9-11/truth/antipathy

About

For reasons which are not yet clear, 9/11 Truth advocates evoke a considerable amount of antipathy in mainstream America. They are often derided as "truthers", "conspiracy nuts" or "wackos", and lumped in with a number of anti-science groups such as creationists, moon landing hoaxers, and even flat earthers – despite the fact that many of the objections raised by the movement are heavily grounded in science. It seems likely that this is due to straw-man advocacy promoted by the mainstream media, but further study is needed.

Examples

Sam Harris on 2010-08-13, listing a number of items which might be considered offensive (in an article which, ironically, included this advertisement):

You could also build an Institute of "9/11 Truth," catering to the credulity, masochism, and paranoia of the 16 percent of Americans who imagine that the World Trade Center was intentionally demolished by agents of the U.S. government.

A sample quote from a dialogue on Amazon Askville:

Anybody who would even consider the premise that a building hit by a 350,000 pound plane full of kerosene, that it fell down for any other reason than impact and fire damage, they're not in the fact-mulling business.

You might as well try to teach a pig to sing.

Links

Related

• 2010/01/29 [L..T] Rebutting (Again!) the 9/11 Truthers “The belief that a handful of unexplained anomalies can undermine a well-established theory lies at the heart of all conspiratorial thinking (that includes, in addition to Holocaust denial, creationism and crank theories of physics), and is easily refuted by noting that beliefs and theories are not built on single facts alone, but on a convergence of evidence from multiple lines of inquiry. All of the "evidence" for a 9/11 conspiracy falls under the rubric of this fallacy.”
• 2005/09/12 [L..T] WTC7 Collapse: The Real Story (not tinfoil) “I see a semi-regular appearance of the idea that the WTC7 building (part of the WTC complex but not one of the Twin Towers) collapsed due to deliberate demolition rather than due to damage from the Twin Tower collapses. This is pretty implausible so I did some internet research to find out why so many people believe it and what actually happened.”