Good and bad modal thinking

WMDs, Apollo 13, the moon landings and 9/11

“It’s easier to fool people than to convince them they’ve been fooled.”

---

At university I did an enjoyable philosophy course entitled Logic and Language that focused on the eight English modal verbs, can, could, may, might, shall, should, will, would and must. I found it fascinating how each can be used in a variety of contexts - not strictly mutually exclusive - notably will:

the future - it will rain tomorrow; probability - that’ll be John at the door; willingness - I’ll help you with that; intention - I will go to the party; threat - if you touch that, you’ll be sorry; habit - she’ll always leave the lights on; instructions/procedures - the tenant will pay rent on the first of the month; conditional - if you study hard, you’ll pass the exam.

There is an amusing snippet showing James Cameron and Arnold Schwarzenegger speaking separately about the iconic Terminator line, “I’ll be back.” Arnie had trouble pronouncing “I’ll” and reasoned that a computer character wouldn’t use a contraction and thus “I will be back” would be better but Cameron wasn’t having it. While Cameron gave no reasons to Arnie for his insistence on “I’ll” other than “I’m the writer”, perhaps it was an instinctive understanding that the line was spoken with a sense of threat and in that situation the contraction is more natural.

Modal thinking

While I was prompted to think of bad “modal thinking” going on with regard to a certain subject by my university course from many years ago I didn’t realise it was actually a thing till I looked it up to see if it was. ChatGPT has this to tell us:

Modal thinking refers to a way of reasoning or interpreting reality in terms of possibility, necessity, or impossibility—that is, modes in which something could be true. It often explores questions like:

• What could happen? (possibility)

• What must happen? (necessity)

• What cannot happen? (impossibility)

In philosophy, especially in modal logic, it's about understanding propositions with respect to these modalities (e.g., "It is possible that it rains tomorrow" vs. "It must rain tomorrow").

ChatGPT examples of good and bad modal thinking

I accepted ChatGPT’s offer to provide examples of bad and good modal thinking which funnily enough happened to be the WMDs (bad) and returning Apollo 13 to earth (good). Main points below:

WMDs - example of bad modal thinking:

• Leap from possibility to certainty: Officials argued: "Iraq could have WMDs," and quickly escalated to "Iraq must have them," even though intelligence was inconclusive or contradictory and thus the thinking was based purely in possibility not in evidence.

• Preemptive logic based in possibility with no consideration of probability or evidence: The Bush administration defended invasion on the logic: "We can't wait for the proof—the smoking gun might be a mushroom cloud." The argument was based in possibility with no consideration of probability or evidence. A priori, however, we know that they knew that nuclear weapons are a hoax in any case.

Even without looking through the modal thinking lens, any not-completely-indoctrinated person knows that “WMDs” were a total fabrication.

Apollo 13, response to crippling of spacecraft due to oxygen tank explosion - example of good modal thinking

• Constant evaluation of possibilities:

  • Those involved had to think in terms of what was still possible given failing systems, limited power, and a damaged spacecraft.

  • Instead of focusing on what was supposed to happen, they reoriented thinking to what could still be made to work.

• Rewriting necessities: While the LEM life-support systems were not designed for return to earth, the engineers worked out how to make what was available meet what was actually necessary.

The moon landings and 9/11 - bad and good examples of modal thinking

The moon landings - bad modal thinking

Rightward of 17430, showing some Rover track and some craters from the Apollo 16 Lunar Surface Journal

Wherever there is flawed reasoning such as bad modal thinking or logical fallacy very often what is behind it are cognitive biases. A person with an inclination to disbelieve the authorities will find it easy to disbelieve them even when - on the very odd occasion - they tell the truth.

What has led to such a significant minority of people disbelieving the moon landings:

• The recognition that Big Lies are told to us relentlessly, eg, 9/11 and the scamdemic and, superficially at least, the moon landings do seem pretty implausible - 384,400 km away, no manned missions since - making them a perfect vehicle to target the disbelievers with.

• Rocketry, space, spacecraft and lunar conditions are all alien to the terrestrial environment and it is easy to apply terrestrial expectations where they are inappropriate.

• A number of agents including our first moon buffoon, Bill Kaysing, Bart Sibrel, Dave McGowan and Massimo Mazzucco, (see The “moonhoax” psyop) have been hired to push out anti-moon landing propaganda. While disbelievers will claim that what these people say has had no influence on why they don’t believe the moon landings, many of the bogus arguments you hear such as “stars should be seen in the photos, ” “telemetry data loss is an issue” and “unsurvivability of radiation”, originated with them.
  
  Moreover, the point isn’t that any individual disbeliever has not been influenced by any of these agents, the point is that no disbeliever has recognised that none of these agents has put forward a word of truth between them that refutes the reality of the moon landings even though a number of disbelievers recognise that some of these agents are agents because of what they say on subjects such as 9/11 … and why do we know they are agents because of what they say on 9/11? Because they MIX truth with lies such as pushing that the passenger airliners were real. Agents don’t generally only tell lies because that would make them too obvious … unless, of course, it is determined that they will be able to get away with ONLY lies … and that is clearly the case with the moon landings. The reason it was determined that agents could get away with ONLY lies is illustrated in the next point.

• In order to disbelieve the authorities one must be an independent thinker - a good thing to be, of course - but independent thinkers can be deluded into thinking that their superior reasoning capacity and limited knowledge alone is sufficient to work out the truth on a subject which tends to make them vulnerable both to not exercising the due diligence required to determine the truth and to propaganda from those who understand this vulnerability of independent thinkers only too well.

Essentially, what disbelievers argue is that quite a number of things in the material presented couldn’t or shouldn’t have happened at all or as shown according to their expectations of reality and for all the evidence presented outside that category that it could be fake. They also put forward arguments that may be based on facts but facts that have little relevance and no evidentiary quality, eg, “never gone again” (no one has to go again to prove they went the first time, the argument “If we’d gone to the moon we would have gone again” falls into the logical fallacy, argumentum ad speculum or Hypothesis Contrary to Fact) and “Buzz Aldrin said in response to the question, ‘Why haven’t we gone again’?, ‘Because we didn’t go there’ (words are taken out of context, moreover, we’re told Buzz was a 33-degree Freemason so perhaps those words were a windup and part of the “moonhoax” psyop propaganda campaign).

Items deemed impossible / not fitting expectations of reality

• Rockets cannot work in a vacuum - this argument is based on the premise that a rocket requires outside pressure to operate, however, this has never been demonstrated physically thus when you consider the wealth of information presented to show that rockets do work in a vacuum - eg, the ISS, Voyagers 1 and 2, Starlink, etc - there’s nothing to convince those who accept the evidence as provided. “Rockets cannot work in a vacuum” is a claim purely in the realm of the hypothetical in exactly the same way the NIST explanations of how the buildings tumbled on 9/11 are.

• Shadows aren’t parallel; the astronauts could not have survived Earth's radiation field; there should be stars in the photos; the flag shouldn’t wave - see Moon landing conspiracy theories, debunked

• Lunar module looks like a tin can - see Why the Lunar Module “looked fake”

• 42 questions raised in American Moon - see American Moon (2017): superficially challenging

• Anomalies raised in Wagging the Moondoggie - see Wagging the Moondoggie: a masterwork of propaganda

• Astronauts haven’t gone again - see Why haven’t humans gone back to the moon? and Going back to the moon isn’t just about cost

• Anomalous confusion over seeing stars in Apollo 11 press conference - see Debunking Gary Fong/Apollo Detectives - Cameras CAN work on the moon

• Photoshopped photos - Why NASA photoshop photos

• Seeming transparency of Buzz Aldrin - see Photography Stack Exchange

Fakery deemed possible

The claim of “could be faked” is perfectly acceptable in the right context (discussed further down) but when it comes to the moon landings, the vast number of items that are waved away dismissively as “could be faked” without:

• clear evidence of fakery of the item in question

• any kind of precedence of such an item being faked, eg, 1,000 hours of audio communications

• no clear evidence of any other item being faked

mean the claim has zero validity.

There are 1,000 hours of audio communications between the astronauts and mission control for the Apollo missions alone. I would argue most strenuously that:

• psyops are not in the least about simulating reality as closely as possible, they are Emperor’s New Clothes affairs so to have test pilots plus quite a number of others sitting around recording 1,000 hours of dialogue that could only be of interest if you were actually there doing it is ludicrous and utterly antithetical to psyop MO

• 1,000 hours of audio communications could not be faked without the fakery being detectable. Disbelievers are misled to believe that because we have been subjected to fake events since the year dot, fakery is easy. Well, yes, fakery is easy, we know that, they do it all time but fakery without detection is a completely different matter. They don’t even try to do fakery without detection though, that’s not the way it’s done and if they tried I don’t know how well they’d go. But what I do know is that there is no way on earth the moon landings could be faked without detection somewhere … and it simply hasn’t been.

What we see are nuances that do not fit with fakery

Under the Apollo 11 LEM we see:

• the faintest traces of regolith particles on the landing pads visible only in high res photos with the magnifying tool.

• the faintest radial exhaust pattern.

These subtleties are what we would expect of reality but not in the least of fakery.

Just as I have repeated myself to a reasonable degree on the moon landings, I shall now repeat myself on 9/11 because it is a rather difficult task to get my message through (much less so on 9/11 admittedly where thousands probably got there before me but it’s definitely difficult on the moon landings) and so I keep repeating myself - that’s what the propagandists do and it seems to work for them - not so much for me though.

9/11 - good modal thinking

Cynthia McFadden, from outside a NY city hospital on the morning of 9/11, telling us: “These empty stretchers and wheelchairs say it all as far as the medical personnel in the city at this point. There have been a couple of firefighters who have made their way here for smoke inhalation and dust inhalation but none of the severely wounded people have made their way here yet.”

It took me four years of study to work out that death and injury were staged on 9/11 even though Simon Shack and others had the information out there quite a few years before I even suspected 9/11 of being an “inside job”. The reason it took so long was due to the False Dilemma propaganda strategy which had me completely fooled … and is still working its magic in many quarters.

The premises from which we deem virtually all death and injury could have been faked

• the passenger airliners were faked so we know that no one died in a plane and we have no evidence they died another way

• the standard protocol when buildings are destroyed by a controlled means is that they are evacuated prior and there is no good reason to think that whatever was done to fake the alleged airliner deaths could not have also been done for the building deaths

• the images of the purported injured are perfectly consistent with “drill”-injured and inconsistent with expectations of people injured by the 12-second destructions of 110-storey buildings

• the images of the alleged jumpers show signs of fakery

• the alleged 118 “oral” testimonies of firefighters on 9/11:

  • exhibit nonsensicalities that undermine their authenticity

  • are only in written not recorded form which would be expected

  • make not a single mention of the alleged tragic deaths of their 343 colleagues

• there are anomalies that undermine the testimonies of the alleged loved ones (see Point 6)

• there is evidence of fakery of quite a number of the alleged dead

• a journalist reports outside Bellevue Hospital in the morning and outside the trauma centre set up in the evening that no injured are being brought in despite 3,000 dead and 6,000 injured reported (see Points 1 and 2)

• the “miracle” survivor stories have no credibility (see The Miracle Survivors, NY Mag)

• it is only propaganda (Conspiracy Solved! - had me totally fooled) that gives us a reason to think that people were wanted killed

• psyops are about making us believe things that aren’t true not doing things for real in order that we believe them. Doing things for real when not wanted for real is antithetical to psyop MO

• events involving staged death and injury are commonplace

The premises from which we might deem death and injury couldn’t be real

• We can guess that a couple of thousand people at least needed to be involved in the 9/11 scam and it is difficult to see how these people would be willing to participate if death and injury were real when - apart from any other reason - 9/11 was a terror story where the only reality desired was the destruction of buildings. No one needed to be killed or injured for the death and injury to seem real. While with the scamdemic we can see how thousands upon thousands of health professionals have been propagandised and coerced into harming and killing others on the basis of over a century of scientific and medical fraud, you cannot say to people, “Hey, wanna participate in a terror story event where we leave people inside buildings to die.” The scenarios are entirely different.

• there would be evidence other than that provided that clearly indicated death and injury were real

I’d never argue there was no injuries or deaths on 9/11 because a few accidental or even intentional ones do not seem unlikely and while I think some of the respiratory injuries claimed could easily be propaganda I cannot see how real ones didn’t occur. In the main, however, both evidence and reason support fakery.

Links to further material