heard of things like people believing that we had faked the moon landing, or the JFK assassination conspiracies, or the Illuminati / new world order stuff before, but it had always been background and fringe to me, about events in the past and currently promoted by nutty people like the Lone Gunmen on the X-files. Hearing this sort of thinking applied to modern events really brought this sort of stuff to my attention.

Most of my friends are still completely oblivious to the notion that these conspiracy theories even exist.
 
Minadin said:
Most of my friends are still completely oblivious to the notion that these conspiracy theories even exist.
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ditto. As a matter of fact, when I have on rare occasion mentioned to friends that I have read up on the issue and try to "debunk" the CTs, I get some pretty weird looks, but never once have I gotten..."Its true, 9/11 was an inside job".

TAM:)
 
For me, it was obnoxious flooders on the Myspace forums who would fill the entire page in the "Politics" section with Loose Change-promotion spam, and who would call everyone who didn't watch the videos immediately and start parroting every word a "sheeple".

That was bad enough, but it got worse. Loose Change started to spread into Myspace chain bulletins. My high school being 98% Myspace addicts, kids at my school became infected and started trying to preach to me. It was like an insane virus. Nobody questioned. Nobody doubted. They just started parroting "ZOMG Bushdidit!" immediately after watching the film. So I went ape[rule10] and became a debunker.



I ever tell you guys that I still have yet to finish watching Loose Change? I got through about 10 minutes and then I was like "Okay, it's taking WAY too long for this guy to get to the point" and went back to playing Starcraft.
 
double post, KILL THIS POST PLZ
 
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1337 I feel your pain, it is a sad fact that LC was a viral marketing piecw of [Rule10] however your playing of starcraft as opposed to playing Total Anihilation is unforgiveble, you zerg rusher you
 
My cousin showed me Loose Change one weekend when I was home, and he was already sold on the idea.

I had always considered him to be a very rational person for the most part, and although he already believed in a conspiracy by the government to hide knowledge of UFO's (and that they were real), I was still very shocked.

It took about two seconds to realize this video was a joke. I spent several hours listening to him move from one ridiculous claim to the next, with nothing but his doubt to present as evidence. I heard things like, "You don't think they would do something like that?" so many times, and hammered home the fact that, just like his precious UFO's, possibility does not equal probability. He still has a hard time with this. He's backed off the 9/11 thing a great deal, and at one point hinted that he was through with it, but the last time he came over for some beers, some of those same old patterns came out, although with less resistance to my corrections.

But have no fear....now he watches Ghost Hunters like crazy, so I still have a lot of work to do. But since that time, I've gone on to have many debates about 9/11 with different people, and have learned a great deal myself. Like many of you probably have, I've moved on to other subjects, now with a fascination of how and why people believe things like that.

I'm a 'debunker' because people believe insane stuff, and much of these beliefs are dangerous in one way or another. And I'm not immune either....after all, I believed my cousin was rational. Oh, the irony.:p
 
Btodd said:
My cousin showed me Loose Change one weekend when I was home, and he was already sold on the idea.

I had always considered him to be a very rational person for the most part, and although he already believed in a conspiracy by the government to hide knowledge of UFO's (and that they were real), I was still very shocked.

It took about two seconds to realize this video was a joke. I spent several hours listening to him move from one ridiculous claim to the next, with nothing but his doubt to present as evidence. I heard things like, "You don't think they would do something like that?" so many times, and hammered home the fact that, just like his precious UFO's, possibility does not equal probability. He still has a hard time with this. He's backed off the 9/11 thing a great deal, and at one point hinted that he was through with it, but the last time he came over for some beers, some of those same old patterns came out, although with less resistance to my corrections.

But have no fear....now he watches Ghost Hunters like crazy, so I still have a lot of work to do. But since that time, I've gone on to have many debates about 9/11 with different people, and have learned a great deal myself. Like many of you probably have, I've moved on to other subjects, now with a fascination of how and why people believe things like that.

I'm a 'debunker' because people believe insane stuff, and much of these beliefs are dangerous in one way or another. And I'm not immune either....after all, I believed my cousin was rational. Oh, the irony.:p
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If you haven't already, read Sagan's "A Demon Haunted World".

Fantastic Book about all that is Pseudoscience.

TAM:)
 
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