Neural Gourmet Archives | Feed Your Brain
Neural Gourmet Archives | Feed Your BrainJust a brief note to thank everyone who participated in today's open skypecast discussion on 9-11 and conspiracism. That was seriously one hell of a lot of fun! Moriarty, procrastinate later, Caution and myself defended the skeptical viewpoint (successfully I think) while new NG member Paula credibly (and politely) represented the questions raised by the 9-11 Truth movement. Thanks Paula for giving us four hardcore skeptics some stimulating conversation. In between we had several other representatives of the conspiracist arguments whom I wish had hung on but sadly dropped out of the conversation and even one person who just sat back and listened to the whole sordid affair. All things considered, for our first run at doing this sort of thing, I thought it went really well (even if I wasn't quite sure how to wind it up after an hour and a half) and a good time was had by all. I definitely want to do another skypecast discussion, perhaps in about 1 month.
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I just finished watching the BBC's 9-11: The Conspiracy Files in preparation for our first open discussion on Sunday. Overall I thought it was an excellent program and gave a broad overview of the state of 9-11 conspiracism. The only thing left out were the more whack-a-doodle theories such as dustification (although they're all whack-a-doodle, some are more whack-a-doodle than others). Dylan Avery, James Fetzer and Alex Jones were good choices to feature as being among the most prominent voices of the 9-11 Truth movement and each was shown to be equally intellectually dishonest. I just can't see this as a hit piece as the troofers do. Avery, Fetzer and Jones' assertions were examined, often stated in their own words, and then factually countered. Moreover, this program came off as highly critical of the U.S. government and devoted a large chunk of the show to detailing the ways in which our government acted to coverup after the fact.read more »
More and my notes after the fold.
Everyone is invited to participate in something new we're trying here at NG. For quite a while now, some Neural Gourmet members and I have been having discussions using Skype. These discussions have been so much fun we'd like to extend that. So this Sunday, we're going to have our first public discussion using Skype's Skypecasting feature. This allows up to 100 people to talk, conference call fashion, at once. If we see a lot of interest, we'll be doing this regularly with a different topic each time.
The topic for our first discussion is centered around the recent BBC program 9/11: The Conspiracy Files which took a skeptical look at the the various paranoid conspiracy theories surrounding the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks in the United States. You can watch the whole program and read more about the discussion after the fold.read more »
