Merged Psychology of Conspiracy Theoriests

[Jango]

See if you can work it out for yourself.

It'll be good for your personal growth.

No. Why can't you make your point? 'Cause you don't have one. Next technique, please.

 

[jakesteele]

Oh, boo hoo. If you want to be taken seriously, don't quote Craig Weller. His article is an unsubstantiated laundry list of reasons why he thinks skeptics are inferior, with a side dish of opinion polls. When that happens, the messenger is the message.

boo hoo(sob, sob). If you want to be taken seriously, don't quote James Randi, Shameless Joe Nickel, the bad astronomer Phil Plait or anybody on this site. It's full of an unsubstantiated laundry list of reasons why you think the woos, etc., are inferior, with a side dish of opinion polls. When that happens, the messenger is the message.[/QUOTE]

 

[Jango]

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?

= My point exactly -- you think X,Y,Z about me but don't know the A,B,C of what we're talking about: the U.S. Public Education system. You think I'm being crazy and hateful even though you don't know what you're talking about and am asking me once again to educate you on another topic you've openly admitted to blindly argue about.

= I think you should re-read what you've said here and repackage it again.

 

[Ape of Good Hope]

No. Why can't you make your point? 'Cause you don't have one. Next technique, please.

...and there's the fail

 

[jakesteele]

How does simply repeating the alleged quotes establish their authenticity?

How does simply repeating the alleged claims that woos, etc., are kooks and nutters establish their authenticity? If you think they are made up or whatever why don't you go find out? Again, whether the quotes are completely made up or whatever doesn't matter to them they immediately take it as proof positive. I had a roommate that was looney tunes bonkers and if he saw a picture of George Bush talking to a member of the Royal Family of Arab nobility oil men then that was proof positive that Bush was crooked and part of the NWO Illuminati. That's the who point of my original post. I should have elaborated this so it was my mistake, sorry.

 

[Gawdzilla Sama]

You've got to be kidding. Have you ever seen posts here where you all viciously call anybody disagreeing with you a woo, truther, kook, nutter, etc.

Yep, they're guilty of character definition.

 

[jakesteele]

Oh, boo hoo. If you want to be taken seriously, don't quote Craig Weller. His article is an unsubstantiated laundry list of reasons why he thinks skeptics are inferior, with a side dish of opinion polls. When that happens, the messenger is the message.

This next quote is by a magician, the guys you think are the **** at being the best and most suited to debunk.(think James Randi).

http://whofortedblog.com/2012/08/09/solve-coagula-debunkers-response
These crusaders of rationality, presumably driven by the righteous disdain for charlatans and their condescending pity for their victims, then ride out upon a wave of self satisfaction and generally try to take the wonder out of life. If you believe that some light you saw in the sky was something unexplainable you’re an idiot and should be treated as such. If you draw a connection between some strange encounter and events in your personal life based on intuition you’re pathetic. If you don’t accept that all of human existence is diagrammed, mapped, and can be put away into neat cubicles you are either a dupe or a fake.

Some of these debunkers are high and mighty in their attitude and bearing. They believe themselves to be above our childish need for UFOs or god and are much wiser and more advance than the rest of us. Some are so self-deluded they believe that their way of living is better and ultimately more satisfying than the rest of humanity’s and they must help us all reach their level. Look at Ricky Gervais, Richard Dawkins, and other celebrity atheists today and their evangelical need to tell everyone that there is nothing after this life and our prayers are futile. Damn, their attitude is a lot like that one other institution that thinks their ways are better and tend to force it down other’s throats… what’s that called… damn, its on the tip of my tongue… oh yeah… religion.

The fact is Randi, Gervais, a few folks who hang out in the comments section here at Who Forted (shouldn’t they be above our silly activities?), are as every bit as small and pitiful as the those they so violently revile. They are desperately trying to make sense of the Universe themselves. They’ve just performed a double-blind. They have “explained life” to themselves by categorizing it and adopting their dead-end philosophy of materialism. Every thing can be explained, damnit, and you better accept that! There is no mystery and there hasn’t been for ages! I know how the universe runs! Heathens! Heretics! Fools!

In conclusion, these people aren’t open minded. Militant atheists, materialists, professional debunkers are every bit as disgusting and evangelical as Christians and their ilk. They are crusaders for an incomplete ideology and mistake the method of science for an all consuming philosophy. If they must preach, why don’t they go teach science in Kansas and combat Creationism or something that’s actually useful? I’d vote for agnosticism over atheism and real self-wrestling doubt other than hiding behind some ideology. Please reference the works of Aleister Crowley and Robert Anton Wilson for further details.

 

[jakesteele]

Superfical, self-serving pop psychology from a handyman. That's almost as convincing as your fake quotes in the "Woos ponder how to rally world against non-existant organization" thread.

I noticed that you don't mention the ones that are real. That's typical. It reminds me of a thread where I went back and forth with a fairly well known and respected poster. I told him at one point that I was setting a trap for him. I said two words, "Disclosure Project." As expected he immediately started to eviscerate Steven Greer. I asked him about all the speakers, many of who were high ranking military. As expected, he went down the list and would say things like, "Well, this general said he saw a UFO and on that basis he killed the messenger without listening to the message. He went down the list and tried to discredit anyone who who had anything to do with UFOs, etc., yet failed to deal with the people who just gave straight forward testimony and address their claims. You remind me him. What about the quotes that are real and valid?

 

[JayUtah]

People...

Are all your posts going to be these childish playground rants?

 

[carlitos]

= My point exactly -- you think X,Y,Z about me but don't know the A,B,C of what we're talking about: the U.S. Public Education system. You think I'm being crazy and hateful even though you don't know what you're talking about and am asking me once again to educate you on another topic you've openly admitted to blindly argue about.

= I think you should re-read what you've said here and repackage it again.

I wish that people would make up their minds. What I always heard was that I was being brainwashed by liberal hippie teachers who made us read Anti-American, biased history books by that commie Howard Zinn. Now Jango is telling me that I was instead being brainwashed to never question the government. I cannot reconcile either of these two views with the reality of my education in the American public school system.

I suspect plasticity of memory and a large dose of confirmation bias are at play here. Jango only remembers the patriotic stuff, and he is conveniently forgetting how he was taught about our mistreatment of the natives and blacks, or what a mess the Vietnam War was.

I noticed that you don't mention the ones that are real. That's typical.

I noticed that you never provided a source for that William Colby quote. That's also typical.

 

[JayUtah]

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.

The problem is not the strength of the language. As far as that's concerned, you'll always see a range of reactions depending on the situation and the people involved. Some people are passionate one way or the other, others are not.

The problem is that it's phrased as an affirmative. Affirming "psi is invalid" as a general proposition is not the skeptical approach. The general proposition I think most skeptics would subscribe to is that "psi is not a proven phenomenon." That leaves open exactly the possibility you first asked about -- that new evidence may come to light.

That will be the general pattern for any "interesting" but unproven phenomenon. You can never prove it doesn't exist, so you say it's unproven. You can sometimes subjectively determine how likely it is to exist based on various factors. But that's a personal decision what to believe when the evidence isn't helpful.

Leaving aside the general case, we can affirm "So-and-so's claims to psi are invalid in a particular case," if the evidence in that case supports such an affirmation. Evidence of that kind would be discovering, for example, how the claimant has cheated in that case. This is the sort of thing Houdini used to do, such as by rigging the claimants' equipment to reveal its use.

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.

Discovering such a "master key" would be a subsequent step in the process of scientific inquiry. The first step, as I outlined above, would be to prove that a phenomena of any kind exists by showing a correlation greater than chance.

It's reasonable to hypothesize that different genres of psi ability have common factors, but in science you have to show that they do by specific experimentation. A difference in phenomenology doesn't rule out common factors but suggests differentiated factors as well. Remember, the first step is showing a correlation. The second step is investigating the smaller mini-correlations that slowly reveal how the overall mechanism works.

The only time you can say that proving one proposition automatically proves another is when you can know in a deductively strong manner that a common factor exists in the underlying mechanism, either a common premise or a proven causation. When the underlying nature is unknown, you can't reliably know of any commonality.

In any case, the raw correlation is the end-run study. As I said, while it's reasonable to suspect that remote viewing and telepathy would have common factors, you can devise and experiment to test each purported ability in isolation. If the test shows positive results for one, but not the other, then you can reliability determine that there is no commonality within the framework of variables in your experiment.

 

[JohnG]

= My point exactly -- you think X,Y,Z about me but don't know the A,B,C of what we're talking about: the U.S. Public Education system. You think I'm being crazy and hateful even though you don't know what you're talking about and am asking me once again to educate you on another topic you've openly admitted to blindly argue about.

= I think you should re-read what you've said here and repackage it again.

What's this monolithic "U.S. Public Education system" of which you speak? There are five teachers in my extended family and I almost married a woman who is now a college poli-sci professor. Maybe I'll tell her your "theory" about the "U.S. Public Education system" and watch her laugh herself hoarse.

I attended both public and private schools throughout the early 70s to early 80s and the only authorities that my teachers were interested in me obeying were themselves. I had liberal teachers, conservative teachers, great teachers, good teachers, mediocre teachers, bad teachers, senile teachers, even one ◊◊◊◊◊◊* crazy teacher, but you probably couldn't have gotten any two of them to agree on anything when it came to politics. I learned about such evils and scandals as slavery & racism, the "Manifest Destiny" mistreatment of Native Americans, the interment of Japanese Americans during WWII, Watergate, Iran Contra, you name it. None of those subjects were given any sort of partisan spin by my teachers.

Take heart! Maybe you just had lousy teachers or maybe you are exaggerating or even making up your own experience based on secondhand stories about the Soviet Union education system or the American education system of the 1950s and tell me, how did that work out for those heavily indoctrinated 1950s schoolchildren who were later in high school and college during the 1960s?

 

[JohnG]

boo hoo(sob, sob). If you want to be taken seriously, don't quote James Randi, Shameless Joe Nickel, the bad astronomer Phil Plait or anybody on this site. It's full of an unsubstantiated laundry list of reasons why you think the woos, etc., are inferior, with a side dish of opinion polls. When that happens, the messenger is the message.

That's the second time today I've seen you make reference to "Shameless Joe Nickel". Clearly you're trying to make that "a thing". That is adorable, but I should tell you that his name is "Nickell", not "Nickel". If you're going to insult the man, at least get his name right.

Tell me, is "Shameless Joe Nickel" meant to be a play on "Shoeless" Joe Jackson? If so, is the fact that both men share the same first name really enough to justify that clumsy play on words? And is he really all that "shameless"? I've read a couple of his books, read countless articles and have seen numerous TV appearances. He's always presented himself as a reasonable, even-tempered guy who usually doesn't go for the snark and grandstanding that some other notable skeptics are famous for. Maybe you could try "Clueless Joe Nickell"? Or maybe play on his usual deadpan persona and call him "Wooden Joe Nickell"? Hey, I'm only trying to help!

 

[Bubba]

The problem is not the strength of the language. As far as that's concerned, you'll always see a range of reactions depending on the situation and the people involved. Some people are passionate one way or the other, others are not.

The problem is that it's phrased as an affirmative. Affirming "psi is invalid" as a general proposition is not the skeptical approach. The general proposition I think most skeptics would subscribe to is that "psi is not a proven phenomenon." ....

Thanks. More accurately, I was referring to those (relatively few) that say or imply that they somehow know for certain anything psi is impossible, will never to be 'proven', ever.

 

[Bubba]

Proposal for psychology thread experiment.

Be nice. No abusive language.
Try for a few posts each.
Make like can respect views of others. Pretend when must.
Optional discussion later, report how that's workin out for you.

(roughly half serious)

If no like, carry on.

 

[JohnG]

Air running low...vision getting foggy...

Can't move legs or write coherent word houses...

(roughly half conscious)

No woman, no cry.

 

[Jango]

What's this monolithic "U.S. Public Education system" of which you speak? There are five teachers in my extended family and I almost married a woman who is now a college poli-sci professor. Maybe I'll tell her your "theory" about the "U.S. Public Education system" and watch her laugh herself hoarse.

I attended both public and private schools throughout the early 70s to early 80s and the only authorities that my teachers were interested in me obeying were themselves. I had liberal teachers, conservative teachers, great teachers, good teachers, mediocre teachers, bad teachers, senile teachers, even one ◊◊◊◊◊◊* crazy teacher, but you probably couldn't have gotten any two of them to agree on anything when it came to politics. I learned about such evils and scandals as slavery & racism, the "Manifest Destiny" mistreatment of Native Americans, the interment of Japanese Americans during WWII, Watergate, Iran Contra, you name it. None of those subjects were given any sort of partisan spin by my teachers.

Take heart! Maybe you just had lousy teachers or maybe you are exaggerating or even making up your own experience based on secondhand stories about the Soviet Union education system or the American education system of the 1950s and tell me, how did that work out for those heavily indoctrinated 1950s schoolchildren who were later in high school and college during the 1960s?

It appears that you actually had history teachers that liked history as a topic, were probably history majors in college and by default, historians of some extent. The first time I met a real history teacher was in college, before that, it was the gym teacher or sports coach, and early childhood history lessons are rated G for a reason. I was taught by the book. What the book said is what I had to remember for the test.

Is it like this everywhere in the U.S. right now? No. But it was my experience and a similar one that other people have had too. I never experienced a school shooting or stabbing, but other kids have. I came across a book a few years ago in the library called Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong. That book talks about similar things that I am because it does happen.

FYI -- My wife is a history teacher. Her passion of history got me interested in the field as well. She was two grades ahead of me and went through what I did until she had a history teacher in the 11th grade who actually liked the subject of history. I graduated without ever having that. My schooling was terrible all-around -- I had health, math, Spanish, psychology, sociology, strength & conditioning, writing and reading teachers who were passionate about their profession and did not rely on the assigned text to be the teacher. There is a gulf of difference between the textbooks I used and the ones I've seen floating around today. But I got the short end of the stick in my gradeschool history lessons.

I'm sorry, but that's the way it was. I received many valuable lessons across the other fields, just not history. What is there to argue about?

 

[jakesteele]

Are all your posts going to be these childish playground rants?

As long as your posts are childish playground rants, I will continue to do so in a like manner and fashion.

 

[jakesteele]

I wish that people would make up their minds. What I always heard was that I was being brainwashed by liberal hippie teachers who made us read Anti-American, biased history books by that commie Howard Zinn. Now Jango is telling me that I was instead being brainwashed to never question the government. I cannot reconcile either of these two views with the reality of my education in the American public school system.

I suspect plasticity of memory and a large dose of confirmation bias are at play here. Jango only remembers the patriotic stuff, and he is conveniently forgetting how he was taught about our mistreatment of the natives and blacks, or what a mess the Vietnam War was.




I noticed that you never provided a source for that William Colby quote. That's also typical.

Do you question the validity of the statement?

 

[JohnG]

But I got the short end of the stick in my gradeschool history lessons.

Lots of people did, no arguments here and not just in history. I'm no fan of certain aspects of the US educational system, but there's a difference between saying that some, perhaps most US children get an inferior education compared to certain other industrialized countries and saying that US schoolchildren are trained to blindly trust all authority.