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A new Bigfoot documentary helps explain our conspiracy-minded era

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Re: A new Bigfoot documentary helps explain our conspiracy-minded era

#111

Post by jibal »

heavyset_go wrote: post #107
jibal wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. Two years after the assassination I wrote a paper on it for a summer school history class. I researched in the local public library, where I read a bunch of magazine articles and Mark Lane books, blissfully unaware of ideological agendas and bad faith, and believed there was a conspiracy--though I didn't know which theory was correct because there were so many and they only increased in the ensuing years. At…

> It is almost certain that there is intelligent life elsewhere in this vast universe, but there is no evidence that any of them are the cause of our UAPs and many reasons from logic and physics why they aren't and could not be. No one is saying that, there is just a history of the government using UFO/"alien" conspiracy theories as disinformation to discredit sightings of classified aircraft, which themselves are mu…

> No one is saying that

I'm fascinated by such absurd and intellectually dishonest comments. Of course there are people saying that ... just because it's not what you're saying doesn't mean there aren't. I've followed the UFO sightings arena on and off since the 1950s when my brother got heavily into tracking sightings, maintaining a file cabinet of them and subscribing to numerous journals ... there's a much broader range of beliefs and activity than you're acknowledging, and that's what I was talking about in my comment, if you would bother to actually read and understand it.

I'm not going to address your other claims, or comment further on this.

Re: A new Bigfoot documentary helps explain our conspiracy-minded era

#112

Post by n4r9 »

GJim wrote: post #87
n4r9 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think if 20 years ago you claimed that there was a global sex trafficking ring that procured young girls for elites, politicians, celebrities, and royalty, you'd be laughed off as a David Icke level conspiracist. These days it just seems obvious that that was going on.

Hard disagree! Such things have existed for millennia. What's more surprising is that people claim to be surprised. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Courtesan

There are big differences between the historical notion of a courtesan and the underage women trafficked by Epstein. The main one being that courtesans played an established and visible (if unwritten) role in society.

Re: A new Bigfoot documentary helps explain our conspiracy-minded era

#113

Post by lithocarpus »

duskdozer wrote: post #108
lithocarpus wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is not a good analogy. Aircraft manufacturers and airlines have a lot at stake if they let any risks slip through. If anyone dies it will be big news and visible to everyone, with real consequences for the companies responsible. (I'm in the US so this may only be relevant there) Childhood vaccines could cause a serious chronic disease in 1% of kids and we would have no way to know because: 1) Many vaccine clinic…

I'd be much more inclined to believe they were holding genuine, consistent opinions of that if they applied the same concern to the other end: unstudied long-term problems from measles infections. But they don't. It's the same for COVID/vaccines. Endless concern over spike protein or long-term risk in the vaccine, but happy to get the spike protein or long-term risk from the viral infection.

That's a good point. I would like to see long term problems from measles infection studied and better understood, but I also understand how they really can't be studied in the US where measles is extremely rare and I wouldn't advocate bringing it back to find out.

It is similar with covid but I wouldn't say it's quite the same. The measles vaccine seems very effective at preventing infection, while the covid vaccine is not. It might reduce harm from the infection, and whether this reduction in harm outweighs potential harm from the vaccine is not well understood. It may have done so early on when covid itself was more dangerous, and it might not with current strains of covid. I would similarly like to see long term studies comparing two similar populations where one took the vaccine and the other didn't. It's complex.

With covid, in the beginning there simply wasn't time to know if the vaccine was safe. And now that we've had some time, it turns out that longer term placebo controlled studies just were never done, so we still don't know. Once it became clear that the vaccine was very ineffective at preventing infection the choice became a lot easier - get the virus, or get the virus and the vaccine, which are categorically different things.

I'm not happy to get either of them, but I'd rather the one than both. The virus itself appears to have been modified and was certainly novel to humans. The vaccines are novel and hard-to-understand in many many more ways than.

There is also a point to be made about the body being a complex system and introducing novelty to a complex system can have consequences that are unpredictable and hard to understand. Still worth studying though.

Re: A new Bigfoot documentary helps explain our conspiracy-minded era

#114

Post by swores »

lithocarpus wrote: post #93
rob74 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those "well-read antivaxxers" are the same as e.g. people with a fear of flying: they spend too much time looking at extremely rare catastrophic outcomes (dying or being seriously injured because of a plane crash or a vaccine side effect) and then think that it will surely happen to them or their children. The only difference is just that when someone who's afraid of flying doesn't take a plane, it only affects very…

This is not a good analogy. Aircraft manufacturers and airlines have a lot at stake if they let any risks slip through. If anyone dies it will be big news and visible to everyone, with real consequences for the companies responsible. (I'm in the US so this may only be relevant there) Childhood vaccines could cause a serious chronic disease in 1% of kids and we would have no way to know because: 1) Many vaccine clinic…

Your claims about vaccine trials are not true. I’m not an expert and don’t have time to go and find citations to argue each of your points one by one, but I’ve read enough studies to know that vaccine trials aren’t nearly as sloppy / poorly designed as you believe.

For example, even when speed was extremely important and everyone was trying to get Covid vaccines out as fast as possible a few years ago, they still ran large randomised placebo-controlled trials (in places with high infection rates so they could get good comparison data relatively quickly).

So please stop spreading false claims about this stuff / spend time actually learning the facts. Claims like these do real harm by undermining trust in vaccines and helping fuel avoidable outbreaks of diseases like measles.

Re: A new Bigfoot documentary helps explain our conspiracy-minded era

#115

Post by heavyset_go »

jibal wrote: post #111
heavyset_go wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It is almost certain that there is intelligent life elsewhere in this vast universe, but there is no evidence that any of them are the cause of our UAPs and many reasons from logic and physics why they aren't and could not be. No one is saying that, there is just a history of the government using UFO/"alien" conspiracy theories as disinformation to discredit sightings of classified aircraft, which themselves are mu…

> No one is saying that I'm fascinated by such absurd and intellectually dishonest comments. Of course there are people saying that ... just because it's not what you're saying doesn't mean there aren't. I've followed the UFO sightings arena on and off since the 1950s when my brother got heavily into tracking sightings, maintaining a file cabinet of them and subscribing to numerous journals ... there's a much broader…

Thanks for the interesting discussion

Re: A new Bigfoot documentary helps explain our conspiracy-minded era

#116

Post by Braxton1980 »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #63
dylan604 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

9 out of 10 experts agree. It's that last one. That one person is just enough for people to latch on. Then, of the 9, 6 of them get tired of yelling at clouds and quit. The 6 get replaced with those that believe the one so that there's not 7. That goes on for long enough, you get people in charge that do away with vaccinations and measles has a come back.

That's not actually how the measles thing happens. What really happens is that the one nutter stands in the town square ranting about lizardmen and 99.99% of people ignore him, or an actual scientist gets bored and challenges him to a debate and then lizardmen guy gets trounced and further discredited, and everything is fine. Until someone with an authoritarian streak gets tired of winning debates with lizardmen guy…

>The problem is fundamentally that censoring something discredits you rather than them.

Why?

Re: A new Bigfoot documentary helps explain our conspiracy-minded era

#117

Post by AnthonyMouse »

Braxton1980 wrote: post #116
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not actually how the measles thing happens. What really happens is that the one nutter stands in the town square ranting about lizardmen and 99.99% of people ignore him, or an actual scientist gets bored and challenges him to a debate and then lizardmen guy gets trounced and further discredited, and everything is fine. Until someone with an authoritarian streak gets tired of winning debates with lizardmen guy…

>The problem is fundamentally that censoring something discredits you rather than them. Why?

Because it implies you can't defeat their argument with a counterargument and have to resort to violence.

Re: A new Bigfoot documentary helps explain our conspiracy-minded era

#118

Post by Braxton1980 »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #117
Braxton1980 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>The problem is fundamentally that censoring something discredits you rather than them. Why?

Because it implies you can't defeat their argument with a counterargument and have to resort to violence.

Why does it imply that?

Re: A new Bigfoot documentary helps explain our conspiracy-minded era

#119

Post by Braxton1980 »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #97
ourmandave wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the "do vaccines cause autism" sort of thing, they don't. But then frauds like Wakefield somehow got a bullshit paper published saying they do and it's off to the toon races. The paper wasn't censored, it was disproven by multiple studies and discredited by investigation. The Wakefield paper studied 12 children (multiple who had siblings with autism) and was funded by lawyers suing the vaccine companies at the tim…

Let's not pretend that nothing was being censored during COVID or that no one remembers it. The backlash is the primary reason we ended up with RFK. There are also multiple ways to solve problems. If the Wakefield theory is that vaccines using mercury as a preservative can cause autism then you don't even need to challenge it to make it irrelevant. It has memetic power because having mercury in medicine seems intuiti…

The reason we ended with RFK is because of the massive number of lies Trump and his allies told compared to the Democrats, the majority of people are not sufficiently intelligent to overcome this, and the economy.
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