These kooks are crazier than ever, it seems…
The church of the UFO: Out of body or out of mind?
Wow. Just when one thinks one has gazed into the depths of stupidity and managed to remain sane, something even more stupid appears in the deep, distant mists. It is bloody bottomless.
;D I have not laughed that much in too long… these people aren’t serious are they?
Oh, but they are. Deadly serious. There’s not that much difference between believing in the risen Christ and that George Bush is a giant lizard bent on world domination. The religious and these whackos are equally serious, and equally deluded. We are members of a sick species.
I doubt if they’re stupid. They are, however, quite literally insane.
But I don’t think we need to pay them much attention. Like flat-earthers, they simply do not have enough influence on anything to really matter, and can probably be written off as harmless nuts.
Never said they are stupid - their fucking “theory” on the other hand, is stupid beyond mere words to express.
Whether one has to be stupid to accept stupid ideas, are insane for accepting such stupid nonsense as true or whether there is any correlation between batshit crazy and stupidity, I wouldn’t want to venture an opinion.
But I am quite convinced that the human pit of stupidity is bottomless. Wasn’t it Einstein who said their are only two things infinite? One being the universe. 
Well, speaking for myself as a sceptic, I’ve developed something of an allergy to nuts… 
'Luthon64
The complete nuts like these UFO kooks don’t bother me. They pose a danger to no one but themselves.
It is often the apparently sane that cause the most insidious harm. E.g. all over the western worlds, the universities, those bastions of science and reason and logic, have been increasingly taken over by postmodernist nuts, and no one seems to have even noticed (well, Alan Sokal did, but few others.)
Another example: the satanic ritual abuse scare of the 1980s was to a significant extent promulgated by “experts” doing “research” at respectable universities. Our own satanic scaremongering is done by a widely respected and quoted “researcher” in the form of “Donker” Jonker.
All over the world, medical research has begun to sink into an exercise in naive correlation studies, and more and more doctors get almost all their information about medicine from pharmaceutical representatives. Modern medicine is more and more resembling the quackery of “alternative” medicine, and once again, no one seems to be taking much notice. (I wonder what percentage of South African doctors believe in the efficacy of homeopathy. We should perhaps arrange some sort of poll?)
Incidentally, you probably know about this site, but in case not, this is a nice repository of critique of both “alternative” and, where appropriate, mainstream medicine (and also some other nuttery):
Let us not even talk about the sheer lunacy that passes for economic and financial “science;” we have all seen the results of it over the past few years.
Us skeptics keep on hammering away at fads that were last of any real social importance in the 1980s. The world has moved on; no one in his right mind pays any attention to the UFOlogists anymore, nor to most other popular debunking targets.
We should perhaps turn our skeptical gaze towards the current fads, some of which are very much mainstream. E.g. the continual reliance on “expert” forecasts of the financial or political future, despite the overwhelming evidence that they do no better than any average person. Or global warming, which, while probably real enough, has nevertheless begun to take on all the hallmarks of a cult religion - we hear less and less about it from climatologists, and ever more and more from politicians and Hollywood celebrities. Our education system is in a total shambles, partly because of utterly fuzzy and uncritical thinking on the part of the people charged with managing it (not to mention their insistence that ideology take precedence over the interests of kids).
Let the UFO nuts believe as they will, I say. They make for an amusing sideshow. I think perhaps we have bigger fish to fry.
My post was 90% tongue-in-cheek and 5% wordplay, ergo the winky emoticon. The remaining 5% was not specifying which particular brands of nut I’ve developed an allergy to. It’s all of them, no exceptions. Nonetheless, I have no issues with your position statement (in fact, I agree with it), and I’m pleased to see that it has earned you a stripe.
Scepticism is, by the nature of its social context, a frustrating pursuit. The religious or UFO or CAM or conspiracy nut feels much the same frustration: “Why will the world not see sense!?” — which doesn’t prevent the sceptic from using these UFO nuts and other fringe elements as an extreme and generic illustration of how easily human thinking can become derailed.
'Luthon64
That’s the way I took it too, but then I started ranting and raving off on a tangent and got carried away. I do that a lot. 
The remaining 5% was not specifying which particular brands of nut I’ve developed an allergy to. It’s [i]all[/i] of them, no exceptions. Nonetheless, I have no issues with your position statement (in fact, I agree with it), and I’m pleased to see that it has earned you a stripe.
I never noticed before that one can earn stripes here in the first place. I’ll be sure to award some in the future.
Scepticism is, by the nature of its social context, a frustrating pursuit. The religious or UFO or CAM or conspiracy nut feels much the same frustration: “Why will the world not see sense!?” — which doesn’t prevent the sceptic from using these UFO nuts and other fringe elements as an extreme and generic illustration of how easily human thinking can become derailed.
I think there is rich ground for psychological research among these type of nuts, especially since they are more often than not actually completely sane in most respects. Some are even professional scientists. But when it comes to this one thing, whatever it might be, they are bonkers.
My amateur observations:
- For all their apparent frustration that no one else can see the truth, there is often a smugness about them too. They know something special that the rest of us don’t. I.e. I think part of the attraction of these fringe theories is that they make you feel special without actually requiring much effort or study or work to achieve that special status. You just have to fervently believe.
I notice it a lot with religious fundies: they don’t actually want to convert you. In their heart, they want to feel like God’s special little boy, and what they really want more than anything else is to sit back in heaven and watch the rest of us burn. Thus their attempts at converting people frequently seem rather perfunctory to me, like they are actually deliberately trying to alienate you. That way they get to say that they really tried, and you were just too stubborn/evil to see the error of your ways. So they can keep on feeling holy without eventually having to share heaven with you.
- When it comes to vast conspiracy or end-of-the-world nuts, I am often struck by how un-alarmed they actually seem, considering that virtually everybody is going to die any day now. In fact, one can often sense a distinct excitement in them at the prospect. And that tells me that perhaps they are actually just bored with life and fervently hoping that everything will change. As Thoreau said, “the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” Do the kind of job that most of us do for a decade or two, and perhaps most of us could be forgiven for beginning to hope some vast catastrophe will sweep it all away. Especially of course if you have inside knowledge of where and how you can be safe: that way, after the disaster you can emerge into a clean new world.
Thus endeth my session of amateur shrinkage.
Agreed. Perhaps one very pressing question would be to identify the reasons, processes and factors that seem to compel such nuts towards accepting their particular nuttery niche even in the face of strong, clear countermanding facts, knowledge and evidence. In other words, whence comes the nutty perversity? I suspect that it has much to do with our day-to-day thinking patterns mostly being both acquired and habitual.
Good point. So it’s actually motivated by a yearning towards superiority, which itself is typically a symptom of an underlying insecurity.
Thomas Aquinas made the point that hell exists for the amusement of heaven’s occupants. More to the point, if the fundies’ approach is as you describe, the irony is of course that it is self-defeating in terms of their own beliefs. They’ll be the first to assert that their god knows exactly what’s in every person’s heart, so their own god must necessarily know of their insincerity and subterfuge. The sad part is that they will feel little if any discomfort when this dilemma is pointed out.
That was my two cents’ worth of shrinkage.
'Luthon64