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Comment by martythemaniak | Hacker News Reader

It'll never cease to amaze me that people look at photographs like this and think "Uhhmm ackshually, the planes had nothing to do with this, it was <insert nth truther variation here>"

Here's an annotated high-res one that made the rounds on reddit a few days ago: https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fh...

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The idea that my gov't is totally in control at all times and willing to do evil things is more comforting than the idea that geopolitics is actually chaos, and a few motivated individuals can decide to murder the president or coordinate an attack on citizens to inspire a 20 year war.

I have no idea why you are getting downvoted.. but people cannot deal with chaos or "shit happens for no reason". People seek purpose and when none exists, make up one.

Hence all the Kennedy assassination conspiracy theories. People just cannot stand the idea that a single nut could destroy Camelot.

And it's one of those opinions that (IMHO) is hard to hold for someone with sufficient history training.

The murder of one archduke kicked off a world war. Of course the action of one person in the worst place at the worst time can precipitate unspeakable horror. It's happened before.

>sufficient history training

>action of one person

The murder of the archduke was a literal conspiracy. Involving high-level spooks, too.

Now, I don't know shit about shit, but from what I've tried to read on the subject, a nascent German empire after the Franco-Prussian war was ready to demand its place at the grown up table of France, England, and Russia for years.

So no, not just a single moment of bad luck turning friends into enemies.

>Germany did it.

Keep reading.

Tell me what the /pol view of WW1 is, then.

I wouldn’t know. The Sleepwalkers is a good start.

The Powers That Be may be evil but at least they’re highly competent. The real horror is in the idea that no-one is in control.

I don’t think anyone doubts that planes hit the buildings except WTC7. University of Alaska Fairbanks published a paper which suggests fire was not the cause of WTC7 collapse[0].

Memories can be faulty, but I remember news reports from the time of a controlled demolition of WTC7 to avoid a more catastrophic collapse later. In the midst of all the chaos I thought it crazy that they could set that up so quickly, but before long the building was down.

0 - https://ine.uaf.edu/wtc7

> I don’t think anyone doubts that planes hit the buildings

The doubt is whether the plane crashes could've made the buildings collapse. And they exist, because I've argued with them in real life.

Those are reasonable doubts to have.

No they are not.

What’s unreasonable in thinking that a plane that has hit a building at the top of it shouldn’t make the whole building collapse in just a matter of tens of minutes? If anything, this war in Ukraine has proved that buildings can sustain a lot and lot of damage until structurally collapsing.

I can't think of a single example in Ukraine of a building experiencing anything remotely similar to the sustained heat of 24.000 liters of aviation fuel burning and spreading throughout the building by way of the elevator shafts.

Buildings are great at surviving individual impacts and explosions. They're not so great at aviation fuel melting through the concrete and steel supports and weakening them over time.

If Russia started indiscriminately dumping thousands of liters jet fuel inside buildings and setting it on fire, we might see something remotely similar to what happened on 9/11. Until then, I don't know why Ukraine has any bearing on what happened back then.

Same. Even argued with Flat-Earthers. It's wild. you make some progress, then they come back and say "you almost had me there, but what about XYZ?", and we're off to the races again.

It's always circular, too. You knock down one argument, go through the discussion, and half way through they no longer realise they agreed that an earlier discussion point was invalid.

thingx disproved... they say "ok".

10 minutes later "but what about thingx!"

I've had to say "now you can never, ever mention thingx again, right?", but of course, they do, and look baffled when you say no.

> It's always circular, too

Well it sure as hell ain't spherical. :-)

(Off in the distance, you hear screams from the direction of Canada.)

But the planes didn't cause the buildings to collapse. The internal steel structure of the buildings reaching annealing temperature caused them to collapse.

The jet fuel didn't need to melt the steel beams, it just had to get close, and gravity would do the rest.

Jet fuel (plus misc office combustibles) burns hot enough to turn airplanes (aluminum) into thermite, which is certainly hot enough to melt steel.

Yah, just look at what remains of an airplane that caught fire on the ground.

Not much.

The reason the SST that caught fire crashed was the fire melted away large parts of the wing.

There's an enormous amount of energy in jet fuel, which is why it is used in jets.

This video disproves that conspiracy theory, and with just the right amount of "WTF-you-truthers-are-idiots" attitude:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzF1KySHmUA

I (as someone who didn't know any of the details about WTC7 previously) found this (debunk) video very informative: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nP3TNHPCIVU

There are definitely conspiracy theorists that believe there were no planes. There are prominent people who promote the no-planes theory. Conspiracy theory isn't about truth.

Conspiracy theorists believe untrue things so why not believe that the planes in images were CGI. They ignore all the people that saw planes hit the towers. And don't consider what happened to the planes and people on them. Or what is the point of having fake planes when Al-Qaeda or the government could blow up the towers like they tried before.

> It'll never cease to amaze me that people look at photographs like this and think "Uhhmm ackshually, the planes had nothing to do with this, it was <insert nth truther variation here>"

It's a way to get people to waste their time, spin their wheels, and slow down everyone around them. To grasp the societal impact, imagine a co-worker who did that about work issues.

Yup

There are hordes of people who want to be fooled by Active Measures and ordinary malcontents.

The research I've been able to find on belief in conspiracy theory followers seems to point to minds that are so disturbed by a world that contains random events that they'd rather believe in some evil cabal that makes bad things happen. (Maybe because it seems somehow possible to discover and overthrow a hidden evil cabal than to make a disorderly universe orderly?) There also seems to be a correlation with reilgiosity, which seems a bit unsurprising as most religions train you to believe things without good evidence, and to avoid good evidence in favor of faith.

It'd be fine if these were harmless chatter, but they are actively exploited to undermine trust in institutions and science, and that literally kills people.

>[...] they'd rather believe in some evil cabal that makes bad things happen.

The flip-side of this is also true. Many people reflexively reject alternative theories because it makes them uncomfortable to feel like they're being manipulated by powerful actors. I'm not saying that's the case with 9/11, although, I suspect we were never told the total truth about that day (as with most big news stories.)

The frustrating thing is that there are people who will simultaneously be skeptical that oil and coal companies have worked to downplay the risks of global warming and slow the adoption of green energy, while believing that a car engine that runs on pure water was invented in the 70s but suppressed.

Eh, I'm tired of arguing. Believe what you want.

I do agree that undermining all trust in science, education and things like this is generally bad. I just think if someone is a serious flat earther, I'm not going to convince them otherwise, and I'd rather just enjoy the rest of my day.

its important to make the distinction between questioning and undermining.

Kind of a side bar but I wonder as AI generated images get better, it seems to me only a matter of time (if it hasn’t happened already) before images are generated to create “proof” of conspiracy theories. I wonder if over time, particularly with our history now being primarily digital, if it will become more and more difficult to “know” which history is “true.” I say this as a quote from Napoleon comes to mind: History is a set of lies agreed upon..

> Kind of a side bar but I wonder as AI generated images get better, it seems to me only a matter of time (if it hasn’t happened already) before images are generated to create “proof” of conspiracy theories.

Photographs have been manufactured for that purpose (and, even more simply, real undoctored photographs presented with false context for that purpose) for about as long as photography has existed.

Yes I think we’re all aware of that. Images of Stalin where people are edited out as they are purged come to mind. In the case of faked photographs these images were relatively few.

I think AI generated images open up a whole new realm fakery not just in quality but quantity and variety and ability to widely distribute those images. A person wanting to create a fake narrative could potentially make it very difficult to tell what is real and what is fake.

This was a regular feature of Soviet photographic record going back to the 1930s at least. They became quite good at removing (and occasionally adding) people to photographs for propaganda purposes or just rewriting history.

This was the origin of Winston Smith's job in Orwell's Ministry of Truth -- are you going to believe your memory when the photographic (and text) record says otherwise?

And to avoid that (as well as to not pollute future AI scrapers), Adobe and other companies have created the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) [0] and are doing attestation on camera made photos versus those made in software.

[0] https://contentcredentials.org/

I'm watching a current Netflix documentary on WW2 where they've colorized the old b+w footage. I've seen attempts at colorizing it before, which weren't that good. This attempt is much better (though they really ought to do better with peoples' teeth! ouch!). I recognize most of the footage, it's amazing how much more real it looks when in color.

I've seen some bits of ancient film sharpened with AI, which makes it look incredibly new and fresh. I'd like to see that used with the WW2 footage. It's much more watchable that way. In a way, yes, it's lying, but not in a way that alters history.

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