"We're laughing AT you, not with you"

[dbeach]

I tried to pal with that fred fellow..thought his comments had some value..now I will rethink<br><br>'Hey Fredrick' was great song by Jefferson Airplane off theri Volunteers album <p></p><i></i>

[RebelYell]

As long as Diebold machines count the votes, DU is irrelevant. When they have real power, I'll pay attention to DU. <p></p><i></i>

[Ferry Fey]

dbeach, for noting the Jefferson Airplane reference. <br><br>Yes, intentional, but only because it was the first thing that came to my mind in terms of "Frederick." No arcane secret reference. <!--EZCODE EMOTICON START :D --><img src=http://www.ezboard.com/images/emoticons/happy.gif ALT=":D"><!--EZCODE EMOTICON END--> <p></p><i></i>

[Rigorous Intuition]

"I'd only hit reply there because yours was the last one on the page at the time."<br><br>Ah! Done it myself, and kicked myself in the head for it later.<br><br>Thanks Ferry. That does sound like a fit for Rense. <br><br> <p></p><i></i>

[Qutb]

Hey Ferry, I'm Frederik.<br><br>I'm still missing the point. <br><br>Perhaps it was very obvious, somehow, that you were talking about Jeff Rense and not Rigorous Intuition. But as you were responding to Jeff's post, it was sort of natural to assume that you were making unfounded assumptions about RI. Your tone was very similar to that of Beam Me Up Scottie, who by the way found your post hilarious, and whose mission on DU is to ridicule every discussion of the parapolitical by associating it with mind control beams from Mars and/or anti-semitism. You appeared to be a member of the posse.<br><br>I didn't remember your name from here, sorry. <p></p><i></i>

[seemslikeadream]

Frederick is a great person, he was only defending a friend from I quess was a mistaken reply to Jeff<br><br><br>Ooops, there you are. What are you doing up so early? <p></p><i>Edited by: <A HREF=http://p097.ezboard.com/brigorousintuition.showUserPublicProfile?gid=seemslikeadream@rigorousintuition>seemslikeadream</A> at: 7/30/05 8:46 am<br></i>

[glooperoo]

That's a scarily common kind of thread. Yuck. A pattern I've noticed amongst some of the most ardent "conspiracy theory" dismissers is that they very rarely acknowledge that the evidence presented is accurate and true, like with the 9/11 wargames of London bombing drills. Perhaps a useful general technique for reframing those debates would be to explicitely ask the dismissers to tell us that these things did not happen. If they refuse to do that, present the evidence again (which is usually the MSM when it comes to a ton of this stuff), and then ask if they have simply forgotten or not seen this evidence due to the usually-amnesic media coverage, or that the information is unreliable, or that it's irrelevant. Odds are it'll be considered irrelevant, but that's still progress in the discussion. Even threads that are filled with dismissal and derision serve an invaluable purpose if they contain those vital clues that we are being lied to. You main audience is predominantly lurkers, so just getting the info out there and better yet acknowledged to be true should be a top priority. <br><br>Another general refrain to fall back on when faced with the inevitable strawmen (the "lol, yeah, it was the alien reptoid mossad agents working from beyond pluto that piloted the holographic planes into those buildings" types of strawmen), is to once again reframe the debate by simply asking if they feel the official story tells us the truth about whatever the taboo topic at hand. Do they feel the 9/11 Commission on the up and up? Do they really believe it was truly independent? And if not, than what exactly do they think the our trusted institutions lied to us about? Is the coincidence of those 7/7 drills so unnewsworthy as to merit maybe a total of 60 seconds of MSM news coverage out of all the hours dedicated to by it all the media outlets across the globe? If it is newsworthy, than what's a reasonable amount of coverage and why hasn't so much of this stuff received a reasonable amount? I suspect that in many cases these are questions your debate partner (to use a friendlylabel) has rarely, if ever, considered...unless they're some sort of outright agent provacateur knowingly working to cover up a crime, in which case you might be better off asking them their thoughts about karma if you want to stimulate some of their probably under-used mental/spiritual muscles. <!--EZCODE EMOTICON START :p --><img src=http://www.ezboard.com/images/emoticons/tongue.gif ALT=":p"><!--EZCODE EMOTICON END--> <br><br>I have to admit, before 9/11 clued me into the nature of our Social/Media Matrix, I fully believed that the information that is so often discussed in the "batshit crazy conspiracy theorist" communities simply couldn't be real or relevant because I truly thought if something as big as those 9/11 wargames, or 7/7 drills or all the other quiet blips of damning info in the MSM's coverage would, <!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>without a doubt</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END-->, be covered. I had no idea what was <!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>actually being</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END--> discussed in communities like these, but I readily dismissed it out of hand with confidence when the topic came up, which was rarely. If I hadn't seen the pervasive patterns of deception with my own pair of eyes I never would have bothered investing the time and energy into researching this stuff and giving all these dark possibilities a second thought because I never found pondering perceived impossibilities too productive a way to pass the time (much like picking pecks of pickled peppers, it just wasn't something I was apt to ever try). It was a combination of witnessing what I didn't think was possible, and in my case a kind of whimsically grim spirit of adventure, that propelled me along through that crucial initial phase where you keep slipping back and forth between that official paradigm of the world and the much more disheartening "I don't know what exactly is the real story here but I now see a capacity for Big Lies to be told about who-knows-what that's been there for who-knows-how-long" kind of world-view. I do miss the old paradigm. This new one is way scarier. <br><br><!--EZCODE EMOTICON START 8o --><img src=http://www.ezboard.com/images/emoticons/nerd.gif ALT="8o"><!--EZCODE EMOTICON END--> <p></p><i></i>

[dbeach]

"Hey Frederick"..I thought ya was an OK guy.<br><br>THANX for confirming it.<br><br>guess I should slow down and listen so sorry shoulda checked with that Seems Like A Dream person..<br>about the DU intricities..been as ya may guess at da beach communicating with the Mother Ocean and matching waves of bliss with surf..and .."Wondering Aloud" how to SAVE THE PLANET!! <p></p><i></i>

[Ferry Fey]

Dream's End, you really ought to work that up as an article. It is very, very good, and a perspective that is uncommon. I think a lot of us would be happy to pass it on.<br><br><!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>"I'm still missing the point. <br><br>Perhaps it was very obvious, somehow, that you were talking about Jeff Rense and not Rigorous Intuition. But as you were responding to Jeff's post, it was sort of natural to assume that you were making unfounded assumptions about RI. Your tone was very similar to that of Beam Me Up Scottie, who by the way found your post hilarious, and whose mission on DU is to ridicule every discussion of the parapolitical by associating it with mind control beams from Mars and/or anti-semitism. You appeared to be a member of the posse."</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END--><br><br>Part of the problem is simply a structural one because of their thread software. With a forum like DU that moves very quickly you've got three choices. You can scroll down to the bottom, and then hit REPLY, which will keep your message the newest one until something else comes along. Second choice is that you reply to the parent posting. Third choice is that you click REPLY on the message (or any message that's roughly in line for that thread), but that might leave your posting halfway through the thread and make it unlikely that much of anyone would see it. It's why for all its faults , I like the EZBoard practice of just having the one long page and everything coming on sequentially.<br><br>Some reasons I judged the thread to be poking fun at our own foibles: <br><br>1/ While I haven't been at DU for more than a few months and don't know many people's "voices," the principle people posting (I'm starting to sound like Daffy Duck saying that, aren't I?) have more than 1000 posts listed under their names, so I figure they are not newbies or trolls.<br><br>2/ It was a really accurate skewering of the faults our community (and by that I suppose I mean roughly AnyConspiracyTown, USA ) can have, and do regularly exhibit online (other than use of "sheep," when I think it should have been "sheeple.") When self-proclaimed "skeptics" try to do it it usually just clunks along. They don't pay attention to our arguments, so why should we expect them to show sensitivity to the nuances of our discourse? It's completely different from their way of analyzing.<br><br>3/ We DO have people in our online commuities who speak online the way the jocular parody depicted them.<br>They can be crazy-making, but given that their intentions are usually good, I figure it's better to gently correct them and see if there is something we can do to help their posting style mature. Something like that thread can give them something to think about without feeling they're been attacked personally.<br><br>Does that give you a better perspective on what the people playing on that thread were doing, or trying to do?<br><br>Ferry Fey<br><br><br><br><br> <p></p><i></i>

[Qutb]

<!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>Does that give you a better perspective on what the people playing on that thread were doing, or trying to do?<hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--><br><br>No, because you grossly overestimate them, or misoverestimate them as Bush might say. They were really just ridiculing any attempts at "alternative" analysis of current or historical events, as they do every time they post in GD (they usually reside in the lounge). It makes them feel intellectually superior. The finer distinctions between Jeff Rense and Jeff Wells is lost on those people. I personally don't see the point in encouraging them. I agree that it <!--EZCODE ITALIC START--><em>would</em><!--EZCODE ITALIC END--> have been funny if it was directed specifically at the Jeff Rense variety...<br><br><!--EZCODE QUOTE START--><blockquote><strong><em>Quote:</em></strong><hr>We DO have people in our online commuities who speak online the way the jocular parody depicted them<hr></blockquote><!--EZCODE QUOTE END--><br>I'm not disputing that. The thing about DU is that it's a site for "the people", which is great, but with 70,000 members inevitably many of them haven't spent a thousand hours researching deep politics. So most posters there are either pretty mainstream or they theorize about the BFEE engineering the tsunami to distract from Bush's falling approval rating and so on. Of course there are dozens of conspiracy-oriented sites on the net which offer analyses at about the same level, each with its favourite scapegoat to blame it all on. In fact RI is the only "conspiracy" site that I read as a part of my daily web routine, there aren't many others I've come across that offers much of interests other than occasionally. <br><br><br> <p></p><i></i>