The following visual record verifies that it is possible to saw a man in half and put him back together again:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UQZ8TV1y8-8

There's no possibility of any other explanation. Spare me the "poncy language." It's on YouTube, therefore it's undeniable.

• What did happen and is evident from the visuals is a top down sequence of destructive explosions.
• I believe in the Holy Spirit, the holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body and life everlasting.
• أشهد أن لا إله إلاَّ الله و أشهد أن محمد رسول الله

@Paul Dick Ash

OMFG pwn3d!!1! I'm sure glad there's a new post, so hopefully no one will come to this comments thread and witness how I have been so wittily and comprehensively shut down. Cringe.

I'm not sure what you're referring to about "counterfactual hypotheticals," but I'm guessing it's a misstatement of ondelette's criticism, rather than mine.

and the FAILboat makes for the horizon...

How's that know-nothing circle jerk going?

If you're in a serious debate, and if you don't have a good counter-argument, a sensible response would be to simply not post again. It's an online forum, after all, so it's not like your only options are just to sit there is silence or get all angry.

Of course, if you're just a crank-yanker, junior-high taunts work just as well.

I don't intend to be courteous.

On your next trip around the Internet, look up "sarcasm."

How stupid are you to believe this PDAsh? And is there any likelihood between now and full blown Fascism arriving that you might wake up and realise how utterly stupid you have been to believe it in the first place?

I have said over and over again that I don't "believe" any one thing or other that I didn't witness with my own eyes.

You, on the other hand, seem to want to believe the 9/11 Commission's account - rather than the report of the engineers who did the investigating - with a fervency that borders on religiosity. Time and again, you grasp onto whatever supports your world-view and reject whatever doesn't fit.

And, as I've said before, that's fine: most of us do it to a greater or lesser extent. But it's the polar opposite of a search for "Truth."

Thanks, as always, for resisting the impulse to be insulting. Your perspicacity is matched only by your courtesy.

It's interesting to watch your arguments deteriorate. For a guy with such a strong command of philosophical vocabulary and predicate logic, just maintaining a consistent argument and avoiding F-bombs seems to be beyond you.

Since you admit that I came up with an exception, then universalist deontology is thereby reduced to absurdity. Demonstrating aburdity is a pretty strong case.

You created an exception by rigging an absurdly unlikely scenario. A system of philosophy that works in all cases except one that is vanishingly unlikely to the point of impossibility is pretty good... even from a consequentialist point of view! To make your case, you'd have to show that a philosophy that is purely morally relative in all cases - including the ticking time bomb - is preferable. You haven't. So are you saying we should be deontological unless and until the ticking time bomb scenario, in all its particulars, shows up?

Gosh, aren't ALL crimes really crimes against humanity when you get down to it? But since "humanity" doesn't have a central nervous system, it doesn't count in the utility calculation.

Look up the term "crimes against humanity." It has a specific meaning. It's a pity that the people at "high levels at the ACLU" didn't have the time to explain it to you, but they were probably busy.

Your argument is essentially that all the information always comes in one big package, which is such a bad argument you should be embarassed to have made it.

No. That was your argument, which I quoted in full in an earlier comment. We have this thing here at Salon Letters called the "Read (so-and-so's) Previous Letters" button. People can click on it and see the scenario as you proposed it yesterday.

It was not "the terrorists have a nuke and the FBI finds out about it." While terrorists getting a nuclear weapon is unlikely, it's certainly plausible and within the realm of possibility. But that wasn't your scenario, and it's gaspingly dishonest of you to pretend that it was, and surprisingly Foolish that you think you can get away with changing your story in midstream like this is a bar-room debate.

Your scenario was that each and all of the following conditions must obtain simultaneously before the waterboarding and testicle-crushing may begin:

• our intelligence services intercept a communication or bug a room or surreptitiously copy a hard drive
• revealing many details of their plan
• but NOT the location of the bomb
• we know several of the people who are part of the plan
• we know that some of them know the location of the bomb
• We capture one of the conspirators
• whom we know knows the location of the bomb.

This is both vanishingly unlikely and implausible. It does not require "imagination," it requires a desperate need to make a case for torture when none exists.

There's no case for torture.

There's no case for genocide.

There's no case for rape.

Q. E. fucking D.

The core did NOT remain standing for as many as 15 - 25 seconds... the floors nonetheless collapsed in free fall time of 10 seconds.

Since this proposition is at the core of your whole 9/11 argument, and by extension pretty much your entire worldview and political philosophy, I'd really like to know how you arrived at it. You seem quite certain of it.

It's a real question. I'm awaiting an answer patiently and with an open mind. I know you don't care what I think so there should be no reason for you to be insulting.