I did a search on John Titor and only one thread came up (coincidentally a current thread, with our own SDMB time traveler. I guess posting on forums is just etiquette if you’re in a foreign time), after hearing about Titor and his tales from a friend this weekend. I had a look at the site (www.johntitor.com) and my bullshitometer refused to drop below deep orange.
What’s the dope here? crazy prankster? are we reserving judgement for another year or two? busy taking lessons on water purification?
(apologies if this is a beaten to death UL kind of thing)
I think even ‘crazy prankster’ is too kind; it is just the lame, unimaginative rambings of someone with too much time on their hands.
Well, first of all, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. John Titor’s all about not offering up anything that can actually be checked. Second of all, the future he describes reads to me like some goofball’s view of the way things ought to be. Case in point: “It might also interest you to know that the day of worship is Saturday, the day God meant to be the Sabbath and the 10 commandments have been restored to the ‘10’ that God gave us.” In the future, all major denominations will, for no particular reason, simultaneously alter their traditional day of worship. How likely is that?
Bottom line: What Mangetout said. I could do just as well or better pretending to be a time traveller.
Time to put my money where my mouth is:
Ask the ‘time traveller from the future’.
Indeed. The crap about the sabbath and the gun-toting made me wonder what kind of coincidence it would be for him to choose (from all the forums out there) to post on a forum composed predominantly of paranoid patriots, and then describe their ideal future to them.
Good one, Mangetout! But you need to work on your vagueness. As anyone from the future could confirm, details are a no-no (Paul first? 
).
Actually, it is a lot harder than I thought; the picture I’ve painted so far in MPSIMS contains a lot of inconsistencies (although I may be able to fabricate ad-hoc explanations for these). I should have planned it a little more.
Inspired by this thread, last night I eschewed my usual novel at bedtime, and printed out and read the entire johntitor.com site (107 pages of foolscap).
Here are the ‘predictions’ he got right: China will put a man in space soon. There will be a damn fool war in Iraq.
The “hints at 9-11” I couldn’t find anywhere. Everything else was tosh based on current affairs in 2000 - e.g. CJD never became an epidemic at all.
It was a mildly diverting piece of science fiction. It was also the wish-fulfillment fantasy of a libertarian communalist militia type.