When I'm talking about 9-11 I am completely aware that I do not really know what I am talking about. I don't know much about natural sciences in general, so I don't think I have anything meaningful to say about chemistry, physics, architecture, engineering, aviation etc.. So, I feel pretty handicapped when I try coming to any strong opinion on many of the most discussed topics like WTC 7. My opinion is pretty much:
"A lot of things around 9-11 look extremely fishy, but I don't see any smoking gun yet, anything that could convince the public that their goverment had acted in a way that would make them lose their trust in it, but good thing there is the American Truth Movement to find out. I trust the guys as they are well intentioned."
After meeting several Americans at Anarchapulco in February this year I realized I could not just stay agnostic on the topic because I was less affected than they were and I could not keep insulting them with my doubts in discussions when they were so utterly convinced that, for instance, building 7 had been brought down by controlled demolition.
So I decided to try once again to form a firm opinion on the matter and gain knowledge, to come close to something I would call "thruth". As WTC7 is considered to be a smoking gun, I decided to focus on that single question in order to not get completely lost in the ocean of 9-11 theories. The first frustration on my trip to the thruth which cost me hours was that I was not able to find a single satisfying scholarly oxford style discussion with two equally well informed and well intentioned civilized debaters on the Internet, 15 years after the event. Either I really suck at googling or this says a lot about the deplorable state of the global debate culture on essential topics. The divide between "Truthers" and "Mainstream story believers" is so deep you hardly can watch them talk to each other online other than flame wars.
As I am generally biased towards the Truthers for obvious political reasons, I started in that camp and emerged in truthers videos and articles for a whole week-end. I picked the people at http://www.ae911truth.org/ as main source, because well, I thought architects would obviously know wether and why some building collapses or not. Plus they had a high reputational risks doing so, in my perception, because which architects would want to be considered a "tinfoil-hat truther" if they were not really sure what they are talking about? After hours and hours of binge watching videos, the talk of a very reasonable sounding austrian construction engineer and explosion expert (Sprengmeister) finally convinced me.
I now felt prepared for the "debunkers" and even turned kind of cocky and overconfident, as I could not imagine anymore how you could reasonably claim that WTC7 had not been a controlled demolition. The next logical step to me was to find a truther who had turned sceptic and listen to his reasoning and that's how I stumbled upon Charles Veitch, "the 9/11 conspiracy theorist who changed his mind, in an interview with an annoyingly arrogant young british dude named Myles Powers:
I did not like Myles condescending way towards "Truthers" in general, because I thought and still think there is enough to question on 9-11, just not as much as many Truthers think. After all, to quote Murray Rothbard:
There are, of course, good conspiracy analysts and bad conspiracy analysts, just as there are good and bad historians or practitioners of any discipline.
https://mises.org/library/conspiracy-theory-history-revisited
When I then saw that Myles had a whole series of 9-11 debunking videos, I thought this was to be a good intellectual challenge, as I even had to overcome my antipathy to even watch the guy to make him convince me.
And boy he did.
He utterly destroyed any doubt I was having about WTC7 and any other topic he covers in his series. Plus, I actually like him now and I like watching his videos and I consider him as a trusted well intentioned expert for fields I know little about.
I still feel a lot of sympathy for the Truth Movement and support it in general, and that's why I am writing this, because I am honestly concerned about the seemingly widespread lack of intellectual self discipline which harms the whole liberty movement.
But this is in no way meant as an insult to anyone. I am simply back at square one, I have no real clue what really happened and I might change my mind again.