And here I thought that Mackey had played his swan song with “Irreducible Delusion,” yet now he has submitted another screed, which I suspect he intends will accomplish what his last opus had not: to provide a rational reason why skepticism toward the official story of 9/11 is irrelevant, unnecessary, and should be ignored by similarly rational people.
The hope is that if someone could just put a tidy frame around this damn conspiracy, we can move on with our lives, which is what Mackey is proposing. A more subjective, less referenced (except for self-referential) “analysis” has not been seen since Mark Roberts was posting. But I join with Mackey in declaring the Truth Movement dead, the conspiracy irrelevant. If we do that maybe we can move on to the business of skepticism and put NIST’s, the Commission’s, and the government’s story to the test. 9/11 is a massive historical event, arguably, the most complicated single day in American history. Surely, no one on a forum which dedicates itself to critical thinking and skepticism would suggest that everything is already known, all hypotheses proven, all questions answered. But that’s not what’s going to happen here on jref. As much as the mods and the prevailing majority whine about it, the 9/11 sub-forum is the perfect place to keep this discussion. If the sub-forum were closed, this event would have to be discussed like other historical events, without rancor, without conflation of hypotheses, without guilt by association. What’s Mackey and his fellow debunkers to do without the demon Truthers?
Granted, questions are anathema here, yet Mackey is focused on just one set of questions and appears incapable of answering them. To whit:
The reason for his inability to answer these questions is because he has succumbed to the temptation of demonizing and conflating all skepticism toward the official story with Conspiracy Theory and Trutherism. 9/11 Truthers are like the Westboro Baptist bigots or Holocaust deniers. They suffer from the same flawed thinking. Their motives and means not all that different. The “truthers” he focuses on are the more controversial and high profile, the most fringe theorists. I suspect it’s difficult for Mackey to categorize people such as Frank Greening, Kamal Obeid, Steven Dusterwald, Paul Thompson, and Gregory Urich. Are they basement dwelling Twoofies? Or is the answer to Mackey’s unanswered set of questions that when informing oneself about the official explanations a very rational response is skepticism, even when some of these skeptics are structural engineers or scientists with very relevant professional experience?
Let’s help Mackey out and declare the issue dead once and for all, so we can get on with treating 9/11 as we would any other historical event: a complex set of circumstances and an incomplete record that must be studied with the same dispassion and scrutiny as any other subject.
