Debunking911.com, an older site that has been around since 2006 (and was on geocities before that) has gone offline. It's not clear if it's permanent (sometimes sites go offline by accident), but the site had not been updated in years, and possibly the author simply could not be bothered to pay for the web hosting.
It can still be browsed via archive.org
https://web.archive.org/web/20060427214154fw_/http://www.geocities.com/debunking911/index.htm
but any links to the original site are now broken, and it's possible for the archive.org site to be wiped if someone else repurposes the URL
If anyone knows who owns it, I'd be happy to host it here.
The loss of a useful site like this raises the issue of how to preserve good debunking sites. Obviously we have archive.org, and for individual pages there's archive.is, but I think it's more than simply making copies of things - older sites are often goldmines of information, but the gold is increasingly in the form of hidden nuggets, buried in outdated information, and formatted in ways that make it difficult to find. When these sites are abandoned by their creators (for whatever reason, including the death of the creator), they just fade away.
The gold is still there though, perhaps what it needs is some mining and refinement. It needs to be made accessible to the modern audience, and not left to fade away.
I think this is particularly an issue with 9/11. Lots of things were debunked ten of more years ago, but people don't see that as it's lost in the noise. Instead you have AE911 with their slick nonsense - pushing simple-minded interpretation of the laws of physics etc, things that were addressed many times in the past.
Unfortunately what is really needed here is hard work - distilling years of debunking into accessible forms is not an easy task. But it is perhaps one worth doing.
It can still be browsed via archive.org
https://web.archive.org/web/20060427214154fw_/http://www.geocities.com/debunking911/index.htm
but any links to the original site are now broken, and it's possible for the archive.org site to be wiped if someone else repurposes the URL
If anyone knows who owns it, I'd be happy to host it here.
The loss of a useful site like this raises the issue of how to preserve good debunking sites. Obviously we have archive.org, and for individual pages there's archive.is, but I think it's more than simply making copies of things - older sites are often goldmines of information, but the gold is increasingly in the form of hidden nuggets, buried in outdated information, and formatted in ways that make it difficult to find. When these sites are abandoned by their creators (for whatever reason, including the death of the creator), they just fade away.
The gold is still there though, perhaps what it needs is some mining and refinement. It needs to be made accessible to the modern audience, and not left to fade away.
I think this is particularly an issue with 9/11. Lots of things were debunked ten of more years ago, but people don't see that as it's lost in the noise. Instead you have AE911 with their slick nonsense - pushing simple-minded interpretation of the laws of physics etc, things that were addressed many times in the past.
Unfortunately what is really needed here is hard work - distilling years of debunking into accessible forms is not an easy task. But it is perhaps one worth doing.
