Here’s a trip down memory lane: remember Armoured Skeptic? I first tangled with him about 9 years ago, when he was part of the YouTube misogynist mob, but his name popped up a few times since, never in a good context. He was a speaker at Mythcon, like all the good little regressive skeptics, and has sunk deeply into conspiracy thinking.
Notice that “skeptic” is in his name; his whole schtick was that as a good skeptically minded critical thinker, he could see right through the perfidy of feminazis and SJWs. Well, his content now includes…skepticism about the moon landings. Apollo 11 was a hoax, for some of the dumbest reasons ever.
There was a time when I was the target of his rants (his videos about me have been removed, for unknown reasons), because I was such a soy boy. It does my heart good to see how far he has fallen, and I’m pleased that I was sensible enough to stop paying attention to him long ago.
I might pay attention again when he starts promoting creationism, though.
“…had no good evidence to back up his claims…”
Yeah…no shit.
The white flashes in the video of Armstrong et al might be the exposure to cosmic radiation that Armored Skeptic was complaining about not seeing.
“The Apollo astronauts walked on the moon on the very first try. No failed attempts. No mistakes.” Did someone forget about the previous 10 Apollo missions? What does he think they were doing? In what way was the catastrophic fire on Apollo 1 not a mistake?
I find his lack of math disturbing.
For example, on the question of radiation fogging the film:
There should be numbers for the radiation levels in the Van Allen belts.
There should be numbers for the radiation levels elsewhere on the journey, such as on the moon surface.
There should be numbers for how much that radiation would be reduced by shielding.
There should be numbers for how long the film was exposed to those radiation levels.
And the detail that they were using large format film in Hasselblad cameras: that would reduce the effect, because equivalent photos with smaller film formats would have to be enlarged by much more.
He doesn’t give any of those numbers, or perform any calculations about how many events per square mm of film surface should be expected. He just waves his hands a lot.
As for Buzz Aldrin punching out a harasser who demanded he swear on a Bible, I found this:
Buzz Aldrin is agnostic
At the time fo the moon landing, Aldrin was Presbyterian, and famously held a religious service on the moon. But this account, which I cannot vouch for, claims he later shifted to agnosticism.
The point being, even if Aldrin was telling the truth about landing on the moon, he may have found to harassment to be undeserving of a response, and turning it into a religious question could be offensive for a new set of reasons. A non-Christian might consider swearing on a Bible to be useless, and a devout Christian might consider it to be blasphemous or idolatrous.
Viced Rhino just had a long debunking of him, too.
I like copycat actual skeptics slightly more than fake skeptics. How many more debunkings of the same bunk with the same dees can we expect in the next month? This stuff’s flame for YouTuber moths who all want me to “smash” a like button.
So, a dictionary atheist became a dictionary skeptic? Because “skeptic” just means to doubt or disbelieve, right? But that raises the question of what, specifically, to disbelieve? Well, one useful criterion might be: whatever maximizes Youtube views.
It’s laughable to think that:
a.) The Soviets (or any other developed country at the time) couldn’t figure out that the moon landings were faked.
b.) That the Soviet Union wouldn’t relish the opportunity to expose the USA’s lies and humiliate their greatest rival.
Never mind the mountains of footage made here and on the Apollo mission. The tens of thousands of people who worked on Apollo mission, or the actual testimonies of the astronauts themselves.
I wonder if there are Russians who believe the Soviets never made it into space, and MIR was made out of chicken wire and paper-mache.
There is a recent post (“Dr. Kelly…”) over at Science-Based Medicine about how people who go off the deep end in one area tend to go off the deep end in others. When you’re an Internet personality, you have to keep upping the ante to keep your audience increasingly riled up with your Deep Insight into how Things Really Are.
I wonder how he thinks those very accurate measurements of the distance between the earth and moon are made, and that we have determined that the moon is receding at a little under 4 cm/year at this time. A reflector on the moon is needed for a laser to get that kind of accuracy and it seems really coincidental that the locations of many of those reflectors happen to be where some Apollo landings are said to have been.
@9 Matt G
Sounds a bit like Crank Magnetism
Reginald, sounds exactly like it, because it is; but of course it’s an unwarranted over-generalisation and doesn’t hold up.
It probably refers to the YouTube equivalent of what would be called “shock jocks” in older media.
Take, say, https://www.youtube.com/@penguinz0/videos — been blogging since 2007, no particular escalation.
Take, say, https://www.youtube.com/@lindybeige/videos — not sure when he began, but at least since 2011
And others. Those two I like because they don’t do all these cuts all the time or read scripts; they just sit in front of the camera and talk.
BTW, I thought there was an analogous Internet “law” akin to https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Badger%27s_Law but for ‘skeptic’. Not finding it, but I’m pretty sure it’s been brought up here before.
It is certainly my heuristic that any commenter with ‘skeptic/sceptic’ as part of their nym is generally a wooist or otherwise incompetent.
We really are going down memory lane. Climate Deniers arguing “Climategate” BS on one thread and Moon Hoaxers on another..
@ ^
Maybe Richard Hoagland will show up. ;-)
John Morales @13
The same heuristic can be used for anyone claiming themselves to be smart, skilled, rich, successful, etc. And nothing emphasizes the degree of the negative more than their repeating said claim.
I’ve always wondered about th moon landing hoaxers. So we faked the moon landing perfectly so no one knew what we did? Then, for good measure, we faked it 5 more times, again, perfectly.
Since I can’t read this shit-for-brain’s mind, I can’t tell if he’s being serious or if he’s just looking for new sources of revenue by expanding his “skepticism” (i.e. denial) to all things–especially events and ideas held “sacred” by those he doesn’t like.
If this was sincere, it shouldn’t surprise us. It seems there is only a short leap from “powerful forces are forcing us to be racial/sexually accepting while they also demand we tear down our economic system for the snail darters” to “powerful forces are lying to us about EVERYTHING!!! EVERYTHING YOU KNOW IS WRONG!!!” These days, “skepticism” is now more likely to be misused to advance a political goal than used properly, to examine claims about reality. Thanks a lot, dude-bros, for making life harder for those who are actually skeptics rather than professional asshole, like Armoured Skeptic.
Where’s Phil Plait when you need him?
@19
It wouldn’t have help. Haven’t you heard that Plait was “owned” by Joe Rogan on this very topic?
“Armoured”
Tell me you’re insecure without telling me you’re insecure.
@#20 Dear gods, why did Phil ever agree to take Joe Rogan’s call? There is nothing of value to be had from talking to Rogan about anything but the art of beating other meatheads bloody. I can only imagine how painful that “debate” must have been. Was it the catalyst for turning Penn Jillette away from Libertarianism?
@22 According to a YouTube interview, Jillette was boggled to the point of changing his affiliation by people campaigning to prevent other people from wearing masks in early Covid days. He specifically said that if they were merely campaigning for the right not to wear them, fine, but forcing other people not to? That’s not just dumb, it’s not libertarian! A point of comparison for him was wearing seatbelts — it’s your right to wear them! Frankly, I find it amazing it took him so long.
More about radiation fogging: you can avoid it by shielding the film/sensors with a good thickness of metal. Standard practice, usually it’s lead but for the Apollos that would have been a weight penalty, probably the brass those Hasselblads were built of and the metal walls of the capsules were more or less enough for the few days the missions took (no idea if the film was stashed under additional shielding after the exposure).
Of course longer periods will kill your sensors and darken the glass of your lenses, but that takes time, depending on the intensity – I have seen modern, shielded cameras cooked in a couple of years, but it was under very harsh conditions.
And the quality of those 6×6 negatives was smashing.
@17. John Fleisher : “I’ve always wondered about th moon landing hoaxers. So we faked the moon landing perfectly so no one knew what we did? Then, for good measure, we faked it 5 more times, again, perfectly.””
Plus Apollo 13. NASA’s finest hour and who could’ve scripted that..
^ … before it happened in real life anyhow not the later movie based on Jim Lovell’s (Jeffrey Kluger’s) Lost Moon book.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Moon )
@19. drksky, #20. Akira MacKenzie & #22.Artor : I wish I knew. I miss Phil Plait’s old blog and the little commenting community there, I really do. Also I must be out of the loop here because I missed that interview with Rogan. Missed Penn Jillette turning away from Libertarianism too, though never really a big fan of them.
@16. HidariMak : As the old saying goes : “Self praise is no recommendation.”
Incidentally the Intuitive Machines private space flight set to land on our Moon with its Odysseus lander has now launched successfully :
https://www.space.com/spacex-launch-im-1-private-moon-landing-mission
Here’s hoping it goes well this time.