Listener Feedback X

by Brian Dunning
December 1, 2009

As I sit here at my desk, it's a beautiful fall morning, sunny and clear. What better way to brighten it even further, than to open my inbox, and hear what some of my detractors have to say. People often ask me if all my email is really this bad. The fact is that very little negative feedback ever comes through email; it's almost always posted to the web comment form. I guess the people who hate me don't want the comparatively personal confrontation of email. In fact I welcome it, so bring it on! But for today, here is a selection of a few more interesting snippets of feedback.

The first comes from Rob in Burbank, CA, regarding my episode on The Rendlesham Forest UFO. In 1980, some new young recruits to an airfield in the UK chased a blinking light through the forest, unaware it was merely the beam of a nearby lighthouse. Later some of them embellished the story to turn it into a fullblown UFO encounter. Like many people who watch the cable networks, Rob seems to prefer the supernatural explanation:

I've been studying this case for years, and I'm not sure what your objective here is but you certainly missed a great deal of the story.. I've heard interviews of all the men involved and where's the letter from Lt. Col Halt? Where's the statement from the British Ministry of Defense.. It is so funny that you mentioned the lighthouse. That was debunked years ago as the lighthouse has a shield on the back so it doesn't interfere with the the AFB operations. Love how you picked just the pieces that would prove your skewed point.. What a flake you are.

I have no idea whether a shield may have since been installed, but if you've been "studying the case for years", you've no doubt seen the video of the lighthouse taken from the base, and read the police reports taken on that night where the local constables stated the airmen were following the lighthouse. So there certainly was no shield in 1980. I find this assertion bizarre. You also ask about Col. Halt's report and the statement from Ministry of Defense. For time constraints I summarized their contents in the episode, because they don't really contain anything particularly interesting. But if you'd like to see them for yourself, here are links to them: Col. Halt's memo, statement from the Ministry of Defense. Col. Halt simply reported the stories given by the men, which I gave in detail; and the Ministry of Defense simply said that as far as they're concerned it's a non-incident. If this is your best evidence that "I'm a flake" and I cherrypicked evidence, I hope your profession is not in research.

On a lighter note, here's a profound and insightful thought from "Mr. Nook" on the "East Coast" of the USA, on my episode about shadow people:

HAH. I have just made a decision. I am going to be like Brian Dunning. I am going to become an authority on something i know nothing about. let's see, I do not know how to perform open heart surgery, so I am going to start writing articles on a website with my thoughts on the subject and how i think it's not done right. this guy probably works at McDonald's when he's not typing on his site. I bet his kids are totally jacked up. he's probably brain washed them. I see another Fred Phelps rising up.

If that's really the way I am, why do you want to be like me? Oh well, I guess we all have our aspirations.

Here's a good one. My episode on multilevel marketing, predictably, drew in all sorts of multilevel marketers, who used the comment form as a stump from which to pitch their miracle business plan. "Team Acai Chico" from Chico, CA, posted the following:

MonaVie has a document called the Income Disclosure Statement that is essentially our W-2. It show's the High, Low and average earnings of it's Distributors. The document states that 99% of Distributors earned an average of somewhere in between $23 and $65,548 per week for the weeks of July 4, 2008 to June 26, 2009. Link to Income Disclosure Statement is: monavie.com/ids

Take a look at that document. After the $2K minimum required purchases, it shows that 85% lost money, and 97% made less than $7K/yr. How reliable is that? All the data is self-reported ON THE ORDERING FORM!!!! But even crazier, a sharp reader pointed out that to even be included on that statement, you have to have recruited at least one person and received at least one bonus. MonaVie reported to Newsweek that fewer than 1% of their distributors who make these required purchases ever qualified for any commission at all, so the remaining 99% who never recovered a dime are all excluded from the "averages" reported on this statement. So, in effect, this document (produced for marketing purposes) boasts that 99% of all MonaVie participants, plus 85% of the top 1%, lose money. This is the best that Team Acai Chico can come up with to try to impress me?? Like I said in the episode: Victims like Team Acai Chico are susceptible to these plans for two reasons — (a) lack of business acumen, and (b) poor math skills.

"PJ" from "DK" had this to say on my episode about the safety of food cooked in a microwave oven:

I've been eating micro stuff for a decade, and i'm feeling worse and worse, my memory is bad, my concentration is bad etc.

Let me just ask you a question, PJ. What happens to the average normal human being as they age? They feel worse, their memory and concentration seems to go. These are called "symptoms of life". They're the things that happen to most people as they get older. But let me ask you another question: Over that entire decade where you've eaten microwaved food, have you ever done anything else that might affect your health? Have you aged? Are you obese? Do you smoke, drink, exercise, swim in toxic waste, take good care of yourself? Do you have any congenital conditions? Is it really likely that eating microwaved food is the only risk factor you've been exposed to? Why single it out?

Do you feel you're not as young as you used to be? Yes. Do you eat microwaved food? Yes. Omigod, a correlation!!! Let me ask you one more question: Do you use toothpaste? Yes? Omigod!!! It must be poison!

I did an episode called Screwed, a musical parody of a meeting of a secret society of Illuminati planning their takeover of the world through conspiracy and deceit. I waited curiously to see what people this one would draw from the woodwork, and was not disappointed in the person of Joe from Hanover, ON. Interestingly, Joe was, for a while, one of the most prolific posters of pro-Christian commentary on the website, preaching Biblical literalism and Young Earth creation. When he heard Screwed, Joe said:

...If any of you don't believe that "the New World Order of Masonic Illuminati" or something similar do not exist, then they have successfully pulled the wool over your eyes. Doing spoofs or parodies on secret societies is fun, but there's a line from an old song that says "the devil thinks it's great that you don't believe in him...". The same applies to the hidden hands of governance. Are you paying attention, Mr Dunning? When you have been plastic-monied, data-chipped, phone-tapped, email-tapped, and protected by a ton of "for-your-safety" laws, to the death of your liberty, you may not have room to wonder where and why it all came upon us. "The best thing for tyranny to succeed is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke. Oh yeah, deception is hilarious.

It's funny. Of course everyone (or almost everyone) agrees that unreasonable invasion of our privacy is detrimental in many ways. I don't like it that everything I buy with my debit card can be tracked. I don't like it that phones and emails can be tapped, even though I don't have any particular reason to care. What I do is my business. To that point, I think most of us would agree with Joe. And I'll agree with Joe on one other point: There is almost certainly something out there that most of us don't know about that would allow the goverment to track some aspect of what we do. I don't care for that. But tracing your point-of-sale purchases and archiving your Gmail are not really the driving evils of the type of secret society I was parodying in Screwed.

Where Joe leaves the realm of rationality is in his belief that such tracking is not only pervasive and malevolent, it extends to far more than just surveillance and constitutes control. He believes his life is being controlled by a secret power. He believes that anyone who does not embrace a belief in this secret power has had the wool pulled over their eyes. Secret, Joe, means secret. That means you don't know about it. That means there is no evidence. There's nothing secret or mysterious about ATM transactions. The secret overlords manipulating Joe are really just one more expression of his faith. Well Joe, I don't choose to live and make my decisions outside the realm of what's real. I don't put entities whose very existence requires faith in charge of my life. If you prefer to do so, then there's a secret alien entity out there that wants you to make large contributions to Skeptoid.

I like to always close with a particularly fun one. I did a joke episode about homeopathy. It was ten minutes of silence, which I thought was a fun way to make the point. Tom from Dusseldorf had this to say:

You are just an arse homeopathy works no matter what you spew out your mouth

Even, apparently, when I spew nothing at all.

By Brian Dunning
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