woof! said:
I've done necromancy too. It wasn't supernatural, it had nothing to do with performance art, it proved nothing of a scientific nature to anyone, it was not a con game and it was a good thing. For good reason that the OT prophet (sorry I forgot chapter and verse) excoriated necromancers who "peep and jibber", that kind of necromancy leads to nothing good and is nearly always fraudulent anyhow. Slim is a performance artist, he can explain this stuff better than I can (probably almost as well as AR can) but I predict that he won't. He earns his living at it. In his own way, he's just another AR.
To put it from another angle, he wants the AR foundation or whatever to make a big investment in a Slim peep-and-jibber show. Whatever the AR foundation or whatever is, they ain't that particular kind of idjit. Peep-&-jibber shows are old hat, they do more to make fools of perps than to prove anything interesting about dead souls. What Slim himself has posted is still online, Slim may be ashamed of it but the AR foundation or whatever isn't.
--Toto
This thread began as critique of "the Amazing Randi". There have been some interesting developments in that story, some of which his personal critics may have gotten a whiff of a lot sooner than did the rest of us who had nothing invested in the guy one way or the other. That story is still unfolding, I don't know how it will turn out. But here's my take on it, subject to revision without notice.
1. The guy's accused of being homosexual. What's that to me? I really don't give a carp. Some of the best people I've known male and female have been gay, and of the worst nearly all have been hetero or at least pretending to be so.
2. His young buddy is accused of identity fraud, being an illegal alien. The "illegal alien" part doesn't bother me any, given that most of our ancestors came here without legal status, and also because I live less than an hour's walk from Mexico. Wild guess 1% of my co-workers are illegal and 10% of my neighbors are, I make no such distinction myself, that's for the taxman to decide. Identity fraud, well, that's fraud no matter how you cut it. Who was harmed by the fraud and by how much? Heck, if it weren't for the US Government turning a blind eye to SS account fraud, you (in the USA) wouldn't know what food looks like, so remember that when you say Grace. AR's buddy is just part of the system that gave you diabetes and kept the roof on your house repaired.
3. AR is a "magician" (i.e., stage performer) by any standard. It's an honorable profession and he admits to practicing it. He has done the world a service by attempting to educate people on how con artists use similar techniques, especially trying to educate scientists how con men work because many scientists simply assume that most people have intellectual integrity. That's how the Internet which began as a system where trust was more or less a given, became the world of computer crime that we constantly have to defend against no differently than from our own physical front door.
4. AR (as I understand it) established a foundation and a US$1M prize for (to simplify it) prove something previously regarded as supernatural, thereby revising scientific understanding. The prize was not a $20 bill. He said (as I understand it) that his money was probably safe, but that seeing scientific understanding overturned was worth a million bucks if you've got it, and he evidently had it. Of course an offer like that is an open invitation to con artists who either want the million bucks itself or a claim to have been cheated out of it. So ya gotta cut BS'ers some slack to maintain some credibility, but at some point ya gotta lose patience with pretenders.
5. How many people have applied for the million bucks? And actually met the standards imposed for screening qualification, after this ain't welfare!? Of those, how many had the competency to negotiate a million-dollar proof protocol, assuming that the AR foundation was completely honest and eager to see the money go to a prizewinner? Well heck, where is that contestant? So far, as far as I know, the contestants have been bigger crooks than the AR Foundation Whatever, has been accused of being.
6. It feels rather odd here, defending an organization that I know virtually nothing about, knowing only too well the people and organizations who are attacking it. Is AR & Co. saints? Probably not. Is your preferred Presidential candidate (USA) a saint? Gotta be kidding! We're all sinners!
7. As I said, "knowing only too well the people and organizations who are attacking." You also know them, and the point-blank question is what do they pin on you? Do you knuckle under, or do you create a world better and smarter than the one than the world as it really is, was delivered to you for you to reinvent?
--Toto
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