[mos6507]

I guess this is sort of a side-discussion of The Oil Drum post, Clown Fest.

I noticed as I was making the rounds this evening that the usual trolls like Shorty were out in force (I'd prefer to call him Shorty rather than his new handle, Xenophobe. Shorty seems so much more appropriate).

I was wondering, and this goes for all political discourse as a whole, not just peak oil... What drives people to ignore facts and just dig in their heels and push one agenda or another blindly?

It definitely is a religious sort of thinking the way some people start with a position and then work endlessly to rationalize it rather than using the facts to formulate a position. And they say religion is the opiate of the masses.

I'm starting to think maybe it's not so much that all these people truly intellectually believe their own kool-aid. I think they are using the drama of playing devil's advocate to kind of perform an emotional juggling act so they don't have to face the reality that some sliver of their consciousness really is worried about. If they truly didn't think any of this mattered, then why would they be hanging around worldsends like this? Why the personal crusade to debunk what is such a non-event anyway?

It's like their form of therapy of dealing with doom is to flog the true-believers because he's afraid if he doesn't keep inserting (bogus) doubt into the proceedings, he'll have to face the stark truth of doom himself.

That's the only thing that seems to make sense when these trolls continue to lose every debate and yet they keep on coming back, repeating the same nonsense over and over again, day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year, never having conceded anything, never seeming to hold onto anything that's presented to them for more than the attention span of a fruit-fly.

What do you think?

[Daniel_Plainview]

What drives people to ignore facts and just dig in their heels and push one agenda or another blindly?
...
What do you think?

In recent days, it seems that 50% of all posts at this site are by Xeno (Shorty) ... There are at least 4 explanations for this phenomenon:

1. Shorty is a paid shill;

2. Shorty is a mental defect who enjoys disrupting genuine discourse;

3. Shorty has absolutely nothing better to do than troll the Internet;

4. Shorty is desperate to make his last stand before TSHTF -- peakoil.com is his chosen venue to announce his final Hail Mary: it's as though he realizes that very soon the reality of Great Depression II will be irrefutable, and with crude in the $115/bbl range (Brent), any pretense of a recovery will be dashed. So this is Shorty's last clear chance to make his case. He's desperate ... and he'll keep gnawing away at po.com until he's banned.

[mos6507]

Wasn't shorty banned once? What's the use banning someone if they can just hit the continue button with a new alias? So his post count resets. Big deal.

[Keith_McClary]

I'm starting to think maybe it's not so much that all these people truly intellectually believe their own kool-aid.

Did you notice they've changed your kool-aid:

"This revolution has shown the people of the world, not just in the Arab world, that peaceful change can come about and violence and extremism is not required in order to achieve democracy and freedom," (McCain) told reporters.
...
Before the revolution, it was thought "there were only two choices: on the one hand a secular dictatorship, on the other hand a fear of a religious extremist dictatorship," Lieberman said.

You don't have to think that anymore.

[mos6507]

Before the revolution, it was thought "there were only two choices: on the one hand a secular dictatorship, on the other hand a fear of a religious extremist dictatorship," Lieberman said.

We should be grateful for anybody who is willing to alter their position to reflect new data or new circumstances.

The reason I keep ribbing Planty is that he never admits his flip-flops. He thinks he can leave his past support for Palin intact, while supporting policies she doesn't, or attacking policies she does, or attacking people over their character issues, when those issues were as bad if not worse with Palin. If he's changed his mind about what's right and wrong, man up to it, and move on. But to do that, for people like him, is almost admitting you were wrong, and if there's one thing people on the internet don't do, is admit to being wrong. They don't admit they're wrong. They try to show how the OTHER guy is wrong.



So they often hang onto ideas they may kind of know are wrong, just to save face.

[Fishman]

Other folks kool aid keeps us on our toes. If they drink it, it gives us time to get in front of them when the bear comes. If they dispense it, and others drink, buyer beware.

[vision-master]

Lindsey Williams/ Alex Jones claim this whole 'peak oil' is being engineered just to drive up the price of crude to $200 barrel, then once this is done all those capped wells with huge oil deposts and new reserves will be opened in the USA/ Artic cicrle.

~just sayen, this is what ppl are being told.

[mos6507]

Lindsey Williams/ Alex Jones claim this whole 'peak oil' is being engineered just to drive up the price of crude to $200 barrel, then once this is done all those capped wells with huge oil deposts and new reserves will be opened in the USA/ Artic cicrle.

~just sayen, this is what ppl are being told.

And to think a lot of peakers (like the infamous Jotapay) are Alex Jones fans. Cognitive dissonance.

[Pops]

Peak oil, global warming, political anything, taps into basic beliefs so I think that does qualify them as religion. When I first came here I said something along the lines of "peak oil is about our food!" and I really believed it was a imminent threat, turns out in the US we choose to feed half our food to our food and a good portion to our cars so I'm not quite as concerned as I once was, still someone will blast me for being naive and we are all about to starve. Same for saying we won't stay home from work when gas is too expensive because we'll share a ride, saying things like that will get you yelled out of Peakerton.

I hung out at the Chris Martenson forum briefly, it seemed like a balanced bunch of people - guru-followers but pretty smart. Until I mentioned pre-salt oil like Tupi and what people's thought were about it's impact on supply - you'd have thought I was advocating abiotic oil or methane from Jupiter, The Man himself stepped in and said from all his exhaustive research, he had concluded "shale oil" would make no difference to overall production rates. There you go, the guru/Grand Phoobah/high priest had no idea what pre-salt oil is but the idea of a previously discounted formation type yielding significant oil was heresy and a threat, I guess, to his paid subscriptions. Hey, it's his sandbox, he can make the rules, and the rules there are abandon hope... but more, don't look around, just keep believing. I haven't posted there since.

You mention ignoring facts and plunging ahead as if on a crusade. Just yesterday I was reading the magazine that all Missouri rural electric coop members receive and there was a letter to the editor addressing a recent article about CFLs and I could just see the fellow (had to be a man) ranting to the guys at the coffee shop about the government. His main points were A) "the government" (liberals and hippies) had made it hard to "cost effectively" produce electricity, so B) "They" (you know who) were mandating use of inferior products (CFLs) that are "poorly conceived, cost more and don't work very well".

Now you could put just as many studies and facts of the value of CFLs in front of that guy as you please and you would never convince him the socialist treehuggers weren't out to break him personally and maybe even give him mercury poisoning. Old fashioned incandescent bulbs were good enough for his daddy by golly and they're good enough for him! Those curly Q bulbs, not to mention the whole idea of conservation (and for heavens sake don't even think about limits) are simply against his religion, upbringing and morals.

So it cuts both ways and it's no surprise to me that people perhaps change their guesses of how extreme events may be but rarely do they change their basic Belief.

[vision-master]

Sounds like theoilage...... Magadoom banned me after I posted a Nasa video that explained, there is no Planet-X. I tried to initiate a discussion, but It went against his beliefs.

[lper100km]

Peak oil, global warming, political anything, taps into basic beliefs so I think that does qualify them as religion.

Belief is a word with several inflections of meaning and lives in that grey area between fact and opinion. To me it signifies that there has to be some knowledge gap that has been bridged by mental gymnastics in order to support the tenets of the ‘belief’. This fits wonderfully well with religions of all kinds. Knowledge gap is not the same as ignorance, since if one were ignorant, the presence of a knowledge gap would be not even recognized. Belief also fits well with ignorance – the holding of a point of view without bothering with the details.

Belief does not fit well as a descriptor when the knowledge is complete, the facts are reasoned and the logic chain is solid. Belief is not necessary then. One does not need to believe in gravity for instance – it just ‘is’.

To describe awareness of PO as a belief and by extension as a religion is erroneous imo. The general principal of PO is an indisputable fact – that there is a finite supply and that our ability to extract it will fail at some point. There may be minor disputes along the way such as how much remains at any given time, the timing, the economic impact etc., but the broad consequences of consuming a finite resource are incontrovertible. To put a basic fact of the physical world on the same level as a belief or as a religion has the effect of diminishing it’s value and the importance of it’s message to our existence.

Unlike the consequences of religious non belief which are not known, or not known ever, until after one has no further interest in this earth (unless heresy is involved), the consequences of PO will affect all in this life, whether PO aware or not.

[Newfie]

We all have to believe most of what goes on in our world, we can't possibly understand it all. And the world works mostly on trust, if you didn't trust the average guy you would never get in a car and hurtle down the road amongst total strangers.

So why is it in Lowes they have to put all these barriers when ever they restock shelves?

We are not rational animals. We are highly prejudiced, we must be because to try to take a fresh look at every bit of information that comes to us would put us into overload. So we are highly selective in what we reconsider.

It is only a very, very few people that have the ability (or affliction) to look our over-population situation straight in the face and see it for what it is. Even then, as we congratulate ourselves for our wisdom, we may be missing some other near term catastrophe (a mole that is skin cancer?) because we are blind to that risk.

In short believing our own kool-aid is inevitable.

Back to the point of the hard core deniers a new poster Puchia said this on the methane thread:

Asimov wrote cheerily about being 'safely and cozily dead'. But its not so easy to comtemplate the Earth's death, is it? Our gut tells us that if its the Earth or us, we root for the Earth? What a beautiful blue jewel. I can't internalize this information. Me for the massive human die off and the Earth survival. Makes you think about what the Bible saying 'God's wrath came; to bring to ruin those ruining the earth.' This thread has really gotten me exercised. I wonder how many people understand the threat and its seriousness. No wonder people are disputing and denying this methane collection information; its hard to accept!

[vision-master]

To believe is to wish.

[Pops]

...the consequences of PO will affect all in this life, whether PO aware or not.

Unless you have perfect knowlege you can not say that with certainty. My tendency is to agree with your statement but my opinion is based on very limited knowledge and vague, mostly circumstantial evidence that the peak of hydrocarbons is near. Basically, belief not knowledge.

We all like to think we are perfectly logical and rational. A few years ago if you had asked if oil was to be found under layers of salt, most oilmen would have said no, the salt formed at the bottom of seas before the precursors of oil began to be deposited. This is logical and factual as far as it goes but also overlooked the equally rational fact that under pressure, formations can be plastic and actually invert over time. Just because drilling had always stopped when salt was encountered didn't mean oil did not in fact exist under salt, that was just the belief.

I'd ask one question and if honest, I think the majority of both peakers and deniers would say that their conclusions regarding PO (overpopulation,environmental decline, GW, etc) did not develop over time and research but were pretty "instinctive" upon first exposure. For myself, I took to PO like a tar-ball to a sandy beach! My version of doom is moderate simply because I know I don't have perfect knowledge and that my view is influenced by my belief humans are not good stewards and will take the easiest route regardless of consequences.

[vision-master]

This guy is pretty optimistic about our future energy needs.


http://www.theresonanceproject.org/

[mos6507]

V-M, if you believe that guy's kool-aid, why don't you heed his call and keep him comfortable in his dome in Hawaii where he is surely conducting serious research in zpe:



You may donate by check to :: “The Resonance Project Foundation” PO Box 764, Holualoa, HI 96725, or by telephone at (808) 329-0070.

BTW, he's gonna disappoint you because Nibiru has come and gone!

[lper100km]

Pops: I was careful to leave out any reference to timelines since that indeed encroaches on conjecture even with the best of knowledge. I limited my certainty only to the fact that by consuming a finite resource we will eventually exhaust it. The consequences are open to discussion until they actually happen.

To a degree it’s splitting hairs, but I intended to dispute the notion that PO is a religion or a cult.

[vision-master]

V-M, if you believe that guy's kool-aid, why don't you heed his call and keep him comfortable in his dome in Hawaii where he is surely conducting serious research in zpe:



You may donate by check to :: “The Resonance Project Foundation” PO Box 764, Holualoa, HI 96725, or by telephone at (808) 329-0070.

BTW, he's gonna disappoint you because Nibiru has come and gone!

No sense in bad mouthing the guy moss. Believe is a matter of faith, do I believe? Maybe, after all physics hasn't stopped with Einstein. Why must you be so ridgid in your thinking?

Nassim Haramein has been turning heads for years with his very radical yet sensible thoughts on the grand unified field theory, seamlessly tying the macrocosm to the microcosm.

Haramein's recent paper, "The Schwarzschild Proton" received the "Best Paper Award" at the University of Liege, Belgium during the CASYS'09 conference.

Quantum Gravity Unification of Strong Nuclear Force

[mos6507]

physics hasn't stopped with Einstein. Why must you be so ridgid in your thinking?

Because this guy ain't no physicist. If I want to know about bleeding edge info on physics I'll crack open an issue of Scientific American or something.

[Pops]

Pops: I was careful to leave out any reference to timelines since that indeed encroaches on conjecture even with the best of knowledge. I limited my certainty only to the fact that by consuming a finite resource we will eventually exhaust it. The consequences are open to discussion until they actually happen.

To a degree it’s splitting hairs, but I intended to dispute the notion that PO is a religion or a cult.

Yeah, the basic premise itself is pretty foolproof, Lynch et al would surely agree, it's the consequences part where beliefs come in.

"Religion" doesn't fit, I had to look up "cult" and #4 says:
a group or sect bound together by veneration of the same thing, person, ideal, etc.
I don't know about veneration but we are certainly a group bound together by the idea of peak oil doom - to a greater or lesser extent anyway. But that really isn't my point.

To use Mos' analogy and Newfies argument, we all drink our own Kool-aid but we always pick the same flavor. Which is why most Peakers are convinced of AGW and the perils of GM foods and the evils of Monsanto and 99% of Mocando's output is still on the bottom of the GOM and Simmons was an Oracle except when he wasn't and the EIA is all politics except when it isn't.