"Oh, my god, Mulder! It's happening!"
Posted on 11/16/2001 1:05:35 PM PST by MindBender26
This entire series of posts and threads on the loss of the AA flight is an amazing display of 2001 sociology. If we thought the internet was going to change people’s commercial activities but not our core behaviors and underlying thought process, we were certainly wrong.
Many of us have been following the crash aftermath here in FR. This is not an indictment or criticism of any one poster, not will this post attack anyone. It will ask the question, who are these internet people, and what are we all becoming because oft hem. Even more, it is certainly not a criticism of FR itself, JR, etc. He has done great work for America.
There is a certain suspension of rational thought process going on here. People are making, defending and angrily supporting crash theories based on some rumor someone else says a friend told them was heard on the radio. People are angry because others seek to apply basic rules of physics to an argument. Others propose the wildest theories, and defend them ad infinitum. Last year, some poster claimed TW800 was caused by ghosts of a 1948 Navy electronics experiment gone wrong, and other chimed in to agree!
At least eleven mutually exclusive theories as to cause of this week’s accident have been proposed, and if one is determined to be the real cause, the proponents of the other ten will all probably cry "foul" and "government cover-up."
People are accusing the government of fraud and murder because they haven't yet determined the cause of the crash, or grounded the Airbus fleet. Others demand an answer right now, before any laboratory testing is complete. This failure to deliver a verdict before bedtime is taken as further proof of negative government intervention.
This post is certainly NOT directed as criticism at any one person, but rather as an amazed wonderment of what is going on in supposedly Conservative society. Does the anonymity of the internet encourage people to suspend the rational judgment process? Did Clinton and Clintonism so skew American thinking on the issue of government dependency that anytime our government does not give us what we want, and deliver it to us gift wrapped and right now, we begin to have our little internet temper tantrums?
Another amazing observation is how there is little attempt to understand who is posting fact and who is posting mental masturbation stories. In ordinary conversation, there is a constant "reality checking" processing going on in our minds. It seems absent here. If we were down at the Grange Hall, high school homecoming, or even Harvard, we would be using all our senses to help us understand what is going on here. If some person joined the conversation and began to blame the crash on a weight and balance problem or wake turbulence, we might listen for a moment. But when we saw he was 9 years old, wearing adult diapers and had a throazine bottle in his hand, we might tend to discredit his theories! On the net, he will have a brigade of followers within the hour.
Old pilot's ditty: "Fish gota swim, planes gota fly; and sometimes they crash when they try!" Crashes occur, but this one seems to have brought out a demonstration of a change in the way we think.... or don't think. What do these post crash threads say, not about the crash, but about us
Again, certainly not a criticism of anyone, just a wonderment, that with all the technology in the world, have we again become the Clan of Grug, Druhr, Mogor and Allihia arguing by grunting over our cave fire, while the Cave Bear waits in the near distance recovering from his wounds of 1992?
Seems to me, you're pissed off because your 'damage control' isn't working. Moreover, your pissed off because people aren't listening to you.
As Don Henley sings...."get over it."
"Oh, my god, Mulder! It's happening!"
I really like to believe this crash was due to some mechanical failure. IT is identifiable, typically repeatable and can be fixed through proper changes. BUT, if preliminary indications are showing this, why haven't Airbus 300's been grounded in this country?
One. A flight attendant. The NTSB report is here, in case you're interested. Seven serious injuries, 57 minor.
But the point remains that it took me all of 30 seconds on Google to find another example of structural failure. While it is extremely rare, it does happen. And to throw out; " I do not think it unfair to mention that it is relatively unusual for planes to start breaking apart in mid air.", is extremely unfair. You toss in that statement essentially to rule that out as a cause.
I still think terrorism is a likely cause, but I'm willing to wait for the investigators to come to a conclusion.
I don't ask or expect the government to be able to provide the reason for this disaster immediately. What I DO expect is an honest statement about the circusmstances. A statement that does not need to be parsed. A statement that is not intentionally misleading.
I completely agree with you. We're big grown ups and can deal with the truth and reality of any situation and I don't see people running the streets in a panic.
One incident that sticks out in my mind is the anthrax thing when the Postmaster General announced that he couldn't guarantee that the mail was safe. That was a true statement and I accepted it as such. Next, Ari Fleischer tried to spin the PGs statement to mean something else, I suppose so the public wouldn't panic.
Sheesh, I was born at night but not last night!!
Congrats, you got NOTHING right in that statement. It was an Aloha Airlines flight, and it was structural failure (which IS what we are talking about) that was the cause, not a bomb.
I guess "someone told you" it was a bomb?
Cars just dont fall apart either but over the millions of miles driven each year you can find many examples of where it does happen.
Huh? Cars just don't fall apart, but it does happen?
I realize the French kind of spoiled the pool by grounding all the Concordes after that one accident, but that's just not how things are done in America. The closest we've come was the DC10 problem, which actually was maintenance related (there were 2 ways to take the engines off for repairs, one that tended to damage the connecting strut but was fast, one that was slow and safe); all the airlines had already (before the crash) been adviced to do it the right way, but many still weren't. In the end the fleet wasn't grounded by the government but by the people, we lost confidence in the DC10. Which is a real shame it was a great airframe, still considered by many in the business to be one of the best ones ever built.
Just reporting the facts. Of course, since I quote from the NTSB incident report, I am an obviously brainwashed, head-in-the-sand shill for the government.
Spot on.
Spot off. Give us a break. It was the premature verdict of "accident" by those heading an official investigation (echoed by the usual amen chorus in the press) that raised doubts about the objectivity of the process. I don't know about you, buddy, but there are a bunch of us out here that don't like to be treated like children by government agencies and a horde of commentators that pop up after tragedies like AA 597 to parrot whatever theory is palatable and convenient. (Has anybody noticed that no one knows a lot of these commentators from Adam and that they slink back into obscurity once they've said their piece?)
BTW, note that I have posited NO conspiracy theory here and neither have the great majority of critical posters on these threads these last two days. We just know that something smells, that's all. Now go back to sleep.
Absolutely. And perhaps the best example of this was the events of 9/11 themselves. People dealt with it. They didn't start looting or murdering or acting like savages. They knuckled under and learned how to deal with it.
One incident that sticks out in my mind is the anthrax thing when the Postmaster General announced that he couldn't guarantee that the mail was safe. That was a true statement and I accepted it as such.
Again, I think this is correct. Once we all knew there could be a problem each one of us individuals were put in a position where we could decide how best to deal with it. Whether that means opening you mail with latex gloves outside, or not taking any precautions or switching solely to E-mails or not using the post office at all, people dealt with the problem as they saw fit. No panic. No rioting in the streets. We will deal with the prospect of terrorism the same way the Londoners dealt with the Blitz. Each one of us will decide for himself whether to move to the country so to speak or stay in the city so to speak.
The truth, stated plainly, is nothing to fear. Rudy Guiliani proved it when he acted so forthrightly following 9/11. He received accolades for his being up front. He treated the New York populace as adults and they responded as such. We don't need a nanny state making all of our decisions for us.
BTW, the British grounded their Concordes, too. Of course, the entire fleet of Concordes is only 12 aircraft.
People who grew up in the Forties, Fifties and early Sixties were instilled with a strong level of trust in our government to be fair and honest. As we became adults, we realized that this wasn't always so.
Long before Clinton came on the scene, there were truly wild things going on that would have been hard for the people of that time to fathom - such as our CIA teaming with the Mafia to try to oust Castro. Then came the Kennedy Assassination and the thousands of questions still left unanswered today about it.
Then came Vietnam, Watergate, Waco, Elian... and even someone inclined to take the government at their word comes to the conclusion that sometimes our government lies its ass off. It turns out some of those "conspiracy kooks" were RIGHT!
Clearly, they're not always right but how can we be sure when we're being told the truth and when its all Barbra Streisand? Unfortunately, there are no easy answers. You have to take things on a case-by-case basis and not get too blinded by one particular viewpoint that you reject other valid viewpoints before examining them.
Eight years of Clinton pushed mistrust of government off the charts for many people. Some are preconditioned to assume its a lie and demand proof. Since the greater the proof, the easier it is to spot an inaccurate detail, the easier it is to howl "conspiracy" or "cover up" at anything government says. It's a vicious cycle.
What may be different is the internet has brought a "vox populi" out that has never been so available before. The blithering idiot and the informed source have an equal seat at the internet table. The cautious hypothesizer and the shrill loon can both have their say with minimal restrictions. The adjustment has to be with ourselves to sort out the (as one nicely put it) silver from the dross.
I, for one, would rather have people free to speculate with all sorts of nutty theories than to be restricted to the point where only the "official" answer is allowed to be spoken. The internet, and forums such as FR, challenge us to separate the worthy from the unworthy theories while being willing to entertain a wide range of viewpoints.
I hadn't thought about Guiliani until you mentioned him but you're exactly right! He is getting all the accolades because he's been honest.
The above is speculation on my part and should NOT be taken as my theory.
Stay well - stay safe - Stay armed - Yorktown
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