site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   32315 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 17, 2023

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

11
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Further developments on the ayy lmao front

You may recall a few weeks ago, former intelligence officer David Grusch came out with claims that the US has several alien spacecraft in its possession, and has been studying and reverse-engineering them for decades. While claims like this have floated around for decades, including from former government employees, Grusch was different because of his undeniable credentials, and because he is going through 'proper' whistleblower channels.

This was the latest act in a drama that goes back to 2017 (well, 1947, but let's not get ahead of ourselves), when Leslie Kean and Ralph Blumenthal published a piece in the New York Times disclosing the existence of a pentagon program dedicated to studying UFOs, known as AATIP (or AAWSAP, depending on when and where) led by a man called Lue Elizondo. This sparked an apparent sea change in government, and UFOs and aliens, formerly dismissed out of hand, began to be taken more seriously.

Everyone from Obama to former CIA director John Brennan started dropping hints that hey maybe aliens might possibly could be here. Some apparently very sober Navy pilots came forward and shared their apparently inexplicable experiences on 60 minutes. Lue Elizondo did the talk-show circuit.

'UFOs' were rebranded 'UAPs' since over the past few decades, 'UFO' had become synonymous with 'flying saucer.' Congress held its first UFO hearings in over fifty years. A new office, AARO, was founded to investigate and classify UAP sightings..

Well, now the latest development. Chuck Schumer has sponsored a congressional amendment with bipartisan support mandating that, if it exists, any alien biological or technological material, or any evidence of non-human intelligence (and yes the bill uses those terms) held by any private or illegal government entity be turned over to congress.

I've been pretty skeptical about this whole thing. NY Post journalist Steven Greenstreet provides an alternative narrative, where this is the result of a small but fanatical, well-financed, and well-motivated group of UFO/paranormal fanatics that has been pushing all of this stuff for years in and outside of government, without any real proof to back any of it up. He has provided evidence that AATIP started out not as a 'UFO program' but as a pet project of senator Harry Reid, who in conjunction with Robert Bigelow, another big-time paranormal fan, wanted first and foremost to conduct a study of Skinwalker Ranch, which they believe(d) to be a hot-bed of supernatural activity, including werewolves and (as Greenstreet never tires of pointing out) "dinobeavers." While the media has focused on the apparently more grounded, sober claims of mysterious craft in the sky demonstrating apparent technological superiority to any known human craft, a lot of people don't realize just how closely aliens and UFOs are tied up with werewolves, bigfoot, demons, ghosts, remote viewing, and every other kind of woo.

That said, now that Chuck Schumer is sponsoring legislation that boils down to "show me the aliens!" it's getting harder for me to believe that this is all down to a small band of committed UFO nuts taking everybody (themselves included) for a ride. I'm still skeptical, and I still don't think this is going to end with a flying saucer being wheeled in front of congress. But it seems increasingly undeniable that something is going on here. The lazy counter is "it's a psyop" but one has to ask, "a psyop to what end?" To increase government funding for the military? I don't think the military needs to put on a dog and pony show like this to squeeze some extra dollars out of congress. To "distract us"? This stuff tends to not be front-page news, actually. I don't think a lot of people have even heard about this new amendment. To fake an alien invasion and use it as a springboard for a one-world government? I kinda doubt it. To scare Russia and China? That would be the most plausible version of the "psyop" hypothesis I think, but it still doesn't ring true for me.

Another possibility is this: it is known that the government has, for ulterior motives, psyopped people into believing in UFOs and ultimately driven them insane.. It's entirely possible that this is all 'sincere' insofar as, within the tangled web that is the US federal government, there are SAPs staffed at least in part by people who believe they're studying or have studied alien spacecraft or alien bodies, even though they aren't, because they've been lied to or misled by their colleagues and superiors.

IMO at this point, that's the most likely explanation.

Or maybe it really is aliens.

As to the culture war angle, interestingly, with the exception of Kristen Gillibrand, who is not the leftiest of dems, most of the representatives and senators who have been vocal and active in pushing for UAP transparency have been republicans like Marco Rubio, Tim Burchett, Mike Gallagher, and Anna Paulina Luna. If some government official does come out and say, "yes, okay, fine we have a flying saucer in the basement" it is interesting to think that aliens might become a new culture war battlefield, with aliens-are-real being right coded and aliens-are-fake being left coded. But seeing how in-flux political alignments were in the early months of COVID, who knows?

That said, now that Chuck Schumer is sponsoring legislation that boils down to "show me the aliens!" it's getting harder for me to believe that this is all down to a small band of committed UFO nuts taking everybody (themselves included) for a ride.

No one here seems to have mentioned the possibility that Greenstreet's explanation is correct and Schumer just fell for it, as many other people apparently have.

My position is that if any of this was true, there would have been profound advances in theoretical physics during this time where the US government is capturing and studying alien technology. There haven't been. Unless all these spacecraft have been sitting in a warehouse next to the Ark of the Covenant, which is even dumber. The last claim about UFOs I heard involved "Unknown Elements." It's possible I'm being pedantic, but why is the element still unknown? Do they mean entirely new elements? (which are still going to be somewhere on the periodic table) or just previously-unknown isotopes of elements? Exotic matter? New metamaterials and wacky alloys? Details were not forthcoming, and I'm not left with any confidence these questions would even be understood by the leaker.

Show me the godsdamned Element Zero Drive or shut up.

Ugh, the "unknown elements" quote made me facepalm when I first heard it - because I can imagine how a perfectly reasonable reality got twisted into "woah aliens!" Firstly, there is absolutely research being performed on wreckage of UFOs; literally, flying objects that are unidentified. Zero implication of extra terrestrials or advanced technology. Say US Intel dredges up some scrap from the ocean floor in the vicinity of a North Korean missile test, or collects shards of metal from a Middle Eastern desert where they detected what could be an Iranian drone crash - those could easily (and correctly) be classified as "UFO wreckage". They're going to perform tests to identify what they collected, which could involve classifying what they're made out of - not because it's some mysterious wonder element, but because they want to know if NK is being provided Chinese metals, or they want to estimate how far Iran is in developing composites. Some of the material is inevitably going to be unidentifiable because tests aren't perfect - there's always a chance of false readings and the samples could be damaged beyond recognition or contaminated or many other reasons. Now imagine some bookkeeper with no context reads the report. They're going to see "TOP SECRET", "UFO", and "test inconclusive, composition unknown". They leak that to the whistleblower with aliens on the mind, and of course it's going to turn into "alien vehicles with unknown elements."

My working theory for guys like David Grusch, John Podesta, Bob Lazar, and pretty much every other "senior official" coming forward claiming that the US government has access to alien technology is that that are at least vaguely on the spectrum and don't realize when they're being messed with, or otherwise being nudged to mind their own business.

If I'm a defense contractor assigned to a black project, and some chick at the bar or one of my coworkers who hasn't been read-in asks me "where I've been for the last 3 days" or "what I'm working on" I can not tell them the truth. If I did, the DCSA agent handling my case would be waiting for me at my front door when I got home and I would at least be out of a job if not standing before a judge. However, if I tell them I've been dissecting aliens out at Site-4 I am obviously joking and no harm no foul.

Edit: That is unless someone actually believes me

Yeah, especially because almost all these stories are second hand, like the Grusch stuff is that he encountered people who told him the aliens were real. Obviously if someone said this they were messing with him, but he’s too autistic or otherwise gullible to see that, so he believes it.

Good summary. There's scheduled to be a public congressional hearing on July 26th which will hopefully help clarify if there's any substance here or just more of the same old rumours and blurry videos.

AFAIK, the main plausible explanation is that it's a cover for top-secret stealth aircraft. The gov't doesn't want to explain, so they just imply it's probably aliens. Schumer's bill contains an exemption for national security data, which will encompass anything meaningful. They know perfectly well the Chinese and Russians know this, it's a kabuki show for the normies because it's easier than both keeping that stuff secret and batting away paranormal "researchers". The change in policy was to put up a lightning rod to attract conspiracy theorists rather than trying to repel them.

I'm struggling to imagine a scenario in which anything involving aliens was kept hidden for this long but didn't count as national security data to be exempted from such a clause. Like, if aliens were real and we captured their flying saucers of course that would be secret national security data! What is Scheumer's bill expected to do in the first place?

It'll get him some good PR with the UFO believers.

As Carl Sagan used to say, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. A single clear picture of an alien spacecraft, a single radio signal listing off prime numbers, a single microbe in a meteorite that shares no common origin with life on Earth, any of these would be evidence of extraterrestrial life, but none have been presented. All we get is a lot of hemming and hawing, winks and hints, and the tiniest crumbs of blurry images or eyewitness reports. Show me the data and we can have the conversation. Otherwise I don't see the point.

That saying is bad because it all hinges on who is deciding what is extraordinary. The king is he who defines the null hypothesis.

Shit, I'd take ANY evidence at this point. A single crumb of empiricism.

I think part of the issue is weird occurrences that have no satisfying explanations given, which people can then attribute to their own pet theory.

Take the Phoenix Lights for example. Super weird, seen by millions, and the only explanations given are "aliens!" and "super secret weird government shit." Given that to many people these are more or less the same thing, or at least connected, you end up with a lot of people that can then point to the Phoenix Lights as evidence of aliens.

Most serious alien believers are, in my experience, equally willing to accept "the government engages in numerous weird programs and experiments, often testing them on the unwitting public (or at least exposing members of the public to them) MK Ultra style," to explain these weird events as much as they will accept aliens, or demons, or synchronicities or kabbalah or whatever.

What they won't accept is "none of that happened, pay no attention to the strange occurrences, nothing happens that is not publicly available information."

No offense but literally just googling "Phoenix Lights" gives you a wikipedia entry that offers fairly mundane explanations relating to pilot training, not "super secret weird government shit". I haven't looked too deeply into this particular incident, but in my experience this is a pattern that has repeated over and over: Alien believers go around claiming that something is being suppressed or that the only other plausible explanation is secret government projects that sound as outlandish as aliens. If you point out the mundane explanations, they are nitpicked on minuscule details in a way that you simply can't do with "aliens did it" (or "god did it", for that matter) since the space of things that can be imagined is always almost infinitely large.

It's like seeing an image of jesus on a toast, doing a statistical analysis on how unlikely that is to happen by chance and then concluding that the only reasonable explanation is an act of god. Sure compared to happening by chance it may seem reasonable, but that's hardly the most sensible explanation.

It's like seeing an image of jesus on a toast

If you understand it as a partly religious phenomenon (the entire UFO thing) that didn't succeed very much, it starts to make sense. Aside from being a folktale that spreads in spite of the lack of any simple and direct empirical evidence, there are literally multiple UFO religions.

It's like seeing an image of jesus on a toast, doing a statistical analysis on how unlikely that is to happen by chance and then concluding that the only reasonable explanation is an act of god. Sure compared to happening by chance it may seem reasonable, but that's hardly the most sensible explanation.

What is the most sensible explanation for jesus appearing on a piece of toast? I thought it was just people pattern matching random chance.

Aliens, obviously.

The example I was thinking about is a news story I heard some years ago about people setting up a shrine - I think in Latin America - with a Jesus on a toast with details way beyond the capabilities of a mere toaster. To my eyes, somebody obviously helped along with a burning needle or something similar (or just directly used a burning iron with a Jesus stamp form). Either way, I could only shake my head at the so-called critics claiming "it's coincidence" and the believers rightfully pointing out that it is almost physically impossible to be so - therefore, god. The people running the shrine clearly seemed to make some money off it.

Now that you made me write it out though, I realize that I nowadays would probably think that the critics are probably also simply paid to look silly. I'll leave it to the judgement of the reader whether I've not been cynical enough back when I was younger, or whether I've become too cynical by now.

Oh yeah apart from aliens of course. No, the direction my mind went was that statistically unlikely - even impossible - things actually happen with some frequency, and using stats as the basis of your reasoning that God/aliens did it is a misapplication of statistics. But I was thinking of the more mundane version where it is just wishful thinking, not the engineered variety.

In this case, without evidence, the phoenix lights are a pilot training program. Why? It’s culturally plausible to you. Nobody claims that it is. There aren’t official government records. It’s just a thing that you think is likely, therefore it’s the null hypothesis and everyone else has to prove why it isn’t that.

via wikipedia:

Both sightings were supposedly due to aircraft participating in Operation Snowbird, a pilot training program of the Air National Guard based in Davis-Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson, Arizona. The first group of lights were later identified as a formation of A-10 Thunderbolt II aircraft flying over Phoenix while returning to Davis-Monthan. The second group of lights were identified as illumination flares dropped by another flight of A-10 aircraft that were on training exercises at the Barry Goldwater Range in southwest Arizona. Fife Symington, governor of Arizona at the time, years later recounted witnessing the incident, describing it as "otherworldly."[5][4]

Sounds like people are claiming it was specific, recorded training flights, for which there would be official government records.

In Dan Carlin's Hardcore History series King of Kings, he recalls that his college professor once asked "What influence has magic had upon history?" Meaning that, while we know today that magic doesn't exist, the ancients thought it may have existed. Due to this, the ancient Persians disseminated propaganda boasting about their powerful mages, which may have scared their enemies such that the Persians had an edge on the battlefield.

I think the USA's handling of alien technology is similar. It's designed to scare our potential enemies (foreign or domestic) into thinking we may have alien military technology, or at least to create enough public doubt such that our enemies need to waste time considering whether or not we have alien technologies. If this is the case, the U.S. military would have an incentive to cultivate this belief, which they could accomplish by releasing doctored footage of mysterious spaceships or by having ex-military guys claim that they saw alien technology.

One problem here is that the Chinese or Russians or whoever else has access to the other publicly available knowledge that we have via physics and astronomy and access to telescopes (and they have their own of course). Trying to convince Putin that Spock is giving us technology runs into very precisely the problems that astronomers and physicists in this country have with UFOs — namely that nothing we’ve discovered in deep space points to a spacefaring civilization. If Putin talked to his physicists and astronomers, they’d tell him that.

Don't underestimate the stupidity of supposedly intelligent people. Remember that the CIA (or some element of it) seriously studied psychic powers after believing that the Soviets had them. If 9/10 Russian science advisors say "no UFOs" but one says "yes absolutely UFOs we need to study this it could be the end of us!", I'd say the chance of Putin listening to the UFO guy is greater than 1/10 thanks to how human psychology works. Those odds might be worth it.

For the record, I don't believe there's a concerted UFO psyop, but I think it is likely at least some of the US intelligence apparatus is happy to let the believers run with it a bit for the counterintel effect. There are enough wacky people already, you don't need to plant evidence.

Are we sure they actually did that? If you’re talking about remote viewing, it seems like much the same issue as radar. They needed an excuse for being able to see things that they shouldn’t be able to. In WW2, we told the Germans our pilots could see better because they ate carrots. It turned out that we had radar. If our spy satellites can see into Soviet territory, and you don’t think they know about the satellites, saying “we have psychic powers that let us see stuff from an aerial perspective” covers the gap.

I don't think the CIA was telling people they had psychics, but they spent quite a bit of time researching it https://www.cia.gov/stories/story/ask-molly-did-cia-really-study-psychic-powers/

Meaning that, while we know today that magic doesn't exist, the ancients thought it may have existed.

They wouldn't have just thought it would have existed, thanks to the placebo effect it actually would have existed in a real way. If you were a medieval scientist who did a study comparing the outcomes between people who received magical healing and those who did not, the people who received magical healing would most likely show better subjective outcomes (objective too most likely, but good luck measuring blood concentration levels in 200 BC) and recovery rates. When you remember that the placebo effect exists and you can even see people getting (placebo-equivalent) results from faith healing in the modern day, I think that believing in magic is actually entirely reasonable for the ancients - after all, a double-blinded study would actually provide evidence for the efficacy of magical healing in those times, so I don't feel like judging them too hard for believing what would actually be statistically significant and easily replicable phenomenon in their context.

One of the other uses for magic, divination, was useful because it essentially functioned as a random number generator - and if you're trying to make sure that your opponents cannot predict your movements, literally throwing the dice and picking at random is often the optimal strategy. There are actually real, adaptive reasons for the ancients to believe in magic, it would have been a useful tool in their lives and the experiments they were capable of performing would indeed show that magic was real for them.

a double-blinded study would actually provide evidence for the efficacy of magical healing in those times

Why would magical healing prove more effective than a placebo in a double blind study, where, by definition, neither the doctor nor the patient knows whether the patient receives the “real” treatment or a placebo?

I may have been being a bit glib - my mind automatically translated "most effective research technique we have for dealing with placebos and magic in the modern day" and simply transposed it to the past. I meant more that their most effective research techniques would actually produce repeatable and consistent evidence that magical healing worked.

I’m pretty much convinced it’s not aliens. The physics we know doesn’t support the idea of ships fast enough to make interstellar travel plausible without generation ships. We have lots of telescopes trained on deep space including two space telescopes, and we’ve never detected any signs of civilization in deep space: no signals, no structures, no signs of life. We have only once found an object in our solar system of extra-solar origin, that was Oumoua which was almost certainly an asteroid. There’s not really much reason to think that there’s a star-faring civilization out there, let alone one that came here.

The politicians getting involved here seems less like a weird outcome of “there must be something here” and more of a way to score political points on an issue where there’s no downside to playing along. If there’s anything interesting to be known, it’s already highly classified, and probably only available to the intelligence committee in vague details. And if nothing is there, there’s obviously nothing to report. But Schumer et Al. Get in the news feed and they can talk about how they’re in favor of transparency (except for the contributions to his superPAC) which always sounds good.

I don’t see how a very small group of UFO enthusiasts could get much traction, or why it would happen exactly now, given that UFO enthusiasts have been around since before Roswell and they’ve been ignored by mainstream government for well over half a century. There’s nothing that’s substantially different now that would make congress of all places suddenly interested in what a small band of unconnected people see as their hobbyhorse.

As cover for a weapons program, I think UAPs make a lot of sense. Everyone in 2023 has a camera on their person at all times. Anything that requires real-life testing is probably going to be seen — and filmed — by someone, and that movie can with a few clicks, be shared across media platforms before the government has any idea footage exists. This is new and different. In 1948-1990 stopping the release of a movie of a new weapon or plane was as simple as confiscating the film and perhaps the old version of the UFO story was cover for that activity. People would obviously wonder why the government was taking film from private citizens, and it wouldn’t work to tell people they’d accidentally taken a picture of a classified weapon, as word would get around fast that there were classified aircraft around a given area. Blue book as a “we’re investigating these aliens” story later followed by “huh, it turns out they were mostly false positives and a lot of the observers were drunk,” fits that era.

I’m pretty much convinced it’s not aliens. The physics we know doesn’t support the idea of ships fast enough to make interstellar travel plausible without generation ships.

This is much weaker "evidence" than you think. One possible explanation is that "aliens" are results of an AI driven Von Neuman probe that was activated by some human technological advancement a few decades ago. It jumpstarted factories somewhere in Ooort cloud producing more and more advanced technology that visits us, on its mission as programmed by some long dead civilization.

Similarly, no evidence of structures or signals is not evidence of nonexistence. We did not even map our own system, it is still possible that there is undetected planet X in our own solar system, we know nothing about interstellar space or other star systems.

Agreed, except to note that there's no need for aliens to be hiding in the Oort cloud - mobile and under the ocean somewhere would likely do just fine, along with a number of other close-to-home alternatives. And that the absence of observed radio signals can be explained as well by 'there are superior options for interstellar communication and aliens use those' as 'there are no aliens sending signals'.

I’m not saying that it’s evidence aliens don’t exist, however, I think the point that I’m mostly aiming for here is that “things that are asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.” And until some new sort of evidence shows up, there’s little reason to put aliens anywhere in the picture. Now if we find something, that’s when I’d start taking aliens seriously as a phenomenon. But until then, all we actually have are bizarre suppositions used to either get around or negate the problems that exist. On the evidentiary side, to be absolutely clear we have no evidence of life, let alone intelligence. Now you’re correct that we haven’t looked everywhere, but again, we have nothing that would make us think there are aliens. Likewise, we have no evidence of anything unusual going on in the Oort Cloud or AIs. As far as the evidence goes, we have one planet with any kind of life, and while we’re on the cusp of AGI in my estimation, but that’s it. Likewise, our understanding of physics is probably primitive compared to what we will know a thousand years from now. But, until we have a good reason to discard what we know about astronomy, physics, biology, and robotics, I don’t think it’s reasonable to assert that we are wrong about any particular topic in science, you can’t just a priori toss it when it comes to aliens, or if you want to, provide an actual reason to doubt the stuff we know or think we know.

The physics we know doesn’t support the idea of ships fast enough to make interstellar travel plausible without generation ships.

For big, wet sacks of thinking meat, maybe, but you can posit many theories of interstellar travel that are congruent with physics.

The physics we know is entirely congruent with agelessness, and we haven't come up with any reason to think machines can't be intelligent or self-repairing.

I agree on that, although I think you’d still find evidence of megastructures or ships.

I agree with everything you've said, except the claim that we've never received an alien signal. I'd say the wow signal is most likely a signal from an alien radio telescope, although obviously we cannot have definitive proof.

https://earthsky.org/space/wow-signal-explained-comets-antonio-paris/

According to this, the most likely source is a comet that was in that part of the sky when the WOW signal was found. A very similar signal was detected when following the orbit of the comet with another radio telescope.

Reminds me of the MJ-12 documents. As Skeptoid theorized:

During the early days of the cold war, the Air Force became concerned that such UFO groups might conceivably collect actual sensitive information about classified Air Force capabilities. It stood to reason that Soviet spies — who were no dummies — might reasonably attempt to infiltrate such groups. It was perfectly plausible that the UFO groups on stakeout formed a pipeline of classified information to Soviet spies. And so in an ironic twist, the UFO groups, who intended to support national security by revealing what they thought was an alien threat, actually became the national security threat themselves.

...

How was the Air Force to deal with this potential leak? They could have arrested the UFO guys, but among the various types of fallout that would create was the fact that such arrests would certify to any Soviet spies that the information was indeed valuable. Another way to deal with it was with disinformation, to discredit the UFO groups by persuading them that their observations did indeed pertain to aliens, and not to actual Air Force capabilities. Soviet spies were much less likely to take interest in claims of flying saucers than they were in film of American F-117A aircraft. So the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI) developed a new expertise: Feeding made-up disinformation about aliens and UFOs to the UFO enthusiasts, indicating that the United States did indeed have deep relationships with aliens. In some cases, this information — which was exactly what the UFO groups salivated for — was actually provided in exchange for information about the UFO groups' movements and what data they may have collected.

This does have quite a bit of explanation for other parts of the story that never seemed sensible. Like moon bases, aliens needing human dna, hybrids (which I don’t think make biological sense at all as life on another planet might have different t-rna and thus the DNA would essentially produce gibberish proteins and thus not a hybrid living being), and sharing technology (which, assuming they’re far enough ahead of us to travel to other solar systems is likely to be incomprehensible much like us trying to explain jet travel to Abraham). All of these things are sci-fi tropes more or less, including more than one type of alien, galactic wars, and hippie ideas of ascension make perfect sense as cover. None of it would require those telling the tales to know anything about astronomy, chemistry, physics, or biology. Hell they don’t even need to explain how they’re translating the alien language.

Debunking a conspiracy theory by positing a smaller, less powerful conspiracy? I guess Occam’s razor technically supports the strategy.

I don’t think SAPs work the way you suggest. They’re about hiding the contents from the outsiders, not the inside. (But of course that’s what I’d expect them to say!)

Aliens narratives are part of the normal Brownian motion of news. There’s some fraction of people who are convinced, or signaling their outsider status, or just trolling. They get picked up from the background noise and signal-boosted in proportion to their rhetorical utility. For obvious reasons, calling your enemies credulous or close-minded has perennial appeal. Likewise for painting them as shady, wasteful, paranoid, outdated, et cetera. But you can’t just make fun of the same people all the time and expect it to stick. Not on a national scale. So aliens, like any other gossip, come and go from the public eye.

I can think of a few reasons why the topic has peaked in the last few years. Misinformation is definitely a Current Thing. Dumb conspiracy theories, too. Some of the other credibility battlegrounds, like Christianity or climate change, have been quiet compared to the pre-recession years. Though the latter has flared up a bit lately. We’re also hitting a bit of an uptick in militarism.

Hell, maybe the same nostalgia-bait that gave us Stranger Things has made aliens great again.

I’m fond of a certain “sneer-state-debate” theory where different rhetorical attacks work a bit like “rock-paper-scissors.” If all your opponent can do is throw shade, state a constructive vision, and make him look small. If he’s making sweeping statements on such a vision, debate him to pick it apart. And if he’s nitpicking details, just sneer at the nerd and his obviously-insufficient values.

Aliens are usually in the news for sneering purposes. Look at those idiots, wasting time and money on an obvious hoax. But that sort of sneer has proven really ineffective against the Trump wing of the GOP, because it plays right into the grand narrative of coastal elites sneering at proles. The Chuck Schumer approach, here, pivots to a “debate” attack. If the theory is so truthy, fine, prove it. Make it pay rent. Debate me. In theory, this defuses belief in aliens as a tribal signal, making it boring. In practice, it might just open up the Democrats to counter-sneering. Trump is historically pretty good at that!

All in all, I expect it to be reasonably effective. Assuming no actual aliens, and thus no shocking reveals, I don’t predict aliens will have much salience after the ‘24 election. The cycle will continue.

What would be the signs of the elites believing in aliens?

If the top of society believed in aliens, we would notice a few changes. The obvious first move if we are in real risk of an invasion would be aiming more sensors towards space. We would need far more telescopes, satellites observing other bodies in our solar systems and antennas. Astronomy is a miniscule portion of the global economy and ramping it up Manhattan project style could greatly increase capacity within a decade or two. We wouldn't even need investments that would account for 0.01% of global GDP to completely change the roadmap for telescope construction. Instead, the 30 meter telescope in Hawaii is getting delayed in endless legal processes.

Defending a solar system is far easier than attacking one. Even at relativistic speeds it takes decades to get here. There is no hiding in space, and hitting dust particles with a large ship at 10% of light speed will make the ship glow brightly. Sci-Fi often presents aliens as magical, but they would be bound by the same laws of nature as we are. Slowing down from relativistic speeds requires immense amounts of energy. Hitting a small metal object at relativistic speeds is equivalent to being nuked. At 10% of light speed, a tungsten rod is 30 000 km away one second before impact. Launching swarms of weapons at them would realistically be able to destroy an enemy ship.

If we are facing an alien invasion in the coming decades, we would see far greater investments in launch capacity. The SLS program was delayed and not exactly managed as a project critical to the survival of all life on the planet. The European Space Agency is meandering along with the Ariane 6. We aren't seeing the capacity to put large numbers of nukes in orbit. We aren't seeing a race to build a rail gun on the moon to launch volumes of munitions at high speed toward an enemy armada.

If the world leaders truly believed the aliens were here, NASA wouldn't be struggling with a budget 2.5% the size of the US militaries.

Defending a solar system is far easier than attacking one. Even at relativistic speeds it takes decades to get here. There is no hiding in space, and hitting dust particles with a large ship at 10% of light speed will make the ship glow brightly. Sci-Fi often presents aliens as magical, but they would be bound by the same laws of nature as we are. Slowing down from relativistic speeds requires immense amounts of energy. Hitting a small metal object at relativistic speeds is equivalent to being nuked. At 10% of light speed, a tungsten rod is 30 000 km away one second before impact. Launching swarms of weapons at them would realistically be able to destroy an enemy ship.

I think this is backwards.

Offense is easier than defense in space. A large tungsten rod could be lobbed at earth from outside the solar system going at 10% of the speed of light and we would have almost no chance of seeing it or being able to prevent it from hitting by the time we did see it. The Earth is on a predictable trajectory and cannot dodge. Hell if you don't want to bring your own Tungsten rods you can just use asteroids.

Spaceships do not have to be on a predictable trajectory. They can theoretically dodge lasers traveling at the speed of light.

Space is big and hitting an object that does not have a consistent velocity is basically impossible.

While throwing heavy objects at earth would be an effective strategy, Earth is large. We also have an atmosphere that would burn off some energy from projectiles. An object moving at 10% of light speed would be farily bright. The solar system isn't empty and hitting gas particles at 10% of light speed causes a sizeable bang. Meanwhile we have a whole planet full of capacity to lob stuff toward the enemy.

As for changing orbits it requires energy. Slowing down from those high speeds would require extreme energy and a large part of the enemy ship would consist of fuel and material for the rocket used to slow them down. Accelerating the ship in other directions to preform evasive maneuvers would consume additional fuel. Space ships don't fly like fighter jets. There is a reason why rockets are giant gas tanks with a tiny capsule on top.

With that said it would depend on our ability to fight back with a sizeable force, the efficiency of their engines, the size of their force and the capacity of their counter measures. We would be at a technological disadvantage.

We are not the first people to think about this topic. I've read lots of hard sci Fi, and they all agree planetary defense is near impossible.

Dodging objects is the only real defense in space battles. Even if you can spot an object it does not mean you can impart enough energy on that object to stop it in time.

If a spaceship is past Jupiter it's about one light hour away. At that distance a 1mph change in a direction means they can dodge a laser by a mile. Lasers aren't particularly effective, but they are the fastest weapon, so if you can't hit something with a laser you can't hit it with a bullet. A 1mph change in velocity is nothing for something capable of crossing interstellar distances.

But all of that is moot. If you can cross interstellar distances you can probably calculate orbital mechanics. The earth has a predictable path through space. There is no need to even enter the solar system. They could lob objects at us from light years away. And they don't have to follow the orbital plane where all the convenient gas and dust is. The north and south pole are valid targets for an object with enough mass or speed.

, NASA wouldn't be struggling with a budget 2.5% the size of the US militaries.

NASA was never the real space program.

The real space program has always been the NRO.

We aren't seeing a race to build a rail gun on the moon to launch volumes of munitions at high speed toward an enemy armada.

Minor quibble.

Were aliens real, which we could only know by having seen them up close, that'd mean it'd be already too late to resist because anyoen capable of interstellar travel would have AI and replicators, so perfectly able of outproducing Earth in material within a few years given the right minerals. Of which there's plenty out there.

Also, anyone capable of interstellar travel would have no actual reasons to conquer us unless they preserved some completely atavistic instinct for conquest or had religious reasons (enlightening barbarians?). And I don't think preservation of such instinct is likely. People largely self-domesticated themselves and gradually got less violent and adventuring due to civilization.

it'd be already too late to resist because anyone capable of interstellar travel would have AI and replicators,

No, it would be too late because they would have access to interstellar travel.

As much as rationalists like to treat them as a bogey man, fact is that AGI and replicators are a relatively trivial capability (pun intended) compared to being able to bypass fundamental laws of physics.

That said there is the possibility we're living in the Path not Taken timeline where space-time manipulation is actually really simple and humans as a species were just too autistic to figure it out and thus invented radio, radar, and nuclear weapons instead.

compared to being able to bypass fundamental laws of physics.

If you don't age, travel at 1% of lightspeed is doable, easily.

Obviously comparing a theoretical extraterrestrial species with Earth life has plenty of inherent issues, but looking at the handful of species that (at least seem to) experience biological immortality, the most complex is a jellyfish. At least in Earth life it would appear that there might be something incompatible between complex life forms and biological immortality.

There are a few higher animals whose organisms do not break down with age.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negligible_senescence#In_vertebrates

That's a very laconic 'if', and as the old SB.com gag goes, for any value of "how many X would it take to beat Y" the answer is "1 at sufficient velocity."

That's not even the point. 1% of the speed of light is achievable, but in any case people don't observe ayys in space, so the idea that they'd have to cover some interstellar void in some "reasonable" time is a mere conjecture. UFOs that figure in these reports allegedly move at tens of Ma. But they screw with laws of physics in the process – no inertia, no exhaust, no friction, no sonic booms, no apparent energy use, no nothing; routine four-figure accelerations in the course of prolonged encounters. If we could figure doing that for macroscopic objects (not to mention housing complex tools or life), it'd be even cooler than interstellar travel.

You are correct, and that right there is part of the reason why I classify AGI as a relatively trivial capability in comparison.

The real space program has always been the NRO.

The real space telescope program has always been the NRO, sure. I remember how dumbfounding it was to learn that Hubble was basically leftovers from a string of spy sats.

But those spy sats have been launched on Delta IV rockets no more exciting than what everyone else uses. If anything NRO input may have set back spaceflight in general, making Space Shuttle requirements even more complicated and underperformance more likely.

Also one could imagine interstellar travel implies FTL, which implies access to physical principles beyond our current science or at least out current and prospective technology, and to energy levels well beyond what our technology is capable of. So I don't think there would be much use in "resistance". That said, I agree that it's unlikely aliens at this point of their development would have any interest or use of conquering humans. That's like human civilization mobilizing to conquer a particular patch of lichen somewhere in northern Canadian forests. What for?

I mean, I agree that we likely have no value to a civilization that can build an Alcubierre drive, but if hyperspace/jump drives/whatever is real then it's because our physics are wrong, not because exotic technology made it that way. We might conceivably only be as far behind such as civilization as the Aztecs were behind the Spanish.

Maybe more like between Aztecs then and the Spanish now. Modern technology - and modern military - has powers that for a pre-technological person would not be otherwise appear possible, such as clairvoyance, instant communication over any distance, power of flight, ability to deliver overwhelmingly destructive strikes at any point within minutes, near invulnerability to most weapons, etc. Maybe 16th century Aztec could conceptualize many of these things - in a way that we could conceptualize FTL - but they certainly wouldn't be able to even imagine how one could achieve such feats, and certainly any resistance they could put up to somebody who can do all that would be doomed from the start. But also, modern Spanish probably wouldn't attack them anyway.

I think you’re underestimating just how extreme the tech difference was. The Spanish brought canon, steel plate, pit bulls, horses, large ships, etc, which were all more or less inconceivable to the Aztecs, much less imitable.

Not Aztecs, but other American tribes adopted horses, guns and other nice stuff pretty quickly, I think, so I don't think they had any serious conceptual barriers with it. One thing when you have a big house that floats - I'm sure they had boats and rafts on the rivers and lakes before, same thing, just bigger - another thing is when this thing flies and drops a volcano on your head. The latter would probably be much harder to deal with.

And we, too, have flying death machines that kill with fire. Not hard to figure out how to deal with.

More comments

I think something like your last paragraph is the most likely story - heavy secrecy and over-compartmentalisation around aerospace secrets that has lead to a persistent UFO rumour mill that's now being amplified by true believers within the DoD itself (Elizondo, Grusch, etc).

The X-Files captured a moment in time when conspiracy-theorizing was more bipartisan. Within the context of that content, the government and national leaders were mostly engaged in cover-up to hide the truth of the actual subject matter of those conspiracies, which were a giant nebulous "other." That stands in sharp contrast with today where the conspiracy-theories are much more niche, partisan, and point the finger at the government and real people rather than a fictional entity.

It seems quaint to think of a time when the biggest conspiracies a baby boomer would come across would be aliens, bigfoot, etc. I think part of the reason this stuff is given oxygen is because it harkens to a time when being a "conspiracy theorist" meant something completely different, and more benign, than it means today. Back then, that conspiracy mythos brought people together more than it pushed them apart, even people with different political beliefs could have a discussion about aliens or bigfoot. Now they just live in entirely different universes, and the "conspiracy theories" are that the other side is irredeemably evil.

It's easy to tell about one's labors and days. More of a challenge with one's times. Especially our times. Why is that?

In Carbon times, there were a lot of smartasses thinking about the future. No wonder people knew little about their own era. Everything important was declassified on average in a century, and a lot of interesting things were revealed about great tank victories, assassinations of presidents, moon landings, contacts with reptilians and so on.

But, although people lived in the darkness, they knew some things about their present and past. For example, that a certain great tank battle really happened on such and such a date in such and such a place. Or that such-and-such a president had really been assassinated in such-and-such a city.

The rudiments of freedom remained with the people of that time, too. It was still possible to argue with each other and even with the officialdom, although it was connected to many risks.

And you could say anything you wanted about the future - they wouldn't kick you from there. That's why in Carbon they were constantly writing articles and novels about the coming epochs. They'd say they'd have it this way, and this way, and this way.

Well, here we are in the future. And it turns out that even with the most naive predictions of our ancestors, it is difficult for us to debate.

Because today we know nothing about the world. We don't know anything at all. But we can't talk about it - the very belief in the existence of "secrets" is strictly punished and is called "conspiracy" (yes, I'm alluding to my most famous punch-in, but I'll talk about it later).
The list of what we know for certain is very short. You can count it on your fingers with me. One hand will suffice.

[…]

That's it. No, really.
Thought there'll be something more? Check it on your own.

We do not know the answer to the rest of the questions that our inquisitive ancestors used to ask: whether machines think, what are the limits of technological growth, who has the real power over the world and the Cloud, what the exact political map of space looks like and who is the beneficiary here.

But not because anything is hidden from the people. Nothing needs to be hidden now.

The implant with the "QQoo" doesn't highlight excessively distant expeditions of human curiosity. We don't even know what our economic system is - feudalism? Capitalism? Post-capitalism? Meta-socialism? Maybe even some total klepto-corporate communism? I personally tried to figure that out for one of my punch-ins and couldn't.

The questions aren't posed like that anymore.

They're not posed like anything at all, because they've ceased to be raised.

– Pelevin, KGBT+

Your comment reminds me of this video about Deus Ex in which the guy talks about how much the cultural baggage around the term "conspiracy theorist" has shifted since the game's release in 2000.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=UN1GJLBM8Wc

For anyone debating wasting 22 minutes watching this, it is a left-coded video essay about the author, having been subsumed into the successor ideology, becoming uncomfortable with his previous enjoyment of Deus Ex now that the subject matter is more right-coded. He goes on to call Gamergate and other grievances “conspiracy theories”.

It's so depressing to me when I see this happen: "I used to enjoy X but now that I espouse ideology A I see how misguided my enjoyment was and can no longer experience it". Their brain has literally been attacked by a parasite that is eating away their personality, how sad. Like a psychological version of Alzheimer. I hope it never happens to me.

If the exercise wasn't so depressing, I think I'd start collecting these sorts of videos for a documentary or something. There's a thousand things I find wrong with the successor ideology, and I think I could suffer through most of them, even the ones resulting in the loss of human life and lowering of living standards across the board, but brainwashing someone into putting away their favorite toy (publically!) hits me right in the heart.

The march of progress may continue unabated, but I think this sort of stuff is getting memory holed, and I'd like to force people to remember it.

Why the assumption that this person cannot make his own decisions and can only be "brainwashed"?

Why the assumption that brainwashing is contradictory with making your own decision?

I believe he's brainwashed for the same reason I believe Pavlik Morozov was. Not that "I don't like my favorite game, it's for rightoids now" is the same as selling out your own parents, and on the other hand it very well may be that Pavlik was a little rat psychopath who never loved his parents and communists just gave him an opportunity to shine, but assuming we're dealing with psychologically normal people, I believe that not only is it natural to protect the things you love, it's perverse to self-flagellate over having loved something. I've seen turned-away-from-the-life-of-sin-born-again-Christians who have more ability to enjoy media they find problematic. It doesn't help that his sudden realization that Deus Ex is problematic comes smack on top of the peak of the Brown Scare hysteria, this has peer pressure written all over it.

Is it not within your conception of the psychologically normal person that they can change their mind? Even about something they loved? Yes, sure, according to some worldviews no one ever changes their own mind, but just assuming you believe in freedom of will.

It's just that it looks like, according to you, there is no purpose for this forum as a platform for seeking truth, because everyone who's normal is just going to defend what they love instead of what's true.

Is it not within your conception of the psychologically normal person that they can change their mind? Even about something they loved?

Not in this particular way, especially about the things they loved.

It's just that it looks like, according to you, there is no purpose for this forum as a platform for seeking truth, because everyone who's normal is just going to defend what they love instead of what's true.

That's not what I'm saying, and the question of truth doesn't even apply here. The idea that past enjoyment of a game is problematic is a moral claim, not a factual one.

Yeah, I didn't agree with all of it. He's right that the term "conspiracy theory" has vastly different connotations now than 20 years ago, but I did bristle when he described gamergate as such.

I was thinking the exact same thing.

If I hadn’t read too much Hanson over the years I would likely be a true believer in the alien stuff. The issue is it just seems unlikely that “Aliens can visit us” but “we don’t see visual evidence of Aliens colonizing the galaxy”. This has raised my belief that “Aliens have visited us” from almost 0% to .001%.

I think it’s likely Aliens are somewhere out there but I don’t believe they have visited us.

If I hadn’t read too much Hanson over the years I would likely be a true believer in the alien stuff.

What do you make of Hanson apparently thinking the alien stuff is legit nowadays? As far as I understood, he thinks "they're here but we don't see them colonizing the galaxy" can make sense if there was just one abiogenesis event in the Milky Way, it led to both life on Earth and an alien civilization somewhere reasonably close in the stellar neighborhood through some sort of panspermia process. This would mean the single alien civilization that's contacting us has no serious competition driving it to visibly messing up the galaxy and is close enough they can reach us with less impressive interstellar technology that one that turns an entire galaxy into Dyson spheres.

he thinks "they're here but we don't see them colonizing the galaxy" can make sense if there was just one abiogenesis event in the Milky Way, it led to both life on Earth and an alien civilization somewhere reasonably close in the stellar neighborhood through some sort of panspermia process

This is just ridiculously speculative. Anyone can write science fiction about this. He’s invented a scenario and then invented a complex, impossible to falsify story to make that scenario make sense.

What if Dyson Spheres are low-tech compared to the ultimate horizons of what's possible? Advanced countries leave forests to grow because we don't need firewood for fuel, it's too crappy to worry about. I think we should be looking for alien life in the remaining 95% of the universe's 'dark' matter/energy, the stuff that we can't understand. It's not sufficient to look through a mere 5% and say 'no aliens here, so no aliens anywhere'. That's like looking for gold in riverbeds only, not finding it and going home.

The general counter to those type of arguments ends up being then “why are there claims of us having their ships”. Then you need to make an argument “they have all this fancy tech that we can’t even see, but when they visit us they come in rinky dink ships that crash on our planet”. It doesn’t feel all that logical which is why I rank it at a very low probability because that narrative feels false.

Think now some kind of multiverse makes more sense where the technology to jump between parallel worlds is somewhat easy but being away from their infrastructure their ships occasional fail which explains why they lack techs we would expect for a super advanced civ in our universe.

Claims of us having alien ships are much more incredible than simply alien ships messing with us. Where is the Nimitz-tier footage of a flying saucer with a US flag slapped on the side?

If the US has alien spaceships, then what the hell are they doing with the F-35?

What if advanced civilizations become indolent and ultimately self-extinguishing? What if dark forest? Etc, etc.

If you haven't read 95% of a book, you're not in a position to describe the characters. We don't understand 95% of the universe so “we don’t see visual evidence of Aliens colonizing the galaxy” is not sufficient.

On the other hand, we’ve been looking at what we have and none of it points to alien technology in space. And that makes these sort of arguments specious to me. It’s not a discussion of actual evidence, or even theories backed by theoretical physics, it’s simply hand-waving a lack of evidence and treating all those pointing directly to a lack of evidence as “closed-minded”.

I’ll clearly accept that we haven’t seen most of the known universe. That’s not an issue, I’m open to having my mind changed. But you can’t say “well, you’re being closed minded because you’re not accepting aliens when we haven’t explored everything.” I’m skeptical until the evidence at least exists: a microbe of extrasolar origin, an unambiguously artificial signal, an extra solar artificial satellite, something.

To posit aliens with no evidence beyond speculative statements by people with no expertise in astronomy or physics is in a word irrational. And until we find evidence there’s no reason to take any of it seriously.

My point is not that we need to accept aliens based upon our ignorance but that we shouldn't dismiss them based upon our current, insufficient level of knowledge. Above Sliders said his earlier probability was well below 0.001%. He's very confident and I think he shouldn't be.

Furthermore, there are problems with our current model of how things should work. How can it be so improbable for civilizations to develop that we see no evidence within our entire lightcone? Is it that life is improbable, despite the huge number of stars and planets? Or are we looking in the wrong places, in the wrong ways?

What do you think our long-term future in the galaxy looks like? Is it really likely that our technological civilization will just poof out with no real impact? (Even the AI doom scenario involves a superintelligence that will start gobbling up the reachable Universe.) This is the argument underlying the Fermi Paradox: we have only one example of an intelligent civilization, and there seems to be little standing in the way of us spreading through and changing the galaxy in an unmissable way. Interstellar travel is quite hard, but not impossibly so. The time scale for this would be measured in millions of years, which is barely a hiccup in cosmological terms. So why didn't someone else do it first?

On a similar note, I'm very confident I'm not standing next to a nuclear explosion (probability well below 0.001%). Am I overconfident? Ok, yes, I'm being a bit cheeky - the effects of a nuclear explosion are well understood, after all. The chance that there's a "great filter" in our future that would stop us and all similar civilizations from spreading exponentially is a lot larger than 0.001%.

Why is everyone stuck with 'changing the galaxy in an unmissable way' or 'the great filter', when we could just be looking in the wrong places, in the wrong ways?

Why does everyone assume that we have a firm understanding of the limits on an interstellar civilization with massively powerful superintelligences and stellar-scale engineering skills? Maybe if you build a ridiculously huge particle accelerator you can open up opportunities for expansion that make Dyson Spheres look quaint, harnessing or building with 'dark' materials. Maybe if you have quantum gravity and a lot of energy, you can bypass lightspeed limits with some clever warping of space.

More comments

If I have a book and 5% of the pages I look at are blank, I'll have the strong expectation that the rest of the pages are blank too. And for the same reason - why would the author leave any pages blank? Energy is energy. If you're bothering to colonize any measurable amount of the universe, you'll colonize the rest too. Any species that ever stopped expanding would stop expanding long before it became globally visible.

If we developed Dyson Spheres, we'd stop burning coal or uranium. That energy is more expensive and complex than stellar fusion, doesn't scale so well. Energy isn't just energy, there's energy and there's Energy. The next stage above that is to not mess about with Dyson Spheres and extract energy from some other source - presumably this would be the stuff that makes up the remaining 95% of the universe.

Eh. Dyson spheres are a transitional tech to stellar lifting, where you stop treating suns as god-given infrastructure and start using them as hydrogen mines that happen to be temporarily on fire. But in the really long run, you'll use the coal and uranium too - there's no reason not to. The limit with humans is largely effort, whether personal, investment, or regulatory; I can't see that being an issue for a true post-scarcity post-uploading post-AI society.

We're still very much in the "scale-up" regime, not in the "optimal use" regime.

The next level esoteric take in this, advocated by a number of high profile UFOlogists actually (Jacques Vallee, J. Allen Hynek, and some of the people behind this current disclosure push) is that they aren’t aliens in the sense of intergalactic visitors but rather the same entities that have been with us since the beginning, whether we have called them gods, devils, fae. They aren’t from another planet but from, for lack of a better term, ‘fairyland.’

Cribbed from Arthur C. Clarke.

But at that point, don't they stop being a viable explanation for UFOs?

Why would Schumer's move be evidence in support of the ayys? Perhaps he's as tired of this nonsense as any old dinobeaver, and tries to call the UFO people's bluff – by showing that there is no legitimate claim of their quest being suppressed – and exhaust the excuses faster. (I won't claim this comports well with my earlier hypothesis that @2rafa has kindly mentioned; if anyone, Chuck would've been in on the joke).

It's needless to say that even if they passed such a law it'd be just ignored by the relevant very secret organisations on the basis of national security.

In the Art Bell world, the two alien species who tend to be mentioned are the Greys and the Lizardpeople.

Just on a culture war front, I’m more inclined to distrust the Greys because of all the anti-Lizardpeople propaganda; in SF, bad aliens are lizard-coded and good aliens are smooth-skinned, big-eyed, small-nosed. I remember being startled by the similarity between Lilo & Stitch’s Grand Councilwoman and the Star Wars cloners, the people of Kamino, when both movies came out close to each other. They were the first “tall Greys” I’d seen in media, as opposed to Stargate SG-1’s Asgard take on the short Greys.

Those are both the very model of a scientist salarian.

There's a subreddit just for the classic grey alien heads, but I forgot what the name was.

Another possibility is this: it is known that the government has, for ulterior motives, psyopped people into believing in UFOs and ultimately driven them insane..

@DaseindustriesLtd 's 'psyop overcapacity' thesis, which is a less extreme version of this, remains the most likely scenario. It's not for a one-world government, it's to keep the Pentagon or the wider intelligence community's capability for domestic propaganda sharp without running into any political disputes or 'culture war' topics. They know the 'Voice of America' content is amateur hour compared to what China or possibly even Russia are producing for domestic consumption, there needs to be some kind of feedback mechanism so that people who've spent 50 years working on this stuff know whether it works. UFOs and similar stuff let them test what works, what doesn't, what people like, what memes succeed etc.

Or maybe it really is aliens.

It is extremely unlikely that the US alone has all the world's supply of UFOs and/or that the US has agreed with every other government that had UFOs land in its territory never to reveal anything to the public. Even if such a thing had happened, that nothing ever leaked from the archives of the USSR or any non-Western or non-US country that these UFOs presumably also landed in seems equally unlikely.

The whole logic of (alien) UFOs existing but being kept secret doesn't make sense. They're secret because the USG is worried about what other countries might do with UFO technology...but that doesn't explain why other countries wouldn't also have UFOs. It doesn't explain why every major world government would secretly - and only on this one issues, seemingly - cooperate to hide this from everyone else. It doesn't explain why so much of the world's alleged UFO activity happens in the US, which makes up just 6% of the earth's landmass. ('Only the US can shoot them down' doesn't make sense, because the allegations iirc are of largely intact, ie. landed UFOs.) It doesn't explain why, if other countries do know about UFOs, they wouldn't just make the information public, since at the point when China/Russia/etc all know, there's no longer any military or technological reason not to inform the public.

As to the culture war angle, interestingly, with the exception of Kristen Gillibrand, who is not the leftiest of dems, most of the representatives and senators who have been vocal and active in pushing for UAP transparency have been republicans like Marco Rubio, Tim Burchett, Mike Gallagher, and Anna Paulina Luna.

Didn't you just say Chuck Schumer is sponsoring legislation that would force the USG to inform congress about aliens? I doubt 535 people are keeping their mouths shut on this issue. (Apparently, it would actually allow the senate to appoint a panel to declassify UFO reports).

I think the NY Post article is the best bet. A lot of senior congressmen, military/pentagon and intelligence officers are literally UFO nerds because they grew up during the Cold War in the peak UFO-mania period. Now they have power they're obsessed with combing through intelligence archives trying to find the secret black box ultra-classified program run independently of any other agency that's storing the alien spaceships in the Nevada desert, and they're getting ever more desperate.

The whole logic of (alien) UFOs existing but being kept secret doesn't make sense.

Because it's a proto-religious movement, it doesn't have to make a lot of sense in worldly terms. It doesn't seem like it because it uses all these science-y terms, but every religion started with concepts plausible to the populace; how else would anyone believe? Regardless, things seen in the sky having an importance on worldly affairs is not a new religious concept.

Of course, not everyone involved is motivated for this reason, but I think that's the most comprehensive, logical explanation for its start, functioning, and persistence. UFOs are a fantastically adaptive tool for a myriad of central religious questions, as proven by their influx in new religious movements. Even outside that, it's very difficult to escape all the talk about the governments hiding these awesome technologies, obviously piloted by enlightened beings- but just you wait, the truth will come to light; and not see the parallel with the good-evil duality mytheme that still persists in the west.

The reason why government is interested is because it's a useful tool for distracting attention from new military technologies.

content is amateur hour compared to what China or possibly even Russia are producing for domestic consumption

Western propaganda and hybrid war capabilities are an entire epoch ahead. The West exploits egalitarian instincts and youthful naivety & rebellion by promising liberation from irrational traditions and cultural strictures. It's extremely effective because elites in the West truly believe in the liberal BS they're peddling.

The Chinese and Russians are merely lying in an organised manner to advance narrow political interests.

The West is subsuming everything into their own system based on curating giant ecosystems of NGOs, activists to launder the influence of interests of powerful entities.

(e.g. the eco-activism pushing denuclearisation was subsidized by green energy and natural gas companies, with the activists being mostly naive to why they're being donated to)

If ‘deep state propaganda’ is so good, why couldn’t they prevent Trump winning in 2016? I don’t think they’re as confident as you think.

Trump specifically addressed things that have been sidelined from politics: immigration by relentless pressure.

I'd also argue that Americans who have been under this regime the longest are probably more resistant to it now. Trump promised change, they believed their own polls and failed to 'fortify' the elections.

Also, America doesn't have that much need to wage hybrid war on itself.

Just as you can't get a good fire going on in a desert, the full potency of liberation meme Americans bring only ever manifests in traditional societies, where there is social capital to burn and something to rail against. In America the activists are forced to rail against 'white supremacy' and 'toxic masculinity', meanwhile somewhere with a functioning, non-atomised societies they have real targets, not phantasms.

Don't get me wrong, they're trying but it seems half-hearted and there's been a lot of time for the population to develop some sort of resistance.

Didn't you just say Chuck Schumer is sponsoring legislation that would force the USG to inform congress about aliens?

Yeah but that's new. As far as I know this is Schumer's first foray into the alien issue. The other representatives I mentioned have been crusading for years.

Everything else you say makes sense though.

I want it to be aliens, but, that’s all the more reason to be thoroughly skeptical.

Even if there are aliens, what is this legislation supposed to accomplish? Surely any such UFO program, if it exists, is operating at a higher level of secrecy than anything else on this planet. The government agencies involved would be quite literally above the law. Why would we expect them to comply? They could simply ignore the law, or continue to deny that any alien tech has actually been recovered.

Possibility: There’s a government/military agency somewhere who’s been eating up $X billion a year to “study UFOs” (i.e. a BS excuse for standard waste and grift). This is Congress’s way of saying “put up or shut up, if you have something then you have to show us, otherwise we’re cutting off the money”. It’s not motivated by any actual evidence that UFOs exist, it’s just motivated by the need to better account for where all this money is going.

I look forwards to schizoposting on this topic. I have some good material about an ancient nuclear war on mars to share when the government claims it destroyed or lost track of a flying saucer. If only Bigfoot fanatics could have a similar long March through institutions and the Two could start fighting.

Wow. I missed the word “fanatics” and was definitely read for Bigfoot’s Long March.

No, that’s erotica on Amazon.

Bigfoots/Yeti are clearly the giants of the Bible, and the Smithsonian has a giant-finding operation which covers up their North American archaeological evidence. It was the Bigfoots of Michigan who provided king Solomon with his copper, in trade for gold, and it’s that gold which the Smithsonian is after. The Mormons were supposed to reveal them as the rightful rulers of America, which is why Mormons have been so vigorously persecuted.

That implies that angels are very hairy and apelike if the nephilim are giant ape-people. So ancient women had sex with angelic apes?

But then I suppose that's not much worse than ancient women being impregnated by four-headed bull angels or on-fire radioactive angels or concentric stone rings covered in eyes.

Technically speaking, angels assume whatever physical form they want because they don’t have bodies.

They don’t ever since Christianity got Greek philosophy’d, but the authors of the Hebrew Bible itself seemed to have believed angels, gods, and even Yahweh himself were actual physical beings that more or less functioned like humans, but bigger and stronger.

I was thinking more about Goliath and the other sons of Anak. Imagine young David facing a classic Bigfoot, but with his body hair ceremonially braided, covered in armor a regular man couldn’t hope to pick up, let alone wear.

If I were to make a Noah movie, I’d have the pre-flood giants be 8-ft-tall superheroes, with most of the usual powers except flight.

FWIW, copies of Samuel from the Dead Sea Scrolls, as well as the Septuagint (ancient Greek translation of yhe OT) have Golaith's height 2 cubits shorter than the Masoretic Text (which most older translations of the Old Testament are based on). So at least according to those, Goliath was about 6' 9".

Smithsonian, you’ve done it again! Dr. Jones should never have given them the Dial of Destiny.

a study of Skinwalker Ranch, which they believe(d) to be a hot-bed of supernatural activity, including werewolves and (as Greenstreet never tires of pointing out) "dinobeavers."

And skinwalkers, presumably?

I think that goes in the 'werewolf' category.

Werewolf suggests involuntary transformation into a defined form. Navajo yee naldlooshii are evil witches who can assume multiple different forms and possess animals and other people. Update your monster manuals appropriately.

According to an old Navajo coworker I had, Skinwalker Ranch doesn't make any sense because according to Navajo lore skinwalkers only have power within some specific geographic boundaries (bounded by some specific mountain ranges I think, I don't recall the exact details).

Not necessarily. While there are old stories about people being involuntarily transformed into animals, the classic European werewolf (the kind they used to burn at the stake) was an evil sorcerer who made a pact with the devil for the ability to turn himself into a wolf at will, actually quite similar to a Navajo skinwalker. The cursed soul who transforms against his will at the full moon and is not in control of his actions while in lupine form is mostly a product of early twentieth century Hollywood.

The l/rougarou(x) of new world French folklore is much older than that and classically thought to lack self control, although his vulnerability to witchcraft was due to a character flaw of some sort.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats