Post by JayUtah on Apr 11, 2006 15:35:44 GMT -4
No, I'm saying that one needs to have an open mind.
Agreed, but what you're doing is not open-mindedness; it's blatant credulity. You don't have an open mind. You have an elaborate fantasy world that substitutes where necessary for the real world in order to maintain you predetermined beliefs. In this fantasy world, for example, Apollo workers are sluggards with no real knowledge of what they're being asked to accomplish. That fantasy saves you the discomfort of dealing with the implication of your argument -- that Apollo workers were deceptive. You just arrange in your mind for them to be misled, not devious. All neat and tidy.
Too bad it has nothing to do whatsoever with what actually happened.
When the schools teach you that "This is what happened", and all the history books say...
I'm disappointed, Turbonium. You of all people should realize that the Sheeple Argument has nothing to do either with this crowd or with the people at Bad Astronomy.
Yes, some people believe certain things because that's what they were told repeatedly. But that's not why everyone believes things. Some people believe things because they have studied the facts surrounding them extensively, and have empirically tested those beliefs for years. Some even are held legally liable for the correctness of their actions predicated on those beliefs.
And when push comes to shove, those people can always demonstrate far more facility with the actual facts than can you. Based on that, which of us is more likely to be basing his belief on fact and sound reasoning, and which upon simple credulity or wishful thinking? If you're the one whose grasp of the facts is deficient, you can't credibly accuse others of not having fact-based beliefs compared to yours.
So when solid evidence is uncovered that proves "This is NOT what happened", one can be upset or even traumatized, if one has a personal or emotional attachment to the event.
But you can't present "solid" evidence. You can only provide personal opinion, or at best nitpicky attempts to erode the prevailing story that boil down in almost all cases to your inability to understand the evidence and the sciences that pertain to it.
"I think this looks like a bare arm" is not solid evidence.
"It's not entirely impossible that it could have been done some other way" is not solid evidence.
When you deploy those arguments, and when you are met in response with objective, factually-supported, and largely dispassionate responses, you cannot credibly argue that objection to these "new" ideas must therefore be emotionally motivated.
But yours is the last refuge of the die-hard conspiracist. Faced with the inability to defend his own points beyond the extent of his initial credulity, and confronted with learned rebuttals he neither understands nor believes, he tries to paint his opponents as emotionally fragile.
Shame on you, Turbonium. Do you really think you can talk to a bunch of space engineers and other professionals who have patiently explained to you the error of your allegations and try to convince them that you're the rational one and they're all being emotional about it?
The person may go into denial, and say the new evidence is fake - no matter how solid that evidence is.
Red herring. Our argument is rarely that the evidence is fake because your argument is rarely based on the objective observation or fact; it's almost always based on your interpretation of that observation, which in many cases is just blatantly wrong.
If we take your "bare arm" argument, for example, nobody argued that the photograph itself was "fake". There was considerable argument that JPEG artifacts in your particular version may have contributed to a mistaken identification. That's a perfectly rational argument that has nothing to do with fakery. Others argued that you were simply seeing things, which is also a perfectly reasonable argument considering that you were indeed looking at a picture and interpreting what its contents might be. If that is to be your argument, you cannot escape the inevitable counterarguments that discuss human perception.
What specific arguments of yours have we rebutted simply by trying to claim that your evidence is "fake"?
As for denial, hoo-boy!
In our 9/11 discussions you question the propriety of using certain kinds of steel to validate the FEA models. In response I pointed out that your argument was based on a completely wrong conception of what FEA validation mathematically consists of. You are simply applying your layman's intuition of what FEA "must" be, and trying to impose those limits on people who do it for a living. Then I went on to point out how the specimens recovered for such validation are actually very well-suited to the task, and how the specimens you propose to recover would have been empirically and mathematically less useful in validation.
What do you do? Do you attempt to understand FEA more fully? Do you attempt to discuss the metallurgical aspects of temperature?
No. You let the responses drift into the mists of memory, and then you come right back with the same old arguments about improper validation sampling as if nothing whatsoever had been said by anyone else on the subject.
Which of us is really in denial, Turbonium?
You tell us you can't understand why people don't act on these "obvious" errors. So you conclude that it must be because their belief is irrational. But in fact you can't deal with the notion that what you consider "obvious" other people righly recognize as your personal, uneducated, and unsupported opinion. And you can't deal with the elaborate technical and factual explanations people give you for why they believe what they believe.
So you continue along in your fantasy that you are right and everyone else is just emotionally resisting what ought to be self-evident fact.
Or one can become angry that these "nutcases" with phony "evidence" are trying to alter "Historical and globally accepted fact", probably "to make money" or "get attention".
Again you're trying to push the emotional component. If we can show that their arguments are far less credible according to the facts than the prevailing one, then it is legitimate to conclude that they are trying to alter history.
If we can show that they all have some book or video to sell, or that they shop themselves out to the media, then it is reasonable to conclude that they are so motivated.
It isn't necessary to become emotional about this -- just point out that their behavior suggests that their motives are not as pure as perhaps they wish it believed.
A lot of people have asked you to provide alternate scenarios for Apollo, for 9/11, and perhaps for other historical questions you consider controversial and poorly supported. You can't and won't do it. You say you're just questioning the "official" story. How does that remotely measure up to what is often carefully researched and verified history?
You simply want your handwaving and vague nitpicking immediately to be considered on par at prima facie with the prevailing stories.
The evidence for the authenticity of Apollo is nebulous at best, imo.
Yes, in your opinion. That's the problem. Your opinion isn't very well grounded in fact, and you strenuously resist all efforts to have fact applied to it.
The "kind" of evidence is questionable: it is based on one type of physical evidence - the moon rocks.
What other "physical" evidence is possible to obtain from the moon? If not pieces of it, then what? Your typical attempt to artificially limit the evidence is pretty amusing.
Physical objects pertaining to Apollo also consist of surviving examples of the the technology used to retrieve those samples, which technology has been the beginning of a successful multibillion-dollar private industry.
For one, because only a very small percentage of the entire collection will ever be released for analysis (the rest has been declared "Set aside forever for posterity", whatever that's supposed to mean).
You're very bold to base your belief on what will be the case. The problem is that for now these specimens constitute the only material recovered in situ from the lunar surface. Barring future missions, these have to last us indefinitely. Much of the research we want to do has to be done on pristine samples that haven't been subjected to any other study, so we have to consider very carefully which destructive research we plan to do. Even looking at a sample under an optical microscope would render a sample unsuitable for some other purposes such as gas chromatography.
It is still remarkably easy to get a sample of lunar material to study, as long as you're not picky about whether it's new or used and as long as you return it undamaged and unaltered. To imply these samples are being horded by a select few is simply -- once again -- to deny the facts and to substitute your own fantasy world for reality.
And now that you can see there is a valid scientific reason for needing carefully to keep some specimens in reserve for future destructive testing (i.e., as new methods of investigation become available), that throws quite a lot of water on your implication that the only reason to withhold samples is to keep people from finding out that the majority of them are fake.
Speaking of that, you said that one of the hallmarks of an emotional argument was the off-handed dismissal of evidence as fake. Unless you can provide any evidence that the remaining Apollo samples are fake, all you have is a handwaving assertion to that effect. Doesn't that quite effectively make your attempt to refute the moon rock evidence an example of an argument you say is poor and ineffectual?
Unmanned craft and lunar meteorites can account for the actually available (to analyze) moon rocks.
Only if you ignore core samples and documented samples -- about half the studied data.
Oh, and right -- you have absolutely zero evidence for any unmanned sample-return missions from the United States. Where's your "solid" evidence here? All you have is a remote, abstract possibility (or rather, the lack of impossibility) but no evidence of any kind that it actually happened that way. So between two possibilities -- one with evidence that it actually happened, and the other which is simply not provably impossible but has no evidence it actually happened -- which is the smart bet?
You take as the default that the moon landings were faked, and require any who believe them to be true to satisfy a colossal burden of proof that amounts to proving beyond all shadow of doubt. That's not how history is studied; that's not how truth is uncovered. That's how people with predetermined beliefs act to protect those beliefs: they impose impossible burdens of proof on their opponents so that they can maintain the illusion that their position is unassailable.
The imaging projects have failed to do so, despite several efforts.
No, there has been no real effort. People talk about it as an abstract possibility.
You claim they only failed for technical reasons...
I don't claim that at all.
The mirrors could have been placed on the moon without human presence.
Yes, but where's your evidence that they were? Again, you simply believe your conclusion as the default and require objectors to provide huge amounts of proof to the contrary. You have absolutely no proof of any kind that your conclusion is what happened. All you have is an abstract lack of impossibility.
There is exactly as much evidence that the U.S. bred super space pixies who carried the LRRRs to the moon on little fairy wings as there is that they were placed with some unknown unmanned spacecraft.
The astronauts are the only first-hand eyewitnesses...
The only first-hand witnesses to certain arbitrarily-selected events. If you expand that to include all relevant activities, there are hundreds of thousands of expert witnesses and millions of lay witnesses.
...they could be compromised into declaring the missions were authentic.
Abstract possibilities are not "solid evidence". You really think that you can compromise history just by saying that's not the only possible way it could have happened?
The problem you don't see -- but we do -- is that you're quite desperately trying to undermine belief in an event by any means possible, even if it seems grossly absurd on its face and has absolutely no evidence whatsoever in favor of it.
Nor does the authenticity of an event correlate to the "amount" of information recorded about it.
Of course it does. The more you are compelled to write about an event, the more detail into which you will have to delve. And the more detail you purport, the likelier it is someone will note that the details are impossible or inappropriately inconsistent.
If you are required to produced detailed documents describing how you plan to get to the moon, how you got there, and what might have gone wrong, you will have to come up with something plausible.
The former could contain 1% factual information (600 pages) while the latter could contain 100% factual information, and be much more relevant in content as well.
Presumption. As a matter of fact the entirety of available Apollo information is read voraciously by today's engineers. As usual, you're simply trying to slip into your fantasy world where vast amounts of the Apollo documentation is just conspiracy fodder.
Give me some examples of available Apollo documentation that you can show to be nothing more than fancy decoy.
Agreed, but what you're doing is not open-mindedness; it's blatant credulity. You don't have an open mind. You have an elaborate fantasy world that substitutes where necessary for the real world in order to maintain you predetermined beliefs. In this fantasy world, for example, Apollo workers are sluggards with no real knowledge of what they're being asked to accomplish. That fantasy saves you the discomfort of dealing with the implication of your argument -- that Apollo workers were deceptive. You just arrange in your mind for them to be misled, not devious. All neat and tidy.
Too bad it has nothing to do whatsoever with what actually happened.
When the schools teach you that "This is what happened", and all the history books say...
I'm disappointed, Turbonium. You of all people should realize that the Sheeple Argument has nothing to do either with this crowd or with the people at Bad Astronomy.
Yes, some people believe certain things because that's what they were told repeatedly. But that's not why everyone believes things. Some people believe things because they have studied the facts surrounding them extensively, and have empirically tested those beliefs for years. Some even are held legally liable for the correctness of their actions predicated on those beliefs.
And when push comes to shove, those people can always demonstrate far more facility with the actual facts than can you. Based on that, which of us is more likely to be basing his belief on fact and sound reasoning, and which upon simple credulity or wishful thinking? If you're the one whose grasp of the facts is deficient, you can't credibly accuse others of not having fact-based beliefs compared to yours.
So when solid evidence is uncovered that proves "This is NOT what happened", one can be upset or even traumatized, if one has a personal or emotional attachment to the event.
But you can't present "solid" evidence. You can only provide personal opinion, or at best nitpicky attempts to erode the prevailing story that boil down in almost all cases to your inability to understand the evidence and the sciences that pertain to it.
"I think this looks like a bare arm" is not solid evidence.
"It's not entirely impossible that it could have been done some other way" is not solid evidence.
When you deploy those arguments, and when you are met in response with objective, factually-supported, and largely dispassionate responses, you cannot credibly argue that objection to these "new" ideas must therefore be emotionally motivated.
But yours is the last refuge of the die-hard conspiracist. Faced with the inability to defend his own points beyond the extent of his initial credulity, and confronted with learned rebuttals he neither understands nor believes, he tries to paint his opponents as emotionally fragile.
Shame on you, Turbonium. Do you really think you can talk to a bunch of space engineers and other professionals who have patiently explained to you the error of your allegations and try to convince them that you're the rational one and they're all being emotional about it?
The person may go into denial, and say the new evidence is fake - no matter how solid that evidence is.
Red herring. Our argument is rarely that the evidence is fake because your argument is rarely based on the objective observation or fact; it's almost always based on your interpretation of that observation, which in many cases is just blatantly wrong.
If we take your "bare arm" argument, for example, nobody argued that the photograph itself was "fake". There was considerable argument that JPEG artifacts in your particular version may have contributed to a mistaken identification. That's a perfectly rational argument that has nothing to do with fakery. Others argued that you were simply seeing things, which is also a perfectly reasonable argument considering that you were indeed looking at a picture and interpreting what its contents might be. If that is to be your argument, you cannot escape the inevitable counterarguments that discuss human perception.
What specific arguments of yours have we rebutted simply by trying to claim that your evidence is "fake"?
As for denial, hoo-boy!
In our 9/11 discussions you question the propriety of using certain kinds of steel to validate the FEA models. In response I pointed out that your argument was based on a completely wrong conception of what FEA validation mathematically consists of. You are simply applying your layman's intuition of what FEA "must" be, and trying to impose those limits on people who do it for a living. Then I went on to point out how the specimens recovered for such validation are actually very well-suited to the task, and how the specimens you propose to recover would have been empirically and mathematically less useful in validation.
What do you do? Do you attempt to understand FEA more fully? Do you attempt to discuss the metallurgical aspects of temperature?
No. You let the responses drift into the mists of memory, and then you come right back with the same old arguments about improper validation sampling as if nothing whatsoever had been said by anyone else on the subject.
Which of us is really in denial, Turbonium?
You tell us you can't understand why people don't act on these "obvious" errors. So you conclude that it must be because their belief is irrational. But in fact you can't deal with the notion that what you consider "obvious" other people righly recognize as your personal, uneducated, and unsupported opinion. And you can't deal with the elaborate technical and factual explanations people give you for why they believe what they believe.
So you continue along in your fantasy that you are right and everyone else is just emotionally resisting what ought to be self-evident fact.
Or one can become angry that these "nutcases" with phony "evidence" are trying to alter "Historical and globally accepted fact", probably "to make money" or "get attention".
Again you're trying to push the emotional component. If we can show that their arguments are far less credible according to the facts than the prevailing one, then it is legitimate to conclude that they are trying to alter history.
If we can show that they all have some book or video to sell, or that they shop themselves out to the media, then it is reasonable to conclude that they are so motivated.
It isn't necessary to become emotional about this -- just point out that their behavior suggests that their motives are not as pure as perhaps they wish it believed.
A lot of people have asked you to provide alternate scenarios for Apollo, for 9/11, and perhaps for other historical questions you consider controversial and poorly supported. You can't and won't do it. You say you're just questioning the "official" story. How does that remotely measure up to what is often carefully researched and verified history?
You simply want your handwaving and vague nitpicking immediately to be considered on par at prima facie with the prevailing stories.
The evidence for the authenticity of Apollo is nebulous at best, imo.
Yes, in your opinion. That's the problem. Your opinion isn't very well grounded in fact, and you strenuously resist all efforts to have fact applied to it.
The "kind" of evidence is questionable: it is based on one type of physical evidence - the moon rocks.
What other "physical" evidence is possible to obtain from the moon? If not pieces of it, then what? Your typical attempt to artificially limit the evidence is pretty amusing.
Physical objects pertaining to Apollo also consist of surviving examples of the the technology used to retrieve those samples, which technology has been the beginning of a successful multibillion-dollar private industry.
For one, because only a very small percentage of the entire collection will ever be released for analysis (the rest has been declared "Set aside forever for posterity", whatever that's supposed to mean).
You're very bold to base your belief on what will be the case. The problem is that for now these specimens constitute the only material recovered in situ from the lunar surface. Barring future missions, these have to last us indefinitely. Much of the research we want to do has to be done on pristine samples that haven't been subjected to any other study, so we have to consider very carefully which destructive research we plan to do. Even looking at a sample under an optical microscope would render a sample unsuitable for some other purposes such as gas chromatography.
It is still remarkably easy to get a sample of lunar material to study, as long as you're not picky about whether it's new or used and as long as you return it undamaged and unaltered. To imply these samples are being horded by a select few is simply -- once again -- to deny the facts and to substitute your own fantasy world for reality.
And now that you can see there is a valid scientific reason for needing carefully to keep some specimens in reserve for future destructive testing (i.e., as new methods of investigation become available), that throws quite a lot of water on your implication that the only reason to withhold samples is to keep people from finding out that the majority of them are fake.
Speaking of that, you said that one of the hallmarks of an emotional argument was the off-handed dismissal of evidence as fake. Unless you can provide any evidence that the remaining Apollo samples are fake, all you have is a handwaving assertion to that effect. Doesn't that quite effectively make your attempt to refute the moon rock evidence an example of an argument you say is poor and ineffectual?
Unmanned craft and lunar meteorites can account for the actually available (to analyze) moon rocks.
Only if you ignore core samples and documented samples -- about half the studied data.
Oh, and right -- you have absolutely zero evidence for any unmanned sample-return missions from the United States. Where's your "solid" evidence here? All you have is a remote, abstract possibility (or rather, the lack of impossibility) but no evidence of any kind that it actually happened that way. So between two possibilities -- one with evidence that it actually happened, and the other which is simply not provably impossible but has no evidence it actually happened -- which is the smart bet?
You take as the default that the moon landings were faked, and require any who believe them to be true to satisfy a colossal burden of proof that amounts to proving beyond all shadow of doubt. That's not how history is studied; that's not how truth is uncovered. That's how people with predetermined beliefs act to protect those beliefs: they impose impossible burdens of proof on their opponents so that they can maintain the illusion that their position is unassailable.
The imaging projects have failed to do so, despite several efforts.
No, there has been no real effort. People talk about it as an abstract possibility.
You claim they only failed for technical reasons...
I don't claim that at all.
The mirrors could have been placed on the moon without human presence.
Yes, but where's your evidence that they were? Again, you simply believe your conclusion as the default and require objectors to provide huge amounts of proof to the contrary. You have absolutely no proof of any kind that your conclusion is what happened. All you have is an abstract lack of impossibility.
There is exactly as much evidence that the U.S. bred super space pixies who carried the LRRRs to the moon on little fairy wings as there is that they were placed with some unknown unmanned spacecraft.
The astronauts are the only first-hand eyewitnesses...
The only first-hand witnesses to certain arbitrarily-selected events. If you expand that to include all relevant activities, there are hundreds of thousands of expert witnesses and millions of lay witnesses.
...they could be compromised into declaring the missions were authentic.
Abstract possibilities are not "solid evidence". You really think that you can compromise history just by saying that's not the only possible way it could have happened?
The problem you don't see -- but we do -- is that you're quite desperately trying to undermine belief in an event by any means possible, even if it seems grossly absurd on its face and has absolutely no evidence whatsoever in favor of it.
Nor does the authenticity of an event correlate to the "amount" of information recorded about it.
Of course it does. The more you are compelled to write about an event, the more detail into which you will have to delve. And the more detail you purport, the likelier it is someone will note that the details are impossible or inappropriately inconsistent.
If you are required to produced detailed documents describing how you plan to get to the moon, how you got there, and what might have gone wrong, you will have to come up with something plausible.
The former could contain 1% factual information (600 pages) while the latter could contain 100% factual information, and be much more relevant in content as well.
Presumption. As a matter of fact the entirety of available Apollo information is read voraciously by today's engineers. As usual, you're simply trying to slip into your fantasy world where vast amounts of the Apollo documentation is just conspiracy fodder.
Give me some examples of available Apollo documentation that you can show to be nothing more than fancy decoy.
