Commentary on Mystery Of The Urinal Deuce (Commentary)

Pat Curley of the Screw Loose Change blog posted this video today:



Here are decent responses published at 911truth.org and 911blogger.com at the time.

This episode aired in late 2006, so this commentary is most likely from awhile back as well. I have to wonder if South Park creators Trey Parker and Matt Stone have come to realize that haphazardly choosing to feature 911truth.org on a t-shirt in the episode to show people how "goofy and dumb" they think 9/11 truth advocates are was a complete back-fire.

I really don't think they knew they were calling these people retards:

Respected Leaders and Families Launch 9/11 Truth Statement Demanding Deeper Investigation into the Events of 9/11

But I'm sure plenty of other people found out!

Here is a first hand account of how the show back-fired from Debunking the Debunkers blog contributor Scootle Royale, who at first was also suckered in by the pseudo-skepticism of Popular Mechanics, but who unlike Trey and Matt, researched his way past initial perceptions and cognitive dissonance and emerged a true skeptic!

When I was a young teenager going through secondary school, I was very supportive of the scientific establishment. I was strongly anti-religious, I was pro-globalism, and I genuinely believed the only way to make poverty history was to genocide everyone living in poverty and start again! In the summer of 2007, as I was about to start a university course on the wonders of data-mining, I watched an episode of South Park that completely changed my life. It was called "Mystery of the Urinal Deuce" and it was a parody of 9/11 truth. Although the episode was basically a hitpiece, the writers inserted enough points in there to spark my interest in the subject.

Unlike most people however, I took a more neutral approach. I read the Popular Mechanics debunking piece quite early on and at first I fell for it as it seemed very authoritative and credible. When I did deeper research however, I realised that the piece was nothing more than propaganda. It was full of strawman arguments, ad-hominem attacks, arguments of ignorance/incredulity and appeals to authority. The biggest shock I got from studying 9/11 was the revelation that scientists lie! I never really trusted the government or the media, so I had no problem coming to terms with the idea that they were lying about 9/11, but I was very naive when it came to the scientific community. I always thought of it as as an open forum, free from political motivation, religious persecution and corporate control, where anyone can voice their dissent and put forward alternative theories. Oh, how wrong I was!

Scootle The Anti-Skeptic

It is important to note regarding the Popular Mechanics debate that is referenced in the commentary that many in the 9/11 truth movement pleaded with the producers of Democracy Now to bring on more formidable opponents who do not support all of the claims made in Loose Change.

Related Info:

Debunking Popular Mechanics' 9/11 Lies

Popular Mechanics and the military should get their stories straight on NORAD! As it is, we have caught Popular Mechanics and the military lying about NORAD's true capabilities on 9/11.
Dean Jackson/Editor-in-Chief DNotice.org Washington, DC

The NORAD Papers--NORAD's Mission To Monitor and Control Territorial Airspace on 9/11

Nitpicking the Nitpickers: Curley's Mistranslation

**Note: JM told me about SLC's post in a Youtube message, I didn't realise he had already posted a rebuttal until I submitted my post.**

ScrewLooseChange hasn't really been debunking much lately. It's essentially now little more than a 9/11 truth gossip blog. And when they do debunk it's usually a repost of something about CIT created by people in the 9/11 truth movement. And on the rare occasion when they do some original debunking, it's usually nitpicking.

Pat Curley has once again claimed Sibel Edmonds lied in her letter to the 9/11 Commission by misrepresenting an article from the Chicago Tribune. He's referring to an Iranian case in which, according to Sibel, a translator received information that Osama bin Laden was planning attacks on four to five cities with planes, some of the people were already in the country and the attacks would happen in a few months.

Pat's February 2009 analysis of the article she cited:

1. Attack in the US targeting 4-5 cities. Status: False. In fact the article quite clearly states that the impression of the official was that the attacks would be overseas.

2. Attack will involve airplanes. Status: True.

3. Some of the attackers already in the US. Status: False. No discussion of this in the article, and indeed, given that the belief was that the attack was more likely to take place overseas there is no reason to believe this claim.

4. Attack coming soon. Status: False. "...no mention of when or where the attacks might take place."

Pat makes it seem like Sibel was using that article as proof of her claim. But she was simply stating that the press had reported on the incident and that they confirmed the information was received in April 2001.

The fact is the US was a POTENTIAL target at the very least so his analysis of point 1 is bunk. He admits point 2 is true. There's no discussion about point 3 in the article so it is neither confirmed or disproven. And, with regards to point 4, "...no mention of when or where the attacks might take place" could be referring to a specific date. They could still have known that an attack would happen in the near future without knowing exactly when it was going to happen. So, even if we assume the article wasn't a deliberate damage control whitewash, it still disproves nothing. At worst Sibel may have been slightly exaggerating in her letter, but not lying like Pat claims.

This is textbook debunking - find the strawman, misrepresent, respond, exaggerate the significance and put the reader in a state of mind where they don't know who to believe any more to put them off looking any deeper into it. That's what happened to me when I fell for the Popular Mechanics article back in Winter of 2007. It never convinced me that there was no conspiracy. It just made me unsure of what to think or who to trust any more so for more than eight months I just stopped caring.

In this case, even the Chicago Tribune article admits that the incident was a key piece to the puzzle, regardless of how much you want to downplay its significance.

Here's Sibel in her own words from her August 2009 deposition: