Alternative Knowledge

Started by monkey424, Fri 05/02/2016 23:31:26

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Snarky

Quote from: Gurok on Sun 27/11/2016 10:43:14
Blind acceptance of authority is just as bad as total abandonment. I'm a proponent of centrism when it comes to these things -- a healthy scepticism for authority.

Sure, but when was the last time people in a democracy overwhelmingly blindly accepted something, just because it was stated by an authority?

Quote from: Gurok on Sun 27/11/2016 10:43:14
Quote from: Snarky on Sun 27/11/2016 08:22:26
Yes, I think it's clearly been demonstrated that it is harmful to public discourse, and I think it's becoming more and more morally questionable for these forums to provide a platform for it.

It is strange that you think these ideas are harmful and you have a moral responsibility to protect the the forum from them. I believe there's a sense of personal responsibility everyone should have and that we're all adults here.

The ideas themselves are mostly just foolish. It's the aggregate effect I think is harmful. It undermines the ability to have arguments grounded in reality, because who's to say what reality is? Global warming? Could be a Chinese hoax. Obama was supposedly born in Hawaii and supposedly went to Harvard, and there's plenty of documentary evidence of that, but who's to say it hasn't all been doctored? A Clinton staffer dies in a mugging? Well, that's what the police, his family, and mainstream investigative journalists say, but here's a blogger who thinks he was murdered, and Julian Assange has hinted the same, and we all know the Clintons are evil, so clearly that's a more likely story...

Doctors go through much the same thing, with their "science" and "western medicine" and "expertise" dismissed in favor of self-taught internet research and "alternative knowledge" cults (e.g. vaccines cause autism, pro-anorexia, Morgellons disease, gang stalking). And certainly physicians are not infrequently wrong, and medical science has some serious flaws, but is this "alternative knowledge" in any way helpful?

The irony is that this kind of paranoid thinking, when widely adopted, opens the door to an Orwellian nightmare far more oppressive than the groupthink of mainstream media. In Turkey just this week, some 15 000 government employees (mostly cops and military personnel) were purged for supposedly belonging to a conspiracy (links to the coup or the PKK). That makes more than 100 000 people sacked or arrested so far. Needless to say, if the coup attempt really had the support of 100 000 people inside the government, it would have been far more successful than it turned out to be. But hey, proper investigations, burden of proof and all that is for the sheeple.

Quote from: Jack on Sun 27/11/2016 13:53:43
Fake news? What is that?

This, for example.

Jack

Quote from: Snarky on Sun 27/11/2016 15:54:24
This, for example.

QuoteHe says he got into fake news around 2013 to highlight the extremism of the white nationalist alt-right.

"The whole idea from the start was to build a site that could kind of infiltrate the echo chambers of the alt-right, publish blatantly or fictional stories and then be able to publicly denounce those stories and point out the fact that they were fiction," Coler says.

In other words, he ran his sites to subvert the "alt-right" with a form of strawman argument.

Here an investigator does essentially the same to the far left to see if their reports are vetted: Trump-Inspired Harassment Hoaxes | A Case Study

It's also funny that this "fake news" is so much more dangerous than the confirmed fake news peddled by the establishment, which has led so far to over 100,000 civilian deaths in just one of the countries unlawfully invaded and occupied (Iraq).

People won't soon forget that outlets now hysterically screaming "fake news" are the same who blatantly tried to steal an election for hillary.

LimpingFish

#262
Quote from: Jack on Sun 27/11/2016 02:56:04
I will not stop.

Bring it.

What? Bring what? A Chicken Pot Pie? Less links? You've side-stepped the actual meaning of my post, and instead responded to it as an attack on your liberty, so I'll repeat and expand upon it. What is the function of this thread, beyond being a repository for your link cache? Who are you trying to reach? Conspiracy peddlers only appeal to other conspiracy peddlers, which is why conspiracy peddlers function best in an echo chamber. Norms/squares/sheeple simply don't care and therefore go unexposed to your views. So...what is the point? Why go out of your way to invite conflict and antagonism into an otherwise peaceful environment? To what end? You're introducing thoughts and opinions, from people who aren't here, as fact, leaving me with little room to build a debate. Do I personally believe these thoughts and opinions? No. Do I believe you believe them? Very much so. Where is the room for debate? Who am I supposed to debate with? You or the people you link to? What do you ultimately get from this thread?

Quote from: Gurok on Sun 27/11/2016 03:46:40
Pardon me, but I can't see why anyone with a creative bent who disbelieved the content would see harm in this thread. What a sad outlook you must have.

Equating creativity with a low tolerance for bullshit seems like a bit of a stretch. The harm doesn't come from the content of this thread. It comes from the unflinching arrogance, rush to conflict, and, frankly, insulting self-righteousness that accompanies the posting of such content. I see the same harm inflicted by hard-line theists (and atheists, for that matter) who peddle their own brand of bullish, self-aggrandizing, fancy. This has nothing to do with whether I believe the pyramids were the chariots of the gods.

And my outlook is happy as a clam, thank you for asking. :)

Quote from: Stupot+ on Sun 27/11/2016 04:11:29
Those Reddit threads feel no different. A bunch of internet-dwellers finding clues and building up a false narrative to fine-tune their ever-convincing theories.

Agreed. One of the many reasons why Reddit is such a shit-show, and this community isn't.

Quote from: Ali on Sun 27/11/2016 11:39:53
To his credit, Jack hasn't been pushing the most unpleasant (e.g. Jewish people were warned about the 9/11, the Holocaust was part of a Zionist plan, vaccines cause autism/cancer/Ebola/everything.)

True.

Although I do find it interesting how choosy conspiracy enthusiasts can be in how they determine the veracity of one conspiracy over the next. Where in the chain does the ultimate believability break down? When it strays into racism? And how do I determine a "good" conspiracy peddler from a bad one, when their purported conspiracies may themselves be nothing more than a springboard used to introduce more harmful, extremist views?

All in all, I stand by my view that this thread has become (or may always have been) less about debating conflicting worldviews, and more about a handful of people (or rather one person, now that Monkey424 hasn't posted in a while) with a desire to be taken seriously, but incapable of constructing a meaningful dialog (links are not an argument, and regurgitating third-party opinions is not a debate) without resorting to name-calling.
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Andail

Quote from: Jack on Sun 27/11/2016 17:44:06
It's also funny that this "fake news" is so much more dangerous than the confirmed fake news peddled by the establishment, which has led so far to over 100,000 civilian deaths in just one of the countries unlawfully invaded and occupied (Iraq).

I don't think that counts as some kind of hushed up conspiracy; that was just the Bush administration being stubborn and really needing a reason to go to war.
It was widely known - at least outside of the USA - that Iraq didn't have WMDs, that they weren't linked to the 9/11, and that the invasion would be unjustified. Any serious news outlet at the time would have cited Hans Blix and his UN committee explaining exactly this; what you chose to listen to instead is another matter.

selmiak

Is it true they download the internet to recreate 1984?

Jack

Links to my previous postings on pizzagate and institutional paedophilia:

Link 1 (twittergate breaks and NYT presents a fact check without facts)
Link 2 (1,400 people including government officials investigated for paedophilia in the UK, people investigating trafficking end up dead)
Link 3 (a mass of links showing how the BBC, including the current head of NYT, covered up the savile case, and a known VIP paedophile ring under thatcher. Former child actors speak out on hollywood's paedophilia. Child traffickers released by the office of hillary clinton, and more)

Quote from: Andail on Mon 28/11/2016 07:17:22
Any serious news outlet at the time would have cited Hans Blix and his UN committee explaining exactly this; what you chose to listen to instead is another matter.

I don't dispute this. My point was that, practically all of the ones accepted as above reproach, the mainstream media, presented this false evidence, enough to sway public opnion. I showed before that in britain the government itself used mainstream outlets to present these false claims as fact. These are the same now accusing everyone else of fake news.

That's not a hushed up conspiracy. It's a known conspiracy. If my links are so damaging to the social fabric, why are the peddlers of confirmed fake news, which causes untold suffering, given a pass?

Quote from: Andail on Mon 28/11/2016 07:17:22
It was widely known - at least outside of the USA - that Iraq didn't have WMDs, that they weren't linked to the 9/11, and that the invasion would be unjustified.

So they only peddled lies where public opinion was required to go to war. Again, I don't dispute this.

Quote from: LimpingFish on Mon 28/11/2016 01:40:04
You're introducing thoughts and opinions, from people who aren't here, as fact, leaving me with little room to build a debate.

If I were posting conspiracy editorials, there would be no argument, you would ask where the proof is. Well, here it is, as much as they're allowed to publish. Pizzagate alone presents more than enough circumstantial evidence to warrant a full official investigation. Unless you want to pretend that the police sketches of madeleine mccan's abductors don't look conspicuously like the pedostas. That they didn't used to stay at a friend's house (a known paedophile), less than a kilometer from where she was abducted? That bill clinton never rode on the "lolita express"? That someone didn't email pedosta saying that her children would be in the pool for entertainment?

Here are the sketches, kept from the public for five years:



Quote from: LimpingFish on Mon 28/11/2016 01:40:04
Conspiracy peddlers only appeal to other conspiracy peddlers, which is why conspiracy peddlers function best in an echo chamber.

Care to share some links to back up this claim?

This thread is for people who find it useful. If it makes you sad, afraid, angry: Don't read it.

Snarky

Hey, here's some actually intriguing alternative knowledge: A NASA test tentatively confirms that the "impossible" EM Drive (it violates conservation of momentum) seems to work, as reported in a journal paper that just passed peer review. If this is real and can be scaled up, the potential applications for space travel are very exciting, since it would make constantly-accelerating ships feasible without the need to store large quantities of fuel. Particularly for long-distance space travel, that would speed things up enormously.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/11/nasa-impossible-emdrive-physics-peer-review-space-science/

That said, the experimental effects observed so far are tiny, and since it does appear to violate the laws of physics we should probably remain skeptical:

http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/11/nasas-em-drive-still-a-wtf-thruster/

Khris

Quote from: Jack on Mon 28/11/2016 11:40:58If it makes you sad, afraid, angry: Don't read it.
It's neither of those. It makes me roll my eyes.
You see yourself as the lightbringer, waking up the people who gullibly consume MSM. But let me repeat: you are *not* smarter than the average conspiracy crackpot. You may think so, but there's really no meaningful difference between you and monkey424.

The fact alone that you happily cite MSM whenever it agrees with you makes your entire approach to "truth" laughable. You are up to your eyeballs in confirmation bias, true belief and unfalsifiable convictions. You simply haven't noticed yet.

Scavenger

Quote from: Jack on Mon 28/11/2016 11:40:58
Pizzagate alone presents more than enough circumstantial evidence to warrant a full official investigation.

Not... really?

The fact that it originated on /r/The_Donald alone should ring some alarm bells, because, maybe there's some conflict of interest there? They are really really stretching to find anything to pin on anybody there.

I mean come on, they're even doing the illuminati triangles thing.

Danvzare

Quote from: Jack on Mon 28/11/2016 11:40:58
Unless you want to pretend that the police sketches of madeleine mccan's abductors don't look conspicuously like the pedostas. That they didn't used to stay at a friend's house (a known paedophile), less than a kilometer from where she was abducted?
I thought we had already established that those sketches look like her father. In other words, her parents killed her. >:(

Jack

Quote from: Scavenger on Mon 28/11/2016 14:02:38
Not... really?

Notice how they "debunk" all the low hanging fruit? How half their article is made up of alefantis saying "nah-uh"? The NYT article, which everyone in the MSM and their shill grandma is referencing, doesn't even bother with the former and only contains the latter. Should ring some alarm bells. Debunking the most ridiculous theories does not mean an investigation is over. And really, no one should be relying on a single site for absolute truth.

And Khris, you can save the ad hominem. You're not dealing with one of your people here. The MSM links are not for my benefit.

Ali

Under President Trump all criminals will have names that reveal their crimes in French, and everyone will believe six impossible things before breakfast.

Khris

Quote from: Jack on Mon 28/11/2016 17:48:45And Khris, you can save the ad hominem.
A personal attack isn't an ad hominem. Telling a blind person they're heading for a gorge isn't an ad hominem.

LimpingFish

Quote from: Jack on Mon 28/11/2016 11:40:58
Care to share some links to back up this claim?

Nope. The most fervent audience a conspiracy believer can have is one made up of other conspiracy believers. A feedback loop is created, reinforcing the views of the believers and the veracity of the conspiracy itself. Without that feedback loop, you get an individual who looks less like a champion of truth, and more like an angry outsider who sees shadowy cabals behind every injustice (real or imagined) they feel they have suffered. But for arguments sake, I'll add a hearty "In my humble opinion..."

Quote from: Jack on Mon 28/11/2016 11:40:58
This thread is for people who find it useful.

I'm fascinated by your use of that word.
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Andail

Quote from: Khris on Mon 28/11/2016 22:11:31
Telling a blind person they're heading for a gorge isn't an ad hominem.

That was masterful, Khris.

However, this thread is pretty close to becoming circular and kind of pointless. I'm not too fond of the entire premise of this thread, nor its title, and would prefer if specific topics could be treated in individual threads.

Snarky

Having wasted a little bit of time looking at the Pizzagate "evidence" (with damning proof such as "someone once used the word 'afterparty'", "there's art by an artist who has done other work that would be inappropriate to display", and "a friend of theirs went to Burning Man" â€" which they seem to think is some kind of witches' sabbath... yes, this is a literal witch hunt), it occurs to me that it would be pretty easy to put together a similar dossier of circumstantial evidence that AGS is a pedophile ring, starting with the highly suspicious americangirlscouts.org URL (what is this, a group that scouts for little American girls?) and "Mittens" (which represent childhood, and visually resemble, if arranged a certain way, the butterfly in one of the umpteen secret pedophile signs). I'm sure if you go looking you'd find that some forum members have some kind of connection with some sex offenders, so that's guilt by association right there. Add in some off-color jokes and bits taken out of context from various games, old forum posts and IRC, and voilà ! Who will dare expose this powerful conspiracy?

Snarky

Post deleted and thread locked in response to member complaint, and because the AGS Forums will not be used for harassment against individuals or to spread allegations based on flimsy circumstantial inferences. Posting pictures of children implying that they're the victims of sexual abuse based on nothing but speculation particularly crosses the line.

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