[iuyoiuyy]

You can't pretend to have a high standard of evidence and yet never even consider any evidence that contradicts what you want to believe.

Furthermore just because two masked men kills innocent people that does not imply anything about who commit the crime. Your "obvious" belief is only obvious because it's what you want to believe.

All you have to do is look at what independent investigators like Chossudovsky have found and it immediately becomes clear it was a false flag.

[AnimalMuppet]

You condemn us for not considering evidence that contradicts what we want to believe, but you don't actually present any. Telling us to "look at what independent investigators like Chossudovsky have found" isn't much. Maybe a URL? Maybe more than one? Who are these people who are "like Chossudovsky"?

[Lawtonfogle]

I've found that 'evidence please' is 9 times out of 10 to be a tactic to dismiss a point of view. Even when talking about facts that I can link to scientific peer reviewed papers, I am accustom to a request of evidence to indicate an attempt to call a bluff and not an actual desire to see evidence on an issue.

[anigbrowl]

No it doesn't. There are certainly some weird coincidences that are worthy of further investigation. But in any dramatic news event that touches the lives of a lot of people, there tend to be some weird coincidences. Many of them turn out to mean nothing at all. While one shouldn't dismiss things on that basis - because the fact that something seems highly improbable may well mean it is worthy of further scrutiny - one shouldn't uncritically accept them as fact on the mere basis of their improbability.

Look at the Germanwings plane crash that happened recently. At first a lot of people were convinced that the action had been carried out by radical Islamists, because such people have a track record of that sort of activity and terrorism in general in recent years.When it turned out to be a white German guy, some people were sure that he was a recent convert to Islam or something - which was a possibility worthy of consideration but not of certitude. When it further turned out that he was a neurotic and depressed guy going through anxiety about his eyesight and the impact that it might have on his career, a few of the people who really really believed int he Islamic terrorist idea started talking about how it was a big cover-up. It's possible they're right, but it's much more likely that they're just imagining it.

I agree that it's possible that this is a false flag operation. The French security services have crossed the line into unethical behavior on previous occasions. There's also a high degree of xenophobia in French culture for various socioeconomic reasons, and in difficult economic times (like now) it's certainly more politically convenient to whip up anxiety about wicked foreigners than to take up the politically unpalatable task of structural reform. Thus, the motivation to carry out false flag operations certainly exist.

But motivation isn't evidence. Otherwise you could take my bank statements and say 'oh, you had a mediocre economic situation lately, I guess you had motivation to rob that bank last week, didn't you? Didn't you?!' And so on. It's good to be skeptical and examine inconsistencies or oddities in the way news stories are reported. But reasoning from the existence of such things to a firm conclusion about what happened can be just as misleading as unquestioning acceptance of claims by authority figures. For one thing, it depends on the false premise that people in authority never make stupid mistakes, so that if they say something which later turns out not to be true, it must be because they were lying. In fact, people in authority are just as prone to jumping to conclusions, making mistakes, forgetting things, and saying whatever bullshit they think people want to hear as everyone else. So while they sometimes do lie, you should at least consider the possibility of simple incompetence first.

Don't fall into the trap of swapping one kind of credulity for another.