Re: Why do "skeptics" troll on Bigfoot Forums?

[StankApe]

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[Blondie1]

Using the words "In my opinion" or "I think" would go far to curb a lot of the harsh and rude posts for either group.

For example "You're an idiot" or "You're crazy" or " No you're wrong" does nothing to encourage debate. Once I tell someone they are wrong for thinking the way they do, they will shut down and become defensive, which is understandable. For them to even consider what I have to say I need to remain civil and respect their beliefs.

I often think that if we would respect others opinions or beliefs and respond civily (even while gritting our teeth) and not attack it would save everyone's blood pressure.

As far as I'm concerned facts should always be stated with links to back them up. BUT...that is only my opinion. If someone has a link I'll go and read it.

I do not consider "skeptics "trolls if they present their position civily and respect civil responses. I truly wish all (both sides) could ignore the baiting which so often happens.( For a while I got lots of practice.) I like it when someone states what they believe and why, not try to force it down my throat! Because I believe something different, I'm not wrong, I just have different beliefs and experiences which cause me to think the opposing way.

It's the toilet people I consider trolls, the ones who act like they are 10 years old and have discovered new words and leave filthy, racist, sexual inuendo comments. In my mind trolls look like Jabba sitting at a computer screen all day getting great satisfaction from the shock effect and stirring up trouble. I sometimes wonder if they have a rating system they use to grade themselves!

*All of the above is my opinion only...

[CMcMillan]

That's cuz the math says it should exist. Not because somebody can't prove it doesn't. 2 different types of possible there.


The Higgs Boson fit in the standard model of particles. hence it "should" have existed.

Some people think Fairies and witches are real. Though they are both possible I guess (or can't be shown to be impossible) but I would submit that though, possible, it is very unlikely that they exist.

They haven't Verified that what they discovered was the HIGGS BOSON yet. They said it could be or it could be something else.
Math did not SAY it should be their.
Science NEEDED to explain WHY something was not acting as they Predicted it was suppose too.

Again WHich theory or Quantum Gravirty is Correct ?
Could one be afraid to even answer this because it puts their whole belief that science doesn't Believe in things that at present can not be Identified or explained so we have 3 Different theories to explain the single Idea.

[StankApe]

g

[*****]

Ladies and Gentleman:

Can we try a little harder to play nice? Analogies, Higgs Boson, snipe, snipe, snipe. It so unappealing, and I think we are all tiring of this back and forth between the two of you. How about you both just IGNORE the other?

[Virgil_Caine]

[Virgil_Caine]

Yes it is getting a bit tired. Maybe if there was more humor or use of emoticons there wouldn't be as much of an air of bad vibes. To be honest this whole idea of skeptic vs proponent is off putting to me. I think if people want to believe in bigfoot I can still like them and not feel the need to challenge them personally. I am sure there is something about blogging that creates this sort of tension.

Anybody read Escudilla by Aldo Leopold. Now there's a fine short story.

Escudilla By Aldo Leopold    Life in Arizona was bounded under foot by grama grass, overhead by sky, and on the horizon by Escudiila.  To the north of the mountain you rode on honey-colored plains.  Look up anywhere, any time, and you saw Escudilla.  To the east you rode over a confusion of wooded mesas.  Each hollow seemed its own small world, soaked in sun, fragrant with juniper, and cozy with the chatter of pinyon jays.  But top out on a ridge and you at once became a speck in an immensity.  On its edge hung Escudilla.  To the south lay the tangled canyons of Blue River, full of whitetails, wild turkeys, and wilder cattle.  When you missed a saucy buck waving his goodbye over the skyline, and looked down your sights to wonder why, you looked at a far blue mountain:  Escudilla.  To the west billowed the outliers of the Apache National Forest.  We cruised timber there, converting the tall pines, forty by forty, into notebook figures representing hypothetical lumber piles.  Panting up a canyon, the cruiser felt a curious incongruity between the remoteness of his notebook symbols and the immediacy of sweaty fingers, locust thorns, deer-fly bites, and scolding squirrels.  But on the next ridge a cold wind, roaring across a green sea of pines, blew his doubts away.  On the far shore hung Escudilla.  The mountain bounded not only our work and our play, but even our attempts to get a good dinner.  On winter evenings we often tried to ambush a mallard on the river flats.  The wary flocks circled the rosy west, and the steel-blue north, and then disappeared into the inky black of Escudilla.  If they reappeared on set wings, we had a fat drake for the Dutch oven.  If they failed to reappear, it was bacon and beans again.  There was, in fact, only one place from which you did not see Escudilla on the skyline: that was the top of Escudilla itself.  Up there you could not see the mountain, but you could feel it.  The reason was the big bear.  Old Bigfoot was a robber-baron, and Escudilla was his castle.  Each spring, when the warm winds had softened the shadows on the snow, the old grizzly crawled out of his hibernation den in the rock slides and, descending the mountain, bashed in the head of a cow.  Eating his fill, he climbed back to his crags, and there summered peaceably on marmots, conies, berries, and roots.  I once saw one of his kills.  The cow's skull and neck were pulp, as if she had collided head-on with a fast freight.  No one ever saw the old bear, but in the muddy springs about the base of the cliffs you saw his incredible tracks.  Seeing them made the most hard-bitten cowboys aware of bear.  Wherever they rode they saw the mountain, and when they saw the mountain they thought of bear.  Campfire conversation ran to beef, bailes, and bear.  Bigfoot claimed for his own only a cow a year, and a few square miles of useless rocks, but his personality pervaded the country.  Those were the days when progress first came to the cow country.  Progress had various emissaries.  One was the first transcontinental automobilist.  The cowboys understood this breaker of roads; he talked the same breezy bravado as any breaker of broncos.  They did not understand, but they listened to and looked at, the pretty lady in black velvet who came to enlighten them, in a Boston accent, about woman suffrage.  They marveled, too, at the telephone engineer who strung wires on the junipers and brought instantaneous messages from town.  An old man asked whether the wire could bring him a side of bacon.  One spring, progress sent still another emissary, a government trapper, a sort of St. George in overalls, seeking dragons to slay at government expense.  Were there, he asked, any destructive animals in need of slaying?  Yes, there was the big bear.  The trapper packed his mule and headed for Escudilla.  In a month he was back, his mule staggering under a heavy hide.  There was only one barn in town big enough to dry it on.  He had tried traps, poison, and all his usual wiles to no avail.  Then he had erected a set-gun in a defile through which only the bear could pass, and waited.  The last grizzly walked into the string and shot himself.  It was June.  The pelt was foul, patchy, and worthless.  It seemed to us rather an insult to deny the last grizzly the chance to leave a good pelt as a memorial to his race.  All he left was a skull in the National Museum, and a quarrel among scientists over the Latin name of the skull.  It was only after we pondered on these things that we began to wonder who wrote the rules for progress.     *    *    *    Since the beginning, time had gnawed at the basaltic hulk of Escudilla, wasting, waiting and building.  Time built three things on the old mountain, a venerable aspect, a community of minor animals and plants, and a grizzly.  The government trapper who took the grizzly knew he had made Escudilla safe for cows.  He did not know he had toppled the spire off an edifice a-building since the morning stars sang together.  The bureau chief who sent the trapper was a biologist versed in the architecture of evolution, but he did not know that spires might be as important as cows.  He did not foresee that within two decades the cow country would become tourist country, and as such have greater need of bears than of beefsteaks.  The Congressmen who voted money to clear the ranges of bears were the sons of pioneers.  The acclaimed the superior virtues of the frontiersman, but they strove with might and main to make an end of the frontier.  We forest officers, who acquiesced in the extinguishment of the bear, knew a local rancher who had plowed up a dagger engraved with the name of one of Coronado's captains.  We spoke harshly of the Spaniards who, in their zeal for gold and converts, had needlessly extinguished the native Indians.  It did not occur to us that we, too, were the captains of an invasion too sure of its own righteousness.  Escudilla still hangs on the horizon, but when you see it you no longer think of bear.  It's only a mountain now.  

[CMcMillan]

Sorry I have tried to put him on Ignore but since He is a MOD I can not.
The system will not allow me too.

Well I am tired of him always saying tha REAL science does this or that and it Doesn't but he will not admit it.

He is always saying that it is impossible or real science doesn't work that way... Yet we see it time and time again that Science is not exact as people want to think it is. They have just as many unfounded Theories that have not been proven true or false yet these people let these things a pass but when it comes to bigfoot they don't.
WHY IS THAT?

[Kel]

"......Anybody read Escudilla by Aldo Leopold. Now there's a fine short story.

Thank you, Virgil! Oh, yes indeed it was ~ a triumph of human imagination. What a brilliant gift with words. My favorite line was this: "But top out on a ridge and you at once became a speck in an immensity."

I first had that experience in Arizona, too. I was bombing along, heading north on beautiful US 93 between Phx and Kingman, and just like that, I came up on a ridge and it happened. I had to pull over and get out. Literally shaken. As far as I could see in any direction, there was nothing but hills and mountains and rocks and desert, and a sky bigger than I ever could have imagined. No power lines, no trace of civilization whatsoever, except for the 2-lane blacktop. Yeah, that description was perfection ~ "you at once became a speck in an immensity".

On another note, Virgil. About your name. I've had that song stuck in my head for about two straight weeks now... this is gonna get old

[Sweetsusiq]

The answer? IMO, many of these people aren't skeptics at all. In reality, many of them are DEEPLY FASCINATED by the possibility of this creature and many DO believe in BF, but don't want to be thought of as crackpots or kooks, so they are hedging their bets by hiding under the mantle of "skeptic". In reality, if Ketchum's paper and the competing study are released and prove BF to be a REAL animal, no one will be happier than some of these clowns. It's just like many of those so-called "atheists"; why are they so angry? Because they WANT to believe in God, but are afraid to. Same thing here. Ever notice how ANGRY some of these "skeptics" get when you engage them in debate? If what people choose to believe in(God, BF) is silly and not real, then why don't "skeptics" just let folks believe what they want? Don't get me wrong, there are some TRUE skeptics, and that's fine, to each his own, but WHY, WHY, WHY if they are SOOOOOO intelligent, would they waste time in angry argument with people who believe in "fairy tales"? Anyway, that's just one man's opinion. Your thoughts?

Methinks your fatal error here is over-generalization, IATB. I haven't seen MOST skeptics get "angry" at all, except occasionally in response to a slam from a "believer". Not at all. Same with Atheists ~ I know plenty of perfectly happy (and unencumbered) Atheists, though I think that's a topic unrelated to Bigfoot.

I do agree most skeptics here are hopeful BF will be proven. Who wouldn't think it's cool to learn we have a relation among us that managed to dodge the trappings of humanity? Skeptics simply require more proof than "trust me" because they haven't personally seen BF. Yet that doesn't make one a "closet believer". And that also doesn't mean one can't or shouldn't be interested in following the search for answers.

You obviously are a believer. Do all believers agree BF come out of UFOs, travel an underground web of tunnels, use Mind-speak and block cameras with their EMF waves? We already know true believers debate the "human vs animal" issue. There's also constant in-fighting among different believer groups.

So why be so black and white about either side? I think you'd agree there are troll idiots on both sides, so I will guess you are not always fully reading the context of comments that offend you.

I believed in BF before I ever saw one in person. There were just too many stories and the PGF, which my dad and I believed to be true, for there not to be something apelike and large living in our forests. My dad was well educated, had dual Ph.Ds, and had spent his youth in the forests of Virginia and then Georgia hiking and camping. He told me stories of his experiences, and then when the PGF happened daddy said that he remember thinking "Finally, Proof!" So he had some knowledge of some sort about these creatures.

[Sweetsusiq]

The answer? IMO, many of these people aren't skeptics at all. In reality, many of them are DEEPLY FASCINATED by the possibility of this creature and many DO believe in BF, but don't want to be thought of as crackpots or kooks, so they are hedging their bets by hiding under the mantle of "skeptic". In reality, if Ketchum's paper and the competing study are released and prove BF to be a REAL animal, no one will be happier than some of these clowns. It's just like many of those so-called "atheists"; why are they so angry? Because they WANT to believe in God, but are afraid to. Same thing here. Ever notice how ANGRY some of these "skeptics" get when you engage them in debate? If what people choose to believe in(God, BF) is silly and not real, then why don't "skeptics" just let folks believe what they want? Don't get me wrong, there are some TRUE skeptics, and that's fine, to each his own, but WHY, WHY, WHY if they are SOOOOOO intelligent, would they waste time in angry argument with people who believe in "fairy tales"? Anyway, that's just one man's opinion. Your thoughts?

Ummm, no.................

Skepticisim is merely to require the presence of compelling evidence before signing off on anything as plausible and/or real. I used to think that the PGF was the best evidence I had seen when I was younger, but after examining the blown up stills and video I came to the conclusion it was a suit based on various anomalies. Being that this was the only evidence that had me on the 55% side of plausible I became skeptical that Bigfoot was real. Though my childhood fascination with the subject remained.

To be a skeptic doesn't mean that one dismisses (no matter what certain people "cough cough Mulder" may tell you) it means that one questions and requires proof. I would love for Bigfoot to be real. However, at this present time there is no evidence compelling enough to make such a judgement. If Sykes' paper comes out on the side of unknown hominid and this is followed by a body or enough of a body that a real primatologist/anatomist can identify at as a new, previously undescribed/extinct critter. Then my position is open to change.

The most amusing thing about this is the militant bleevers who by into every picture, every goofy story and propagate the "psychic squatch, shapeshifting, clothes wearing " ideas that make all of you look ridiculous.

In the long run, IF Bigfoot is real, it's just a critter in the woods. Nothing fancier than a pocket gopher or a barn owl.



as an atheist i can answer your second question: It's because we are trying to stop the spread of ignorance and have people grow beyond the middle ages. It's tim to put these silly superstitions to bed and evolve as a scientific society.

It is wonderful to see you and anyone else acknowledge that BF is a creature living in the woods around the world, and has no supernatural powers, nor does he fly off in UFOs. Some of these odd to me beliefs just floor me. How do they even come up with these ideas? Animals are animals, now if you locate a living Unicorn, I will be thrilled!

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