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twistedmentat posted:
I've had a similar trajectory with sceptic podcasts: they just can't avoid going full well-actually and sneering at everything. There's a great essay out there called "why I am no longer a sceptic" which calls out a lot of this behaviour and how self-described sceptics so often carry water for racism and misogyny.
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Mar 3, 2020 21:16
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FreudianSlippers posted:John Ringo has an evil doppelganger called Paul George. The NBA star? 
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Mar 4, 2020 00:27
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nonathlon posted:I've had a similar trajectory with sceptic podcasts: they just can't avoid going full well-actually and sneering at everything. There's a great essay out there called "why I am no longer a sceptic" which calls out a lot of this behaviour and how self-described sceptics so often carry water for racism and misogyny. Yea, its probably due to a lot being men, and pretty arrogant. They clearly know everything, so anything that conflicts with their world view must be wrong.
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Mar 4, 2020 06:49
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OutOfPrint posted:I'm getting some real
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Mar 4, 2020 07:45
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Something that always makes me laugh about a lot of Woo believers is they love to find the one weird thing and act like that proves everything. Like You have one picture of what they think is Nessie that cannot be fully explained and say "ah ha! Out of the thousands of pictures, you can't disprove this one! So therefor you're all wrong, nessie is a surviving dinosaur and Jesus is real" Something I'm super into is Globsters. Weird things washed up on shore that look weird and freaky and people think they're sea monster or something, but they almost all turn out to be decomposing whales or basking sharks. Often some would be claimed to be giant octopuses but they were probably the junk from Sperm Whales, which looks like an octopus. We don't see those very often anymore because there isn't as much whaling as there once was, so not as many Sperm Whales are being killed and the waste being dumped overboard. 100% the weird stuff in the sea is the most likely thing to actually result in some crazy new species. Like the chances of finding megafauna in the oceans is way more likely than a bigfoot. But I guess you can't screamin the ocean and claim the echo is bigfoot calling back. God that reminds me of the one Bigfoot hunter show I watched and it was literally some guy pointing out everything in the woods and going "bigfoot!". It was actually kind of sad, but the best part was someone in the group who was probably just a backup camera guy found a magazine in the woods and made a comment "So this is probably bigfoots" clearly as a joke and the hunter says "yes! Bigfoot probably found it and brought it back!".
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Mar 4, 2020 08:55
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twistedmentat posted:Something that always makes me laugh about a lot of Woo believers is they love to find the one weird thing and act like that proves everything. Like You have one picture of what they think is Nessie that cannot be fully explained and say "ah ha! Out of the thousands of pictures, you can't disprove this one! So therefor you're all wrong, nessie is a surviving dinosaur and Jesus is real" Just heard a guy on one of the shows. He was watching some grainy video that he claimed was evidence and said, as explanation: "I haven't seen a bear do that for that long, but you know who has been described that way? Hairy Man."
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Mar 5, 2020 04:51
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I stumbled across a YouTube treasure trove of George Noory's interview show Beyond Belief at work, so I've been listening to that while waiting for computer stuff to process. The three big takeaways from this experience are:
In an interview with a guy who claimed the mythological flood was caused by an ice ball that dumped two miles of depth of water on a mostly dry world, the guest put a map up on the screen behind them of what the world looked like before the ice ball. Noory asked, with complete sincerity, what the blue stuff on the map was supposed to represent. When talking to an annunaki nut who was saying the fallen angels who came down to smang it with some human women to create the nephilim were aliens, Noory asked, with the enthusiasm of a small child, "Did they have wings?!" George Noory is an absolute delight and I'm disappointed it took me this long to discover him.
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Mar 5, 2020 15:58
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Art Bell was the superior Coast to Coast AM host, though
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Mar 5, 2020 17:13
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Randaconda posted:Art Bell was the superior Coast to Coast AM host, though Oh, absolutely. Noory is just an adorable cartoon puppy dog, and I'm happy he's such an important part of the paranormal community.
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Mar 5, 2020 17:21
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Randaconda posted:Art Bell was the superior Coast to Coast AM host, though Every time I heard Art Bell gently say, “go on,” during an interview, I knew poo poo was about to get wild.
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Mar 6, 2020 05:48
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nonathlon posted:There's a great essay out there called "why I am no longer a sceptic" which calls out a lot of this behaviour and how self-described sceptics so often carry water for racism and misogyny. Is that the one by Stephen Bond?
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Mar 9, 2020 19:35
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twistedmentat posted:If you have the 2 hours or so, this is the best take down of the Ancient Aliens BS https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eeO3wm2y2zI It's about three hours and twenty minutes, and I watched the whole thing. It's a very consistent and solid "here's why what they're claiming is wrong at best (but they probably know better and have just been lying for the show)" until act three, when the speaker's counters to "aliens!" in ancient texts start becoming "actually they are really talking about angels (which are obviously real)" which was a weird tonal shift. Its one thing to point out how detail-oriented Ezekiel was as a counter to "aliens!", it's another to start kinda arguing that "actually they're angels (in this context) and the Bible is accurate (for reasons that aren't much better than the AA folks' takes)" Example: Sumerian records of the flood (evidence, obviously, of an actual global flood after celestials hosed hot human ladies (this is a subject deemed important enough to feature in act 3)), despite predating Hebrew flood records, must not be as useful or reliable because the Hebrews had better record-keeping traditions. The similarities just mean that the Bible is better, duh. All in all, highly approve for chapters one and two, but chapter three goes woo in an older direction. FFT has a new favorite as of 10:49 on Mar 11, 2020 |
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Mar 11, 2020 10:41
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FFT posted:It's about three hours and twenty minutes, and I watched the whole thing. It's a very consistent and solid "here's why what they're claiming is wrong at best (but they probably know better and have just been lying for the show)" until act three, when the speaker's counters to "aliens!" in ancient texts start becoming "actually they are really talking about angels (which are obviously real)" which was a weird tonal shift. I like watching alien and pre-Sumerian civilization talks and counting comments to see how long it takes until hitting "NOT ALEINS, ANGULS AND DEMMINS."
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Mar 11, 2020 14:29
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M_Sinistrari posted:Is that the one by Stephen Bond? That's the one
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Mar 11, 2020 19:00
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I will say that the bit about "UFOs" in baroque art actually did teach me something. I'd always just kinda dismissed them as "obviously not flying saucers but I don't actually care enough to figure out what's actually going on in this obviously religious art beyond 'neat, I can see why you'd think that'" and it turns out yeah, they're the sun, or the moon, or a weird circling angels construction used to represent God. Turns out if you take a closer look at these paintings it's super obvious that they are Identified Flying Objects.
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Mar 12, 2020 01:39
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Cool kids like IFOs
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Mar 12, 2020 01:51
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IFOs > USOs > ISOs > UFOs
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Mar 12, 2020 01:52
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I admit that I love UFOs but these are far and away the best
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Mar 12, 2020 01:56
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Captain Hygiene posted:IFOs > USOs > ISOs > UFOs USOs still terrify me. Fuckin lobstermen and AOE torpedo horeshit.
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Mar 12, 2020 03:09
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I'll never stop wanting to see the initially proposed next TRON sequel
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Mar 12, 2020 03:48
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All I ever wanted was to travel off in exotic places and meet new exciting people and then eat them
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Mar 12, 2020 03:52
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FFT posted:It's about three hours and twenty minutes, and I watched the whole thing. It's a very consistent and solid "here's why what they're claiming is wrong at best (but they probably know better and have just been lying for the show)" until act three, when the speaker's counters to "aliens!" in ancient texts start becoming "actually they are really talking about angels (which are obviously real)" which was a weird tonal shift. Until the very end when he's talking about Nephilim does it really come out, but before that its more "This is what the text says and this is what biblical scholars says it means". Like Biblical scholars are a thing and its seen as a legitimate academic profession, and not purely a crazy pants on head religious fascism that dominates American religious life. I do love the whole Ezekiel Space Ship thing because what that rocket scientist dude comes up with makes zero sense. I'd not be surprised if the guy who came up with it may have worked for NASA but it was on sorting tiny screws or something. That also reminds me of something that always infuriates me about Ancient Aliens, its always stuck in the Apollo Era. Like they constantly use terminology like Space Capsule and always compare stuff to what it looked like in the 60s. Though this is most likely because their high priests are all old as gently caress and haven't updated their terminology. I like Sci-Man Dan's vids, but when he does the Flat Earth stuff it's so cringy. Not what he's talking about, but because flat earth is just so....stupid. It's the ultimate in the "I can't understand so therefor it's not real" conspiracy theory. Like all their evidence is little more than bad faith questions, and ignoring well understood scientific concepts, and straight up lies. Also my favorite is "NASA spends 50 million dollars a day! What do they do with that?" You know, because NASA isn't a huge organization with many many projections going on that need many many people, a lot of them highly skilled so therefor would be paid well. What do they think about how much other major government organization spend daily? twistedmentat has a new favorite as of 03:56 on Mar 14, 2020 |
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Mar 13, 2020 02:35
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There was talk about UFOs and stuff in the USPol thread in D&D because a bunch of footage got declassified and it brought me back here. One fun thing I didn't see brought up was Am Fear Liath Mòr, a Scottish spirit from Ben MacDhui, the second highest peak in Scotland. It's described as an eerie feeling and the sounds of footsteps, but is sometimes seen as a tall humanoid that comes out of the mist. It has a nice description (taken from that page): quote:...In October 1943 I spent a ten day leave climbing alone in the Cairngorms... One afternoon, just as I reached the summit cairn of Ben MacDhui, mist swirled across the Lairig Ghru and enveloped the mountain. The atmosphere became dark and oppressive, a fierce, bitter wind whisked among the boulders, and... an odd sound echoed through the mist – a loud footstep, it seemed. Then another, and another... A strange shape loomed up, receded, came charging at me! Without hesitation I whipped out the revolver and fired three times at the figure. When it still came on I turned and hared down the path, reaching Glen Derry in a time that I have never bettered. You may ask was it really the Fear Laith Mhor? Frankly, I think it was. Which is pretty freaky. However, there does seem to be an explanation, a phenomenon known as the Brocken spectre, which is seen when the sun is behind you and casting a shadow onto the fog in front of you. You can even create an artificial one, on a foggy night if you stand in front of your car with the headlights on. Once you know what it is, it's perfectly reasonable, but when you're on a mountain, hearing sounds you can't place because of the fog, and suddenly you see something massive looming out of the mist ahead of you? Yeah, that'd scare the pants off me.
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Apr 30, 2020 01:52
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catlord posted:Which is pretty freaky. However, there does seem to be an explanation, a phenomenon known as the Brocken spectre, which is seen when the sun is behind you and casting a shadow onto the fog in front of you. You can even create an artificial one, on a foggy night if you stand in front of your car with the headlights on. Once you know what it is, it's perfectly reasonable, but when you're on a mountain, hearing sounds you can't place because of the fog, and suddenly you see something massive looming out of the mist ahead of you? Yeah, that'd scare the pants off me. Yeah, I've seen something like the artificial one they show in that article and it makes you jump when you first see a big unexpected shape, I could totally see being spooked by it in the right conditions.
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Apr 30, 2020 02:10
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I found this thread because of the UFO mentions in USPOL as well, and I thought I'd post about two old guys who endlessly frustrate me: Graham Hancock and Randall Carlson. Their whole thing is that they believe in an ancient lost civilization that generated all other early civilizations, but unlike entertaining cranks, they don't say poo poo about the lost civilization itself or try to imagine what it was like as much as they just note random coincidences about proportions of ancient sites or say that there could be old cities submerged under former coastlines. Their signature move is to just drone on endlessly about how the lengths of the stone pillars at some ancient site have proportions that can be mapped onto longitude lines or match the number of days in the Mayan calendar or some dumb numerological poo poo, leaving the impression that there is some significant pattern within the things they mention. But they never actually articulate anything about this mystery civilization. See how long you can listen to them describe the Younger Dryas and the Parthenon to credulous boob Joe Rogan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aDejwCGdUV8 I mean, I like weird poo poo and it is plausible (unlikely, but technically possible) that there was a city 14,000 years ago that invented agriculture independently and then was washed away by a melting glacier or something, but they never even go that far and just notice number patterns without actually making an argument, They don't even have a mechanism to explain how some earlier civilization could influence the Romans to make the gates of the coliseum the same proportion of inches apart as modern lines of latitude on a mercator projection, when by the logic of their own argument that earlier civilization would have vanished thousands of years before the ancestor civilizations of Romans had emerged. It's the same sort of frustration I have about the Missing 411 guy, who I think is a crank and a grifter who also just lists information without articulating a hypothesis, who maybe I will post about next.
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Apr 30, 2020 16:17
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Yeah, I've seen Hancock speak. As you say, it's crap but a constant stream of it with a seemingly academic air. So if you haven't heard of them before, it comes across like some earnest investigators stumbling across some curious evidence. The jury is out on whether they actually believe what they preach, or if it's a conscious grift like Alex Jones. The 1493 guy is another case. It's more intriguing factoids and ideas that you have to read around to understand how flimsy it is.
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May 1, 2020 05:09
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Is the 1493 the thing about China discovering North America?
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May 2, 2020 00:28
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That's Gavin Menzies' 1421. I read it, it's pretty fun, especially for alt-history speculation, but it's not difficult to notice that the first half, describing Zheng He's actual expedition, have a lot more citations and footnotes than the second half where they discover America. I haven't read his second book where he claims that the Chinese also sailed to Europe and kick-started the Renaissance, it sounds kinda lame honestly, but apparently his third book he argues that the Minoans were Atlantis and had an empire reaching from India to North America, so gently caress, maybe I should see if I can find that in a used bookstore. Edit: One thing that doesn't get mentioned often enough with 1421 is that he also claims they discovered Australia, and also accidentally mined a bunch of uranium and lost a bunch of sailors to radiation poisoning. 1493 appears to be written by the guy who wrote 1491 about native civilizations pre-Columbus, which from my admittedly unknowing position, seemed pretty good. Are there notable issues with Charles C. Mann? catlord has a new favorite as of 01:05 on May 2, 2020 |
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May 2, 2020 00:59
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catlord posted:That's Gavin Menzies' 1421. I read it, it's pretty fun, especially for alt-history speculation, but it's not difficult to notice that the first half, describing Zheng He's actual expedition, have a lot more citations and footnotes than the second half where they discover America. I haven't read his second book where he claims that the Chinese also sailed to Europe and kick-started the Renaissance, it sounds kinda lame honestly, but apparently his third book he argues that the Minoans were Atlantis and had an empire reaching from India to North America, so gently caress, maybe I should see if I can find that in a used bookstore. Why would a Chinese person sail all the fucken way to Europe when walking was probably safer and way cheaper if you weren’t transporting tons of cargo? Ibn Battuta made his way from North Africa to China and back 100 years earlier, and he’s just the guy whose memoir survived.
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May 2, 2020 05:51
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twistedmentat posted:Is the 1493 the thing about China discovering North America? That's the one. I misremembered the title. It's an interesting book because it so slowly and surely goes off the deep end. The grand Chinese navigator (Zheng?) is an amazing figure and you start from credible and documented history, head into slightly speculative areas, bundle in with some genuine historical anomalies, and by the end of the book it's all supposition, extrapolation and wild imagination.
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May 2, 2020 13:14
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nonathlon posted:That's the one. I misremembered the title. No it isn't, edit your post. 1491 and 1493 are legit history books by Charles C. Mann. 1421 etc are bullshit about China discovering the world by Gavin Menzies.
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May 27, 2020 09:02
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I loved reading Weekly World News as a kid and I've been looking for something similar on the web. Does anyone know how https://www.ancient-origins.net/ is as a site or alternately, a better site for reading pseudoscience bullshit? I've been reading their free articles and I'm liking it. I'm considering a subscription to see how the paid content is but I don't want to support lovely people. I did some googling and it doesn't look like they're a secret racist site or anything but goons are usually on top of things so I figure it doesn't hurt to check before paying. Speaking of Weekly World News, they often mocked up cryptid pictures and Bat Boy had to be my favorite.  He wasn't really that good but my grandmom liked the paper too so we laughed about Bat Boy together a lot and I like the memories associated with it, On the subject on newer topics, I think Randall Carlson in that Rogan clip posted earlier is the guy I like to follow. Whoever is the one who thinks the Sphinx is older than estimated because of water erosion on the paws and it has to have been rain from thousands of years earlier. I want to believe it and other proof of "advanced ancient civilizations" so bad. Graham Hancock is fun too. His leaps of logic are great. "No explanation for this rock. But the edge is chipped in the same way a lightbulb shatters so therefore this proves it's a tool used to invent early lightbulbs. My theory is now just as valid as the one based on real evidence because I have this evidence now and you can't prove what I said about my evidence isn't true."
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May 31, 2020 18:20
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Quid posted:Graham Hancock is fun too. His leaps of logic are great. "No explanation for this rock. But the edge is chipped in the same way a lightbulb shatters so therefore this proves it's a tool used to invent early lightbulbs. My theory is now just as valid as the one based on real evidence because I have this evidence now and you can't prove what I said about my evidence isn't true." I never been sure if Hancock is sincere or if he's just a grifter that figures to make money. Which could be said of a lot in the fringe science sphere.
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May 31, 2020 23:08
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nonathlon posted:I never been sure if Hancock is sincere or if he's just a grifter that figures to make money. Which could be said of a lot in the fringe science sphere. His underlying motivation seems to be the legalization of psychedelics. If you watch his Rogan interviews, he eventually reaches a point where he says that all evidence of the lost original civilization has been suppressed because they were the ones who brought psychedelics to all other cultures and they used them for ritual and to increase their own intelligence and invent great marvels, but the governments of the world are afraid of evidence that would disprove the narrative that drugs are dangerous and the war on drugs is justified. Maybe he just knows his audience when he's with Rogan, but the whole lost civilization thing seems tied to his contempt for legal authority to the point where it becomes the fundamental justification. He also ties he contempt for the government in with the derision he receives from real scientists, because to him they're all paid by and therefore in bed with the government. He's got a massive persecution complex. Randall Carlson seems similarly fixated on global warming being a myth. He gets really excited in that video explaining how the authorities can't let anyone know there was an advanced civilization in the last ice age because the changes in temperature were more massive than predictions of global warming in the next century, and the government would lose its control over us if it wasn't able to scare us into giving up our rights with stories of catastrophe. How he squares that the "a climate catastrophe destroyed this ancient civilization, even in the dumb fantasy I made up" doesn't really come up for some reason. They're both weird mixes of old hippie anti-establishment spirit and reactionary conservative hatred of science. But Joe loves them because of the drugs.
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May 31, 2020 23:36
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On the topic of atlantis-style lost civilizations, there's also this lol NBC special from 1996, hosted by Charleton Heston: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ctC141Ma4E I remember seeing this when I was in elementary school, just flipping through the channels at night. Even then, it seemed like the stupidest poo poo imaginable. Network tv paid for and aired a tv program that claimed plate tectonics was wrong and the entire crust of the Earth rolls around like the loose skin of an orange when too much ice piles up on top of the North Pole.
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May 31, 2020 23:39
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Quid posted:I loved reading Weekly World News as a kid and I've been looking for something similar on the web. Does anyone know how https://www.ancient-origins.net/ is as a site or alternately, a better site for reading pseudoscience bullshit? I've been reading their free articles and I'm liking it. I'm considering a subscription to see how the paid content is but I don't want to support lovely people. I did some googling and it doesn't look like they're a secret racist site or anything but goons are usually on top of things so I figure it doesn't hurt to check before paying. the metaguide is all about metaphysical properties of various gems, and often accidentally drops into outright cosmic horror when it describes the various beings that inhabit them
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May 31, 2020 23:42
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Antifa Turkeesian posted:On the topic of atlantis-style lost civilizations, there's also this lol NBC special from 1996, hosted by Charleton Heston: Late mid/late 90s was full of documentaries about that kind of stuff. I remember prime time Nostradamus docs that were trying to tie Saddam Hussein into his end times prophecies, which apparently is something his promoters do every time some new bad guy pops up because it was a remake of one from the early 80s where Khomeini is seen as the ultimate evil. I also remember one on Edward Cayce (sp?) that just uncritically accepted everything he did as fact. Which is what they all do, just say "oh mainstream scientists don't agree but they're full of poo poo". Lastly there was one with Graham Handcock and a bunch of other psudeoarchologists, one of really hated striped toothpaste, that really got into the Sphinx's wear patterns, and it made it seem like the majority of scientists totally know there was a great mystical ancient civilization but are hiding it for...reasons? I will admit, I do think its possible that maybe we don't have the clearest picture of our planets history, that some unknown civilization did exist that we have no knowlage of, but it won't be a single object that proves it, no matter how grand it may seem. You'd need to find something mundane like a pot or something to prove it existed.
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Jun 1, 2020 03:32
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Antifa Turkeesian posted:His underlying motivation seems to be the legalization of psychedelics. If you watch his Rogan interviews, he eventually reaches a point where he says that all evidence of the lost original civilization has been suppressed because they were the ones who brought psychedelics to all other cultures and they used them for ritual and to increase their own intelligence and invent great marvels, but the governments of the world are afraid of evidence that would disprove the narrative that drugs are dangerous and the war on drugs is justified. Thanks, I never knew that. It's a weird motivation and explanation - the government has suppressed history and archaeology because they don't want you to know about  because ... where like so many of these conspiracy theories, it falls down on motivation. twistedmentat posted:I will admit, I do think it's possible that maybe we don't have the clearest picture of our planet's history, that some unknown civilization did exist that we have no knowledge of, but it won't be a single object that proves it, no matter how grand it may seem. You'd need to find something mundane like a pot or something to prove it existed. History-goons might clarify, but I dimly recall reading a history of the world book where it talked about there being early civilizations (perhaps in Africa) that we know next to nothing about. As in, our ideas of the first civilizations is just the first ones we've been able to identify.
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Jun 1, 2020 12:16
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Jericho is a city that dates from before the invention of agriculture. Surely it wasn’t just that one city on the entire Earth. People didn’t just suddenly switch from grunting cavemen to modern people ten thousand years ago. There’s nothing crazy about thinking there are cities and civilizations that have been lost to history from Gobekli Tepe times or before.
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Jun 1, 2020 13:36
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nonathlon posted:Thanks, I never knew that. It's a weird motivation and explanation - the government has suppressed history and archaeology because they don't want you to know about A good chunk of the oral histories that might have held clues to older civilizations in Africa were sadly lost due to colonialism and the slave trade. For cool technologies, I vaguely remember that in Eastern Africa, somebody was making steel of better quality, and earlier, than European stuff using mud ovens and wooden tongs.
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Jun 1, 2020 13:54
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