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McDowell posted:but I poop from there!
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Jul 23, 2014 17:14
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razorrozar posted:This never made sense to me. What is an alien supposed to learn by sticking metal up someone's rear end that they couldn't learn better with an external scanner? If we can do it with external scanners and they're supposed to be so far beyond us, why the impromptu colonoscopy? Probably the same reason that high school students cut up frogs, even though everyone knows exactly what the inside of a frog looks like and there is no information to be gained from it any more. I mean even if they did need to probe us to gain information, after the first ten years you think they would have gotten what they need. At this point it's clearly not about the actual results.
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Jul 23, 2014 17:16
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Ashcans posted:Probably the same reason that high school students cut up frogs, even though everyone knows exactly what the inside of a frog looks like and there is no information to be gained from it any more. Perhaps all the aliens that probe people are in college xenobiology classes.
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Jul 23, 2014 17:18
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Jul 23, 2014 17:29
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razorrozar posted:This never made sense to me. What is an alien supposed to learn by sticking metal up someone's rear end that they couldn't learn better with an external scanner? If we can do it with external scanners and they're supposed to be so far beyond us, why the impromptu colonoscopy? It's commentary on our society's fears of the gay agenda and otherizing gays by representing them as alien life forms.
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Jul 23, 2014 17:34
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RagnarokAngel posted:It's commentary on our society's fears of the gay agenda and otherizing gays by representing them as alien life forms. I have this book called They Know Us Better Than We Know Ourselves which asserts that the Alien Abduction phenomenon is actually an expression of general alienation from a confusing technological society. So it's not specifically homophobia (though I'm sure that's a factor for some people) but rather the ways in which human lives, even reproduction, are rationalized and manipulated by an uncaring society for goals divergent from the individual's goals. Reminder that one of the seminal abduction accounts was from a mixed-race couple, Barney and Betty Hill, who were taken in 1961. So it kind of predates homo-panic.
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Jul 23, 2014 17:43
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I was kidding you autist.
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Jul 23, 2014 17:52
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RagnarokAngel posted:I was kidding you autist. Obviously. I'm elaborating on the point you sensitive, wonderful man. Also it occurs to me that anal probing is likely a post-hoc addition inspired by homo-panic and awkward homoerotic humor. Most abduction accounts are focused on probing the abdomen or facial cavities, not the anus specifically. I guess some people find it funny that hyper advanced aliens would cross the vastness of the galaxy just to torture cows and stick their fingers in your butthole.
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Jul 23, 2014 17:55
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Spacemen have always been all about rape. It is kind of weird how the whole abduction narrative dropped out of sight after the 90's, though. Maybe a scarier real world pushed the greys right out of the popular imagination. It was scary as hell watching tv as a kid circa 1994, though. Sightings, Unsolved Mysteries, Encounters, and the Paranormal Borderline were all on tv and had at least one alien story a week, plus that Communion book cover and Fire in the Sky. loving greys all over tv, man. You never knew where you'd see that face staring back at you.
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Jul 23, 2014 18:02
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Jack Gladney posted:It was scary as hell watching tv as a kid circa 1994, though. Sightings, Unsolved Mysteries, Encounters, and the Paranormal Borderline were all on tv and had at least one alien story a week, plus that Communion book cover and Fire in the Sky. loving greys all over tv, man. You never knew where you'd see that face staring back at you. How the hell did you forget The X-Files? 
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Jul 23, 2014 18:07
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Jack Gladney posted:Spacemen have always been all about rape. It is kind of weird how the whole abduction narrative dropped out of sight after the 90's, though. Maybe a scarier real world pushed the greys right out of the popular imagination. I think it's larger than that - spaceman rape as a metaphorical construct to explain feelings of social alienation and emotional trauma, not a more literal form of physical violation. Jack Gladney posted:It was scary as hell watching tv as a kid circa 1994, though. Sightings, Unsolved Mysteries, Encounters, and the Paranormal Borderline were all on tv and had at least one alien story a week, plus that Communion book cover and Fire in the Sky. loving greys all over tv, man. You never knew where you'd see that face staring back at you. When I was a kid, aliens terrified me more than anything else. Of course most of that 90's narrative was part of a larger cultural dialog about aliens themselves drawn from a commonly established mythology. If you want to analyze what that mythology means at its root, you have to look at abduction accounts from the 1970's and before, prior to a common coalescence of alien mythos such that people who aren't UFO nuts know roughly what a Grey is. Kind of like how modern views of vampires and zombies in pop culture obscure what vampires and zombies meant as symbols at the time they originated. If you look at vampires in folklore, it's obviously anxiety about the dead sucking life from the living. If you look at vampires on television today, it's anxiety about time sucking youth from the young. e: It's also telling that our current alien mythos started developing almost in synch with the Cold War. Ideas of aliens pre-1947 have very little in common with aliens post-Roswell. boner confessor fucked around with this message at 18:43 on Jul 23, 2014 |
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Jul 23, 2014 18:39
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Greys come from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which got its aliens from Barney Hill, who got his aliens from The Outer Limits.
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Jul 23, 2014 19:04
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rmoller posted:It seems like this debate is sort of pointless. We all know that aliens have visited us because they left us a prophet in the former racecar driver from France, Rael ne Claude Vorilhon. The Raelians used to supply free LSD in my home town Fremantle when I was in my early 20s and hot drat did those folks like to gently caress. And some of the women where smoking hot too. Its pretty much a party cult.
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Jul 23, 2014 19:28
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Jack Gladney posted:Greys come from Close Encounters of the Third Kind, which got its aliens from Barney Hill, who got his aliens from The Outer Limits. I guess they were formalized in Close Encounters, but really Greys are just big old human fetuses.
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Jul 23, 2014 20:18
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moller posted:It seems like this debate is sort of pointless. We all know that aliens have visited us because they left us a prophet in the former racecar driver from France, Rael ne Claude Vorilhon. Rael also made some singles in the sixties, imitating Jacques Brel's singing style: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EiwjBLhkjJs His manager committed suicide in 1970, a few years before his revelation. This guy has a crazy loving life. Kurtofan fucked around with this message at 20:39 on Jul 23, 2014 |
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Jul 23, 2014 20:32
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razorrozar posted:This never made sense to me. What is an alien supposed to learn by sticking metal up someone's rear end that they couldn't learn better with an external scanner? If we can do it with external scanners and they're supposed to be so far beyond us, why the impromptu colonoscopy? To be fair, none of the 'alien abductees' ever claimed that they were actually anally probed. Some claimed that aliens implanted devices in them, usually around the head or neck, leading some people mocking them by saying that they were anally probed. And since anal probes are funnier than the concept of being abducted and vivisected. The anal probe joke stuck amongst people who want to make fun of alien abductions. Edit: Not that I believe that people have been abducted by aliens. Communion was mostly based off of recovered memory therapy, which lead to such insights as all day care workers are secretly satan worshipers, and D&D leading to Satanism. (Instead of the much more common arguments amongst D&D players about how to pronounce THAC0.) thrakkorzog fucked around with this message at 07:50 on Jul 24, 2014 |
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Jul 24, 2014 05:35
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Alien sightings dropped out of existence right around the time that people started having cell phones on them at all times. Kinda makes it hard to convince people you totally saw an alien aircraft if you then for some reason didn't take 2 seconds to get your phone and record it.
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Jul 24, 2014 06:11
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limeincoke posted:Alien sightings dropped out of existence right around the time that people started having cell phones on them at all times. Kinda makes it hard to convince people you totally saw an alien aircraft if you then for some reason didn't take 2 seconds to get your phone and record it. They disable the phones with their space rays  
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Jul 24, 2014 06:38
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Going back to the "Dungeons N' Dragons/PokeMon/KISS/Heavy Metal/Harry Potty"=Satantic theories mentioned earlier. Is this just ignorance on the behalf of the people that are presenting this or do they actually know what the "Symbols" indeed mean and are using it as shock value? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VkFEwSKP9HI Like this video clip for example. Nikki Sixx isn't saying anything that's too "outrageous" when you think about it. I've seen going to a football game at "X-Stadium" described as a "religion", I've seen race tracks described as "Cathedrals of Speed", etc. Does the presenter just have selective hearing on this or is he going "You know what, these naive suckers are going to send me 20 dollars because they think I'm saving their kids souls!".
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Jul 24, 2014 07:39
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McDowell posted:but I poop from there! O meatsack, what the elder races have to teach you about the potential of your Spacetime Third Eye. Levitation and other forms of anal telekinesis are only the beginning.
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Jul 24, 2014 07:50
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FuzzySkinner posted:I've seen race tracks described as "Cathedrals of Speed" B-but they're not red?? 
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Jul 24, 2014 07:53
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FuzzySkinner posted:Going back to the "Dungeons N' Dragons/PokeMon/KISS/Heavy Metal/Harry Potty"=Satantic theories mentioned earlier. Well, it did lead to the Parental Music Resource Counsel, where senator's wives, most notably Tipper Gore tried to censor music lyrics in order to make them more wholesome. I could never bring myself to vote for Al Gore after that travesty. I think the only appropriate to watching mid-80's Tipper Gore is an excuse to abuse our ability for swearing. "gently caress that bitch straight up her oval office." It doesn't make any sense, but I still feel like I'm not swearing enough. I need more forceful swear words when it comes to Tipper Gore. thrakkorzog fucked around with this message at 08:43 on Jul 24, 2014 |
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Jul 24, 2014 08:13
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QuarkJets posted:This also raises the point that we can't even really interact with most of the universe, which is just dark matter and dark energy. There could be tons of intelligent life that we have no way of ever meeting
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Jul 24, 2014 08:20
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razorrozar posted:They disable the phones with their space rays Realistically if they traveled to our planet we cannot rule out mobile-disabling space rays, sir. On conspiracies, the developing child-rape-rings-in-UK-establishment-gate scandal is making it very hard for me not to become a conspiracy nut. I think a lot of it is most people pick "group x has been organising this since x year" over "everyone operates in their own interest according to their individual situation" which is equally valid. I mean sure conspiracies exist (NSA watching you, Iraq War, CIA friendly operations, CIA killing all of South America, UK police-media corruption etc.), that's just a plain fact, the mark of the conspiracy nut in my opinion is that all these conspiracies are tied together into one mega conspiracy that explains them all. Its very tempting to do so though because then you've figured it all out.
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Jul 24, 2014 08:23
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nopantsjack posted:Realistically if they traveled to our planet we cannot rule out mobile-disabling space rays, sir. The power of "it seemed like a good idea at the time".
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Jul 24, 2014 08:24
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I CANNOT EJACULATE WITHOUT SEEING NATIVE AMERICANS BRUTALISED!
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Strudel Man posted:Eh, that's not really what those things are about. Dark matter is almost certainly composed of what's termed a 'WIMP,' or "weakly interacting massive particle." Like a neutrino, but heavy. Dark energy is the energy content of empty space, possibly corresponding to the quantum-mechanical "zero" state for space itself. In either case, there isn't going to be any lifeforms that are composed of them, any more than you could have organisms made out of photons or of gravity. Well what if they travelled here through a black hole, huh smartguy?? Coup de grace, mon'amie. I think it was said earlier in the thread, most regular little conspiracies that don't spiral into aliens, masons or illuminati are probably caused more by lack of education or knowledge, knowing a lot about something that isn't true is more gratifying if your default position is not knowing the truth or how to find it. e: I mean, there could also be something behind the fact that if you look into the Establishment for any given place while looking at the history of that place you see basically the same poo poo happening endlessly, i.e. establishment is dominant - > popular power is dominant - > establishment is dominant -> popular power is dominant. I think again, people choose "The same group must have been in control of the establishment all along!" rather than "Establishments change but the basic motivations of the powerful and powerless don't". I don't think its because people are stupid, just they don't get taught how to learn properly or find truths, either through gently caress-up or conspiracy. Communist Thoughts fucked around with this message at 08:43 on Jul 24, 2014 |
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Jul 24, 2014 08:30
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nopantsjack posted:Realistically if they traveled to our planet we cannot rule out mobile-disabling space rays, sir. True, but Occam's Razor suggests it's more likely it simply didn't happen. (I know it's not foolproof, but it's still a useful tool.)
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Jul 24, 2014 17:07
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I don't know if it's been discussed yet in this thread, but reading a different thread prompted me to think about the moon landing conspiracy and how odd it is among conspiracies. As pointed out in this thread I'm sure, most conspiracies revolve around a disaster of some kind, or at least making something innocuous sinister (like chemtrails) but it's widely pointed out that usually, it's crackpots inventing a narrative that's easier to swallow (Lizard Men did 9/11!) than the cold honest frightening truth that there are just bad things that happen in the world with no real logic in who they hurt. But a faked moon landing? What's that narrative protecting? The pride of the American people? If it indeed did not happen, all that changes is that you remove what is otherwise the greatest feat of humankind from history, at least for now. We take a few steps back in our glory, admit that the space race was an intimidation contest with the USSR (and even this is already a given) that we went to absurd measures to win. What makes the moon landing conspiracy so different?
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Jul 25, 2014 17:32
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That 3 men could make it to the Moon and back using 60s technology can inspire disbelief in the same way that a group of terrorists could bypass national security and orchestrate an attack that leveled the WTC. I don't see a particular agenda to it, just that the sheer scale and scope of the achievement makes it difficult to believe.
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Jul 25, 2014 17:48
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gradenko_2000 posted:That 3 men could make it to the Moon and back using 60s technology can inspire disbelief in the same way that a group of terrorists could bypass national security and orchestrate an attack that leveled the WTC. I don't see a particular agenda to it, just that the sheer scale and scope of the achievement makes it difficult to believe. The release of 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968 also played a role in making people believe that space travel could be convincingly reproduced with special effects.
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Jul 25, 2014 20:12
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gradenko_2000 posted:That 3 men could make it to the Moon and back using 60s technology can inspire disbelief in the same way that a group of terrorists could bypass national security and orchestrate an attack that leveled the WTC. I don't see a particular agenda to it, just that the sheer scale and scope of the achievement makes it difficult to believe. Both ignore that the entire operation involved a greater number of people than the ones that actually carried it out. The Moon landing had thousands of people involved beyond the astronauts who went up. limeincoke posted:Alien sightings dropped out of existence right around the time that people started having cell phones on them at all times. Kinda makes it hard to convince people you totally saw an alien aircraft if you then for some reason didn't take 2 seconds to get your phone and record it. I think it was on the Monstertalk podcast that they said that sightings by amatures has gone way down since the advent of cel phone cameras, but sightings from "pros" have gone up. That is, people who make a living hunting for bigfoot or aliens or what not, have increased since camera equipment became way cheaper to get at a professional grade. Though these pros create way more poo poo and obvious hoaxes than anyone since the invention of the camera.
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Jul 26, 2014 00:23
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Strudel Man posted:Eh, that's not really what those things are about. Dark matter is almost certainly composed of what's termed a 'WIMP,' or "weakly interacting massive particle." Like a neutrino, but heavy. Dark energy is the energy content of empty space, possibly corresponding to the quantum-mechanical "zero" state for space itself. In either case, there isn't going to be any lifeforms that are composed of them, any more than you could have organisms made out of photons or of gravity. That is most definitely what those things are about. We have absolutely no idea what dark energy is, it's just a description for the energy that results in the expansion of the universe. None of the physics phenomena that we have observed explains dark energy. Dark energy could be the result of other natural forces that simply don't interact with the 4 natural forces with which we're familiar. These forces could give rise to types of matter that we can't even interact with. There could be a "dark electromagnetism" that simply doesn't interact with our natural forces at all, and it could be one of many forces that contribute to dark energy. Likewise, we have no idea what dark matter is. WIMPs have never been observed, so at this point there could be an entire hierarchy of massive weakly-interacting particles that is similar to our standard model. Dark matter could be composed of its own boson-like and fermion-like particles, giving rise to dark mesons, dark atoms, etc. All that we know for sure is that there is way more dark matter than matter and that dark matter interacts with us via gravity. Strudel Man posted:In either case, there isn't going to be any lifeforms that are composed of them, any more than you could have organisms made out of photons or of gravity. Dark matter is not merely a field, it is matter. I'm arguing that organisms are made out of matter.
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Jul 26, 2014 23:13
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I watched the West of Memphis documentary on Netflix the other night, and I had no idea that it was as bad as I thought. I had read the Wikipedia article and a few other things about the West Memphis Three. That doc made the police investigation went as follows - Oh how horrible! These boys were murdered! - Wow, the condition of the bodies is really bad, one of them is missing his genitals! - This sounds like Satanists! - Hey there is this weird kid who likes heavy metal and draws skulls, I bet he's a satanist! I bet he did it! - Yea! And these other weirdos were probably in on it too! And that was the extent of the case. They spent 18 years in prison, including one on death row and confined to a cell for most of the day becauase of a conspiracy theory and the fact these kids were weirdos. Though tireless efforts of many people the courts eventually freed them. By the end 2 of the families were convinced these guys weren't involved. When people say "What harm is there?" about conspiracy theories, thats one big one. Also, apparently some towns in California are spending money on investigations into chemtrails, so wasting public funds that could go to infrastructure or services. And now we have the guy who runs Naturalnews calling for the deaths of the Agents of Monsanto and putting up a site with their names and home addresses so people can do something, but totally not kill them, even though a few paragraphs above he was totally calling for their deaths. Though he claims its all a sophisitcated false flag by Monsanto to frame him and look crazy, because the site was registered to him before he posted the NN piece. http://www.twipscience.org/news/2014/7/25/mike-adams-builds-a-naturalnews-nazi-time-machine I have a few Anti-GMO friends, and I have to bite my tounge because I know they mean well, but it sickens me how the entire movement is based on nothing but fear and lies and making problems with capitalism become problems with health. They take anything anti-gmo on face value, but every time someone points out that every reputable study and scientist and everything that has ever been published via scientific methods is just faked because they've all been bought off by Monsanto.
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Jul 27, 2014 01:35
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This one from that Cracked article was cute;quote:People who ahve theories about a conspiracy MAY be wrong. - That's why they call it a theory. And you are saying you know this? Hello infinite loop I mean that's kind of the problem, those that have the "theories" are the ones that claim they know the truth. SocketWrench fucked around with this message at 07:36 on Jul 27, 2014 |
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Jul 27, 2014 04:40
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twistedmentat posted:I watched the West of Memphis documentary on Netflix the other night, and I had no idea that it was as bad as I thought. I had read the Wikipedia article and a few other things about the West Memphis Three. That doc made the police investigation went as follows If you're that shocked, you should read up on the McMartin preschool trials which was literally a witch hunt. It involved allegations of Satanism, ritualistic orgies, child sacrifice, black masses, the whole shebang. The state of California was willing to spend millions of dollars on investigating and prosecuting a witch hunt, back in ye olde times of 1990. thrakkorzog fucked around with this message at 09:30 on Jul 27, 2014 |
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Jul 27, 2014 09:15
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QuarkJets posted:That is most definitely what those things are about. We have absolutely no idea what dark energy is, it's just a description for the energy that results in the expansion of the universe. None of the physics phenomena that we have observed explains dark energy. Dark energy could be the result of other natural forces that simply don't interact with the 4 natural forces with which we're familiar. These forces could give rise to types of matter that we can't even interact with. There could be a "dark electromagnetism" that simply doesn't interact with our natural forces at all, and it could be one of many forces that contribute to dark energy. quote:Likewise, we have no idea what dark matter is. WIMPs have never been observed, so at this point there could be an entire hierarchy of massive weakly-interacting particles that is similar to our standard model. Dark matter could be composed of its own boson-like and fermion-like particles, giving rise to dark mesons, dark atoms, etc. All that we know for sure is that there is way more dark matter than matter and that dark matter interacts with us via gravity. These ideas work well as a background for a science fiction setting, but considered as actual science, they are not particularly credible.
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Jul 27, 2014 10:18
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Strudel Man posted:I'm afraid not. Dark energy, to the best of our understanding, is constant across space; it has no structure, no organization. It's an interesting problem in considering the universe as a whole, but by its very nature, dark energy is never locally interesting - it's flat. Uniform dark energy is one idea. Non-uniform dark energy density could work just as well as an explanation for the expansion of the universe, and this has not been ruled out like you've claimed. quote:This, at least, is theoretically plausible - however, it's pretty much the opposite of a parsimonious hypothesis. One unobserved, non-interacting particle type is a much, much simpler explanation for dark matter than the entire menagerie of particles that would be required for such a Dark Universe, interacting only with each other and not with any of the particles that make up the baryonic universe we know and love. Given all that we know about the universe, it seems unlikely that a single particle is responsible for 27% of the mass of the universe. It would not be surprising if the first WIMP that we discover comes in 3 flavors, for instance. Occam's razor is not a well-respected argument in physics. The universe is a complex place, and every time that we try to answer a question in a simple way we find that we just wind up with even more questions. Stupid reality always likes to create scenarios that break our beautiful theorems, things like neutrinos having mass and the matter-antimatter asymmetry. It sure would be simple if the universe was just Newtonian and we didn't have to worry about challenges to our basic understanding of everything, although I wouldn't want to live in that boring place. quote:These ideas work well as a background for a science fiction setting, but considered as actual science, they are not particularly credible. Do you have some experience studying dark matter or dark energy, beyond the casual sense? I wrote a chapter on dark matter in my PhD thesis, which I wrote while I was working at the LHC. Trust me when I say that I know a few things about dark matter and that I'm not the only one who hypothesizes that there could be a dark matter particle hierarchy. If we're colleagues on this matter, and you're not just some guy on the Internet working off of wikipedia, would you mind toning down the condescension? I'm presenting valid ideas and you're brushing them off as though physicists aren't interested in them, but that's simply not the case. The idea that dark matter could be composed of a hierarchy of particles is not new, nor is it discredited. The idea that dark matter has its own Standard Model is definitely going into science fiction territory (simply because we know so little about dark matter), but nothing about the idea lacks credibility. e: (do you really believe that Rome had robots?) QuarkJets fucked around with this message at 01:52 on Jul 28, 2014 |
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Jul 27, 2014 20:58
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thrakkorzog posted:If you're that shocked, you should read up on the McMartin preschool trials which was literally a witch hunt. It involved allegations of Satanism, ritualistic orgies, child sacrifice, black masses, the whole shebang. The state of California was willing to spend millions of dollars on investigating and prosecuting a witch hunt, back in ye olde times of 1990. McMartin is really crazy, and kids stories about sacrificing babies and being flushed down toilets to be molested by Chuck Norris was all taken at face value by investigators. Though its really obvious from the transcripts that the kids were pretty much lead to say these things.
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Jul 28, 2014 00:16
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thrakkorzog posted:If you're that shocked, you should read up on the McMartin preschool trials which was literally a witch hunt. It involved allegations of Satanism, ritualistic orgies, child sacrifice, black masses, the whole shebang. The state of California was willing to spend millions of dollars on investigating and prosecuting a witch hunt, back in ye olde times of 1990. So the US basically learned nothing from the Salem witch trials. Good to hear. edit http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_care_sex_abuse_hysteria 
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Jul 28, 2014 01:32
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Sir Tonk posted:So the US basically learned nothing from the Salem witch trials. Good to hear. Moral panics and culture bound syndromes aren't a uniquely USA thing, although the states do seem to be really into them. One of our political parties is pretty much moral panic based at this point. Edit: Liz Warren's info about the sudden necessity for dual income households pretty succinctly explains the day care sex abuse thing.
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Jul 28, 2014 01:38
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