Taking the shows off the air won't change their ignorance. They will just find other things to reinforce it. So, I watch them as entertainment, and believe me, they are a gold mine of humor.
Zachary Quinto to Host ‘In Search Of’ revival
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Taking the shows off the air won't change their ignorance. They will just find other things to reinforce it. So, I watch them as entertainment, and believe me, they are a gold mine of humor.
Keeping the shows on the air just encourages this nonsense. We need to encourage real science, not superstition.
That may or may not be his underlying motivation but I don't buy the idea that today's wide popularity of ancient alien belief is a byproduct of white supremacism.
It's not that people don't believe non-europeans could build the pyramids and the like as much as people don't believe ancient cultures could know a few tricks that we don't.
This feeds into the arrogant myth of linear progress, that each society that follows the next must be more advanced across the board (save for dips like the dark ages).
The other thing fueling this phenomenon is the unraveling of established religions. Ancient alien narratives of the rise of man and technology provides a pseudo-scientific gloss over what is ultimately a creationism story. You see this even in serious science-fiction with things like the intervention of the monolith people in 2001, for instance.
This is also why Scientology is popular, as it is the median point between religion and pulp scifi.
Simple evolution is really anti-climactic as an origin story to a lot people. It's much more appealing to graft on some sort of ancient-alien thing.
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You misunderstand me. I'm not saying all the fans of these ideas are white supremacists. I'm saying that these ideas originated with white supremacists, and it's important to consider the source. Erich Von Daniken wasn't just a harmless crank, he was an actual white supremacist popularizing beliefs that originated with Nazi sympathizers and descended from the blatantly racist biological theories of the 19th century. So the question is, should a television show really be popularizing theories that have such a hideous origin?
And the fact is, these theories have also been embraced by the modern so-called "Alt-Right" -- in other words, Neo-Nazis -- as one of the ways that they encode their ideology in a way that seems harmless to non-racists, which lets them infiltrate their ideas into the public discourse and smooth the way for more overt rhetoric. It's called a "dog whistle" -- coded hate speech that sounds harmless to ordinary people, but that's instantly recognized by fellow racists for what it's really saying. They use stuff like this to get ordinary people to give a hearing to ideas they'd instantly reject if they knew what was really being said beneath the surface.
I have seen a number of ghost hunting shows.
I have to say the most interesting one that I have seen is Ghost Adventures. I realize that the ghost hunters want to put on a good show. The main investigator of that show uses a lot of theatrics to hype up the spookiness.
Nevertheless, some of the evidence that have been presented on that show seem very compelling. The investigators have captured plenty of odd images and sounds on recording devices. So, it is not just hearsay evidence. And they do give the impression that they are investigating in good faith. They don't appear to be hoaxers. There do seem to be a quasi scientific method to their investigation.
The ghost phenomenon is interesting. I don't know if it should be dismissed out of hand.
Yeah, there's weird people out there and the Internet gives them a platform to be obnoxious. So what? They're not going away anytime soon, so I might as well laugh at them.
But the whole point of a hoax is to make people think it's credible. That's why you can't trust appearances and have to test things critically and systematically using the scientific method. It's not enough to show something that looks like it might be what it's claimed to be; you have to rule out every other possible interpretation. "Odd images and sounds" are too ambiguous to be proof of anything.
As I mentioned, the seemingly inexplicable sounds associated with "hauntings" are usually the result of subsonic vibrations caused by environmental sources in the vicinity. The subsonics are below the threshold of human hearing, but they can vibrate a building enough to make it creak or groan, or cause doors to spontaneously open or things to fall off shelves. And they can create a sense of discomfort and unease in people, especially since there's no way to tell where that feeling is coming from. People are far too quick to assume that anything they can't directly sense must be supernatural. Which is arrogant, since human senses are actually very limited compared to those of many other animals, so there's a lot going on in the physical world that we can't see, hear, or smell.
There was a time when even a lot of scientists took the claims of psychics seriously, because the apparent abilities the psychics demonstrated looked convincing and passed the tests that the scientists devised. But then the magicians got involved and showed the scientists how the "psychics" created their fraudulent illusions. The scientists were fooled because they didn't know what to look for. Their methods were based on drawing conclusions from what they observe, and magic and illusion are about making people think they're observing something other than what they really are. So a good illusion or hoax can be convincing enough to fool everyone except a professional illusionist, someone who knows how the trick is done.
I think you can attack pseudo-science on the basis of the validity of the science or you can attempt to shame them by saying they are in some way associating with hate groups, x-steps removed, sort of like this:
...personally, I would stick with the scientific arguments.
^I'm not "attempting to shame them." I'm reporting the documented fact that Erich von Daniken was a white supremacist who used his claims about aliens to advance his political ideology. He was the one who made it political and racial, and we forget that at our peril. (Along with the fact that he was a convicted criminal who confessed to forging evidence to promote his theories.) That is the objective truth, a truth that has been obscured to the extent that even I was unaware of it until I researched him just recently. Research is not propaganda. Getting the facts about the origins of an idea is important to assessing its credibility. That is part of the scientific process, because science is the process by which we test ideas and try to exclude sources of bias and misinformation, leaving behind only accurate data. Identifying fraudulent or deliberately biased claims is an integral part of that process. Scientists were not able to properly assess the legitimacy of psychic claims in the past until they were assisted by magicians who were able to expose the deceptions being used to defraud the scientific community.
If someone actually is trying to defraud people, it is not "trying to shame them" to expose that truth. They shame themselves. Fairness doesn't mean ignoring evidence that an idea comes from a harmful or dishonest place. That's the opposite of fairness. A fair game is one in which cheaters are punished or excluded from competition, so that people who play by the rules can win or lose on their own merits. If you have proof that someone is cheating and are forbidden from doing anything about it because it might hurt their feelings, that is anything but a fair game.
If someone actually is trying to defraud people, it is not "trying to shame them" to expose that truth. They shame themselves. Fairness doesn't mean ignoring evidence that an idea comes from a harmful or dishonest place. That's the opposite of fairness. A fair game is one in which cheaters are punished or excluded from competition, so that people who play by the rules can win or lose on their own merits. If you have proof that someone is cheating and are forbidden from doing anything about it because it might hurt their feelings, that is anything but a fair game.
Zachary Quinto is no Leonard Nimoy. And I'm not talking about Spock.
Has anyone else seen the In Search Of remake?
There are so many shows about the paranormal out there. The new In Search Of is not distinctive enough to be really worthwhile.
The Nimoy In Search Of, at least, came across as creepy. Maybe it was the relatively poor picture quality and grainy images. (Or it could have just been my lousy tv set at the time.)
Nimoy himself, with that voice and even his appearance, seemed spooky. The original had an atmosphere of eeriness. Quinto is kind of bland as the host. The new show is too matter of fact. Perhaps if the show tried to project a more scary mood, it might work better.
Has anyone else seen the In Search Of remake?
There are so many shows about the paranormal out there. The new In Search Of is not distinctive enough to be really worthwhile.
The Nimoy In Search Of, at least, came across as creepy. Maybe it was the relatively poor picture quality and grainy images. (Or it could have just been my lousy tv set at the time.)
Nimoy himself, with that voice and even his appearance, seemed spooky. The original had an atmosphere of eeriness. Quinto is kind of bland as the host. The new show is too matter of fact. Perhaps if the show tried to project a more scary mood, it might work better.
No, but he's in the next Mission Impossible film as a master of disguise.
