By quoting a CoC violation, you are also breaking the same rule.  Please hit report rather than quote on questionable posts.

Please disagree with the post content, NOT the post author personally, no matter how big of idiot you feel he is.


CoC 6  You have the right to disagree, but please do so in a respectful manner.


CoC 7 Posting discussions that do the site or community harm. ...specifically creating topics and or replies meant to ... disrupt members ... It can also be the posting of threads or replies, in which it appears that the sole purpose is to provoke other members,... .

Boils down to:
1)  Don't' say crap that makes people want to punch you in the Face  and,  2) Don't punch people in the Face.


Please do not accuse other members of being a troll.  If It's an attacks or insult and not Just an unpopular opinion, don't quote it to call that member a poopie head.  Hit the report button - NOT "Quote". Doing  That wastes way More thread  capacity than the original post.  Quoting is in "Site Resources" violation.

A disagreement is not a violation, a baited question where any response would be against CoC; is Bait.  
Anybody violating these rules will be escorted from the thread.

< Broken Record Small Hijack, all apologies. >

Ridicule, harassment, mocking, thread shitting, hijacking and other similar posts are not allowed in this forum.  This forum was created to be able to speak without typical incessant GD harassment for not thinking in lockstep than the herd.   Do not drag arguments from GD here, start a new thread, though posting similar story is allowed.  Threads once moved to GD cannot be moved back out of GD due to rapid ... "tainting".  I'd prefer if you didn't directly hotlink to here in a GD thread, only mention a serious version exists and people will find it.  

With that said, disagreement is allowed, not everybody has to agree.  It is only required that the snarky sarcastic part of brain not brought here - show your dissenting data and reasoning of your own viewpoint besides "don't believe it", "this is gay" or "don't care".  Most people mocking "conspiracy theories" have zero clue what the theory is, let alone actual proof is and what they think they know about it from it seeping in from other sources who also never researched telling them to stay away from "that stupid stuff".  It's a personality's immune system knee jerking at something that disagrees with the reality in their head.¹


If you're only familiar with GD style posting/responses, please read:  (not directed at anybody in this thread or quoted):  UFO Forum Rules - This is NOT General Discussion

Everybody who is willing to have a discussion rather than a "told ya so" contradiction fest is welcome in this forum, we only ask that topics and other members and their ideas be treated respectfully.  Just because something is written down does not mean everybody in this forum believes that statement 100% to their dying breath.  It's just information to educate yourself and find your own answers to your questions.  We do not need to "prove" anything to anybody, that's not what this area is for - Please report any such posts on sight so the problem can be addressed before it gets several off topic quoted replies to edit.  We do not force others to believe anything, only that they stop and think about everything and draw their own conclusions.

————————————————————————————

¹ The other place you'll prominently see this type of undesirable behavior on this site is in Religion threads as the loudest angry atheist and agnostic antagonists are the least knowledgeable by far.  Those types have not read fully The Bible or even know what is in/not in The Bible when they try to bash all Christians based on the dogma of some small sects in the past. These people cannot be reasoned with as they have no desire to learn, they only want to make other people stop talking about it while they mock others on "safe spaces" and "weakness" like they're the smartest guys on the planet.


<  / End Broken Record Small Hijack, all apologies. >

The way we start to save ourselves is simple:  Stop finding every insignificant thing to disagree about and splitting into new tribes to throw pointless insults around thinking you're on "The Right 'Side'". Look at the big picture and realize all the fear mongering campaigns are designed to keep you from looking at the big picture.  Well, that and campaigns that say looking at the big picture is only what "conspiracy theorists" do, and they are supposed to be hated.

Start finding out what we have in common and move from there. Both on the forum and in your own family then your Own Neighborhood and let it work out from there.

This could have been stopped 30 years ago if everybody wasn't grabbing all they could out of life and assuming somebody else would prevent .gov corruption, and somebody else ensure the MSM only spoke God's own truth, and somebody else would take care of things we could ignore while going boating or on vacation or  watching football.  

You are now that somebody else, don't let yourself down.

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
+1

Never take the opinion of somebody who is paid to successfully deceive you continually, the better they deceive you, the more money and view time pointed at you to deceive you further.   Might match your opinion or sound good to start, but then start leading  in a slightly different direction.  Divide and Conquer.  The various groups following different leaders is what they want, easy to break down.

Simple way to spot if you are being lied to:
•  User has a "Verified Authentic" 🗹 by their User ID and hasn't been banned/censored
•  User works in Hollywood, MSM, or politics but is NOT instantly blacklisted or Red Scarfed/Hiallary'd as Isaac Kappy was when they reveal a taboo open secret (or some not so open secrets).
•  User is a voice on any news source with reach of more than 1 million  people.  (Includes social media personalities with more than 500k followers, at least they are honest there and call them what they are - influencers.)

Distrust all those who fall into those groups with enthusiasm, they'll implant their opinions into your head and you will willfully adopt them since they sound good and make perfect sense.   Once you start taking some of their beliefs, you end up taking more of them even when they aren't directly related to how you feel, you can then "understand" that opinion and eventually support it.

If you don't think this is possible or you can't be manipulated, walk around your house/closets/garage/basement looking at possessions and count how many items you see that you say "What the fuck was I thinking when I blew money on this shit?!?"  You have more opinions adopted with no more reason than appeal than you do useless junk around your house bought on impulse from personally provocative feeling for need also from an exterior source.

It's not just thinking for yourself, it's getting the data for your opinions yourself. Look for material from primary sources, if you're given "facts" from any professional news/entertainment outlet, consider it tainted and look for the original story on the internet, then read all you can about both sides before forming any sort of opinion.

Honest Skeptics

Skepticism is a healthy approach to dealing with extraordinary claims. Some of the greatest afterlife researchers began their careers as honest skeptics. From Ian Stevenson and Raymond Moody through Bruce Lipton, Helen Wambach and Gary Schwartz to Elisabeth Kubler-Ross and Bob Monroe, most of the best afterlife researchers were startled to discover some seeming anomaly. They were curious, and with an open-minded skepticism they set out to study that anomaly enough to be able to explain it and move on. Of course, the phenomena that they had paused to study turned out not to be anomalies at all, so none of them ever did move on. Today their wonderful work forms the basis of modern afterlife-related scholarship. Others, of course, have studied some phenomenon, been unconvinced, and said so. But no honest skeptic ever will attempt to mess with the evidence, or will consider his own view to be determinative of anything.

Debunkers

Skepticism in researching the afterlife is a healthy thing. But many purported skeptics now dealing with afterlife-related evidence are not operating as honest skeptics at all. They are operating instead as debunkers. When they encounter an afterlife-related phenomenon, their first reaction is not curiosity, but fear. The most common debunkers are scientists whose materialism-based careers might be at risk if reality turns out to be more complicated than what mainstream science long has supposed. Many of them are atheists as well. For them, debunking afterlife-related phenomena is a two-fer: not only can they protect their careers, but they can maybe also give God the boot!

Debunkers try to pass for honest skeptics, and it can be hard to tell them apart until you have some experience. To help you recognize debunker foolishness when you see it, here are four common debunker techniques:

1) They might choose what they think is a key aspect of some afterlife-related phenomenon and try to reproduce it under laboratory conditions, thereby in their minds proving that no supernatural explanation is necessary. In doing this, of course, they ignore whole swathes of other aspects of these phenomena which could not be so easily explained! But since they can (for example) produce tunnel vision and visual spots of light by whirling people in centrifuges, the whole well-documented phenomenon of NDEs is thereby “debunked” in their view. Someone conceivably could have opened the film-box that was on the table at Scole while a session was underway, so all the extraordinary photographic evidence which instantly appeared there must be ignored. Whenever a purported skeptical researcher focuses on just one aspect of a phenomenon, that is your cue to be skeptical of him.

2) They speak and write as if scientific hypotheses are the final word on something. As any good professional scientist knows, all scientific claims remain hypotheses. If that were not the case, then how could basic scientific advancements occur? Since all scientific claims are working hypotheses which can be revised or rebutted in the face of new information, when some “skeptic” claims to have the final word, you know he is no scientist.

3) They deny that some well-documented event actually happened. If they cannot find a way to debunk something, they simply say that it has been debunked and move on. Don’t let anyone try to tell you that any afterlife-related phenomenon has been debunked until you yourself have impartially examined all the evidence.

4) They refuse to consider bodies of afterlife-related evidence as a whole. It is in the very nature of afterlife-related phenomena that the evidence for them is extraordinary and usually highly subjective. In general, these phenomena are difficult to study and usually impossible to reproduce. You were the only witness to the appearance of your mother at the foot of your bed while she was dying half a world away? Good luck getting anyone to believe that!

5) They selectively lie. A strong word, true. They specialize in negative propaganda in areas where their lying cannot be balanced, so to do an internet search on any so-called paranormal phenomenon is to decide before the fact that you are not interested in an open-minded search for the truth. To give just one example, William Stainton Moses was arguable among the greatest natural mediums who ever lived, but yet if you attempt a Google search on his name you will learn that he is a thoroughly discredited impostor. He is not that. Check out a blog post by the venerable Michael Tymn for a more balanced view.

To honestly research the afterlife is to begin an extraordinary voyage! When I started doing afterlife research, I assumed that most of the purported afterlife communications that I was setting out to read would be nonsense. What I was looking for was a few bits of similarities among some of them, hoping that I could use those bits to get some idea of whether in fact there was an afterlife and what that afterlife was like. But in reading many hundreds of communications from the dead received over nearly 200 years, I found no outliers whatsoever and I cannot recall finding one duplication. Sure, if you look at one afterlife communication, it might have been faked. But, hundreds? And they all perfectly agree? The odds against chance for such a finding are so long as to be nearly incalculable. Personally, I find this amazing result to be my own surest evidence that all of this is real. Debunkers, however, generally insist on dealing with each event individually.

Everything that a debunker says or writes is fear-based propaganda. Ignore it! Instead, concentrate on reading honest skeptics’ original research, and draw your own conclusions.

The whole field is fractal in nature like that.

The more you look at something, the more you realize there is to learn.   Then you go deeper and you end up looping back to the beginning premise of a different aspect of the topics discussed in this forum (Paranormal/UFOs/etc).

Dunning-Krueger is a big thing, but people tend to realize that themselves.  It's easy to think you know a lot but it seems the more you know, the less you know - especially in these topics. Most don't even bother looking past their knee jerk reactions and then when they actually look the materials, they realize how much there is out here and ask themselves how the hell this isn't public knowledge.  Then you dig deeper into that and you loop into people that are/were disinformation and so you need to re-sort what you think you know.   Then jump from a different direction, and eventually it meanders back into the same area..

After digging for a while, people realize there is some huge "thing" we are ignorant of and it has many symptoms, so varied that entirely different causes are surmised for those sightings/symptoms (such as UFO/ Bigfoot sightings being in same area as a theory).  When you look at it from the philosophical, religious, scientific, common sense, and any other angle, there's always a wall that we bump into.  It's not one of understanding, it's one of essentially "missing knowledge".  

Lots of papers referenced in old books are no longer available but new ones are.  The names of government programs are known but when they are leaked, they simply change the name and lingo to use different acronyms for the same topic and truthfully say the previous one doesn't exist and they can't help.  The private companies don't even share information between teams on projects, let alone the government, other companies, and for sure not the people.

From Archaeology to Aliens, there's some huge stuff out there it seems we are being kept from learning.  All evidence points to it, but trying to define "it" is very difficult.  It's just something that gets bumped into no matter which rabbit hole you jump down, and sometimes it's interesting where you pop back up sometimes in research looking for "it".  I think this concept was best described by Pasulka in "American Cosmic", trying to look at religious happenings and ending up at UFO conferences, that book puts succinctly many of the facets of the something we don't know, and explains it in a way that fosters true understanding.   It is far better than other books on paranormal/UFO that I've read where they delve into events, which I see as symptoms.  Pasulka looks for causes which helps perspective on the whole topic.

Let's say that "a lot" of these various topics (Bigfoot/paranormal/UFO/cryptids/aliens/hollow moon/etc) is disinformation.   For the amount of material out there, we're looking at Trillions of dollars worth of misinformation.  What information are they trying to conceal worth all that time and those resources, continually, for decades?