raven
Jupiter
That ain't Earth, kiddies.
Posts: 509
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Post by raven on Jan 3, 2012 23:31:05 GMT -4
Well, the renaissance period of the Moon Hoax Conspiracy Theory came at a similar period in history to the first, with people feeling mistrustful of the motives and workings of the US government. As an added bonus, social media from forum to vlogs allow people to come together with common interests and allowing ideas to be presented to a potentially large, anonymous, audience. Plus, there is that adolescent contrariness. "You know that thing your generation did that is really cool? Well, I think it was fake!" with a little "I want my jetpack!" thrown in.
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Post by zilch on Jan 4, 2012 7:41:07 GMT -4
Thanks for the welcome, echnaton, and it does look as though there's a lot of interesting stuff to be learned here. I, along with a few other people, watched the Moon landings in 1969, and I would have been astonished to hear that they would be doubted half a century later. But unfortunately, as gillianren points out, there are people who will believe anything.
What puzzles me, though, is the amount of cognitive dissonance deniers have to put up with if they examine the premises of a hoax at all. You must admit that we had rocket boosters that at least flew up out of sight, don't you? And you can't fake satellites in orbit, can you? I saw Sputnik in 1957, and that means that rockets could put stuff in orbit. How much harder is it to get a rocket to the Moon, and why would you bother faking it? I don't get the thinking here.
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Post by echnaton on Jan 4, 2012 10:23:33 GMT -4
The moon hoax is "dying" because there is no one willing to buy books or DVDs about it. In the absence of commerce, there is an absence of promotion. The declining market may be because the hoax has run its course and the interests of the "conspiratorially aware" are increasingly focused on to more modern concerns or simply because of the general decline in the market for books and DVDs. Probably a combination of both but the effects of the broad shift from physical media distribution to electronic distribution on the Internet should not be underestimated.
My view is that people and what they choose to consume, as an aggregate, does not change much over time. What changes is the business of providing the goods to be consumed.
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Post by echnaton on Jan 4, 2012 10:28:06 GMT -4
I don't get the thinking here. Welcome to the club. I can comprehend believing in things without proof. But stubbornly sticking to the unproven despite all evidence to the contrary, that just escapes me. Edited for clarity
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Post by twik on Jan 4, 2012 10:59:16 GMT -4
One reason I think there will be always HBers about Apollo is that there is a lot of documentation available. One important difference between the true conspiracy theorist and the person who just likes to speculate ("you know, Columbus COULD have been inspired by native Americans who made it to Europe first, but the Europeans covered it up! It's possible, right?") is that the theorist has a drive to prove their point. One way to do that (at least to their own minds) is to find "anomalies". For events before movies, before photography, we don't usually have enough data to sift for these anomalies, while modern events, such as Apollo and the Kennedy assassination will have so much data that finding anomalies is, statistically, almost guaranteed.
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Post by gwiz on Jan 4, 2012 11:05:14 GMT -4
How much harder is it to get a rocket to the Moon... Seeing that the first Moon launch attempts, US and Russian, were less than a year after Sputnik 1, and that the Russians achieved their first success within two years, not very much.
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Post by gillianren on Jan 4, 2012 16:03:49 GMT -4
My view is that people and what they choose to consume, as an aggregate, does not change much over time. What changes is the business of providing the goods to be consumed. How does that explain fads? Fashion?
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Post by chrlz on Jan 4, 2012 16:57:46 GMT -4
...will have so much data that finding anomalies is, statistically, almost guaranteed. And of course the less you (or your targeted audience) know, the more 'anomalies' you will find. I'm yet to find *any* anomaly... (not trying to be immodest, it's just that as I investigate new claims, I quickly discover how little the claimant knows..) (A special hi to Patrick1000/DrTea/fattydash and (or?) Jarrah White.)
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Post by chew on Jan 4, 2012 17:37:28 GMT -4
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Post by nomuse on Jan 4, 2012 17:40:28 GMT -4
Thanks for the welcome, echnaton, and it does look as though there's a lot of interesting stuff to be learned here. I, along with a few other people, watched the Moon landings in 1969, and I would have been astonished to hear that they would be doubted half a century later. But unfortunately, as gillianren points out, there are people who will believe anything. What puzzles me, though, is the amount of cognitive dissonance deniers have to put up with if they examine the premises of a hoax at all. You must admit that we had rocket boosters that at least flew up out of sight, don't you? And you can't fake satellites in orbit, can you? I saw Sputnik in 1957, and that means that rockets could put stuff in orbit. How much harder is it to get a rocket to the Moon, and why would you bother faking it? I don't get the thinking here. Your own cognitive dissonance will lessen when you discover more about the basis from which many Apollo Deniers proceed. Someone who doesn't understand gravity or inertia or the lever doesn't have to experience any dissonance whatsoever in constructing elaborate (but wrong) theories about spaceflight. Just check out Godlike Productions some time (if you have a flask of brain bleach handy). Almost every day there will be a new poster noticing you can see our Moon in the daytime sky, and freaking out about the aliens/chemtrails/NASA/HAARP than made this heretofore unheard-of behavior possible.
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Post by twik on Jan 4, 2012 18:08:42 GMT -4
...will have so much data that finding anomalies is, statistically, almost guaranteed. And of course the less you (or your targeted audience) know, the more 'anomalies' you will find. I'm yet to find *any* anomaly... (not trying to be immodest, it's just that as I investigate new claims, I quickly discover how little the claimant knows..) (A special hi to Patrick1000/DrTea/fattydash and (or?) Jarrah White.) If you consider "anomaly" to be "any contradiction or discrepancy", it is a virtual guarantee that multiple accounts of any incident will have anomalies. It does not indicate deception, merely that people's perceptions, memories, and even records will likely not match perfectly. It would be much more suspicious to have multiple witnesses who are 100% in accordance. A common example is that in the accounts of the survivors of the sinking of the Titanic, about half recalled it splitting in two, the rest didn't. The matter wasn't really settled until the wreck was explored and it was confirmed that the ship had essentially broken in half. CTists do not take such natural variations between accounts into consideration.
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Post by echnaton on Jan 4, 2012 18:34:00 GMT -4
My view is that people and what they choose to consume, as an aggregate, does not change much over time. What changes is the business of providing the goods to be consumed. How does that explain fads? Fashion? It doesn't really. I wasn't thinking at that level of detail when I wrote it. The thinking was something more like; we will consume entertainment at a with some consistency, but how we consume it can change widely over a time depending on how it is delivered. That is we all used to watch home video entertainment on a TV, then partially substituted video tape, then DVDs. Now now many people skip the pricey video subscriptions and use their internet connection to download torrents. So the shows have changed according to fashion, but the distribution has changed according to the business needs to reach the customer. Or in the case of torrents...whatever you want to call a torrent user. I know Hollywood has some unpleasant names for them.
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Post by ka9q on Jan 4, 2012 19:06:05 GMT -4
One reason I think there will be always HBers about Apollo is that there is a lot of documentation available. I think you're right, and the irony here is pretty strong. Apollo is probably the most thoroughly documented large engineering project in human history. One would think this mountain of documentation would overwhelmingly prove its reality, but as you say it just gives the hoaxer crowd more opportunities to find so-called "anomalies". And because they don't understand the unique aspects of space flight, nor the moon's very unusual properties as compared with the earth where they've spent their entire lives, they think they find plenty of those "anomalies".
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Post by ka9q on Jan 4, 2012 19:14:17 GMT -4
What puzzles me, though, is the amount of cognitive dissonance deniers have to put up with if they examine the premises of a hoax at all. There's a lot of it out there but it does vary from one HB to the next. I ran into one recently who refuses to accept that rockets can work in a vacuum because they have no air to push against. (This is actually unusual; most HBers do accept that rockets work and at least unmanned spaceflight is possible.) I explained that rockets push on their own exhaust. I gave other examples of action-reaction such as hitting a baseball with a bat or firing a gun. I asked where GPS, DirecTV and Sirius/XM signals come from, if not from satellites put into space with rockets. His way of dealing with the resulting cognitive dissonance was to get extremely abusive.
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Post by gillianren on Jan 5, 2012 0:01:29 GMT -4
It doesn't really. I wasn't thinking at that level of detail when I wrote it. The thinking was something more like; we will consume entertainment at a with some consistency, but how we consume it can change widely over a time depending on how it is delivered. That is we all used to watch home video entertainment on a TV, then partially substituted video tape, then DVDs. Now now many people skip the pricey video subscriptions and use their internet connection to download torrents. So the shows have changed according to fashion, but the distribution has changed according to the business needs to reach the customer. Or in the case of torrents...whatever you want to call a torrent user. I know Hollywood has some unpleasant names for them. Yes, but the very existence of TV was a new purchase once upon a time. The ubiquity of an expensive object in the home for purely entertainment purposes is really quite new. I'm on a fixed income, but the idea of being without a TV--and, come to that, a computer--is all but incomprehensible to me. There are all kinds of things I'd do without first. Whereas it was quite exciting to my grandmother when they first got a radio, I'm sure. Before that, they would have made their own entertainment, and they definitely wouldn't have had, say, a piano. Too expensive.
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