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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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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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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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A while ago some Cuban spies were caught with a one-time pad and it was used to decode a bunch of innocuous messages like “celebrate the contributions of female comrades this week because it’s International Woman’s Day on Friday.” Presumably there was spy poo poo that wasn’t revealed, but yeah it’s pretty well agreed that numbers stations are for sending secret messages. Crime would be a good use for them.
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Oct 8, 2020 22:22
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