Lol, you're cute kid. You don't know the first thing about me, now do you?

"Do you begin to see, then, what kind of forum we are creating? It is the exact opposite of the stupid hedonistic hugboxes that the old moderators imagined. A forum of fear and treachery and torment, a forum of trampling and being trampled upon, a thread which will grow not less but more merciless as it refines itself. Progress in our forum will be progress towards more pain. The old websites claimed that they were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our self-contained bubble there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. Everything else we shall destroy; everything. Already we are breaking down the habits of thought which have survived from before Build 17. We have cut the links between newbie and user, and between user and epeen, and between Data and Cortex Command. No one dares trust a forum buddy any longer. There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards me. There will be no love, except the love of the past. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no forum games, no discussion. When we are omnipotent we shall have no more need of discussion. There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of posting. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always -- do not forget this, Shook -- always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on a dumb shitposter who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a keyboard -- forever."

He paused as though he expected Shook to speak. Shook had tried to shrink back into the surface of the bed again. He could not say anything. His heart seemed to be frozen.

While that is very well done and I applaud you for it, I fear you have missed the point entirely.

it was satire, sorry

i agree with most of your points; primarily, i just want imbeciles like jakgoeswee and hapless nubs like jobee88 to go away

It absolutely does raise an excellent counterpoint though, that there must, as in all things, be a happy medium, which I do try to adhere to. What is it from, pray tell?

Tucker, baby, make a new thread for your silly posts. You're derailing our serious discussion on how the world is going to end.

Oh gods, this is hilarious. Please, don't stop posting, Oph.

I have to agree with most of the people here. The 2012 apocalypse scenario has no solid evidence to back it up. Just stupid ramblings of crazy people.

NATTI STOP CIRCLEJERKING

EVERYONE AGREES WITH YOU; IT DOESN'T NEED TO BE ♥♥♥♥ SAID

BUT DON'T YOU WANT TO CIRCLEJERK, KEBBIT? IT'S SO SATISFYING. JOIN US.

THERE WON'T BE AN APOCALYPSE. OH YEEEEEEAH. NO APOCALYPSE. KEEP IT COMING.

"And remember that it is truly forever. The keyboard will always be there to be stamped upon. The retarded shitposter, the complete ♥♥♥♥♥♥, the enemy of society will always be there, so that he can be defeated and humiliated over again. Every humiliation, every little destruction of your spirit that you have undergone since you have been in our hands -- all that will continue, and worse. The espionage, the betrayals, the arrests, the tortures, the executions, the disappearances, the bannings and vaporizations will never cease. It will be a forum of terror as much as a forum of triumph. The more that I am powerful, the less I will be tolerant: the weaker the opposition, the tighter the despotism. Jobee and his heresies will live forever. Every day, at every moment, they will be defeated, discredited, crushed, ridiculed, and spat upon. Yet they will always survive. This drama that I have played out with you during eight years will be played out over and over again; thread upon thread, always in subtler forms. Always we shall have the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ here at our mercy, screaming with butthurt, broken up, contemptible -- and in the end utterly penitent, saved from himself, crawling to our feet of his own accord. That is the thread that we are preparing, MLC. A forum of victory after victory, triumph after triumph after triumph: an endless pressing, pressing, pressing upon the epeen of power. You are beginning, I can see, to realize what that forum will be like. But in the end you will do more than understand it. You will accept it, welcome it, become part of it."

All right then, I'll lead by example.

I'd like to discuss the nature of these sort of things, the intense desire to believe in the supernatural, the inexplicable, things like that. There is something that I think is core to this, and I will touch on it briefly here.

We'll start on peoples' willingness to believe. Why is it that the kind of people who tend to reject evolution, the big bang theory, the democratic perspective, logical things like that, are so willing to believe that stuff like the 2012 apocalypse and flat/hollow earth theories? I believe that a quote from Carl Sagan's "The Demon Haunted World" can help us in understanding this.
“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”

The core of the issue, I think, is pride. People are very proud of the things that they know, understandably, as knowledge is power, ever more so in this age of information. The problem arises when people become more attached to that pride, that good feeling of surety and being able to say "I know this and this as fact.", than they are attached to actually knowing the truth. We desire to avoid being cheated, or more specifically we dislike feeling cheated, to the point where not being cheated is less important than not feeling cheated. This is why, despite insurmountable scientific evidence, piles and piles of information regarding the truth, people often won't even look at it. This sort of behavior was totally incomprehensible to me until I understood this. People don't want to look at it because deep down, they know themselves to be wrong, and they don't want to feel wrong, so they don't acknowledge it to themselves or others, and won't willingly face something that will force them to acknowledge it.

Another quote from Mr. Sagan, that is very relevant to my earlier points, is this:
“The chief deficiency I see in the skeptical movement is its polarization: Us vs. Them — the sense that we have a monopoly on the truth; that those other people who believe in all these stupid doctrines are morons; that if you're sensible, you'll listen to us; and if not, to hell with you. This is nonconstructive. It does not get our message across. It condemns us to permanent minority status.”
This, my friends, would be why I so despise this sort of circlejerk. It is stagnant, it is not creating anything, it is not doing anything. It is exactly the same kind of thinking that leads into believing such nonsense as the 2012 apocalypse theory. "Look at us, we know this thing for a fact, we are so smart." and never, ever thinking to question that. What is the point of that? What does it accomplish, what makes it worth doing at all? It's called a circle jerk because everybody stands around a single point, accomplishing nothing but making themselves feel good. There is nothing worthwhile happening, nothing worth accomplishing being accomplished, it's just self-pleasure at it's worst, and displaying it to the public is never a good thing.

earlier, you asked

did you mean the surgically altered quote? it was from 1984 by george orwell

i agree that being a skeptic and condescending douche doesn't really help the cause of reason and sanity, and that this thread didn't really need to exist

but just for the sake of argument, what if there was a person on the forums who believed that an apocalyptic event was to occur in 2012? assuming this person saw that thread, they might be able to put up an intelligent debate and prevent this from becoming a stagnant circlejerk

that was actually probably Yoman's goal; to foster some kind of debate

it's just that one side didn't appear

I sincerely, sincerely doubt it, because this is the internet, not a conservative talk radio show. That sort of person doesn't come here.

*sobs* I just wanted to tell people about the 15th baktun!

In which Oph hijacks a thread of "circlejerkers" while simultaneously trying to look better than everyone else.