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Cont: The Sinking of MS Estonia: Case Re-opened Part IV

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Vixen said:
Take it up with the person who brought the topic up in the first place and the person who claimed I 'must have missed a year'.
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You are unable to demonstrate even basic competence in physics. You tell us why it's so important for the rest of the world nevertheless to know how many years you studied physics and how smart your childhood teachers thought you were, and what any of this has to do with MS Estonia.
 
JayUtah said:
Then stop acting indignant when others give your purported training in physics the weight you now agree is proper. Your education and/or experience in physics or any other field is relevant to your argument only insofar as you make them. And when you do make them part of your argument, not only does it become fair game to question them, but often it's the only available rebuttal. Your arguments often consist simply of you stating as fact some proposition outside the normal ken, for which you provide no other authority, evidence, or support. When we note that you have no training or experience in these specialized fields, and that others do and dispute your statement, this is not a personal attack no matter how personally attacked you may feel. Neither this forum nor the world at large is obliged to celebrate incompetence just because its practitioners consider it well intended.

Some of your arguments directly invoke expertise, such as when you tell us how academic engineers are supposed to carry out the work they've been asked to do and what findings they should or should not pursue. That argument has evidentiary value only when you can demonstrate that your knowledge of such things is based on something more than supposition. That's the kind of knowledge that generally only comes from long personal experience. Your uninformed, speculative, or wishful expectations are not a yardstick against which factual observations or others' behavior can be measured in a way that creates evidence of anything but your naïveté.

Some of your expertise-related arguments are comically evident as bluffs, such as when you hurl out the name of some irrelevant physical concept such as Archimedes' Law without being able to discuss in greater detail how you think it applies to the situation at hand. It's an obvious pretense to expertise you obviously don't have -- while others do -- but you seem to want others to believe that mere mention ends the argument. That may work well for the coffee klatches, where the audience legitimately doesn't know much, if any, more than you do. But you won't be able to bluff forever.

Other arguments you make are not the direct product of pretended expertise, but would certainly benefit from an ability on your part to vet them before making them. Most recently, a knowledge of diving, physiology, and the physics of deep water would have permitted you to reject claims of diving to free survivors trapped in the wreck of MS Estonia. More ardent conspiracy theorists count on your inability or unwillingness to know for yourself whether their claims hold water, and therefore on your subsequent willingness to consider yourself smarter for believing their nonsense.

This last point bears on something you said recently. You claimed your interest in the MS Estonia accident belied your propensity to want to get to the bottom of things. But earlier you claimed you ruled nothing out (except, as your critics noted, the official narrative). These are incompatible goals. If you want to get to the bottom of what happened to MS Estonia, you had better starting ruling things out and leaving them ruled out. And if you lack the wherewithal to do that yourself, you had better make start listening to those who have it. Otherwise you're just going to continue to wallow in conspiracy-fueled furor revisiting, in unacknowledged ignorance, the same talking points over and over again until others write you off as ineducable.

I'm sure you've realized that no one believes your claim that you are only reporting current events, with no stake in any particular outcome. You don't seem very interested in why they disbelieve you. It's because they are competent to measure your arguments and actions against what they would do if their own goal was to draw a conclusion on the basis of the evidence. I can't speak for everyone else, of course, but my measurement comes up with the proposition that you are more interested in getting people to believe how smart, incisive, and critical you are than in understanding what happened to the ship and its poor occupants. And I'm afraid to say this is just ordinary conspiracy-theorist behavior.

Through many years of debates such as this, I've found that most conspiracy theorists don't want to get to the bottom of whatever particular matter they're theorizing about. If they were able to prove their claims to everyone else's satisfaction, those claims would then just become the new conventional narrative and the conspiracy theorists would have little more to talk about. Instead they want there to be endless controversy, so that they can continue to believe they are relevant by questioning the conventional narrative -- the narrative only those ignorant sheeple believe. And they pride themselves on being among the few to have the "knowledge" required to challenge the status quo. This is why debates with conspiracy theorists often bog down in inconsequential details like whether emergency buoys worked properly. Every minute inconsistency or irregular can be spun to support some portion of a nefarious narrative, and the conspiracy theorists believe themselves so much the cleverer for having "figured it out." Conspiracy theories are more about creating a world in which the theorist is the hero.

You're well within your rights not to believe a single thing I've said. I expect you'll either ignore this post, or brush it off with one of your signature single-sentence dismissals. But what you can't do is keep doing what you're doing and expect people to believe what you claim about what you're trying to do. It's painfully obvious that you consider any suggestion that you aren't a competent authority on whatever you're pontificating about from day to day to be a personal attack. It's okay not to be a physicist. It's okay not to be a scientist. It's okay not to be a foreign-policy expert, or a seasoned sailor. But when your arguments require others to accept that you have knowledge you can't demonstrate you have, they're going to net you exactly the kinds of responses you have been getting -- properly so.
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So you keep saying.

It is not conspiracy theory. I opened this thread in current affairs thus conspiracy is in the minds of those who insisted it must be a conspiracy theory to agree with the decision of three sovereign nations to reopen the case to examine the hole in the starboard (confirmed by Bäckstrand as being 22m by 4m, or, circa 66 feet by twelve feet, to give it perspective, which was never mentioned by the JAIC, although by all intents and purposes they had had their attention drawn to it by a couple of sources before they issued their report.
 
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JayUtah said:
You are unable to demonstrate even basic competence in physics. You tell us why it's so important for the rest of the world nevertheless to know how many years you studied physics and how smart your childhood teachers thought you were, and what any of this has to do with MS Estonia.
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YOU were the one who DEMANDED I tell you and you had to ask about six or seven times before I told you. That's all the thanks I get for being polite by answering your urgent questioning.
 
zooterkin said:
Dead is dead, whether at 64m or 80m.
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What is being ascertained is whether it is possible for someone to still be alive in an air pocket. A Russian institute claimed it was possible and offered their specialised equipment to help rescue such persons. Bear in mind, this was still within two days of the accident.
 
Vixen said:
So you keep saying.

It is not conspiracy theory.
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What, in your view, would need to be added to your claims in this thread to make them a conspiracy theory? What part of the generally-accepted definition of a conspiracy theory is missing in your presentation?

I opened this thread in current affairs thus conspiracy is in the minds of those who insisted it must be a conspiracy theory to agree with the decision of three sovereign nations...
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Straw man, after which you then go one once again to summarize your theory that there was a conspiracy on the part of JAIC to ignore the real reason why MS Estonia sank.

You would do well to re-read the rather carefully-considered, comprehensive post you've responded to. Clearly only certain points I made got past your filter.
 
Vixen said:
YOU were the one who DEMANDED I tell you and you had to ask about six or seven times before I told you. That's all the thanks I get for being polite by answering your urgent questioning.
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Yes, I had to ask about six or seven times what your expertise was in physics, and then several times afterward before we finally got to any sort of clarity on the point. That was because the arguments you were presenting at the time, and insisted were perfectly reasonable and valid, having to do with ship-to-ship collisions, were based on premises that required competence in physics to test. By presenting those arguments as valid, you purported that the premises on which they were based were valid. But when challenged, you lacked the ability to test the premises yourself, or even understand when others tested them for you. Rather than concede that your argument did not have, as you purported, a solid foundation in physical law, you decided to belabor them on your own authority. Small wonder that authority was eventually shown to be non-existent.

You are the one who decided to predicate an argument on knowledge you could not demonstrate that you had. And it was like pulling teeth for you to finally admit you didn't have that knowledge. Stop trying to blame everyone else for your unwise debate strategy.
 
JayUtah said:
What, in your view, would need to be added to your claims in this thread to make them a conspiracy theory? What part of the generally-accepted definition of a conspiracy theory is missing in your presentation?



Straw man, after which you then go one once again to summarize your theory that there was a conspiracy on the part of JAIC to ignore the real reason why MS Estonia sank.

You would do well to re-read the rather carefully-considered, comprehensive post you've responded to. Clearly only certain points I made got past your filter.
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An incident being 'classified' does not make it a conspiracy. For example, there was an incident in 1987 when a Finnair pilot saw what looked like a missile flying in front of it. This became classified information. Years later, in 2014, the information was declassified.

If someone had started a thread in Current Affairs about this sighting by the Finnair pilots in 1987, does that to your mind make it a conspiracy theory?

I am guessing you do not know the difference between someone 'what-iffing' (are there aliens?) and something that has its roots in fact.

Finnair Flight 915 (AY915) was a scheduled flight by Finnair from Tokyo, Japan, over the North Pole to Helsinki, Finland, on 23 December 1987. In 2014, Finnish media reported a claim by two of the flight's pilots that the Soviet Union had fired a missile at the aircraft, which exploded less than 30 seconds before impact. The allegations came out only in September 2014, when Helsingin Sanomat, the leading Finnish daily newspaper, published an extensive article on the matter
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wiki

The people most likely to feel threatened by such facts are probably those who rely heavily on mass media (Rupert Murdoch, Fox News, etc) to verify something before they will accept it as true. By the same means they vote for who the mass media tell them to vote for and hate or love whoever they are told to hate or love by that same media.

In short, it is not a virtue to disparage anything that not 'official', as you seem to believe it is.
 
JayUtah said:
Yes, I had to ask about six or seven times what your expertise was in physics, and then several times afterward before we finally got to any sort of clarity on the point. That was because the arguments you were presenting at the time, and insisted were perfectly reasonable and valid, having to do with ship-to-ship collisions, were based on premises that required competence in physics to test. By presenting those arguments as valid, you purported that the premises on which they were based were valid. But when challenged, you lacked the ability to test the premises yourself, or even understand when others tested them for you. Rather than concede that your argument did not have, as you purported, a solid foundation in physical law, you decided to belabor them on your own authority. Small wonder that authority was eventually shown to be non-existent.

You are the one who decided to predicate an argument on knowledge you could not demonstrate that you had. And it was like pulling teeth for you to finally admit you didn't have that knowledge. Stop trying to blame everyone else for your unwise debate strategy.
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I never claimed to be an expert. That is all in your mind.
 
Vixen said:
I never claimed to be an expert. That is all in your mind.
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Straw man. You claimed to be competent enough to address the physics embedded in your claims. That turned out not to be the case, by demonstration. And you bristled at that, so I asked you what training you had had in physics, such that you could have had so much confidence in your judgment anyway. Now you concede that the "5 years" you claimed then is not sufficient to establish competence, and that what happens after age 18 is all that matters. Why did you call out the alleged five years' of instruction if not to attempt, at the time, to substantiate that you had some competence, such that we should accept your physical-law premises anyway?

When the value of that education was questioned at the time -- a point you now concede -- you were adamant that it was not the typical education obtained by every U.K. student. You were equally proud of your recollection that your teachers had apparently considered you something of a prodigy. It didn't take much provocation for you to launch into a lengthy boast of your academic skill. Nor is that the only occasion on which you've overstated your academic qualifications, pretending to be a "scientist" on the basis of an irrelevant degree that maintained that vestige in its name.

You're constantly either claiming or insinuating to be something you are not, and expecting others to entertain arguments that require accepting those claims and insinuations as premises. You're constantly trying to bluff and equivocate your way along, and you seem to get upset when people call your bluffs.
 
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Vixen said:
An incident being 'classified' does not make it a conspiracy.
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None of this post has the slightest to do with what I said, nor provided answers to my question.

What would need to be added to your presentation here to make it a conspiracy theory? What necessary element of a conspiracy theory is missing in your treatment of MS Estonia?
 
JayUtah said:
Why is their determination the only one that matters?



Is it possible for there to be a variety of well-reasoned opinions for why such an offer was made?
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The Russian Baltic Fleet has dominated the Baltic for exactly 300 years, since Charles XII snatched defeat from the jaws of victory at Poltava in 1721. Hitherto, the Baltic region had been controlled variously by the Danes and then the Swedes, ever since the days of the eleventh century Teutonic Knights and Livonian Brothers of the Sword, a bunch of Baltic Germans who expanded in the Baltic lands. Sweden lost Livonia (modern day Estonia, Latvia and a part of Lithuania) to Peter the Great, at Poltava, and its only other participation in war in recent memory was with those pesky Norwegians in 1788.

Thus, from King Christian I, Ivan the Terrible (Ivan IV) to Adolphus Vasa to Peter the Great, encompassing the Thirty Years War and the Northern War and all kinds of skirmishes in between, culminating in WWI and WWII, the control of the Baltic Sea has been a matter of great importance and firece competition. Hence, you might have an understanding of how incredibly powerful the Russian Baltic Fleet is and has become.

If the Russians know about rescuing people from air pockets and claim they have the specialised technology to do so, then I for one believe them.

Maybe it is nonsense but when people's lives are at stake there would have been no harm in trying, especially in the earliest hours.
 
JayUtah said:
Straw man. You claimed to be competent enough to address the physics embedded in your claims. That turned out not to be the case, by demonstration. And you bristled at that, so I asked you what training you had had in physics, such that you could have had so much confidence in your judgment anyway. Now you concede that the "5 years" you claimed then is not sufficient to establish competence, and that what happens after age 18 is all that matters. Why did you call out the alleged five years' of instruction if not to attempt, at the time, to substantiate that you had some competence, such that we should accept your physical-law premises anyway?

When the value of that education was questioned at the time -- a point you now concede -- you were adamant that it was not the typical education obtained by every U.K. student. You were equally proud of your recollection that your teachers had apparently considered you something of a prodigy. It didn't take much provocation for you to launch into a lengthy boast of your academic skill. Nor is that the only occasion on which you've overstated your academic qualifications, pretending to be a "scientist" on the basis of an irrelevant degree that maintained that vestige in its name.

You're constantly either claiming or insinuating to be something you are not, and expecting others to entertain arguments that require accepting those claims and insinuations as premises. You're constantly trying to bluff and equivocate your way along, and you seem to get upset when people call your bluffs.
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I mentioned that because a poster claimed I must have been a moron.
 
JayUtah said:
None of this post has the slightest to do with what I said, nor provided answers to my question.

What would need to be added to your presentation here to make it a conspiracy theory? What necessary element of a conspiracy theory is missing in your treatment of MS Estonia?
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Just about everything.
 
Vixen said:
The Russian Baltic Fleet...
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Thanks for the history lesson I didn't ask for.

Maybe it is nonsense but when people's lives are at stake there would have been no harm in trying, especially in the earliest hours.
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Yes, maybe it is nonsense, in which case there would have been nobody credibly left alive, and therefore there would have been harm in trying.
 
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