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Camrath posted:But because they are operating under the model that ‘ghosts cannot exist’ then they refuse to accept that as an option- but then are left without any possible way to explain what they objectively experienced. All ghost experiences can be explained by hallucination, either individual or group. I guess we need to define "ghost" because much like UFO, a lot of people use that interchangeably with "vehicle driven by intelligent beings from another planet" rather than understanding its true meaning, "unexplained thing" So, somewhat supporting your view on the matter, we're really talking about UGOs (unless the apparition levitates in which case it will become a UFO) But if we're considering a ghost to be a being that has some degree of sentience, then that's just complete bollocks. They just don't fit into any existing knowledge of the universe. Take evolution. When did evolution come up with ghosts? Presumably the first protocells weren't leaving ghosts everywhere, and presumably single celled organisms aren't doing so today (otherwise the sheer volume of them would be creaking floorboards everywhere and you wouldn't even be able you see a humanoid ghost because of all the e-coli ghosts in the way). So did ghosts come along with sentient brains? Was there a primate that died and left the first ever ghost? Brains are built by genes so is there a ghost gene, and only that ghost-eligible primate left ghost-eligible descendants? The more we build a hypothesis the more bollocks it sounds because that's what it is: complete bollocks from start to finish Don't even get me started on conservation of energy
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Mar 15, 2023 13:30
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XKCD may be for loving dorks but I think he made a pretty good point that the huge numbers of people carrying decent camera phones and still producing no solid evidence of ghosts/UFOs/Bigfoot/whatever is a strong strike against their existence
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Mar 15, 2023 13:37
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natural phenomena eg. brocken spectre plus human suggestibility equals aah! real
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Mar 15, 2023 13:40
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Oh god, it's the Budget today, isn't it? Let's hope this is goes as well as the last one & brings down another government.
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Mar 15, 2023 13:44
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Will the government leave a ghost
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Mar 15, 2023 13:52
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forkboy84 posted:Oh god, it's the Budget today, isn't it? https://twitter.com/GregHands/status/1635986138773987335?s=19 We're playing the hits here!
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Mar 15, 2023 13:52
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Gonzo McFee posted:https://twitter.com/GregHands/status/1635986138773987335?s=19 Oh my god kill me. Or Liam Byrne from writing that dumb joke. Whatever. How is this still something they run with?
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Mar 15, 2023 13:55
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I mean when you rest your entire economic model on one joke, you're sure as gently caress going to repeat it.
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Mar 15, 2023 13:57
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forkboy84 posted:How is this still something they run with? If the tories wrote that before Labour took power I'd run with it until the end of time. Wouldn't you?
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Mar 15, 2023 13:58
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The right only has one joke, you say?
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Mar 15, 2023 14:01
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lol lowering alcohol prices to get us through cost of living crisis
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Mar 15, 2023 14:01
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If ghosts aren't real then how do you explain the specter that is haunting Europe? Checkmate.
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Mar 15, 2023 14:01
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Microplastics posted:If the tories wrote that before Labour took power I'd run with it until the end of time. Wouldn't you?
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Mar 15, 2023 14:03
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bessantj posted:In my early twenties I joined a ghost hunting group in Newport for a short time, I did this for the same reason I did a lot of things there was a woman in the group I really fancied. However, it was a really interesting experience, the guy who ran it was a physics teacher and was trying his best to make our "investigations" as scientific as possible. While we never did see a ghost or find any evidence of one I learned a lot about the history of various places in Newport which was very interesting. If you get a chance to do an investigation I recommend it, they're quite an experience. Not sure when you were in your early twenties but did you hear about the Jenny Craig centre (in Newport) weird goings on back in the 90s? My dad (in his perennial quest for a diet that worked) joined that plan and there were definitely strange goings on in whatever building they occupied at the time- including photographs that when developed showed the room behind the back wall of whatever room they were taken in (and no, photographs of the behind room had NOT been taken on the same film - I am well aware sometimes that traditional photos ie not digital sometimes overlap and give strange 'ghostly' type extra legs or whatever), wiring that continually corroded, would be replaced with new and corrode again really quickly. The centre was later found to have been built over the graveyard associated with children who had died at the adjacent workhouse in the late 19th/early 20th century? In my opinion ghostly happenings are 'unexplained as yet physics' (though as we know spooky feelings can be induced with magnetic fields, low frequency sounds etc). If the 'many worlds' interpretation of quantum mechanics is in any sense real, maybe they are overlapping universes? I don't think we can entirely dismiss ghosts as a phenomenon, but I'm much more inclined to think there is a rational explanation for what people believe they have witnessed but we just don't fully understand what it is yet rather than dismiss it as entirely made up in their heads. Slightly adjacent example: astrology dismissed by many as 'how can a big thing millions of miles away affect humans' - and then you find out big fkr in the sky Jupiter is so massive it makes the Sun wobble, there is correlation (ok not equal causation but... ) between sun's magnetic fields & heart attacks or psychotic episodes and generation of eddy currents in body cells etc. - I did discuss some of this with refs etc in the intro chapter of my PhD but didn't push the point as it's a bit 'edgy'. The problem with any of this stuff though is that the people with the scientific skills to explore these matters are too scared to do so because it might affect their grants / funding etc*. and the people that 'truly believe' don't want scientific evidence - even if it might support them in some way - because they prefer to believe in 'magic' and having a scientific explanation would ruin it for them. *I have a friend who was told in no uncertain terms not to pursue a line of research relating to 'zero point energy' as it would ruin her chances at an academic career for ever even though her supervisor - a senior professor well known in his field - personally thought whatever it was was quite likely. (Don't ask me the ins and outs I really can't remember, it was over 25 years ago now). Jaeluni Asjil fucked around with this message at 14:16 on Mar 15, 2023 |
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Mar 15, 2023 14:06
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Failed Imagineer posted:Havana Syndrome has been the most interesting recent mass psychogenic delusion. It was so clearly fake from the start yet the US media ate it up uncritically. But what was really going on? Sublimated guilt, work stress, alcoholism, paranoia, depression are all partially explanatory theories One of the more interesting theories I have heard about Havana Syndrome is that it was some technology (like an anti-spy detector) deployed by the Americans that had gone horribly wrong, but they can't own up to it. It would explain the very carefully worded response from the American investigation of this. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/mar/01/havana-syndrome-us-intelligence-services-determine-no-foreign-adversaries
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Mar 15, 2023 14:09
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I like Mick West's (check out his youtube channel) description of the Low Information Zone - from his book "Escaping the Rabbit Hole" about debunking. Essentially it is just that : the Low Information Zone is permanently at the edge of your senses / sensors / sense, and so ghosts, UFO's, cryptids, and every conspiracy lives in that space. Be that your peripheral vision, a 1960's camera, the edge of your torches glow, a 2021 smartphone, a military visual horizon scanning sensor pod, or the meeting notes of your local county council : the wierd magical and wonderful is just over there, just on the blury fuzzy edge of your understanding - no matter what you point at it- double the zoom and it is always twice as far away. It's as if these things are permanently in our perceptions, not the real, so constantly evade capture. The other thing I learned really young is just that, the magician has to do only one thing, convince you at the start it is real with no trickery. Then for the rest off the show they can use mirrors, stooges, camera tricks, and complete falsehoods, but as long as the initial showmanship/conditioning works the rest of the thing can be anything they want. Same goes for : "Now I'm as honest as the day is long", "I always double check that X", "I was definitely alone at the time", "I'm a professional so I wouldn't fall for Y", "There is no way both of us could be wrong", "I was sober and fit at the time" - except with perhaps a little more terrible human memory than active deceit.
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Mar 15, 2023 14:11
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I think guilt induced alcoholism is a much more likely scenario, its just they'll never be able to admit that because, hell, how could you when your entire livelihood relies on continuing evil?
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Mar 15, 2023 14:12
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I feel like if you spent your whole life immersed in an environment which is systemically designed to imagine the most bizzare and improbable things occuring because of hostile nations you would probably be extremely susceptible to going a bit crackers.
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Mar 15, 2023 14:16
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Years ago I was in a field with some friends and we heard a helicopter fly very low overhead and land a short distance away. It was very loud; we could hardly hear each other speak. It was also completely invisible. So I think it’s important to remember that ghosts also come in helicopter form. E: I realised this might come across as me aping the “identify as an attack helicopter” thing which I didn’t intend, the story is true but it was probably weird wind instead of ghosts or cloaking spy tech 🚁 TACD fucked around with this message at 14:19 on Mar 15, 2023 |
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Mar 15, 2023 14:16
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Things going great for Peter Hitchens https://twitter.com/ClarkeMicah/status/1635699102661869569
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Mar 15, 2023 14:17
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forkboy84 posted:Oh my god kill me. Or Liam Byrne from writing that dumb joke. Whatever. eh, it's pretty dumb without context but reading his article made me understand why he wrote it, it's the excuse he used to negotiate deals and savings rather than a boast of the uk treasury
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Mar 15, 2023 14:17
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Lol. I’m in Twitter jail for calling Peter Hitchens a “flatulent old cretin”
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Mar 15, 2023 14:22
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Guavanaut posted:That's not the fault of any given individual seeing any given legless sausage dogs (those things are common enough that there's a movement to end schizophrenia as a diagnosis because it's stigmatizing and not useful, people pattern match stuff all the time), but it is a human herd phenomenon that apparently sometimes just can't stop itself from becoming terrible. This is weird cos I often meet up with a stranger who waits for the corner shop to open in the mornings and he describes himself as schizophrenic but while he might exhibit some mental illness tendencies, I've never really seen any behaviours of schizophrenia that i've learned from media in him smellmycheese posted:Lol. I’m in Twitter jail for calling Peter Hitchens a “flatulent old cretin” this is so dumb when i get racist unionists jibes at me all the time cos i use my real name + pic in twitter and every report is never followed up on
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Mar 15, 2023 14:28
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Jaeluni Asjil posted:Not sure when you were in your early twenties but did you hear about the Jenny Craig centre (in Newport) weird goings on back in the 90s? It does ring a bell. I wasn't in my early twenties in the 90s but my mum used to go to some diet club at Duffryn community centre and I think that was Jenny Craig. I think she talked about another centre being haunted. Jaeluni Asjil posted:The problem with any of this stuff though is that the people with the scientific skills to explore these matters are too scared to do so because it might affect their grants / funding etc*. and the people that 'truly believe' don't want scientific evidence - even if it might support them in some way - because they prefer to believe in 'magic' and having a scientific explanation would ruin it for them. There are a surprising amount of scientists that do actual investigations into ghost/cryptids/UFOs etc... however, they either don't care to publicise their activities as it's more of a hobby or people don't care as it's not exciting or sexy enough.
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Mar 15, 2023 14:35
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I just still can't get over how Keith sounds like that
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Mar 15, 2023 14:37
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*Visit the ukmt to get the lowdown on today's Budget announcements* *The entire thread is taking part in a Scooby Doo episode instead*
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Mar 15, 2023 14:40
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Pistol_Pete posted:*Visit the ukmt to get the lowdown on today's Budget announcements* Legit lol
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Mar 15, 2023 14:41
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The monster was neoliberalism all along.
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Mar 15, 2023 14:41
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Josef bugman posted:Not commenting on the realness or unrealness of ghosts, but there are some cultures that don't believe in ghosts like we do! A famous example is in this fun little article called Shakespeare in the Bush, which I'll link below. A few pages back but worth quoting, a really good read and anyone who skipped it should give it a click instead.
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Mar 15, 2023 14:42
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https://twitter.com/GMcK2012/status/1635977795435216898
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Mar 15, 2023 14:46
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Solefald posted:Legit lol Well the stock market seems really happy with the budget 
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Mar 15, 2023 14:51
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smellmycheese posted:Well the stock market seems really happy with the budget That's just the current bank run, I think.
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Mar 15, 2023 15:10
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Yeah nothing happening to the stock market, exchange rates or gilt yields today has really anything to do with the budget.
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Mar 15, 2023 15:16
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There are lots of strange, poorly understood phenomena, and some number of them get taken up by cranks and weirdos with no real desire to understand them better but a keen interest in using them to sell something. A good example I came across a few years back while trying to do some very low irradiance measurements is biophotons. These are extremely weak, short wavelength light signals that appear to be produced by living cells, a bit like bioluminescence but much, much dimmer. They're totally a real thing, have been measured by proper scientists in white coats and all that, and are very weird. They occur in animal and plant cells, seem to be more associated with damaged or stressed tissue, and can be seen in culture and in live organisms. It's not known exactly what mechanism produces them or what biological function they might have. However, most academic references you'll find to them are in pretty dubious journals where the authors will try to use them to more or less obviously push qi energy fields or orgone theory and such, and they've become the subject of a bunch of pseudoscience "inner light of consciousness" woo, proposed to explain all sorts of things that they definitely cannot explain, and not much actual science. It's probably not helped by the fact they were discovered by a Soviet scientist who was also associated with some pretty fringe biology at a time when, thanks to a guy named Lysenko and another guy named Stalin, Soviet biological theories were not well regarded in the wider academic world. Anyway I decided not to include any references to them because the whole thing seemed like it'd be a hassle with reviewers and was more a curiosity than something I could use anyway. But they'd be great if you wanted an underresearched phenomenon that could conceivably have something to do with ghosts.
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Mar 15, 2023 15:17
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It feels very odd to say so but... This feels like a net positive budget? The free childcare for 1-2 year olds is going to save us a heap of money, and the extension of energy bill relief is, well, a relief. I'm sure there's all sorts of nasty poo poo squirreled away in the small print, but at surface level I feel like my material circumstances are going to be marginally improved by a budget announcement, for more or less the first time ever.
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Mar 15, 2023 15:18
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The Perfect Element posted:It feels very odd to say so but... This feels like a net positive budget? The free childcare for 1-2 year olds is going to save us a heap of money, and the extension of energy bill relief is, well, a relief. I wish the childcare support was coming sooner but oh well. Hunt said something about more scrutiny on benefits claimants, from what I can remember, which doesn’t bode well.
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Mar 15, 2023 15:26
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lol so after all that, hunts budget for childcare won’t kick in until 2025
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Mar 15, 2023 15:27
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So basically it's a budget to encourage new babies A budget to gently caress to
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Mar 15, 2023 15:31
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Pistol_Pete posted:*Visit the ukmt to get the lowdown on today's Budget announcements* Only 50% of Scooby Doo episodes were "well we have debunked this supernatural phenomenon and discovered it was just man's greed manipulating people to unjustly enrich themselves." The other 50% were "Zoinks! Dracula has cursed us. The only way to break the curse is to get the Harlem Globetrotters and Batman to beat a squad of monsters at a game of Basket Ball." It was also 100% about subverting your expectations.
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Mar 15, 2023 15:32
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Gonzo McFee posted:I died ten years ago and have been posting from beyond the grave. Boo! Yeah well so did I, and here I am. Dying isn't what it used to be, the youth of today don't even bother to die properly.
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