The buildings they made like this:
didn’t last as well.
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ETA link and my humble opinion.
“JAQing off” and How to deal with It
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-019-0632-4
These strategies are Very hard to achieve, as you have tô master the subject challenged by the JAQer. I think embracing surrealism and answering the question with a more absurd statement will do the job.
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Behind the Bastards did a series on Helena Blavatsky that covered a lot of this same ground, IIRC:
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“I’m trying to overthrow the paradigm of history”
Every Holocaust denier says the same thing. Go figure.
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Hancock, “I don’t claim to be an archaeologist or a scientist. I am a journalist…”
… well, not exactly a journalist; more a huckster and white supremacist. Buy my book to find out more!
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Which Call of Cthulhu sourcebook did you pull that map from?
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It is from the “Over the Edge” rpg; that’s like CoC on very bad acid 
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They are really nailing the 80s CoC style. Just needs to be brown
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A powerful and dangerous sentiment. It helped get Trump elected.
The American Mind is an online magazine of the Claremont Institute, a right-wing think tank in California that has, in recent years, become increasingly influential in Republican circles. Scholars at Claremont have long subscribed to the belief that the American republic has been dismantled, the Constitution corrupted by left-wing ideas, a viewpoint that is increasingly in step with that of the broader American right. In recent years, the Claremont Institute has also drawn attention for its deliberate provocations, most memorably with the publication in 2016 of “The Flight 93 Election.” The essay took as its guiding metaphor the only plane on 9/11 prevented from hitting its target by passengers who wrested control of the aircraft, arguing that the election that fall presented conservatives with a similar choice: either “you charge the cockpit” (i.e. vote for Donald Trump) “or you die.” In many ways, “Flight 93” was era-defining, abetting a reckoning within the conservative movement and prefiguring the take-no-prisoners style of right-wing politics that would soon hold sway.
Originally published under a pseudonym, “Flight 93” was written by Michael Anton, a Claremont senior fellow and a skilled polemicist, schooled, as he has written, in making “public arguments that move politics.” If his essay achieved anything, Anton told me, it was to turn Trump into a legitimate candidate of necessary change. “The initial assumption was: This guy’s a buffoon, a reality-TV star, not even an amateur politician, not a politician at all, there’s nothing serious about any of his ideas or any of his program, therefore no serious person could possibly support him or make an argument on his behalf, ” he said. “And then we did it.” Thomas Klingenstein, the chairman of the board at Claremont, went further, telling me that “if there is within the conservative movement a kind of intellectual justification for Trump, it comes from Claremont.”
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He has also edited himself since 1995, when, in Fingerprints of the Gods, he came out and said that it was an ancient white civilization.Saying the white supremacy is made up is kind of a stupid hill to die on, when it's directly supported by things the author has said.
(Edit: This post made more sense when someone here was claiming that, but they have thankfully now been lost to history.)
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It seems an appropriate metaphor. The only thing they were capable of doing was crashing the plane, just like these guys are only capable of destroying the country. The difference is that the people on 93 died to save others while these assholes are nazis
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Even those “Ancient Aliens” shows often have more than a hint of white supremacy going on because they’re all predicated on the idea “surely the primitive (usually brown-skinned) people who lived here couldn’t have figured out how to build these magnificent structures by themselves.”
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Hey, come on, it is hardly fair to condemn people by using their own words 
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Also the first line “I am not a scientist but I suspect… and am looking for evidence” is completely backwards and the opposite of Galileo.
You need to start with “I studied XYZ, but found these suspicious or contradictory pieces of evidence which suggest our conventional understanding is wrong. I’m now searching for further evidence to find a more complete theory”
Of course you can still do that and be wrong, and often are. I know plenty of legitimate scientists who have rabbit holes on some offbeat obsession, but at least they approached the problem with some underlying basis and at least the potential to have their pet theory problem wrong.
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This reminds me of “Chariots of the Gods”, a really bad book that came out in the 70’s, where the author took any scrap of information he could find and then extrapolated to try to prove that aliens had given us the technology to build pyramids, or something.
Ancient rock carvings that had some diagonal lines? Those must be rocket exhaust plumes!
A five hundred year old painting with a really distorted human head? That can only be a depiction of an astronaut wearing a space helmet!
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no. that just adds fuel to the idea that the next kook might be right, we just don’t know it yet.
as someone else stated above, extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof. and that’s what galileo did that was different
he didn’t just throw out some ideas. he presented factual observations for scientific criticism in a context where scientific criticism didn’t really exist
i’d argue that today, science is most accurately a process not a set of particular ideas. and people who don’t engage with that process are kooks.
that’s different than being contrarian - finding different ideas that fit the facts, and arguing for them while still applying the process. contrarians might still not always be accepted the way they should, but this is not that
eta:
yeah. that.
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Issac Newton has entered the chat, drinking sips of mercury
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