The only thing holding back the electric car is a better battery (cheaper, more capacity, faster to charge). Big Oil and Big Auto would have a hell of a time trying to suppress that tech when it has such a huge potential market elsewhere.
Well, that is a tall order. 
(That smilie is for what I have seen in this thread)
I did concentrate on the point that the issue of the sonnets was not dealt with in the other thread; and that thread, far from just being full of jokes, it was also full of counterpoints. As it turns out, the issue of the sonnets was already looked at, the point is that when I see those items I linked cavalierly dismissed here I have to say that what the experts on Shakespeare report is still the most valid position.
And based on more recent evidence found it seems to me that the ones that propose that Shakespeare did not wrote most of his works to be the ones that need to get much more evidence than just very nice theories.
Not really as earth-shattering as the above examples. One conspiracy I half-believed was the NBA conspiracy theory. Large-market and popular teams had outcomes determined by outside forces, like TV or the refs. I thought the 2002 Lakers-Kings playoff game was the fishiest, due to the enormous disparity in fouls called.
Turned out it was absolutely true: Referee Tim Donaghy did influence the game!
The strangest part: Nothing happened. Yes, the ref went to jail, but I don’t recall any major backlash other than “he was a lone wolf, nothing to see here”.
What does ‘blue blood is black blood’ mean?
Royal Moors hidden from white posterity, if I understand it properly.
What about chemtrails, people? We’re being poisoned by chemicals (we don’t know what kind) being sprayed from the sky (by we’re not sure whom) for obviously nefarious reasons (though we’re not sure why). I work with a guy who belives this, and he is a mental gnat.
Somehow “hardy perennial” is too benevolent a term.
Russian thistle? Flesh-seeking zombie?
Well, “industrial-grade horseshit” wasn’t bad.
I think there might be something to the claim that conspiracy theories are a conspiracy dreamed up by our Unseen Overlords, to distract us from getting involved in productive activities that might threaten the Power Structure.
Well, right - on the SDMB, pro-Shakespeareans outnumber anti’s by a very large margin.
But I thought **septimus **and **Trinopus **complained that their arguments are dismissed too easily. I’d be happy to go through each one without any eye-rolls or anything.
The break down of a marriage is almost always the result of a multitude of problems and differences. It was like that for me, but I can tell you with conviction that it became a defining moment in our relationship the day that my husband (now ex) came home from a talk about chemtrails given by some crazy author at a local bookstore. I was hanging out with our boy (then 13 years old) when his dad began telling us everything he had learned. We both sat there listening to him talk while our jaws were dropping lower and lower. I think that my face/nose/eyes were about as scrunched up as they could possibly get. My boy was shaking his head and wanted to interrupt, but was trying hard to be respectful. When I realized that he actually believed what he had been fed, and that he was trying his damnedest to convince us that they are real - I stopped him and said, “Ok, enough. I cannot listen to this shit for one more minute.” He accused me of sticking my head in the sand. I dismissed his comment, walked away before an argument could even get started and knew at that very moment that I could never spend the rest of my life with him. For that reason (and many others) I have been divorced for almost three years after 17 years of marriage…from the man whom I once considered smart…and sane.
Worse, many of the anti’s are roaring crackpots. And, worse yet, there are the Baconians and the DeVereians and the Marloweists and so on.
I started reading Joe Sobran’s book with two very strong prejudices against him. First, he was a political essayist whose opinions I strongly detested. And, secondly, I thought the whole idea of Shakespeare authorship revisionism was horsepoop. Sobran, in his book, quietly and logically convinced me – not that the idea was right, but that the idea wasn’t horsepoop. He put forward some solid, cogent, reasoned arguments.
He convinced me, against my will! Damn, that’s good writing!
ETA: The only reason I’m discussing any of this is to suggest that the idea isn’t a “conspiracy theory.” It is, rather, an issue of possible misattribution of authorship. It doesn’t require a conspiracy. My examples of Clarke and Mozart show that this sort of thing can happen – has happened! Simple errors in cataloguing.
I’m not here defending the idea per se, only trying to get it re-characterized as something other than a CT.
Well, there may be something about some misattribution, but I think that unwillingly we are trowing a huge bone here early in the game regarding the bit about the “pro-Shakespeareans outnumbering the anti’s in the SDMB”,** it gives IMHO the impression that this is not the case elsewhere and specially where it counts**, and that is a very basic maneuver of many conspiracy and pseudosciences out there, proponents (not you of course) of very alternative theories attempt to convince people outside academia (where they lost the argument many times) that there is division among the expert scholars and historians, when that is not the case.
And here I’m just saying: Many people that investigate pseudoscience and CTs, have pointed out that one very effective way to deflate a crock is to inform others about the actual levels of support a fringe view has among the experts.
Hi GIGObuster. You post lots and lots of links to pro-Stratfordian pages. I see no response addressing my question: Demonstrate that you’ve studied the anti-Stratfordian arguments.
The previous thread teemed with insults and non sequiturs, and demonstrated that very few of the participating Dopers had even a slight clue about Oxfordian or other anti-Stratfordian arguments.
Lacking any expertise and confused by conflicting claims, I’m uncertain about the Authorship. (One of the many remarkable claims in the earlier thread was that that must be a lie: everyone falls into one of two viewpoints: certainty that Shakespeare or certainty that he did not.)
That’s why I took the opportunity to ask specific questions in the prior thread; questions that would shed light for me and would surely be addressed in some of the myriads of dissertations. I was met with lots of “Why do you want to know?” “What stupid misconception are you operating under?” …* but never an actual answer to any of my questions.*
For me, interest has moved from the Authorship mystery itself to amazement at the diction and argumentation that appears in Internet debates on the topic.
May I conduct a simple poll before going away quietly? I’m curious whether fellow Dopers would give greater credence to my position or that of Musicat in the following exchange:
This may well be an effective strategy when appealing to those with critical thinking capacity.
The response you typically get from the CT-prone is that the small fringe view represents Brave Mavericks who defy the lockstep opinions of their colleagues (who actually agree, doncha know, but are too intimidated by the Man to admit it). Their other counter is that those expressing the tiny minority view must be respected because of their academic credentials (which sound good, until you realize that their degrees and expertise are usually unrelated to the field upon which they’re expounding).
And of course, “experts” is a dirty word for some people, who think their own Google Research trumps years of training and practical experience in a particular field.
Yeah, for me chemtrails fall into a whole different category from, say, the JFK conspiracy theory. I’m not convinced that there’s enough evidence to sustain a JFK theory, but the core theory makes sense. Chemtrails make *no *sense at all. If I’m getting it right, The Man wants to test the effects of some chemical, right? So he sprays it into the air at random and then…what? Checks the rates of absolutely everything in the area for the next hundred years, to see if they vary from some other area? How do you know who was exposed to the chemical, given that the wind is gonna blow it around? How do you know how many of the people you’re surveying moved into town after the spraying, or happened to be out of town that week? How on earth would your data mean anything? And why on earth would you bother?
I don’t give a flip what a bunch of legally-trained individuals think about literary history. I have no idea why you think this bolsters your argument.
I checked the equine scatology box above, but I will note that two of the items on the list may have something to them, albeit not in the typical PCT vein.
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There are a (probably small) number Muslims who would consider the President a Muslim by virtue of his father being a Muslim. I have seen NO evidence that the President considers himself a Muslim in any meaningful sense of the word.
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It is probable that something major, that is still classified (i.e., beyond the scope of Project Mogul), happened at Roswell in 1947, but I do not believe that it had anything to do with extraterrestrials. The secrecy maintained was just too intense for a crashed spy balloon, and given the since-acknowledged government activities in period involving atomic weapons and germ warfare, I find it parsiminous to believe (or at least not dismiss) that they were up to something with ramifications that would still cause a backlash today.
This fellow launched an epically bad thread on the SDMB some time ago. There may be even an itty bitty bit to it in that Northern European monarchs may have had more Southern European/North African ancestry than their typical subject by virtue of marriage alliances with far-flung noble families, but the idea as expounded is a train wreck.
I admit to knowing nothing about your Clarke and Mozart examples.
I will throw out that the first folio clearly calls Shakespeare the author of all the plays therein, that it was edited by people who personally knew Shakespeare and the workings of the Lord Chamberlain’s/King’s Men, and that the attribution also agrees with many of the play printed in quarto editions previously (I don’t mean to imply that some disagree - just many quartos were published without any attribution). These guys wouldn’t have accidentally miscatalogued something.
Of course, playwriting then wasn’t a man alone in a quiet room affair. Many parts were contributed by many. I liken it to a band working on a song that one member has written. But none of the people who could have disputed the attribution. Fletcher was credited when it was warranted - whatever standard they had for deciding if a play was co-written or not.
A couple of good books have been written about the events, one by Joe Nickell I believe, that are as thorough and well-documented as necessary to clear away any mystery. It was a simple incident, blown out of proportion and then wrapped in the smoke and mirrors of Cold War paranoia. Remember, Mogul was an extremely highly classified project dealing with the most sensitive issues of the Cold War - it needs no dressing up to see why the AF and US reacted as they did.
Like the enormous amount of accretions attached to the basic facts of Bermuda Triangle events, Roswell had a number of separate things attached to it - such the balloon dummies from a later time and different project, and some aspects of the supposed coverup that were cover stories for other secret projects.
The “Roswell Incident” boils down to the simple bullet list above, coupled with expanding paranoia and misunderstanding and then the addition of unrelated events.