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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?

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