Skeptic Project

Hey VTV,

Please explain why not only is WWu777 still posting 911 conspiracy claims but is actually arguing with me even though he knows I'm banned!

http://www.thezeitgeistmovement.com/joomla/index.php?option=com_kunena&Itemid=99999&func=view&catid=231&id=203342&limit=10&limitstart=30#244681

That's fine though, right?

Arguing FOR conspiracies is just fine on the Zeitgeist Movement, right?

Maybe you could at least tell him to come here and argue with me instead of talking to himself.

To ED:

I will talk to Jacque and Roxanne about it. You posted a legit concern and I responded and gave you the video to back up my feelings on the matter. They just left the country on their tour so it will take a while.

To the people who think I came here to defend my fragile ego and asking when I will be ignoring them:

You really missed the point of my entire post. Lets think about this logically. Neither of you are people I will ever meet. And even if you did neither of you would even contemplate talking to me like that. The only motive I had was pointing out to the audience here that because your engaging in ad hominem like "fatass" any claim you had to being smarter then me or anyone else in the Zeitgeist Movement is gone. You even lost credibility with the people here when I pointed it out.

It's also to point out the delusion that some trolls particularly in the political/activist realm have that coming to their keyboards and acting like punk children in need of being taken over someone's knee would lend any credibility to their causes.

The reason people get banned from the ZM forums for engaging in stuff like that is not because you hurt our feelings. It doesn't hurt my feelings when people who's egos are fragile enough that they need to engage in hurting other people in the cowardly fashion of doing so over the internet do so. But it is damaging to any constructive dialogue we would ever have. And it is completely irrelevant. I am sure there is one irrelevant physical problem both of you have I could bring up if I knew about it. What and why should it matter? I could be 400 lbs and it would not matter at all. I could also be 150 lbs and rippling with muscles and it still wouldn't matter. Particularly from people like anti-cultist who think they are doing some critical thing by "exposing" us as being a movement that was founded by a guy who plays music in the orchestra. (Dun dun dun!)

For example, Ed didn't engage in any childish personal attacks and he presented what he felt was a problem so I responded constructively.

Anti-cultist and Matt did not. What was the value in the exchange between myself and these two people? Will anyone be "woken up" by exposing me being overweight? Nobody with the maturity level over the 6th grade would even care about this irrelevant data point. It is actually an insult to the people in question to even post something like that.

I am very careful about who in my life has any power over my self image or self esteem. They have to prove themselves to be good people who would give me genuine critique out of an interest in seeing me better myself. Not in an interest in attacking me to cover up their own insecurities. Since neither Matt nor Anti-Cultist fall into this category obviously just because their maturity/mentality is obviously considerably lower then mine to allow them any access to my self image would be absurd.

This is why they don't matter. And it's why I don't even care what they may do to my reputation because anyone who values arguments about my weight would be in the same category as those who think that race, sexual orientation, or even just calling someone "4-eyes" for wearing glasses is relevant.

I do dislike bullies. And I took a bit of personal privilage to remind them that is really all the are. With every negative irrelevant post they prove it. If they were really meaningful we wouldn't be talking about things like my weight that have no meaning. I also pointed out that my weight has been a non-issue all my life. My wife is very attractive and was attracted to me in spite of my weight. She was attracted to something far more relevant. My integrity, compassion, and personality. I actually feel more secure in my marriage for these reasons. Not less. She gets hit on constantly by guys who are more classically "fit and attractive" and turns them down.

I have been at this a long time. If you think your the first people to ever resort to calling me fat in a public setting because I made you look foolish intellectually think again. I am outspoken and afraid of no one. People who are still stuck in the bullshit way we interact as humans really hate that. So I take shit for it but I hold my head high because at least I know I am being me. There are hundreds of others who just quietly sit there wishing they had the courage to be themselves.

So let me take a moment and translate everything I just said down to the maturity level of the people who think someone's weight is a relevant issue to their credibility as a person:

"Sticks and stones will break my bones but names will never hurt me."

In order for you to be someone who could ever get close to touching my ego, you would have to demonstrate a lot more personal character, maturity, and intellect then you have demonstrated. I outgrew being worried about my weight sometime in grammar school. It's unfortunate that you didn't.

So endeth the lesson...

>> Isn't it equally fallacious, though, to ignore a person's argument on the basis that he or she peppered a few insults here and there?

Shut up stupid, here's why I'm right....

@Cranberrysauce

Ignore what argument? This entire thread was just an attack on me personally. I have already refuted the only actual relevant point that I was supposedly giving people bad advice about how to deal with the fact that their mother might not agree with the Zeitgeist movement.

The only argument to that which was offered was this idea that they should just stop talking about the Zeitgeist movement entirely because the person in question making that argument is anti-ZM.

This obviously is not relevant as the person who is trying to talk to their mother is pro-ZM.

And over all, the act of attacking people during debate is a huge threat to intellectual exchange overall.

Here is a re-post of my blog on the subject:

I wrote this a long time ago on the Zeitgeist Forums, and I think it bears repeating here.

I am writing this here as it is clear that debates on this forum just as many other forums like it is fraught with a plague that chokes to death intellectual discussion. And hinders the purest forms of communication. An open exchange of ideas where the goal of both participants is to further their understanding of the subject.

As was pointed out in Zeitgeist, we tend to equate being "wrong" to somehow being inferior. This results in the topic of the conversations presented becoming a conflict of egos and reputations rather then an exchange of information to reach conclusions.

Miyamoto Musashi was a great swordsmen, perhaps the best of his time. He used to say:

"Today's goal is to defeat yesterday's understanding."

The form of debate that I wish to expose for what it is and ask that we all apply social pressure to eliminate from our communication is called Ad Hominem.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem

"An ad hominem argument, also known as argumentum ad hominem (Latin: "argument to the man", "argument against the man") consists of replying to an argument or factual claim by attacking or appealing to a characteristic or belief of the source making the argument or claim, rather than by addressing the substance of the argument or producing evidence against the claim. The process of proving or disproving the claim is thereby subverted, and the argumentum ad hominem works to change the subject."

Essentially, lets say two people are arguing. We will call them Charles and James. They have an audience who is listening intently to the debate.

Charles: "Look, I am telling you the sky is blue during the day."

James: "You are wrong, I declare that the sky is in fact purple during the day."

Charles: "Look at this photo. I took it yesterday. It proves that in fact the sky is blue during the day. Timestamped and everything..."

James: "Well...why should I accept photographic evidence from someone who cheats on their wife?"

Charles is winning the debate. James decides he cannot defeat Charles's logic and evidence presented. So to attempt to "win" the debate he decides to direct the conversation towards Charles's illicit affairs in an attempt to discredit Charles as a person. Thereby distracting the audience from the weaknesses in his own logic and lack of evidence.

This is a fairly obvious example of Ad Hominem, but if you look closely you can see it all over the internet in particular. When you are not face to face with someone it is easy to distract people from the original point because now everyone is focused on the new "subject". When Charles eventually retreats in shame or frustration then James will have "won".

Sometimes people will call each other "stupid" during debate to come to the same conclusion. Or will switch to personal insults and "flames" to further their defamation of the person defeating them. And particularly if they are teamed up with a pack of "trolls" this can be very effective. The intellectual exchange is buried somewhere underneath the piles of bile created by the "trolls". The audience either allows these trolls to convince them that the person is discredited, or they just stop reading the thread altogether.

Rarely will people stand up to these gangs of intellectual thugs because they don't want to be next. This allows this kind of behavior to isolate and bring down one person at a time. Eventually a forum is left with nothing but it's social "clique" of "elites" who are on the top of the pecking order. And anyone who speaks outside of what they like will be punished into submission. And what is even worse, the social structure sets up a "reward" system for participating in the hateful behavior. It's the "in thing" to pick on this person.

Some people simply refuse to participate when this is going on. I say this is the worst thing to do. The "society" of our forum should come together and expose this behavior right away. And make it very clear that it will not be tolerated.

I honestly feel that the battle against Ad Hominem ruining intellectual debate and is important to every aspect of our movement. The notion that being "right" or "wrong" has social implications and consequences is one of the most powerful things holding back mankind.

I used to moderate for a chat room that frequently had trolls. It was a Libertarian chat room so they would hide behind "free speech" as their right to be mean to any member who they saw fit to pick on. They would frequently manipulate the owner of the chat room to allow them back in when they would be kicked or banned for their behavior. What the owner failed to see was that allowing this just furthered the bad behavior. So he asked me to come up with a rule that would prevent this from being an issue. The trolls would always accuse me of kicking them or banning them just for disagreeing with them. Some of them had gotten a hold of some issues of my personal life and felt the need to bring them up whenever the debate was going badly for them. When the owner would finally take a look at what was going on, he would just see me, the one person being isolated. And therefore would identify me as the problem.

Eventually I came up with the rule. And that was no Ad Hominem. Period. We unbanned everyone and simply enforced the rule that you were not allowed to in any way use personal attack during your debate. You could disagree all you wanted to. But you could not under any circumstances refer to some flaw in the person themselves as a flaw in their debate.

It was amazing how quickly the trolls lost interest in the chat room. It absolutely paralyzed them to have such a rule and to have it enforced. This also exposed what I had been claiming all along. The people using this debate tactic were rarely there because they actually cared about the subject matter. They like many other dysfunctional members of our society would just surf the web to look for people to bully from the safety of the internet.

It also opened intellectual discussion in such a way that huge progress was made in the general understanding of the people in the chat room. With the "ego" no longer being a target for debate suddenly people started having discussions to further their understandings, not to prove their understanding was better then some other person.

I urge the moderators of this forum to consider what I have pointed out here, and to apply this same rule to the forums. And I urge the members of our movement to actively seek out and destroy Ad Hominem and ostracism in the forums and in the chat rooms. Both of these things are tools of the same system that has kept mankind in this ridiculous state for so long.

To sum it up, when we allow ourselves to use these tactics we are employing the same bullshit that Bill O'Reilly and the mainstream media does to anyone outside of the establishment. If your right, your right. And no matter how fat I am or whatever other irrelevant data point you can throw means nothing. But if your wrong and this is the best you can do then both people have lost something from the exchange.

To add, you know I am just kinda sick of your line about how everything is just so fucked up that unless we believe in the radical shift in social and political perspectives you propose we're all doomed.

You don't look very doomed to me unless we are talking about risk of heart attack. You look like you have all the comforts in the world at your fingertips and you take advantage of those comforts to the extent where you have grown boobs.

I mean really, where do you get off with this bullshit? Why should anyone take you seriously? Why should I read your endless, self indulgent rants when you can't even take care of yourself?

I think its just an excuse to sit back and do nothing but flap your gums about how awful everything is and rationalize never really doing a damn thing about it.

@VTV:

To be accurate, it is only technically an ad hominem if someone says your point is wrong BECAUSE of the personal attack.

The example you gave was correct (the exchange between Charles and James), but equally someone can call you fat, stupid, idiot and a variety of other personal insults all day long and it wouldn't be an ad hominem unless they used that to avoid addressing your arguments.

You wrote about... "On open exchange of ideas where the goal of both participants is to further their understanding of the subject."

Why then is Zeitgeist cracking down on any form of dissent on the forum? I was not so long ago actually PRAISING the moderation on this point and gave Matt and anticultist's quite a telling off, yet now what they were saying before about how bad it is IS actually happening. If you want the link to that argument I can find it again.

Even the Loose Change boards have a "skeptics" section, why doesn't the ZGM allow any discussion with people who dont agree with them? Merely, they will by Peter's own admission merely "tolerate" them until they don't want to anymore?

In short, why doesn't The Zeitgeist Movement actually show they WANT any open exchange of ideas?

PS: Matt you aren't helping :)

"PS: Matt you aren't helping :)"

You really think he's going to give you a straight answer? Don't get you get tired of the same cognitive dances about how the movies don't represent the movement?

Fine Muertos!

I'd been looking for a reason to use "Twinkie Tits" for awhile. I did, I'm happy.

Let the evasions continue.

@Ed,

If I really thought there was any hope that you'd get a straight answer about that, I'd agree with you.

Typical skeptic.

Judge someone based on what they do in their personal life, then try to discredit someone because of it.

Danny, neither Ed nor I insulted VTV but instead tried to raise legitimate issues about the Zeitgeist Movement's association with conspiracy theories.

By the way, you didn't read the topic I made for you, did you? It's probably on page 2 of the forum by now.

"Danny, neither Ed nor I insulted VTV but instead tried to raise legitimate issues about the Zeitgeist Movement's association with conspiracy theories.

By the way, you didn't read the topic I made for you, did you? It's probably on page 2 of the forum by now."

Oh really, why not take a look at the first page Muertos...you'll see what I mean. And if not, take a look at the tags for this thread.

•VTV could suck a golf ball through a garden hose
•VTV has dick suckin fishlips

Seriously guys? I'm 14 (Edward was close with his guess of my age) and even I wouldn't stoop that low.

I have seen and read your thread muertos, the reason I haven't responded to it was because I don't believe in necroing old threads.

Danny, read the other points not the insults.

I have never insulted VTV neither has Muertos, that is something even VTV said and that I raised a legitimate point.

Maybe its because you're 14 that you are are eager to fit in and have chosen Zeitgeist, the truth movement or whatever it is you happen to believe in so you want to rail against the terrible "skeptics". I find that an amusing criticism, yes I am a skeptic. I use critical thinking. Oh gee I'm so terrible.

@Danny

Got the topic for you here: http://conspiracyscience.com/forums/topic/some-thoughts-for-danny

I didnt even read VTV's posts at all, I am not even interested why he is attempting to justify his presence, because its plain obvious why. His name got mentioned, he didnt like it and he came in to justify his fragile self image.

And then hes off on his usual narcissistic rants, post after post repeatedly trying to bash his beliefs and self righteous garbage on the thread... dude you are infamous for being a total cock end so I see no reason why you are going to change your ways here. Therefore theres no point even debating with you as I already know I cant stand you.