[X] My Assistant

[mike]

You see how the thing progresses?  It comes from a deep-seated sense of inferiority over living in a world that's too complicated for them to understand, and a hatred of anyone who claims to understand things they don't...  It's that fear and hatred that the politicians are currently using to their own advantage.

-the other Doug

I'm not sure that conspiracy-believers hate everyone who has answers to things they don't understand, but that they're just scared of upsetting their worldview. Defense mechanisms and all.. if they were to accept that we had landed on the moon, part of them would have to change, and that change might be 'bad' or 'painful'.

Myself, I've often found that things that are painful in the short-term are decidedly beneficial in the long-term (eventually ), and really, if you're any kind of optimist you have to think this way.

Besides, who wouldn't want to walk around on the moon? That's gotta be fun, even if the moon is apparently just a big dusty rock. Boing, boing, boing. If you were an optimist, you could even imagine that you would find something quite impressive indeed. If you were a pessimist I suppose you'd think the Moon God (or even just good ole' God) would soon crush you while you sleep, and sure, your spacesuit might rip open, but I bet being exposed to the vacuum of space is pretty fun too.

[Jeff7]

This does not make me laugh at all...

Even if that stuff is believed by only 6% of the population, that makes 6% who are not confident with their government, who think that their government lies, manipulate them with the help of ugly little grey aliens, or purposely created the AIDS viruse in a military lab... How could these people be good citizens, or simply be happy? 6% of american citizens, that makes 15 millions!

Well, I do believe we landed on the moon, but I also know that the government lies, and is manipulative.


I still love the arguments about there being no stars visible in the picture. My sister was in a park somewhere once, and a friend took a picture. My sister was in the sunlight, but behind her, it was lightly shaded. Picture came out looking like it was nighttime - there was no background visible at all, even though it was still rather well lit. She just happened to be the brightest spot in the picture, and the camera compensated.
Either that, or the entire thing was staged, and she was actually in a lab somewhere, not a park.

[ElkGroveDan]

It's that fear and hatred that the politicians are currently using to their own advantage.

You're just itching to turn this board political aren't you?

[dvandorn]

You're just itching to turn this board political aren't you?

I was just expressing agreement with similar statements earlier in the thread (not by me). And quite frankly, you can take the "current" out of my statement -- all politicians, to one degree or another, appeal to peoples' fears and hatreds to gain their support.

Sorry, did not mean to offend...

-the other Doug

[djellison]

Now now boys - dont make me lock a thread

It's been moved.

[Phil Stooke]

Call me cynical, opined Phil (just back from vacation and feeling feisty) but I don't think the people behind (I mean really behind, at the deepest level) these hoaxes actually believe them any more than I do. Of course, some sad creatures lower down the chain of deceit probably do come to believe them. I think it's all about making money, from public speaking, web ads, TV specials and so on. The more controversial the better. Well, I did say call me cynical.

Phil

[Guest_Richard Trigaux_*]

You see how the thing progresses? It comes from a deep-seated sense of inferiority over living in a world that's too complicated for them to understand, and a hatred of anyone who claims to understand things they don't... It's that fear and hatred that the politicians are currently using to their own advantage.

I'm not sure that conspiracy-believers hate everyone who has answers to things they don't understand, but that they're just scared of upsetting their worldview.  Defense mechanisms and all.. if they were to accept that we had landed on the moon, part of them would have to change, and that change might be 'bad' or 'painful'.

Interesting discution on how things work, when the matter is about determining our vision of reality. Life is done in such a way -especially at our epoch- that things you deem true or good, later appear false or bad. So we have to accept, or to become mad and angry. We too have defense mechanisms to protect us from believing anything, but these defense mechanisms do not know the truth themselve, so they can work backward, make us stick to false beliefs. Example 1: a man drinks too much, his wife asks him to stop. What to decide, that he must stop, or that his wife is a women libs extremist? Example 2: Greenhouse effect asks us to consume less energy. What to decide: to buy a smaller car, or to say that ecologists are a fundamentalist cult? Exemple 3: Scientists and US government claim to have been to the Moon. What to decide: be amazed and bewildered with wonder for such a feat, or hate whose who are able of this when we are not? etc etc.

A further difficulty is that sometimes, alas, government and medias lie, for various reasons, sometimes legitimate, sometimes not. So when people realize this, they become defiant, and more likely to accept "alternative" theories and views. This is perhaps the reason why a review like "Nexus" specially targets ecologists and New Age. (Nexus was a confidential australian amateur fanzine which suddenly got a worlwide distribution and is specialized into "alternatives" )

Doug, I understand that you do not want your forum to become a politics forum. But sometimes politics comes and seeks us and catches us wherever we try to hide, even in deep space. So we have hoaxes, political influence on space programs and budgets, etc. So I think that it is legitimate to speak of it, and clearly identifies the skates, while keeping away from directly expressing partisan political points of view unrelated to unmanned spaceflight.

(UFOs too are out of topic on this forum because it is "manned" spaceflight )

[Bob Shaw]

(UFOs too are out of topic on this forum because it is "manned" spaceflight  )

Richard:

No, no, UFOs are not manned spacecraft!

Every time *I've* been abducted, it was by dozens of tall blonde Venusian women with hourglass figures and (oh, joy!) all of whom have an insatiable predeliction for the harvesting of interplanetary genetic material, so the things are 'womanned' not 'manned' (I did check, see?).

(and then I woke up)

Bob Shaw

[edstrick]

(thinks Bob's been smoking the Viagra again...)

[um3k]

(thinks Bob's been smoking the Viagra again...)

Bob, that's not what you're supposed to do with it!

[DDAVIS]

[quote=Richard Trigaux,Aug 20 2005, 06:44 AM]
Interesting discution on how things work, when the matter is about determining our vision of reality.

Here is something I wrote up a few years ago on the subject that has made the rounds. I might ass I have seen poles indicating as many as a third of young people in the US and England doubt the moon landings took place. The longer we wait until doing it again the greater the doubts that it was possible will grow.

Don

The reality of historical events is an interesting thing to try to prove.
It seems so obvious to us that Napoleon lived and that Rome once dominated
Western Civilization, and yet what percentage of people could write out
anything resembling a historical time line if they were asked?
A profound difference in awareness of history seems to occur with events
which are still within living memory. Many people still hear stories from
World War II veterans, and tales told by living participants still
circulate. All but a few World One veterans have died and direct living
memory of that event is fading fast.When I was a child there were still
veterans of the Civil War alive.
We are now as far removed from Apollo as Apollo was from the Spanish
Civil War, placing us about a third of the duration of time from then until
when Apollo will also pass from living memory.
After we who remember are gone, the very idea that we were once able to
leave Low Earth Orbit might seem fantastic. There will come a time when the
things we remember will seem as the stuff of legends. I suspect part of the
skepticism concerning Apollo comes from the enculturated belief that
progress is inevitable, that our reach will always be further than in the
past. People have a hard time believing we once did things we are no longer
capable of. While 40 years ago space exploration was striving toward
unlimited frontiers, today we are seemingly eternally confined to low Earth
Orbit, looking at our past like an aged Russian Gymnast looking at fading
photographs of her moment of glory when she was 14 years old.
This is what I see as the terrible truth lurking behind the expressions
of doubt in our past accomplishments. Perhaps it hurts so much to know we
have lost our ability to visit other worlds, that the frontiers we were
enticed with as kids have been canceled, that it is better to claim it was
all a fraud.

[DDAVIS]

that was of course supposed to be two 'd's, not two 's'es. in one word of the above message.

Don

[Guest_Richard Trigaux_*]

Yes DDAVIS there is a matter of time lapse and memory loss. But not only.

If you take the accounts of the Life of Jesus in the Gospels, with the miracles, sky becoming dark, resurection and all, we have absolutely no living memory of this. However there are peoples who admit all this as it, and others who state as abruptly that it is just a bunch of legends.

On the other hand, we have still living memories of the holocaust in World was II. But already we have people who, even against the law, say the holocaust did not took place, that it is a fabrication.

This was to point at the role of a priori opinions of people. For instance scientists are less inclined to admit the reality of miracles, while spiritualists need the miracles to maintain their vision of the world. Idem for the racists, to whom the holocaust is a painful recall of their own wickedness. So memory plays in fact very little role in their opinion making.

So why people could refuse the idea of the landing on the Moon? There may be several causes.

The most obvious would be a lack of confidence toward administrations, scientists and governments. There are many good and bad reasons for this. A good reason is for instance a growth of ecology awareness into the people when governments are heavily lagging into this domain. A bad reason is uncontrolled rumours such as the Roswell stories, which induces into thinking that the governments lies.

A subtle reason would be linked to fuzzy or sketchy ideas in the domains of ecology or spirituality, leading many people to think that science and technology would be "bad". (This is of course not the true ecology or spiritual stance).

Also, when people are confident with the society, they do not accept alternative ideas. But when they see that the society can be wrong, they tend to reverse their behaviour and accept all what criticizes or despises society. It is only later that they can realise that anti-society stuff can be bad too, and make their opinion from facts not from the political label of the speaker.

That 30% of people, or even 6%, cannot accept the Appolo story, it is a very disturbing thing, that goes far beyond any real or supposed criticism against the US government. I think that serious action should be taken, as for the ones who do not accept the holocaust. Both are as fearsome the one as the other.

Imagine they become a majority, and they make a kind of anti-science revolution?

[Guest_Richard Trigaux_*]

There is also the fact that the anti-Apollo propaganda is fairly well done. For instance when they say that no stars are visible in the Moon photos, only somebody with a knowledge of photography can understand why, and thus infer that the argument is false, resulting from ignorance or deliberate tampering. As photographs are only a few minority, the anti-science revolution can still win, it depends only of the conformism of people will change.

[DDAVIS]

[quote=Richard Trigaux,Aug 22 2005, 11:11 AM]
Yes DDAVIS there is a matter of time lapse and memory loss. But not only.

'If you take the accounts of the Life of Jesus in the Gospels, with the miracles, sky becoming dark, resurection and all, we have absolutely no living memory of this. However there are peoples who admit all this as it, and others who state as abruptly that it is just a bunch of legends.'

The ideas of religion are not really what I mean when it comes to our collective view of history. Miracles convienently happen ages ago where they cannot be disproved wheras the rise and fall of civilizations can be traced by sifting buried scraps and lucky finds of surviving bits of literature.

'On the other hand, we have still living memories of the holocaust in World was II. But already we have people who, even against the law, say the holocaust did not took place, that it is a fabrication.'

This continues today with the Turks denying the Armenian genocide. As the World War I era fades from living memory the Turks will have an easier job pushing their party line. Incidently it is not illegal in the US to deny the holocaust, but it sure marginalizes one who does! I have heard radio preachers actually say such things.




Imagine they become a majority, and they make a kind of anti-science revolution?'


There has been such an 'anti science' movement growing since the late 1960's. Who can blame them with the threat of atomic weapons, surveillance of citizenry by governments, overturning of outmoded moral codes by biological choices some view with hostility, and the knowledge that governments indeed do lie to us about big and little things as a matter of course. An appeaciation of science will only be likely among a modect portion of the population as views of history and even of the nature of reality continue to subdivide.

Don
'