I don't know about the "no real life effects". As a teenager, I was dangerously close to falling down a conspiracy theorist rabbit hole, back then with 9/11-"truthers". It was online arguments I witnessed, where their arguments got dismantled by people knowing what they are talking about, that got me out of there before I got in too deep.

Similarily, loneliness once got me adjacent to the proto-"manosphere" before it was a thing as it is today. But arguing with them about how they are wrong about womens' roles historically, claiming they were "privileged" in ways they objectively weren't turned me off of their bullshit really quickly.

I know arguing online has become more exhausting ever since, but I think there might be a bit of an overly dismissive reaction present with a lot of people on the internet. Developing your own ideas against opposition is still something worthwhile in many cases. And online, there's usually at least some kind of audience, that gets influenced by discussions - for better or worse.

That being said, I may be overthinking things. Because any discussion, where your goal is "totally destroying the opponent" is usually in the category of least worthwhile discussions to have.

they have to put something

That's exactly how I read it too

I feel like you must have said something dumb online, and gotten absolutely dogpiled for it, to draw this comic.

Not overthinking. Just covering the whole topic! Those are some good points/examples.

911 was actually probably an inside job!

I think its far crazier to think that the Bush administration wouldn’t murder his people to get justification to attack an innocent sovereign nation that attempted to sell their oil not in dollar but in euroes..

I think arguing in the forums of my favorite band in high school (about topics completely unrelated to music) have made my written communication as an adult pretty good

Interesting! Do you think you would have gotten out with filter bubbles and Echo Chambers as they are these days?

The key is to know why you're communicating and under what implicit rules and beliefs. Some people want to learn something, to spread a message, to impart info, to vent, to feel important, to have fun, to perform for an audience, to feel understood...your job first of all is to figure out what your interlocutor's aim is and if it is different from yours, to bear that in mind before get so invested that you can't let it go.

Sounds like many of the people on my blocklist.

Talking is shared thinking.

Duty Calls

good internet argument there.

It means internet arguing is stupid and pointless and will do the exact opposite of making you feel satisfied or accomplished.

Nobody has ever had their opinions and beliefs changed from arguing on the internet, or if they have, they will never talk about it, so there's no results you can track from it, no outcome, no closure. Arguing on the internet means getting heated for no reason and with no payoff.

Most of the people who say the stupidest shit are just children anyway, but for some reason we've made it socially acceptable to argue with, and take the opinions of literal CHILDREN as seriously as if it's people writing policy.

Duty Calls

He looks like a guy in a reptile suit in panel 2.

So, there's several problems with that, but just the basic ones, which get more complicated when it gets to the details about the whole "how".

"An inside job" has a lot of ambivalence, and everyone can put into it their own interpretation. There are indeed some indications, that reports of something like it potentially happening were not properly followed up on, for example. And it's almost certain, that some of the Saudis that helped finance and support Al-Qaeda at that time also indirectly managed to gain money from the US - but there is no indication that any of it would have been on purpose for this. Both phenomena are very easily and fully explainable, by just miscalculations in Realpolitik and loss of control of a situation that was not taken to be that bad. The US was still riding high on feeling invulnerable after they became the sole Superpower with the dissolution of the USSR, so, underestimating threats makes sense there too. None of this would qualify for "inside job", in my opinion, but the term is ambivalent enough, that people can throw it around easily and move goalposts.

Then there is the logistics of maintaining und setting up a conspiracy like that. Iran-Contra, a much simpler conspiracy, was easily uncovered. Powell later lying about WMDs in Iraq was easily uncovered. Watergate, a super simple conspiracy in comparison, was uncovered. The sheer amount of people necessary to be in the know for setting up 9/11 as an inside job is ludicrous. It also gets the "Moon landing was fake" - problem. Just as with the Moon Landing, where the USSR would have had both means and reason to present irrefutable evidence, there were several international intelligence agencies, that could not have missed such an operation being set up, and would have had a motivation to weaken the US's standing in the world with irrefutable evidence. Investigative journalism could have produced at least solid evidence, yet all I have ever seen was really, really weak and not estimates shared by experts. (e.g. the whole "jet fuel steel beams" situation, where people simply ignored, that jet fuel, and other material, burns easily hot enough for steel beams to lose their structural integrity.)

Speaking of Powell lying about the WMD situation earlier: That clearly illustrates, that to further the imperialist agenda of the US, they would not have needed something so elaborate and risky. And oh boy, is something like this risky. Sure, there are no moral qualms with the US even back then before the even more blatant shifts that happened since. Especially US intelligence agencies would have had no issue killing US citizens, if they believe it to be in service of a "higher goal", e.g. imperialist influence expansion, tightening of surveillance and the bottom line of capital accumulation. But this is not just about the morality, this is about feasibility, necessity and the ability to control a developing situation. Because, no, there was no guarantee of this panning out the way it did, especially considering that if it really had been a conspiracy, proper leaks would have been almost inevitable with the amount of people you need to involve and sources you need to control and eyes that would be on the event (both journalists and hostile intelligence agencies).

The fact that they had to weirdly pivot to Iraq with said lies about WMDs and such, is also a good indicator of how unprepared but opportunistic they were about it. If planned out as an inside job, why not immediately choose to include more trails leading to Iraq instead of Saudi Arabia and Al Qaeda? Also: If planned as a pretence for tightening surveillance and starting a war, why do something so complicated and grand? Again, super risky. Why not just a redo of the WTC bombing in the 90s, maybe with a staged event and some people lured into it dead. That would be enough to whip people up if utilised with a prepared dis-info campaign on top. This way, they did a highly costly (not just in lives) move, that was all too complicated to do reliably without people finding out, and with a real risk that it could have shaken up the bottom line of people, too. All while scrambling to create an interpretation that suits their goals, instead of just creating an event, that already has that interpretation baked in.

The scale and weirdness about it is also, why so many truthers then add strange additional motivations, like "satanic human sacrifice" to the events, which I hope need no further refutation. Even the obscene enjoyment of "being able to break the rules" while in power as a psychological phenomenon, does not at all explain the overall dynamics at play - it's easy to see how that looks with the current president, or e.g. Saudi decadence of the ruling class.

So lastly, my question is: What is it, that makes you and others so emotionally invested, that it seems crazy to you, not to believe that it was an inside job? Because, I agree, they would have had no moral qualms, but to believe that, I don't need the event to have been an inside job, there is so much shit in actual history, that more than explains it. So why the focus on these grand narratives of conspiracy? The two main reasons I have found are: Fear of the actual chaotic nature of politics and history, where there is a genuine lack of control, even no control by some nefarious agents, or personal reasons, like disbelief about how friends and family gulped down the jingoism and nationalism Flavor Aid after the events, suddenly ignoring the fact that torture is now not only done in secret, but shamelessly discussed in the open, no mask necessary - and them suddenly accepting pretences for war, they would have at least been somewhat dubious about earlier. But for that to happen, it did not need to have been an inside job at all.

And my wall of text doesn't even touch on many other details of the more out-there stuff, like claiming "there were no planes" or other shit. All of which get more and more complicated and usually pretty wild in how they are attempted to be put into a conspiracy narrative.

Good question. Genuinely impossible for me to know, actually. On the one hand, things don't feel like they had been radically different back then, I was stuck in a bubble full of people sharing "Zeitgeist" (that shitty "documentary") and circlejerking each other about how they are wiser and more intelligent for months - in b4 jokes about Lemmy not being any different. My father, an old Stalinist made cynical and paranoid by the dissolution of the Soviet Union, of course also immediately supported it on the principle of "anything anti US must be true and righteous!" So I had my work laid out for me, there.

But some stuff trickled through, like in, wow does that date things, Google Video comments which I remember seeing vividly. Or the odd visitor to a forum getting off an argument before being banned as a "shill". Or, interestingly enough, I also got there because the circle-jerky nature of those spaces had them talk about people working for the CIA or some shit, to argue with them - which got me curious about who those people were, and I found out, they were presenting much more reasonable arguments.

I am in general sceptical of explaining everything with "the nature of the internet" and "filter bubbles". While that undoubtedly has clear and real effects, I still subscribe to those effects panning out in the way we witness, because of how more broadly, capitalism has decayed further and further into crisis mode ever since, and more clearly divorced from its marriage with parliamentarian, liberal democracy even in western nations, and the ownership of media, both social and traditional, has consolidated more and more into the hands of a few people, in addition to the profit incentive shaping the way information is packaged and communicated. Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, the genocide in Rwanda, the mass killing of communists in Indonesia, none of those needed the internet to happen - and I find it suspicious how we look for the fault for everything now in "common people just being monsters when left to their own devices in an unregulated space", when that space is heavily regulated both abstractly by the profit motive and addictive engagement, and even special interests of individual capitalists nowadays.

Sry, went a bit on a rant there, not implying that was what you were arguing, that's more me arguing against something just brought up in general quite often nowadays, which I think focuses in on one part of reality (again: it has an effect, not disputing that), in order to explain away other parts of the dynamic at play.

Those children grow up to be the ones writing policy. They are people too, don't forget that you were also once a child.

The "stupidest shit" that is said is often due to them being isolated and in a social bubble where those beliefs are the norm. Those "Internet arguments" may be the only exposure to ideas outside and social pushback outside said bubble.

Lack of evidence of outcome is not evidence of outcome.

If you're getting heated you're doing it wrong.

The payoff isn't to convince the other person one way or another, it's to provide others reading the discussion alternative viewpoints. In this case pushing back against the idea that children's thoughts, feelings and questions should be ignored.

This is how I think of it. I'm not arguing on the Internet to change the person's mind. I'm arguing to make sure anyone reading the thread in the future doesn't come away with the impression that the other person's argument is flawless.

I'm happy to end an argument by just repeating the facts that the other person is getting wrong. I know their mind isn't getting changed but I hope that anyone that comes along later will be able to read the thread and clearly understand the logical disconnect the other person's argument has.

Especially arguing against someone in certain subcultures like the manosphere, yeesh. Their arguments are so subjective and centered around feelings that often all you can do is point that out and hope someone who comes along later sees that their arguments really make no sense.