Merged Psychology of Conspiracy Theoriests

[JohnG]

I know you're going to try to kill the messenger and disregard the message. You're loss.

No, he is turingtest and I'm not sure you passed.

"kill the messenger" Melodramatic much?

 

[Cosmic Yak]

Re OP Psychology of Conspiracy Theorists.

I see above various theories on what motivates conspiracy theorists, such as delusions of grandeur and feeling superior. Unless I missed it, I did not see mention of 'outrage at perceived injustice/corruption' and call for justice. In other words, patriotism, when something like treason, coverup, or assassination conspiracy is suspected.

This is probably because that's not what the vast majority of CT believers are actually doing. I have friends and acquaintances who fall into this category, and I have pleaded with them to address actual, verifiable instances of injustice- the Chinese occupation of Tibet, and their repression of the Uighurs, FGM, illegal logging in Indonesia etc. etc. They have not showed the slightest interest. Nor, when I have suggested that they use their incontrovertible evidence for 9/11 being an inside job to help acquit KSM, have they done so. During the recent pro-freedom protests in Hong Kong, the only mention I could find on any of the usual sites (Infowars, Before Its News etc. ) was a claim that a UFO had been sighted over the city.
CT believers are not interested in justice. They are trying to make sense of a confusing world, whilst asserting their superiority over the 'sheeple'. Hence their inaction, and total failure to make any significant change for the better, anywhere, ever.

 

[Cosmic Yak]

Patriotism is not questioning the government. It is listening, obediently, and without question to anything and everything they ever have to say, even if they contradict themselves, which as you well know, never do.

As defined by you, or as defined by, presumably, the US government? (There being more than one government in the world). Certainly, in the UK, it is considered patriotic to defend the values on which the country was built against possible encroachment by government. The media is full of respected people (Paxman, for example) constantly questioning MPs and civil servants. There are countries where the country is synonymous with the state/ government (North Korea and Saudi Arabia are two examples, where questioning the rulers is considered treason), but to make such a sweeping generalisation ....well, there are words I could use, but I think you can probably guess.
How about showing a school, for example, where your definition of patriotism is taught? Perhaps a dictionary? Or how about someone from your government saying it?

 

[Jango]

As defined by you, or as defined by, presumably, the US government? (There being more than one government in the world). Certainly, in the UK, it is considered patriotic to defend the values on which the country was built against possible encroachment by government. The media is full of respected people (Paxman, for example) constantly questioning MPs and civil servants. There are countries where the country is synonymous with the state/ government (North Korea and Saudi Arabia are two examples, where questioning the rulers is considered treason), but to make such a sweeping generalisation ....well, there are words I could use, but I think you can probably guess.
How about showing a school, for example, where your definition of patriotism is taught? Perhaps a dictionary? Or how about someone from your government saying it?

How about my own gradeschool experience, does that count? I graduated in 2004. The last subject taught to me, history wise, was the Vietnam war. All of the wars preceding Vietnam and all of the rest up until I graduated high school, as more recent ones like Iraq and Afghanistan were asked about, none of them, ever, were started by the U.S. Think I was taught the realities of what Christopher Columbus did when "he" discovered the new world? I learned that organizations like the FBI and CIA existed on T.V. shows or movies, not a textbook in gradeschool. Public education in America is not a shining beacon on the horizon. It leaves much to be desired. You're being argumentative, so do you believe the opposite is true, that U.S. Public Education is perfect? I doubt it, so what's your point?

 

[Cosmic Yak]

My point is that your definition of patriotism has no foundation in reality. It's just more self-serving paranoid nonsense.
I have no opinion at all of the US public education system.

 

[BStrong]

Patriotism is not questioning the government. It is listening, obediently, and without question to anything and everything they ever have to say, even if they contradict themselves, which as you well know, never do.

I haven't seen one individual pointing out the weakness in any individual CT play the "patriot" card, but you can't listen to or read a single CT'er on anything from Pearl Harbor to 9/11 that doesn't work the "patriot" angle or wave the bloody shirt - best example the jerk offs at "Veterans Today."

 

[JayUtah]

Be that as it may (or may not) be....What if?...Suppose good science one day proves beyond doubt that psi is valid. How would that impact the people who are now adamant that psi is invalid?

No one here is "adamant that psi is invalid," even though they may challenge other people who are adamant that it is valid but cannot supply suitable proof. That may extend to harsh criticism of people who claim unproven abilities and ask others to trust them or pay them money to exercise those claimed abilities. Disputing your claim to be able to, say, levitate is not at all the same as saying (adamantly or otherwise) that levitation is impossible or invalid. If you claim extraordinary abilities, then yes I will be prone to test those claims using methods designed to detect whether you're faking it, especially if you propose to trade a service you offer based on those claims for something of value.

Contrary to what makers of extraordinary claims say, rational skepticism is not about denying whatever is "outside their worldview" or whatever nonsensical language the ubiquitous accusation of closed-mindedness is couched in. Rational skepticism is instead about following the evidence wherever it leads. If today there is no rigorously tested evidence of psi, then that is the rationally held belief. If tomorrow evidence is uncovered and passes rigorous tests, then that will be the new rationally held belief. A skeptic has no emotional barrier to changing his mind when the evidence suggests he should.

That said, there are many claimants who are unwilling to subject their claims to rigorous testing, or who quibble over what rigorous tests should entail. There is a whole subgenre of that argument that revolves around accusations that science piles unnecessary sophistication and process over the acquisition of knowledge as way of maintaining the illusion of competence. It usually doesn't go so far as to say the entire scientific method is bogus, but it proposes a "simpler" method that is meant to allow for the natural and intuitive skills of the practitioner being tested. That's another whole debate that's appropriate for this thread, but not especially germane to your questions.

Finally, as you can probably guess, rational skeptics do not require anything to be proven or held "beyond doubt." I understand why you put that in your question; you want to propose your question according to whatever standard of proof you think skeptics will accept. Happily that standard is not as high as it is often misrepresented as. No theory in science is ever purported to stand forever unchallenged. For practical purposes, a theory merely has to reliably predict something best among its peer hypotheses in order to be "held." If we weren't constantly searching for better ways to understand (and therefore predict) the behavior of the universe, there would be no such thing as science and no such occupation as scientist.

For right now, the hypothesis that Criss Angel has strong calf muscles and a practiced sleight-of-foot better explains the evidence than the hypothesis he can defy gravity for a few inches, for a few seconds, by paranormal means.

Would there be any automatic domino effects in other areas? Say...if remote viewing were proven valid, does that mean telepathy is too?

Not automatically, no. Evidence for one hypothesis is not automatically evidence for a related, but different hypothesis.

Here's how the thinking goes. Taxonomies are a wonderful way to organize information, but they are often artificial. We lump remote viewing and telepathy together under psi because we think they're related (either as concepts or as phenomena -- it doesn't matter). That doesn't mean we have to hypothesize that they would work the same way, or that both would exist.

So let's say we prove remote viewing as "valid." What might it mean to do that? Well, naturally you'd gravitate toward an empirical test, suitably controlled to eliminate effects other than the ability being tested. That's a shrewd way of saying that we'd prevent cheating, among other things. The "other things" involve a whole lot of discussion about the instrumentality of empiricism, sampling statistics, and confounding variables, so I'll leave that alone for a moment.

Having designed our test, we could determine whether some particular subject or set of subjects could reliably "see" a randomly produced image or object. We would design the experiment mathematically so that we would know how likely a person is to identify the remote object by chance. If none of our sample is able to do better than chance, then we will have -- in the language of science -- "failed to falsify the null hypothesis." That's a fancy way of saying that there is no correlation between the prediction and the outcome. At that point science either concludes that there is no such effect, or else tries to think of a better way to measure the claims.

Yes, there would be innumerable opportunity to question the empirical test, such as noting that we only sampled the population, and there could still be valid practitioners out there. Or that the objects/images we selected were not "the sort of thing" remote viewing is about. And so forth -- but that's not part of your hypothetical proposal, so we'll discuss those another time.

Hypothetically if we got a strong correlation between prediction and outcome, we would then try to discover the mechanism. That's the fun part, because it requires the most imagination. But it's also the part that answers your question, because in exploring these new properties of the human organism, we might find fertile ground for other research that may include new ways to test for other psi abilities.

I'm getting to telepathy, I promise.

Discovering these underlying mechanisms requires a lot of science. It's all based on the same kind of empiricism, but it would rely on the previously "proven" ability to reliably reproduce the correlation between prediction and outcome. This is one of the reasons reproducibility is an important part of the scientific method. When we try, for example, to determine whether remote-viewing is related to, say, sleep, then we want to be able to attribute variations in the correlation to variations in sleep (the variable we're testing) and not to a sudden inexplicable underlying failure to display the ability at all.

But as with remote viewing, telepathy would first require a demonstration of correlation. If there were not correlation, then it wouldn't matter whether remote viewing had been proven to be an actual phenomenon. The dirt-simple test is always, first, "Does the thing actually occur?" If it doesn't, then there's no point trying to explain why it does.

A scientist would probably note that the big difference between remote viewing and telepathy is that in the latter case there's a human at the remote end. Hence he would have good cause to suspect there's a big difference in the underlying mechanism, because there's a huge qualitative difference suspected between merely seeing objects at an extra-visual distance and knowing what someone else is thinking -- at any distance. (There's an argument to be had here over the neurochemical nature of thought, and a funny story involving the actress Marina Sirtis, but I don't want to go there.)

Therefore it would be possible for one effect to have a sound scientific basis yet to be discovered, while the other one would not.

But wait, there's more. Let's say in the course of trying to reproduce and verify the original correlation for remote viewing, we used two different methods of setting up the remote objects. Let's say in one case a set of printed pictures is placed on the wall in a sealed room, and one at a time is illuminated according to a reliably random function controlling a spotlight. The subject must describe the lit painting.

Let's say in another case a human places those same printed pictures in sturdy envelopes and then is directed -- again by a reliably random function -- to place one of those envelopes on a table in the sealed room for viewing. Now let's say that in the latter case we observe a correlation between prediction and outcome, but in the first case we don't. Would that be evidence of remote viewing?

Well no, you could make the stronger case that it's a proof of telepathy, because the difference in the way those two experiments were designed is that one involved a human who saw the pictures before they went into envelopes. What if the subjects who correctly described the photos were not seeing the photos themselves, but were reading the minds of the test conductors?

See, if science isn't fun and fascinating this way, you're doing it wrong.

But by no means are skeptics the closed-minded, unimaginative people their critics make them out to be. We just know the difference between fact and fantasy.

 

[beachnut]

Re OP Psychology of Conspiracy Theorists.

I see above various theories on what motivates conspiracy theorists, such as delusions of grandeur and feeling superior. Unless I missed it, I did not see mention of 'outrage at perceived injustice/corruption' and call for justice. In other words, patriotism, when something like treason, coverup, or assassination conspiracy is suspected.

Gage lies about 911 due to patriotism; his lies about 911 are to save us all from the evil empire in his delusional fantasy. Gage thinks he is patriotic, but spreading lies is not. It is playing the fool, albeit in his case with a fringe few followers who are also "patriotic", very profitable for him.

The Boston bomber were into conspiracy theories, they blew up people at Boston due to the lies of a cover-up in some dumbed down conspiracy theory they believed. Mentally ill nuts going around killing people because they have a fantasy of treason, cover-up, and other BS - because they are patriotic, but so dirt dumb stupid they are nuts on the loose.

Is the Patriotism a cover for their stupidity, or is their stupidity a cover for their patriotism.

Failed conspiracy theorists are spreading false information in the name of patriotism. A common tactic, when you are spreading lies, give your movement the cover of patriotism, like you are fighting against the man, use the name of truth to cover for the massive lies being manufactured out of ignornace. I know one idiot who is making over 500k/year selling lies in the name of patriotism and truth - he has broken the code, making a living selling lies to the gullible. 80k/year salary, >400k/year for travel, gadgets, suits, travel, hotels, food, tax exempt organization - selling doubt to the gullible - taking money.

False patriotism is used by fantasy conspiracy theorists to feel superior; they use patriotism to hide behind as they lie. "hey I am doing this in the name of patriotism; it will be cover for my lies".

Yes, I can see patriotism as a rationalization for spreading delusions and fantasy from a conspiracy theorists; they have no clue they are liars, and no clue they are not patriots, they are failed CTers

The failed CTer, from JFK to 911, they think they are patriotic questing the government with dirt dumb claims bordering on insanity, and lacking critical thinking skills, unable to research common knowledge, failing to live up to their education (must of been day dreaming about fantasy).
Questioning the government is patriotic, making up idiotic questions based on ignornace is not.

Patriotism is not questioning the government. It is listening, obediently,

 

[Bubba]

No one here is "adamant that psi is invalid," even though they may challenge other people who are adamant that it is valid but cannot supply suitable proof. That may extend to harsh criticism of people who claim unproven abilities and ask others to trust them or pay them money to exercise those claimed abilities. Disputing your claim to be able to, say, levitate is not at all the same as saying (adamantly or otherwise) that levitation is impossible or invalid. If you claim extraordinary abilities, then yes I will be prone to test those claims using methods designed to detect whether you're faking it, especially if you propose to trade a service you offer based on those claims for something of value.

Contrary to what makers of extraordinary claims say, rational skepticism is not about denying whatever is "outside their worldview" or whatever nonsensical language the ubiquitous accusation of closed-mindedness is couched in. Rational skepticism is instead about following the evidence wherever it leads. If today there is no rigorously tested evidence of psi, then that is the rationally held belief. If tomorrow evidence is uncovered and passes rigorous tests, then that will be the new rationally held belief. A skeptic has no emotional barrier to changing his mind when the evidence suggests he should.

That said, there are many claimants who are unwilling to subject their claims to rigorous testing, or who quibble over what rigorous tests should entail. There is a whole subgenre of that argument that revolves around accusations that science piles unnecessary sophistication and process over the acquisition of knowledge as way of maintaining the illusion of competence. It usually doesn't go so far as to say the entire scientific method is bogus, but it proposes a "simpler" method that is meant to allow for the natural and intuitive skills of the practitioner being tested. That's another whole debate that's appropriate for this thread, but not especially germane to your questions.

Finally, as you can probably guess, rational skeptics do not require anything to be proven or held "beyond doubt." I understand why you put that in your question; you want to propose your question according to whatever standard of proof you think skeptics will accept. Happily that standard is not as high as it is often misrepresented as. No theory in science is ever purported to stand forever unchallenged. For practical purposes, a theory merely has to reliably predict something best among its peer hypotheses in order to be "held." If we weren't constantly searching for better ways to understand (and therefore predict) the behavior of the universe, there would be no such thing as science and no such occupation as scientist.

For right now, the hypothesis that Criss Angel has strong calf muscles and a practiced sleight-of-foot better explains the evidence than the hypothesis he can defy gravity for a few inches, for a few seconds, by paranormal means.



Not automatically, no. Evidence for one hypothesis is not automatically evidence for a related, but different hypothesis.
Here's how the thinking goes. Taxonomies are a wonderful way to organize information, but they are often artificial. We lump remote viewing and telepathy together under psi because we think they're related (either as concepts or as phenomena -- it doesn't matter). That doesn't mean we have to hypothesize that they would work the same way, or that both would exist.

So let's say we prove remote viewing as "valid." What might it mean to do that? Well, naturally you'd gravitate toward an empirical test, suitably controlled to eliminate effects other than the ability being tested. That's a shrewd way of saying that we'd prevent cheating, among other things. The "other things" involve a whole lot of discussion about the instrumentality of empiricism, sampling statistics, and confounding variables, so I'll leave that alone for a moment.

Having designed our test, we could determine whether some particular subject or set of subjects could reliably "see" a randomly produced image or object. We would design the experiment mathematically so that we would know how likely a person is to identify the remote object by chance. If none of our sample is able to do better than chance, then we will have -- in the language of science -- "failed to falsify the null hypothesis." That's a fancy way of saying that there is no correlation between the prediction and the outcome. At that point science either concludes that there is no such effect, or else tries to think of a better way to measure the claims.

Yes, there would be innumerable opportunity to question the empirical test, such as noting that we only sampled the population, and there could still be valid practitioners out there. Or that the objects/images we selected were not "the sort of thing" remote viewing is about. And so forth -- but that's not part of your hypothetical proposal, so we'll discuss those another time.

Hypothetically if we got a strong correlation between prediction and outcome, we would then try to discover the mechanism. That's the fun part, because it requires the most imagination. But it's also the part that answers your question, because in exploring these new properties of the human organism, we might find fertile ground for other research that may include new ways to test for other psi abilities.

I'm getting to telepathy, I promise.

Discovering these underlying mechanisms requires a lot of science. It's all based on the same kind of empiricism, but it would rely on the previously "proven" ability to reliably reproduce the correlation between prediction and outcome. This is one of the reasons reproducibility is an important part of the scientific method. When we try, for example, to determine whether remote-viewing is related to, say, sleep, then we want to be able to attribute variations in the correlation to variations in sleep (the variable we're testing) and not to a sudden inexplicable underlying failure to display the ability at all.

But as with remote viewing, telepathy would first require a demonstration of correlation. If there were not correlation, then it wouldn't matter whether remote viewing had been proven to be an actual phenomenon. The dirt-simple test is always, first, "Does the thing actually occur?" If it doesn't, then there's no point trying to explain why it does.

A scientist would probably note that the big difference between remote viewing and telepathy is that in the latter case there's a human at the remote end. Hence he would have good cause to suspect there's a big difference in the underlying mechanism, because there's a huge qualitative difference suspected between merely seeing objects at an extra-visual distance and knowing what someone else is thinking -- at any distance. (There's an argument to be had here over the neurochemical nature of thought, and a funny story involving the actress Marina Sirtis, but I don't want to go there.)

Therefore it would be possible for one effect to have a sound scientific basis yet to be discovered, while the other one would not.

But wait, there's more. Let's say in the course of trying to reproduce and verify the original correlation for remote viewing, we used two different methods of setting up the remote objects. Let's say in one case a set of printed pictures is placed on the wall in a sealed room, and one at a time is illuminated according to a reliably random function controlling a spotlight. The subject must describe the lit painting.

Let's say in another case a human places those same printed pictures in sturdy envelopes and then is directed -- again by a reliably random function -- to place one of those envelopes on a table in the sealed room for viewing. Now let's say that in the latter case we observe a correlation between prediction and outcome, but in the first case we don't. Would that be evidence of remote viewing?

Well no, you could make the stronger case that it's a proof of telepathy, because the difference in the way those two experiments were designed is that one involved a human who saw the pictures before they went into envelopes. What if the subjects who correctly described the photos were not seeing the photos themselves, but were reading the minds of the test conductors?

See, if science isn't fun and fascinating this way, you're doing it wrong.

But by no means are skeptics the closed-minded, unimaginative people their critics make them out to be. We just know the difference between fact and fantasy.

Thanks.

I'm surprised to hear that "No one here is "adamant that psi is invalid,"
Maybe my 'adamant' was too strong a word. I thought I'd seen everything psi rejected as idiot crackpot something or other.

>

If not remote viewing and telepathy, where, I wonder, would proof of one claim automatically (domino) prove another. Wondering if there might be a sort of master key effect common to two or more items in the psi claims.

 

[Axxman300]

I think I am lucky that my CT days ended in 1996 before the interwebs became a place for loons to fester. Back then I had to buy a book and read it, so I wasn't fed a daily dose of BS like CTers are today.

The thing that stands out the most from the CT folk posting here on this seem to lack original thought, like they've bought into the same pre-packaged bill of goods. This is evident from the same arguments coming from different people that are practically word-for-word statements of posters of the past. In my JFK days there was a variety of sub-CTs to explore, some were better than others, and all were generated organically from the misconception that Oswald couldn't have made the shots.

Today, no matter if it's UFOs, 9-11, Illuminattiburgers, or the EIEIO the CTs are all marketed. CT forums are strictly moderated to keep skeptics out, so they've rarely encountered an honest discussion on any of these subjects leading to a tribal mentality.

It's not like I've closed my mind to things, I just require evidence now.

 

[LSSBB]

Thanks.

I'm surprised to hear that "No one here is "adamant that psi is invalid,"
Maybe my 'adamant' was too strong a word. I thought I'd seen everything psi rejected as idiot crackpot something or other.

>

If not remote viewing and telepathy, where, I wonder, would proof of one claim automatically (domino) prove another. Wondering if there might be a sort of master key effect common to two or more items in the psi claims.

Only rejected because no validation has yet to be presented. Show a clear scientific validation and the reception will change. This is a skeptics forum - the theme of the forum is skepticism. Not faith, or blind acceptance, or an echo chamber for unevidenced beliefs.

 

[Jango]

My point is that your definition of patriotism has no foundation in reality. It's just more self-serving paranoid nonsense.
I have no opinion at all of the US public education system.

Thanks for the laugh.

Sentence #1 & #2 are suspicious considering what you said in sentence #3. You think what I'm saying is wrong even though you do not have an opinion about U.S. Public Education. Let me ask you then, did you go through the U.S. Public Education system? Do you have an informed opinion on the subject whatsoever, or are you just being what I said to begin with: argumentative. You don't have a point but you want to argue anyway.

 

[Jango]

I think I am lucky that my CT days ended in 1996 before the interwebs became a place for loons to fester. Back then I had to buy a book and read it, so I wasn't fed a daily dose of BS like CTers are today.

The thing that stands out the most from the CT folk posting here on this seem to lack original thought, like they've bought into the same pre-packaged bill of goods. This is evident from the same arguments coming from different people that are practically word-for-word statements of posters of the past. In my JFK days there was a variety of sub-CTs to explore, some were better than others, and all were generated organically from the misconception that Oswald couldn't have made the shots.

Today, no matter if it's UFOs, 9-11, Illuminattiburgers, or the EIEIO the CTs are all marketed. CT forums are strictly moderated to keep skeptics out, so they've rarely encountered an honest discussion on any of these subjects leading to a tribal mentality.

It's not like I've closed my mind to things, I just require evidence now.

We can't force the government to acknowledge an open-secret. Citing the open record, pointing out the questions the record has that is still open is a better way to go about things then simply ignoring it all and only listening to what the government has said last about whatever the topic is or what is said from foreign propagandists or the musings of real mentally ill people.

 

[Ape of Good Hope]

Thanks for the laugh.

Sentence #1 & #2 are suspicious considering what you said in sentence #3. You think what I'm saying is wrong even though you do not have an opinion about U.S. Public Education. Let me ask you then, did you go through the U.S. Public Education system? Do you have an informed opinion on the subject whatsoever, or are you just being what I said to begin with: argumentative. You don't have a point but you want to argue anyway.

Nice bit of projection there, Jango

 

[Jango]

What projection? I don't see it. What I see is a thorough refutation of Cosmic Yak's 'lack of a point' considering he has no opinion on the U.S. Public Education system, likely because he doesn't know anything about it because he has not gone through it himself, yet there he was commenting about the U.S. Public Education system. He doesn't have an opinion or an informed opinion on the subject as a whole but he absolutely knows that the U.S. Public Education system does not and has never promoted Patriotism or Nationalism.

 

[Ape of Good Hope]

What projection? I don't see it.

Can't say I'm surprised...

 

[Jango]

Can't say I'm surprised...

You rarely say much. You say I'm projecting, I don't see it = you win is a lazy Gotcha!~ If you think I am projecting, then you have reasons for it: explain them. Something you rarely do, because you're too busy with the one-liner express LLC gig.

 

[Ape of Good Hope]

You say I'm projecting, I don't see it......If you think I am projecting, then you have reasons for it: explain them.

See if you can work it out for yourself.

It'll be good for your personal growth.

 

[Cosmic Yak]

What projection? I don't see it. What I see is a thorough refutation of Cosmic Yak's 'lack of a point' considering he has no opinion on the U.S. Public Education system, likely because he doesn't know anything about it because he has not gone through it himself, yet there he was commenting about the U.S. Public Education system. He doesn't have an opinion or an informed opinion on the subject as a whole but he absolutely knows that the U.S. Public Education system does not and has never promoted Patriotism or Nationalism.

My, my, you are building up a lot of steam, aren't you? Take a deep breath, old bean, and calm down while I restate my point:
You posted a definition of patriotism straight out of the CT textbook. I made the point that this definition was only applicable in a few countries, and that the US and the UK were not among them. I then questioned whether you had any examples of this being taught or promoted by governments or schools, because I don't think it is: I think you are making it up to justify and/or support your paranoia and dislike of the US government, or at least parts of it.
Your reply about your schooling did nothing to address these points. Instead, you claimed that you were taught a biased and incomplete version of history and current events. That's as may be, but it doesn't mean that you were taught that patriotism means never questioning your government. You followed this up by asking me if I thought the US public education system was perfect. How is that in any way relevant?
You have also said that I was commenting on the US education system despite knowing nothing about it. Not sure I'm following you here: what comment do you think I made? As far as I know, I have made none. Nor have I said, as you claim, that schools in your country have never promoted patriotism or nationalism. I asked you if they had promoted your definition of patriotism, and until now have not mentioned nationalism at all.
So, rather than 'thoroughly refuting' my point, you have failed to answer it at all. I will, however, in a spirit of optimism and continuing dialogue, try again: Does this definition of yours have any basis outside your own imagination?

 

[jakesteele]

People who want to make money as "psychics" dislike skeptics. What a shocker!

People who want to make money as "skeptics" dislike psychics. What a shocker!