Armchair skeptics on the other hand are reaching for more potatoes chips and pop
I prefer to be called "underwear skeptic". I am in my underwear. Diet Coke and jalapeno chips.
and wanting another person to spit on.
These aren't arguments, now - are they. Vilifying, posing yourself as Captain America, it just gets cartoonish.
It's a hobby. Studying woo. The origin of this board was in James Randi circles where con-men of various styles were unmasked by a professional magician.
And, interestingly it turns out all of these con men have a great deal in common. One of them is to use emotional attacks like this instead of logic and reason. Another is use of a prop. In this case, a machine.
This one is interesting to a keen skeptic because of it's longevity and the quite respectable millions of dollars he's squandered. It's like studying serial killers, but on a far less harmful scale. Morbidly fascinating. The welding gun, this is also of great fascination because it is obviously so stupid. It sparks. So what. It is not the steam engine, this is stone age rubbing of sticks together, wow you made heat.
Scientology, in 2012, was estimated to have taken in half a billion dollars in revenue. So BLP is an insignificant little beetle scurrying about compared to scams of singular historical rank.
Scientology's claims are so fantastical and stupid it's hard to believe, written by a pulp science fiction writer. It's a stupid little stress detector with a religious exemption from scientific testing of the claims.
With BLP, their claims are imminence of production. The perpetual motion machine is
almost ready. Statistically, their claim has zero percent predictive power for three decades running.
And unfortunately PT Barnum's maxim keeps being proven over and over again. A sucker born every minute. We don't have to relish him getting scammed to be fascinated by the crime.
