Bonus points for the Parenti reference. Solid gold, that man.
Did you roll your eyes as hard as I did when the latest Facebook feeding private (lol) Messenger conversations to the Feds came out? This stuff has been going on since the 90s and people are somehow surprised every time. Me, I just assume they're listening, and proceed from there.
It is the fact that they always listen that allows them to make a judgement about your threat level. If the listening results in a calculated threat level then they will come visiting.
That's part of it. I suspect they also use it to keep a finger on the collective pulse, which then gives them an idea of just how far they can push things.
Guerilla tactics have been successful since time began. Everyone innately understands and routinely practices subterfuge, but organizing it requires a new layer.
Deceit is considered bad. But it's good if it serves a noble purpose. We must learn the difference.
Let's be fair, though: if generally people believe the government doesn't lie, because that would be illegal and the government doesn't do illegal things, (or whatever reason, that's just the one I hear a lot) then there is value in showing people how often the government lies. Since we have to take collective action to improve government it is important that we collectively have a good understanding of how it works and how it behaves. Simply saying "Well, yea, of course they lie" feels nice, but it doesn't really help other people understand things. When a student tells me "Holy crap, the price of this concert ticket doubled after the announcement that the concert sold out!" I shouldn't say "No shit... what the hell do you think we have been talking about in class all week?" It is probably better to point out that they are correct, and demonstrate that their observation can lead to insights into other phenomena.
That's a good point. Making a big fuss is often not the way, but rather showing the issue and talking about it. Probably one has to have some rapport with your interlocutor to work from, or else no amount of stoicism will do any good. If they don't trust that things you thing are worth talking about are worth listening too, well you can't get anywhere.
The philosopher in me wants to object that this goes against the principle of parsimony. The objection would say that the most likely conspiracy theory is the one that allows us to keep the most of our old beliefs, which are reliable because they are tuned to the way the world is. But then I think the post has a response: what if our beliefs are so warped and corrupted from decades of official lies and degeneracy and propaganda that you would be better off starting from scratch? So this is sort of like Descartes concluding that his beliefs were unsalvageable and he needed to start from scratch. Except via conspiracy theory. Cool.
if I was managing a moonshot, and I knew from photographic surveys, some of the strange things, that exist up there, I would hire Stanley Kubrick, to make realistic footage, that I could use to prevent my adversaries from knowing the truth, of their own true history. So the moonshots are a both and situation. Yes the moon has been thoroughly explored, at least. Yes Kubrick made the films. His motivation was a promise from the powers that be that they would leave him alone to make his movies without interference. I think he made the right move. The powers that be became interested in him because of Dr. Strangelove. They were astonished how accurate the B-52 cockpit was. They were alarmed about how accurate his airplane sequences were.
Precision is less important than accuracy. Computers that produce 10 decimal points of precision for inaccurate results frequently mislead naive managers. Slide rules require the engineer to understand the complex mathematics that calculators hide.
Looks interesting but the author seems to misunderstand engineering. Sometimes precision is required, usually not. The engineer's job is to fulfill the requirements correctly at the lowest cost. Precision is expensive.
I firmly believe that certain easily debunkable conspiracy theories are state-sponsored psyops with the aim of confusing, dividing and discrediting any and all dissenting voices. I recognise their propaganda tactics (shaming, out-of-context presentations n isolation, etc).
People aren't buying the exaggerated epidemic narrative? Why not associate them with the easily debunkable flat earth nonsense (see space busters, for example). Blatant state propaganda assets.
The government appears to create fake conspiracies in order to discredit real ones. Flat earth always seemed to me a weapon against those that seek to look beyond official narratives.
We'll have him in that Darkened Government Control Room staffed by unbelievably good-looking women wearing tanktops. One will have a satellite visual feed on her monitor, already at maximum resolution, on which he will point to a blurry figure and order her to "Enhance".
Yes, yes. And in the next scene, a heavily backlit John Lithgow can appear on his cellphone teleconferencing app and say, "This goes much deeper than you think."
Then one of the black tank-top supermodel/physicists can "go rogue" and karate their way out of there., scored by a pulsating Daft Punk track. I think the guy who mows my lawn knows their email addy.
If the Americans had faked the Moon landings, the Soviets would STILL be hooting and jeering about it!
As for "No Virus", I don't believe that. What I DO believe is that "virus" is over-used as a cause for things that our "learned men" don't really understand. "Here, we can fix that with a shot...roll up your sleeve". Ummm...NO Go back and re-do your research. I'll actually respect you more if you come back with "I don't know" than with some BS "It must be a virus".
Peter Duisburg opined that whenever there's an outbreak of illness, infectious disease trumps toxicology as a causal factor. Infection is sexier so the medicos tend to gravitate towards it. Bias is often how we get avoidable errors.
The real 9/11 conspiracy is hiding in plain sight. A few rogue Saudis were behind it, and Bush, the national security state, and the media covered for them to protect the royal family and our access to their oil.
If the point was to drag us into a war with Iraq, don’t you think the deep state would manufacture evidence linking it to Sadaam, rather than tell us openly that 15 of the 19 hijackers we’re Saudis before quickly changing the subject?
Speculating on conspiracy theories accomplishes the goal of the entire existent of conspiracy theories. They are myths designed specifically to detract from the focus on reality, to distract from the simple truth that our nation is run by intelligence services, it compliments the fact that everything the American public believes of relevance is a lie. Funny how so many of these are late stage modern myths conjugated from nothing by people who have a professional interest in stoking lies and misconception. The Flat Earth nonsense is a perfect example of a lie created as a distraction from reality, it is a pysop that has been very effective but of course that is also a conspiracy theory.
Bitcoin mining is actually using machines an ancient Vedic ritual.
The Vedic ritual consists of two tones: an ostinato pulse, and ascending high pitch. The ostinato pulse is meant to be a series of “Ohm” chants representing the fundamental sound of the universe, the laws of physics faithfully executing, over and over, a cycle.
The ascending high pitch represents the increasing complexity of the universe over time.
As such, the purpose of the ritual is to both celebrate the universe’s increasing tendency of coming alive and encourage more of that sort of thing.
The ostinato pulse, the low frequency cyclical drone, is bitcoin’s 10 minute block period. So low frequency that you can’t even hear it.
The increasing tone is bitcoin’s hash rate. At this point we are talking a number around 200 million trillion times per second.
So think of prayer wheels or prayer flags, powered by billions of dollars worth of power over then world. People think this is new, but no, this stuff is as ancient as the monks chanting deep under the earth to power the laws of physics. There’s nothing new about bitcoin. It’s older than time itself, literally. That’s why it fits together so perfectly.
One of the common experiences on hallucinogens is the feeing of being “at one with the Universe.” No more us v. Them. I think it was Alan Watts who described our Un stoned view of ourselves as bags of protoplasm in a hostile Universe.
The viruses and the exosomes — what is the difference? One of the most striking quickly-censored Covid-era videos circa 2020 was a researcher showing us electron microscopy photos of exosomes and the supposed Covid virus — and they looked the same!
Some estimate we have as many bacteria as cells in our body, and we have at least 10X as many viruses. They are part of us, not separate from us.
Anyway, this is a small elaboration of what you write, which is thought provoking and entertaining. And I do love your artwork.
As a kid, I remember loving the cover art of albums and especially of science fiction books. I checked out many “John Carter” novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs from the library, based upon their covers (but never read any of them, finding them horrifically written.) It was the science fiction art, the rockets and weird worlds and mostly naked women, that excited me and still does today.
My favorite is the symbiotic viruses conspiracy. In fact, I would be surprised if there wasn't at least some truth to it. Very nice. I also appreciate the need for an alternative vision to the WEF. I feel like I can see it, but not nearly as clearly as the neoserfdom the Davos crowd lusts for
I recall a Sci-fi novel set in a dystopian Europe, set 2030-ish, with mercs & skullduggery. A memorable quote "we serbed the village". But the kicker was "infectious memes", as in mass radical transformation of belief systems, political support etc, via a wetware virus. Given the sales of Catch-22 novels (cinematic bonmot) we all realise that The Human Psyche has been cracked, scrambled then poached (sic). Iyamanopenbook.
& THAT was the plot; how good is my Interface Security? Coz next minute you & your mission have just flipped. That's the milspec guys. Civs are xxx (data) dumps (porn malmot🤫). & re my Catch 22 reference- refer to toilet roll frenzy as test pattern...
I don't think I would agree with the argument here, or at least with the way it is stated. A lie can be elaborate and can capture people's imagination, but that doesn't make it any less a lie. If truth is prosaic, it is still the truth. We don't get to tell other people what their alt-opinions should be, even if we do find the ones they actually have to be boring.
The argument may be leaning in the right direction, though. Merely rejecting a standard narrative as false leaves a hole in our world-map. If we lop off a lie, its stump needs to be scabbed over with new narrative tissue to replace it. That replacement tissue will have to account for all facts as well or better than the lie did, and it will have to blend seamlessly into the rest of our world-map. If it can do so, it will be interesting in its own right, and more so, to the pursuer of truth, than the flamboyant lie.
The problem with the three alt-narratives posed as examples is not their lack of entertainment value, but their apparent lack of a satisfying alternative framework for explaining their subject matter. If they can gain that, then I will be much more open to them.
Of the three, Flat Earth leaves by far the biggest hole in my world-map. Seeing no compelling reason for it, and no problem with my existing Spherical Earth model, I tend to reject Flat Earth out of hand.
No Viruses also leaves a big hole, though not nearly so big as Flat Earth. The damage is still traumatic, and I don't want to go there, but I can at least wrap my head around the idea, somewhat. It tears out a big chunk of basic biology for me, but it also inspires me to ask what we know about the phylogeny and distribution of viruses. Do they really evolve and exist in all life forms, or is virology just a shallow series of store fronts, propped up to cast an illusion that covers a few human and domestic animal diseases?
No Moon Landings doesn't leave much of a hole. HIstorically, whether the U.S. landed a few expeditions of men on the moon from 1969 to the early 1970s makes little or no difference to anything else I think I know about the world. On one hand, I have a hard time seeing what motive could be so compelling as to pull such an enormous hoax. On the other, I have a few questions about how it was physically possible to do it, and half a century of huge advances in electronic control technology, while never landing and retrieving a single craft there again, makes it seem circumstantially less and less likely that it really happened the first time. I'm quite open to persuasion on this one. But if it was a hoax, then it needs to come with a heck of a revisionist narrative.
I wasn't really making an argument per se, in the sense of searching for ontological truth claims, although using that entirely valid lens your approach is one I generally agree with. My motivation here was more cultural. At any given moment in history, there are always weird alternative narratives that gain currency. They're only rarely true, but their aesthetic character can say something interesting about the milieu that produced them. There's something disturbingly flat and featureless about many of the alt-truths that have become popular recently, especially when comparing to the conspiracy world of the 90s and 00s.
So far as the Moon landing goes, advances in electronics aren't really all that relevant to the ability to send humans to the Moon. It's funny: no one ever makes the same argument to claim that the Venera landing on Venus, Viking landing on Mars, or the Pioneer and Voyager missions to the outer planets didn't happen, despite that they used comparably crude electronics but were computationally far more challenging than the comparatively short and trivial round trip to the Moon. The fact that such an argument isn't made suggests to me that the emotional motivation underlying the Moon Hoaxists has less to do with technical incredulity, and is more along the lines of a cope - we did something amazing, then turned our back for so long that we forgot how to do it. There's a deep cultural humiliation there, like an athlete who got fat and now finds it easier to believe he was never an Adonis.
The cultural angle is valid too, but only once we agree that the alternative claims are not true and not understandable as motivated by the search for truth. Then we can discuss what does motivate them, and how that relates to the milieu they come out of.
I've supposed that Flat Earth, post Age of Discovery, was generally a reductio ad absurdum hurled by the orthodox against independent thinkers, i.e., if you don't believe in Covid mandates, then you don't believe in Science, and probably think the earth is flat. If there are people today who really believe the earth is flat, I don't think I've encountered them. Reputedly, they do exist though. If so, I don't know their history or argument very well.
I'm guessing that the No Viruses view has been around since before modern molecular biology, say pre-1950s, and represents a branch of people critical (perhaps with good reason) of vaccines back then, who entrenched their position solidly enough to duck all advances in biology since that time. Under the current vax-covidian scam, they have been our political allies in the fight, and have also increased greatly as our rivals in scientific explanation.
Skeptics of the moon landings have probably been around since the beginning, though I first heard that they were really a thing in this country some time in the late 1980s or early 1990s. I had never seriously questioned the moon landings before, but when I heard that someone was disputing them, and being scorned for it, it raised doubts in my mind immediately. Something that is all hype and no legacy just smells like a hoax to me, like waking up out of a movie-induced dream of that time, and finding no current evidence years later that it was real.
Three decades after the landings, there was talk of going back to the moon again, and MSNBC was interviewing a NASA scientist about that possibility, and he replied something like: "No, those old Apollo guys ran that project, but they're all gone now, so we don't know how they did it." And my jaw dropped. Really? The greatest achievement in human history, and NASA never bothered to keep records on how they did it?
Mars, Earth, and Venus have atmospheres to leverage in controlling a craft trying to land on them, and the missions to the outer planets weren't about landing. The moon has no atmosphere, but a gravitational pull about 1/6 that of earth's. I believe that means that a 12 second free-fall on the moon will be as damaging as a 2 second free-fall on earth, i.e., like falling off a six-story building. The only thing to leverage against that would be rocket thrusters, and with those alone I wonder if you could even prevent pitching, yawing, and rolling. According to Wikipedia, escape velocity on the moon is 99 miles an hour, and the trick is to drop into very low moon orbit at about that speed, just above the ground, and then fire off retro-rockets to slow you down to a reasonable speed before you drop to the ground. I guess that's plausible if you can ensure that you are not turning around all over the place.
The reason I mentioned electronics is that it seems to me that perfect control of the craft and its thrusters would be very important in trying to land in an environment like that. If it can be done with humans, then intelligent computers with sensors developed to do that routinely in drones would be a natural step forward. Once those were perfected, it would make it a lot safer for humans to accompany them as well.
So I remain agnostic about the moon landings. To me, they give off the whiff of a hoax, but sufficient motive is not obvious, and execution of the hoax seems elaborate and difficult. It's been half a century now, with enormous technical advancements in many fields that should be relevant to moon-landing techniques, and there is no excuse for NASA ever to have "forgot how." For me, there is zero cultural humiliation, since I had no part of it and was never emotionally invested in it. At the time, it seemed that progress was happening and that we were well on the way to Flash Gordon and the Jetsons; decades later, it just seems like a passing phase of 60s-70s science fiction popular culture, mainly used now for trite motivational posters.
Bonus points for the Parenti reference. Solid gold, that man.
Did you roll your eyes as hard as I did when the latest Facebook feeding private (lol) Messenger conversations to the Feds came out? This stuff has been going on since the 90s and people are somehow surprised every time. Me, I just assume they're listening, and proceed from there.
All users agree to it in terms of service. I'd suggest they read it, but most wouldn't understand it.
I assume they would be listening if they thought I was a threat but I'm too small and insignificant for them to bother with.
It is the fact that they always listen that allows them to make a judgement about your threat level. If the listening results in a calculated threat level then they will come visiting.
That's part of it. I suspect they also use it to keep a finger on the collective pulse, which then gives them an idea of just how far they can push things.
Guerilla tactics have been successful since time began. Everyone innately understands and routinely practices subterfuge, but organizing it requires a new layer.
Deceit is considered bad. But it's good if it serves a noble purpose. We must learn the difference.
And the same crowd that wanted to "defund the police" are hiring 87,000 more cops, now that they're in charge.
So far I have not seen anyone point out that 87,000 new IRS goons, is ~25% larger than the US troop commitment on D-Day.
Let's be fair, though: if generally people believe the government doesn't lie, because that would be illegal and the government doesn't do illegal things, (or whatever reason, that's just the one I hear a lot) then there is value in showing people how often the government lies. Since we have to take collective action to improve government it is important that we collectively have a good understanding of how it works and how it behaves. Simply saying "Well, yea, of course they lie" feels nice, but it doesn't really help other people understand things. When a student tells me "Holy crap, the price of this concert ticket doubled after the announcement that the concert sold out!" I shouldn't say "No shit... what the hell do you think we have been talking about in class all week?" It is probably better to point out that they are correct, and demonstrate that their observation can lead to insights into other phenomena.
That's a good point. Making a big fuss is often not the way, but rather showing the issue and talking about it. Probably one has to have some rapport with your interlocutor to work from, or else no amount of stoicism will do any good. If they don't trust that things you thing are worth talking about are worth listening too, well you can't get anywhere.
The philosopher in me wants to object that this goes against the principle of parsimony. The objection would say that the most likely conspiracy theory is the one that allows us to keep the most of our old beliefs, which are reliable because they are tuned to the way the world is. But then I think the post has a response: what if our beliefs are so warped and corrupted from decades of official lies and degeneracy and propaganda that you would be better off starting from scratch? So this is sort of like Descartes concluding that his beliefs were unsalvageable and he needed to start from scratch. Except via conspiracy theory. Cool.
if I was managing a moonshot, and I knew from photographic surveys, some of the strange things, that exist up there, I would hire Stanley Kubrick, to make realistic footage, that I could use to prevent my adversaries from knowing the truth, of their own true history. So the moonshots are a both and situation. Yes the moon has been thoroughly explored, at least. Yes Kubrick made the films. His motivation was a promise from the powers that be that they would leave him alone to make his movies without interference. I think he made the right move. The powers that be became interested in him because of Dr. Strangelove. They were astonished how accurate the B-52 cockpit was. They were alarmed about how accurate his airplane sequences were.
Now this is an interesting take.
Want your hair to stand up? Read the astronaut transcripts; the excerpts from transmissions, where the guys were gobsmacked by what they saw.
Maybe it’s a bit scary for some to face the fact that in 1969 the USA sent men to the moon and brought them safely back.
That was back when results mattered more than equity.
.. and did so using 'slide-rule' calculators to achieve precise outcomes of complex mathematics that they 'learned' in schools that 'taught' it.
Precision is less important than accuracy. Computers that produce 10 decimal points of precision for inaccurate results frequently mislead naive managers. Slide rules require the engineer to understand the complex mathematics that calculators hide.
Exactly. Analogue has underappreciated strengths. It sharpens the mind in ways digital cannot.
Just read this- highly rec'd!
"Exactly: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World"
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/41078163-exactly
Looks interesting but the author seems to misunderstand engineering. Sometimes precision is required, usually not. The engineer's job is to fulfill the requirements correctly at the lowest cost. Precision is expensive.
Yes.
I firmly believe that certain easily debunkable conspiracy theories are state-sponsored psyops with the aim of confusing, dividing and discrediting any and all dissenting voices. I recognise their propaganda tactics (shaming, out-of-context presentations n isolation, etc).
People aren't buying the exaggerated epidemic narrative? Why not associate them with the easily debunkable flat earth nonsense (see space busters, for example). Blatant state propaganda assets.
There are excellent reasons to suspect this, yes.
The government appears to create fake conspiracies in order to discredit real ones. Flat earth always seemed to me a weapon against those that seek to look beyond official narratives.
Okay, JC, you can go on break right now to write the screenplay for the Giza Antarctica Luna pilot.
I want it on my desk in 30 days.
June Lockhart and Mark Goddard are already on board, pretty sure I can sign Billy Mumy and Angela Cartwright.
It's mildly surprising that movie hasn't already been made.
Can we add a B plot that involves a bewildered John Cusack searching for his estranged daughter? My life coach plays golf with his agent's assistant.
Done.
We'll have him in that Darkened Government Control Room staffed by unbelievably good-looking women wearing tanktops. One will have a satellite visual feed on her monitor, already at maximum resolution, on which he will point to a blurry figure and order her to "Enhance".
Yes, yes. And in the next scene, a heavily backlit John Lithgow can appear on his cellphone teleconferencing app and say, "This goes much deeper than you think."
Then one of the black tank-top supermodel/physicists can "go rogue" and karate their way out of there., scored by a pulsating Daft Punk track. I think the guy who mows my lawn knows their email addy.
Genius. This could be our ticket out of the ghetto.
If the Americans had faked the Moon landings, the Soviets would STILL be hooting and jeering about it!
As for "No Virus", I don't believe that. What I DO believe is that "virus" is over-used as a cause for things that our "learned men" don't really understand. "Here, we can fix that with a shot...roll up your sleeve". Ummm...NO Go back and re-do your research. I'll actually respect you more if you come back with "I don't know" than with some BS "It must be a virus".
Peter Duisburg opined that whenever there's an outbreak of illness, infectious disease trumps toxicology as a causal factor. Infection is sexier so the medicos tend to gravitate towards it. Bias is often how we get avoidable errors.
BTW I've always wanted to visit Pellucidar.
The idea that Ivan would have let Uncle Scam get away with a hoax of that magnitude is one of the largest plot holes in the narrative.
who benefited from the arms race and the space race, was it different type of people?
The Russians didn't call out 911 being an inside job.
The real 9/11 conspiracy is hiding in plain sight. A few rogue Saudis were behind it, and Bush, the national security state, and the media covered for them to protect the royal family and our access to their oil.
If the point was to drag us into a war with Iraq, don’t you think the deep state would manufacture evidence linking it to Sadaam, rather than tell us openly that 15 of the 19 hijackers we’re Saudis before quickly changing the subject?
Excellent!
Above all else, no matter what, never commit the unforgivable crime of being....dullll.....
Always good advice.
Speculating on conspiracy theories accomplishes the goal of the entire existent of conspiracy theories. They are myths designed specifically to detract from the focus on reality, to distract from the simple truth that our nation is run by intelligence services, it compliments the fact that everything the American public believes of relevance is a lie. Funny how so many of these are late stage modern myths conjugated from nothing by people who have a professional interest in stoking lies and misconception. The Flat Earth nonsense is a perfect example of a lie created as a distraction from reality, it is a pysop that has been very effective but of course that is also a conspiracy theory.
Prospiract theory around bitcoin mining:
Bitcoin mining is actually using machines an ancient Vedic ritual.
The Vedic ritual consists of two tones: an ostinato pulse, and ascending high pitch. The ostinato pulse is meant to be a series of “Ohm” chants representing the fundamental sound of the universe, the laws of physics faithfully executing, over and over, a cycle.
The ascending high pitch represents the increasing complexity of the universe over time.
As such, the purpose of the ritual is to both celebrate the universe’s increasing tendency of coming alive and encourage more of that sort of thing.
The ostinato pulse, the low frequency cyclical drone, is bitcoin’s 10 minute block period. So low frequency that you can’t even hear it.
The increasing tone is bitcoin’s hash rate. At this point we are talking a number around 200 million trillion times per second.
So think of prayer wheels or prayer flags, powered by billions of dollars worth of power over then world. People think this is new, but no, this stuff is as ancient as the monks chanting deep under the earth to power the laws of physics. There’s nothing new about bitcoin. It’s older than time itself, literally. That’s why it fits together so perfectly.
One of the common experiences on hallucinogens is the feeing of being “at one with the Universe.” No more us v. Them. I think it was Alan Watts who described our Un stoned view of ourselves as bags of protoplasm in a hostile Universe.
The viruses and the exosomes — what is the difference? One of the most striking quickly-censored Covid-era videos circa 2020 was a researcher showing us electron microscopy photos of exosomes and the supposed Covid virus — and they looked the same!
Some estimate we have as many bacteria as cells in our body, and we have at least 10X as many viruses. They are part of us, not separate from us.
Anyway, this is a small elaboration of what you write, which is thought provoking and entertaining. And I do love your artwork.
As a kid, I remember loving the cover art of albums and especially of science fiction books. I checked out many “John Carter” novels by Edgar Rice Burroughs from the library, based upon their covers (but never read any of them, finding them horrifically written.) It was the science fiction art, the rockets and weird worlds and mostly naked women, that excited me and still does today.
As the developers say:
/ramble
My favorite is the symbiotic viruses conspiracy. In fact, I would be surprised if there wasn't at least some truth to it. Very nice. I also appreciate the need for an alternative vision to the WEF. I feel like I can see it, but not nearly as clearly as the neoserfdom the Davos crowd lusts for
I recall a Sci-fi novel set in a dystopian Europe, set 2030-ish, with mercs & skullduggery. A memorable quote "we serbed the village". But the kicker was "infectious memes", as in mass radical transformation of belief systems, political support etc, via a wetware virus. Given the sales of Catch-22 novels (cinematic bonmot) we all realise that The Human Psyche has been cracked, scrambled then poached (sic). Iyamanopenbook.
Solid idea but two or more can play at that game. Memes are cheap and memetic warfare can be a nasty free for all, as we're learning in real time.
& THAT was the plot; how good is my Interface Security? Coz next minute you & your mission have just flipped. That's the milspec guys. Civs are xxx (data) dumps (porn malmot🤫). & re my Catch 22 reference- refer to toilet roll frenzy as test pattern...
The Deep State had been operating on the moon before Apollo:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KcFCXtiS1Dk
I don't think I would agree with the argument here, or at least with the way it is stated. A lie can be elaborate and can capture people's imagination, but that doesn't make it any less a lie. If truth is prosaic, it is still the truth. We don't get to tell other people what their alt-opinions should be, even if we do find the ones they actually have to be boring.
The argument may be leaning in the right direction, though. Merely rejecting a standard narrative as false leaves a hole in our world-map. If we lop off a lie, its stump needs to be scabbed over with new narrative tissue to replace it. That replacement tissue will have to account for all facts as well or better than the lie did, and it will have to blend seamlessly into the rest of our world-map. If it can do so, it will be interesting in its own right, and more so, to the pursuer of truth, than the flamboyant lie.
The problem with the three alt-narratives posed as examples is not their lack of entertainment value, but their apparent lack of a satisfying alternative framework for explaining their subject matter. If they can gain that, then I will be much more open to them.
Of the three, Flat Earth leaves by far the biggest hole in my world-map. Seeing no compelling reason for it, and no problem with my existing Spherical Earth model, I tend to reject Flat Earth out of hand.
No Viruses also leaves a big hole, though not nearly so big as Flat Earth. The damage is still traumatic, and I don't want to go there, but I can at least wrap my head around the idea, somewhat. It tears out a big chunk of basic biology for me, but it also inspires me to ask what we know about the phylogeny and distribution of viruses. Do they really evolve and exist in all life forms, or is virology just a shallow series of store fronts, propped up to cast an illusion that covers a few human and domestic animal diseases?
No Moon Landings doesn't leave much of a hole. HIstorically, whether the U.S. landed a few expeditions of men on the moon from 1969 to the early 1970s makes little or no difference to anything else I think I know about the world. On one hand, I have a hard time seeing what motive could be so compelling as to pull such an enormous hoax. On the other, I have a few questions about how it was physically possible to do it, and half a century of huge advances in electronic control technology, while never landing and retrieving a single craft there again, makes it seem circumstantially less and less likely that it really happened the first time. I'm quite open to persuasion on this one. But if it was a hoax, then it needs to come with a heck of a revisionist narrative.
I wasn't really making an argument per se, in the sense of searching for ontological truth claims, although using that entirely valid lens your approach is one I generally agree with. My motivation here was more cultural. At any given moment in history, there are always weird alternative narratives that gain currency. They're only rarely true, but their aesthetic character can say something interesting about the milieu that produced them. There's something disturbingly flat and featureless about many of the alt-truths that have become popular recently, especially when comparing to the conspiracy world of the 90s and 00s.
So far as the Moon landing goes, advances in electronics aren't really all that relevant to the ability to send humans to the Moon. It's funny: no one ever makes the same argument to claim that the Venera landing on Venus, Viking landing on Mars, or the Pioneer and Voyager missions to the outer planets didn't happen, despite that they used comparably crude electronics but were computationally far more challenging than the comparatively short and trivial round trip to the Moon. The fact that such an argument isn't made suggests to me that the emotional motivation underlying the Moon Hoaxists has less to do with technical incredulity, and is more along the lines of a cope - we did something amazing, then turned our back for so long that we forgot how to do it. There's a deep cultural humiliation there, like an athlete who got fat and now finds it easier to believe he was never an Adonis.
The cultural angle is valid too, but only once we agree that the alternative claims are not true and not understandable as motivated by the search for truth. Then we can discuss what does motivate them, and how that relates to the milieu they come out of.
I've supposed that Flat Earth, post Age of Discovery, was generally a reductio ad absurdum hurled by the orthodox against independent thinkers, i.e., if you don't believe in Covid mandates, then you don't believe in Science, and probably think the earth is flat. If there are people today who really believe the earth is flat, I don't think I've encountered them. Reputedly, they do exist though. If so, I don't know their history or argument very well.
I'm guessing that the No Viruses view has been around since before modern molecular biology, say pre-1950s, and represents a branch of people critical (perhaps with good reason) of vaccines back then, who entrenched their position solidly enough to duck all advances in biology since that time. Under the current vax-covidian scam, they have been our political allies in the fight, and have also increased greatly as our rivals in scientific explanation.
Skeptics of the moon landings have probably been around since the beginning, though I first heard that they were really a thing in this country some time in the late 1980s or early 1990s. I had never seriously questioned the moon landings before, but when I heard that someone was disputing them, and being scorned for it, it raised doubts in my mind immediately. Something that is all hype and no legacy just smells like a hoax to me, like waking up out of a movie-induced dream of that time, and finding no current evidence years later that it was real.
Three decades after the landings, there was talk of going back to the moon again, and MSNBC was interviewing a NASA scientist about that possibility, and he replied something like: "No, those old Apollo guys ran that project, but they're all gone now, so we don't know how they did it." And my jaw dropped. Really? The greatest achievement in human history, and NASA never bothered to keep records on how they did it?
Mars, Earth, and Venus have atmospheres to leverage in controlling a craft trying to land on them, and the missions to the outer planets weren't about landing. The moon has no atmosphere, but a gravitational pull about 1/6 that of earth's. I believe that means that a 12 second free-fall on the moon will be as damaging as a 2 second free-fall on earth, i.e., like falling off a six-story building. The only thing to leverage against that would be rocket thrusters, and with those alone I wonder if you could even prevent pitching, yawing, and rolling. According to Wikipedia, escape velocity on the moon is 99 miles an hour, and the trick is to drop into very low moon orbit at about that speed, just above the ground, and then fire off retro-rockets to slow you down to a reasonable speed before you drop to the ground. I guess that's plausible if you can ensure that you are not turning around all over the place.
The reason I mentioned electronics is that it seems to me that perfect control of the craft and its thrusters would be very important in trying to land in an environment like that. If it can be done with humans, then intelligent computers with sensors developed to do that routinely in drones would be a natural step forward. Once those were perfected, it would make it a lot safer for humans to accompany them as well.
So I remain agnostic about the moon landings. To me, they give off the whiff of a hoax, but sufficient motive is not obvious, and execution of the hoax seems elaborate and difficult. It's been half a century now, with enormous technical advancements in many fields that should be relevant to moon-landing techniques, and there is no excuse for NASA ever to have "forgot how." For me, there is zero cultural humiliation, since I had no part of it and was never emotionally invested in it. At the time, it seemed that progress was happening and that we were well on the way to Flash Gordon and the Jetsons; decades later, it just seems like a passing phase of 60s-70s science fiction popular culture, mainly used now for trite motivational posters.
Well, something landed on the Moon and dropped off retro-reflectors there that are still used for laser ranging. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Laser_Ranging_experiment
The data are still coming in unless you think a bunch of French astronomers are in on the hoax. https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2019EA000785
Yep.
Yes. If that's true, that's compelling evidence that someone got those retro-reflectors there, intact and properly positioned.