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Neil Armstrong's reply to a Moon landing skeptic

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Re: Neil Armstrong's reply to a Moon landing skeptic

#191

Post by boomboomsubban »

coliveira wrote: post #86
boomboomsubban wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't see the parallel between the willful ignorance displayed and the "Dark Ages." Do you think the migrating tribes just refused to believe those aqueducts existed?

The rise of the Church made most of the ancient culture to be believed false of demonic. Philosophers were the first put to the fire. Temples were destroyed, along with the books inside them. With the end of the Roman state, there was nobody left in Europe to maintain the engineering knowledge acquired by the ancient.

While there was some persecution of the pagans, they mostly just gradually became Christian. The West lost it's Greek tradition, and with it much of the millennia of knowledge it contained.

Re: Neil Armstrong's reply to a Moon landing skeptic

#192

Post by adsdentiste »

ΚΑΙ ΜΕΤΑ ΑΠΟ ΑΥΤΟ , ΤΙ ΘΕΛΕΤΕ ΝΑ ΠΙΣΤΕΨΟΥΜΕ ? ΕΙΝΑΙ ΔΥΝΑΤΟΝ ΜΟΛΟΝΟΤΙ ΟΙ ΦΩΤΟΓΡΑΦΙΕΣ ΠΡΑΓΜΑΤΙΚΑ ΕΔΕΙΧΝΑΝ ΤΟ ΨΕΜΑ, ΤΟ ΨΕΜΑ ΦΑΝΤΑΖΕ ΤΟΣΟ ΜΕΓΑΛΟ ΠΟΥ ΟΙ ΠΙΟ ΠΟΛΛΟΙ ΤΟ ΘΕΩΡΟΥΣΑΝ ΑΔΥΝΑΤΟ , ΟΤΙ ΔΗΛΑΔΗ ΗΤΑΝ ΑΛΗΘΕΙΑ Η ΠΡΟΣΕΛΗΝΩΣΗ

Re: Neil Armstrong's reply to a Moon landing skeptic

#193

Post by dreamcompiler »

jodrellblank wrote: post #46
dreamcompiler wrote: post #5

What gets me most about these fools is they completely ignore how much such a huge fake job would cost. It would be so expensive that you could cut the budget in half and just...go to the moon.

Why would faking it with a soundstage and some actors in a room, and some small models, cost so much more? A big budget Hollywood film like James Bond Moonraker (1979) was 1/1000th the cost of the Apollo program, and with no famous actors/actresses, simpler script, TV quality, surely a fake would be cheaper than that? If someone thought it was fake, they ought to be asking where the budget really went and whose pocke…

Because it's a lot more than just a movie. Millions of people witnessed aspects of the program in person over a 10-year period. The workers, their families, and the public. You'd have to spend enough money to fool all of them.

Re: Neil Armstrong's reply to a Moon landing skeptic

#194

Post by avmich »

Supermancho wrote: post #180
avmich wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those are not major enough, not billions. 2 centuries are longer than Moon controversy, though not by much.

Adding a new qualification of "not major enough" is a no true scotsman argument, which is not compelling. They are religions by any measure but your arbitrary goalposting. >> people have been selling an invisible product since thousands of years (religion), so it is quite possible to get billions of people to lie to themselves and to others. The "billions" qualification comes from your specific interpretation of this…

> They are religions by any measure but your arbitrary goalposting.

The argument was "people are believing in imaginary things, in billions and for centuries". For billions - or so - and for centuries - or so - arguments to apply, the religion ought to be major.

> The "billions" qualification comes from your specific interpretation of this statement to mean a single religion.

Oh, so now goalposting mean not a single example, but a combined group :) in comparison to one specific - and rather located in time and geography - government program.

Frankly, at this point I don't see much sense in more hairsplitting. Points were made, anyone can think for oneself from these.

Re: Neil Armstrong's reply to a Moon landing skeptic

#195

Post by iainmerrick »

Falling3 wrote: post #179
iainmerrick wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that it’s the US government isn’t the important bit; Armstrong isn’t asking you to trust the government, and his entire argument is explicit, no reading between the lines required. What’s important is the “gigantic fraud involving 400,000 people” part -- clearly establishing that it would have had to be a pretty extreme effort. And rather than just saying “trust us”, he explicitly suggests asking people outs…

And I completely agree with all of that. That doesn't change the fact that "the government wouldn't defraud you" is a horrific argument. And that is one of his points.

I think you need to point to the sentence where he says or even implies that. I can’t see it and neither can the other people responding here.

Three of us (when I last looked) pointed out, independently, that he has two main arguments, and “trust the government” isn’t one of them.

Re: Neil Armstrong's reply to a Moon landing skeptic

#196

Post by dnautics »

jussij wrote: post #175
dnautics wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess the question could hinge on if yellowcake is truly wmd or not, but regardless the administration openly claimed it was, and that's what they based their argument on, and iirc that yellowcake was found.

Don't let a few facts get in the way of that good story: The yellowcake removed from Iraq in 2008 was material that had long since been identified, documented, and stored in sealed containers under the supervision of U.N. inspectors. It was not a “secret” cache that was recently “discovered” by the U.S, nor had the yellowcake been purchased by Iraq in the years immediately preceding the 2003 invasion. The uranium was…

Did you not read what I wrote?

> IIRC the claim was that Saddam Hussein had ceased reporting the location of stockpiles of nuclear material that the UN used to keep track of.

And

> The sin of the bush administration was that they sold it to the public that this was a national security threat even though they knew it was very lightly enriched and counted on the public not knowing or caring (remember the Chapelle skit about yellowcake).

I'll refresh your memory on the yellowcake skit:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9DLuALBnolM&t=1m36s

In any case, the WMD thing was not a coverup/fabrication. It was stretching the truth and stretching reasonable definitions of things, but I think that sort of lie is not in the same category.

Re: Neil Armstrong's reply to a Moon landing skeptic

#197

Post by bcrl »

api wrote: post #184
ceilingcorner wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Flat Earth thing makes no sense to me, but regarding Anti-Vax: again, not defending them, but it’s trivially easy to find examples of governments (worldwide) deceptively giving people medicine which had a negative effect on their health, whether as experimentation, sterilization, or otherwise. The fact that vaccines are scientifically known to be safe is just lost in the noise. I attribute the rise of conspiracy…

My pet theory on the flat Earth is that it's been pushed in order to compile lists of extremely gullible people by scraping social media so that these lists can be used later. For what? Who knows. Targets of scams, marketing, propaganda...

Nah, some AI just figured out it was an easy way to get more clicks on YouTube.

Re: Neil Armstrong's reply to a Moon landing skeptic

#198

Post by [deleted] »

mihaifm wrote: post #104
mullingitover wrote: post #51

Armstrong's exact argument about the vast numbers conspirators that would be required to keep perfect secrecy is exactly what I use when people try to claim that the coronavirus is some kind of hoax or that there's some kind of conspiracy about vaccines. Have you ever tried to get thousands of people to cooperate on anything, let alone perpetuate a massive lie, when they have nothing to gain personally from doing so?

They don't have to lie. You can have 90% of those 400k people do legit work, but still fake the landing. Maybe they built the rocket but encountered some technical bottleneck and had to fake the landing. Not a skeptic myself, but the argument that 400k people needed to keep a secret is pretty weak.

[deleted]

Re: Neil Armstrong's reply to a Moon landing skeptic

#199

Post by nojvek »

mihaifm wrote: post #104
mullingitover wrote: post #51

Armstrong's exact argument about the vast numbers conspirators that would be required to keep perfect secrecy is exactly what I use when people try to claim that the coronavirus is some kind of hoax or that there's some kind of conspiracy about vaccines. Have you ever tried to get thousands of people to cooperate on anything, let alone perpetuate a massive lie, when they have nothing to gain personally from doing so?

They don't have to lie. You can have 90% of those 400k people do legit work, but still fake the landing. Maybe they built the rocket but encountered some technical bottleneck and had to fake the landing. Not a skeptic myself, but the argument that 400k people needed to keep a secret is pretty weak.

It could be a half lie too. 400k people built rocket, they saw the launch but the rocket didn’t actually make it to moon. The actual moon shots were in a studio.

Half lies are the best lies because you can argue half a truth is good enough for the whole truth.

Re: Neil Armstrong's reply to a Moon landing skeptic

#200

Post by dreamcompiler »

Sniffnoy wrote: post #98
duluca wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember reading an article years ago, saying that it’d have required the invention of electronics that did not exist yet to slow down the footage (simulating 1/6th g) and pull off a live broadcast that lasted hours and hours. So in essence, it’d have been the more impressive thing to do technologically speaking. Having seen the new 1 hour documentary on Apollo 11 and how rickety everything looked and barely worked…

You may be thinking of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_loUDS4c3Cs Edit: changed to earlier upload of same video

This is very informative presentation. Thanks for the link.
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