"Consider a conspiracy theory like the claim that the Apollo moon landing was a hoax or that 9/11 was secretly planned by President Bush or that the Holocaust never happened. There are such conspiracy theories and they are believed by a reasonable number of people, but all of them require a large number of unproved and individually extremely unlikely assertions to be true simultaneously."

The preceding passage appears on page 105 of a book called, incredibly, Critical Thinking, Logic, and Argument by Eric Dayton. He's a professor of philosophy.

Making 9/11 skepticism the equivalent of Holocaust denial is a tactic usually reserved for the most pernicious forms of misinformation. This philosophy professor lets the above sentence stand without any explanation.

Cross posted on http://TotallyFixed.blogspot.com

AmericanThinker.com's Michael Lopez-Calderon thinks that people who don't buy the government's line about 9/11 are "extremely dangerous" because they might "undermine our democratic nation's war against the theocratic forces of radical, Jihadi-driven Islam".

Ouch.

And here I was thinking I was being patriotic trying to expose the bald-faced lies and brazen evasions that have constituted the "official story" of 9/11 up to this point. After all, if the Bush administration and/or its cronies DID perpetrate or facilitate the crimes of that day, the central justification for the ongoing war(s) against our officially designated enemies would be undermined indeed.

But, that must surely be because I find comfort in conspiracy theories. As Mr. Lopez-Calderon put it, "Conspiracy theories offer explanatory models of complex events to large audiences of the unsophisticated and under-educated."