Hypocritical Response Squad? Yup!

A person who calls himself "adams_antics" wrote this in the RRS forum:

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Hypocritical Response Squad

When I found RRS, I was very excited to find other like-minded people to have rational conversations with. Where I live that is something very hard to come by. Even on the internet, it seems like everyone is still in the closet about their real beliefs.

I am always open to new ideas and consider any theory possible at first. If the person talking (or writer/blogger) has a better knowledge than me, I will listen to their story, ask probing questions, and learn everything they are willing to share. If I know more than the other person, I will hear them out and give the best response I can.

If I hear crazy conspiracy theories such as aliens are running our government, I will start by assessing the real possibility of it, taking all information into account, then estimate a likely percentage of truth. In this case I would say about 0.01%. Gov't hiding information of aliens, about 70%. 9/11 being an inside job, about 60%. I give these percentages because I don't know for sure, but given all the information I can find, I estimate a likeliness. I do the same for psychological, biological, and social analysys.

The reason I titles this "Hypocritical Response Squad" is because this group appears to be very open minded, willing to have a "rational" debate about topics. It even advertises that:

Quote:

Sapient wrote:

attacks personal or otherwise, are not acceptable, especially from people who aren't willing to admit that they could be wrong.

I have brought up a few topics for debate in which I did not feel like were being rationally debated, and even at times I felt as though i was being personally attacked for my ideas. Most of the time these are not even "my ideas", they are interpretations of other people's ideas, which I then estimate a percentage of possibility. So I don't necessarily "believe" these things, but I do give them consideration.

Two topics in particular are the 9/11 conspiracy (which I said I give a 60% chance of), and most recently, the idea of panspermia. Panspermia is the idea that life can be ejected off one planet (by means of comet collision or other method) and land on another planet and still be able to spread. This is a unique case because with the number of planets and meteors/asteroids, it almost has to happen somewhere in the universe, so I give the idea a 99.9% chance, but the odds of it happening to a given planet are more like 1 in a billion. I give the idea of fundamental building blocks of life forming life a 99.9(repeating)% chance, but again, the odds of it happening on a given planet 1 in a billion. Given both of these methods of life existing on a planet, both seem to have about the same likeliness.

I got flamed for supporting this idea, with comments like I had no understanding about how life or the universe works. I felt like my intellect was being attacked, and the debate on the topic did not get anywhere. So much for the "attacks personal or otherwise, are not acceptable" part. How about the "especially from people who aren't willing to admit that they could be wrong". Some quick searches will reveal that I am not retarded, and that RRS could actually be wrong.

http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/1998/december2/marsunder122.html

Quote:

The idea that Martian microbes may have traveled to Earth as stowaways on meteorites sounds like science fiction, but it may be a good idea. George Thompson, professor emeritus of geophysics, says "the travel time and conditions in transit are probably tolerable for beasts like those found in bore holes," that is, thermophilic organisms. And the recent discovery of evidence of possible life forms in Martian meteorite ALH84001 makes interplanetary immigration of organisms from Mars seem less outlandish.

The study was funded by the NASA Exobiology Program. SR

Posted on Stanfords website, funded by NASA, and I am the one with no understanding of life or the universe? I really don't care that much about panspermia, I just don't like being attacked personally when I am simply trying to get new ideas out in the open.

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After pointing out RRS hypocrisy and his plead to act more mature and kind, he gets ridiculed and attacked by Rook Hawkins. Here's what Hawkins said,

To claim this shows an utter ignorance of how evolution occured...

And:

You are ignorant of the subject matter.

Typical, eh? But Rook Hawkins talking about ignorance? I love the irony.

Anyway, the best part was seeing Croath beat the crap out of Hawkins' arguments.