Can anyone take Steven Jones seriously?
If it talks like a duck, looks like a duck, and walks like a duck… it might be a duck. Similarly, if it talks like a crazy person, writes like a crazy person, and gets debunked like a crazy person, it must be a crazy person. Ladies and gents, BYU Professor Steven Jones is a crazy person.
Now this isn't to say there isn't more to what went down in New York City five years ago. Certainly there are plenty of details that we just don't know. The implication, however, that the office of the President and key higher-ups in the government orchestrated it? That's just crazy talk. As a friend pointed out to me, it just doesn't seem likely that the same people who couldn't readily find WMDs in Iraq could plant a few hundred tons of explosives in a busy office tower without being noticed. He also pointed out the obvious: while conspiracy theorists focus so hard on the minute details, they fail to ask such big picture questions as, say, "what's the motive?"
Sure, there are the obvious ones: consolidation of federal power, increased defense spending, making your place in history… but getting caught is so high-risk and would bring the entire thing tumbling down. To execute a vast government conspiracy like this would take hundreds of people and it would be nearly impossible to keep them all quiet without a sniper squad watching their every move. I don't buy the looney left "it's a war mongering administration bent on killing women, children and fluffy kittens" response as it's about as rational as "terrorists have an irrational hatred of freedom". I can't find any motive good enough to support Jones' claims.
Even if you sincerely believe that there is a big government cover-up, that's just not the kind of thing you can go spouting off in public. You might as well talk about Roswell, Art Bell, and the X-Files. All of them make you sound like a paranoid that missed your meds. The problem is that these people are zealots, folks who won't change their minds and can't change the subject. No matter how much they sound like the regular rabble over at DailyKos, they're sticking to their story as incontrovertible truth, albeit one they can't quite prove yet.
Prof. Jones, stop feeding this demented fire. You've had your 15 minutes, now kindly leave the stage before you continue to embarass yourself.
Jesse
Shauna
I’ve got a similar take on conspiracy theorists and their theories—another thing i’d add–if you’ve worked for the federal government for any extended period of time, you’d see how difficult it would be for this organization to pull off a massive government coverup. Seriously, that’s giving the government a lot of undeserved credit. š
He’s stretching his 15 minutes big time. A cool item in one of the articles you linked was that he was part of the cold fusion debacle back in the 80s. You’d think that some people would learn from making wild, unsubstantiated, later-proven-to-be-totally-bat-crap crazy claims the first time. Sheesh!
I found that to be rather humorous and wondered myself why that hasn’t come up more often. Once is a fluke, twice is a pattern.