I totally have a new phone background.
For the backstory, or a version of the backstory, at least, go to We Are Change Atlanta. (Honestly, I was stunned to hear what I was up to.) Then go to my bosses at the “Georgia Tech Institute of Technology” [sic] and demand that I be fired, because it cracks me up.
RJB
29 Comments | 
9/11 conspiracy theories, conspiracy theory, derp | 
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Posted by Bob
“Lies are like unwashed socks,” opens Rich Veitch’s new comic, The Big Lie. “They come in all sizes and stink to high heaven.” Take the stinker he just published, for instance.
The Big Lie is the story of Sandra Stratton, who works at the Large Hadron Collider in 2011 but travels back in time to the morning of 9/11 to rescue her husband, who was killed in the attacks. She materializes in the WTC subway, and opens with a pee joke:
This is the high point of the comic; it’s all downhill from there. Also, doesn’t it seem strange that they chose as their model a surprised, unbespectacled Desiree Schell?
Anyway, because of some quantum, Sandra has teleported back into the past, but because of some pesky tachyon entanglement miscalculation issues, she only has one hour to rescue her husband. But here’s how Veitch puts it:
Big spelling fail.
Carl’s at an early morning meeting, discussing, as best I can tell, the possibility of demolishing a real steel framed building in Iraq for Steven Spielberg. Really.
I had hopes for this comic book. Usually, when you encounter a truther in the wild of the Internet, you will be debated at and shown youtube videos. I thought that moving to a new medium would perhaps change this. So what does Desiree do when she sees her husband, Carl? SHE DEBATES HIM AND SHOWS HIM FECKING YOUTUBE VIDEOS!!
See?
So they settle into a debate not unlike Plato’s Phaedrus, only populated by snarky douchebags. Take, for instance, the following exchange:
For you non-engineers, Carl is a moron. Silly-puttying “teh thermites” to the wall will only give you burned silly putty and burning thermite on the floor. It burns so hot that you’d actually need to weld trays to the steel of the building, and even then, you would only scorch the steel, not cut it:
That scene of thermite not cutting a steel beam, by the way, is from Conspiracy Theory with Jesse Ventura by the way. Yet he fails to learn anything from it. Oh well. As she is being dragged away by security, Sandra exclaims, “Building 7!”:
I know how you feel, Carl. Oh, by the way, Carl doesn’t recognize his wife, because she was never crazy or old before.
As soon as Sandra is escorted from the building, the office is rocked by a gigantic….
This is the plane hitting, not an enormous exploding owl, as you might expect from the noise it made. In the last scene, they see exposed thermite bombs on the steel beams in their office building. This means that the author is endorsing the idea that not only did the conspirators crash planes, but were also able to decide which floors they would hit, a far, far more complicated project than either an airline strike or a demolition. If you’re going to be wrong, be shamefully, spectacularly wrong, that’s my motto.
It’s confusing. It’s pedantic and saturated with bad arguments by every single character, the product of a mind detached from reality. It’s prefaced by the statement that:
The sheer number of spelling/grammar/factual/anachronistic errors suggests to me that someone at editor at Image, a usually reputable publisher, did not really care if it looked as bad as it is. At least I like to think so. It’s too bad. Veitch, who used to rub shoulders with Alan Moore, is now piddling in the shallow end of the pool with the kids from the short bus.
RJB (with a shout out to Steven for letting me take a peek at his copy!)
39 Comments | 9/11 conspiracy theories, art, mass media, The Big Lie | Permalink
Posted by Bob
I wouldn’t have thought ten years ago that I would be doing what I’m doing now, blogging the strange ins and outs (mostly outs) of the conspiracist mind. If you haven’t heard, it’s been a decade since the World Trade Center attack. The country has not yet fully recovered from that incomprehensible day. I remember groping for some semblance of a narrative to explain what was unfolding in front of my eyes, and I clearly remember the sense of watching the second tower collapsing with a sense of the unreal.
Eventually that narrative emerged, but there are, as always, holdouts against reality, and to these people I now turn. There may be some old stuff in here. The deluge of 9/11 conspiracist stuff I’ve gotten on Twitter this week includes a lot of rehashed, long debunked stuff, especially youtube videos.
And that’s all. We’ll have double dose next week, as there is a lot of stuff I could not get to, like, all the non-9/11 conspiracy theories.
Update: A few weeks ago the archive.org put up a collection of 9/11 related news from the day of the attacks and other materials. I am told (below) that it is a woo-free zone.
RJB
13 Comments | 9/11 conspiracy theories, conspiracy theory, history, mass media, politics, Uncategorized | Permalink
Posted by Bob
Skeptical Humanities 