My Adventures with a Freeman

[AnOwlCalledSage]

My current favourite is "The Jet Fuel Hoax". Don't look it up on You Tube unless you can cope with slapping your own forehead to the point of pain!

[NYGman]

Ahh, but even if there was a car powered by water, would a true FMOTL ever want to pay for said water? I suppose they could fill the car with their own urine, really changing the meaning of "taking the piss, to a suggestion on transport methods" but I would imagine that the other chemicals in it may cause issues with power generation, not that it is possible to generate power from water anyway.

[AndyK]

Au contraire. It is possible to generate power from water --- as long as the water is uphill from you.

[NYGman]

Au contraire. It is possible to generate power from water --- as long as the water is uphill from you.

Scalable?

[noblepa]

Au contraire. It is possible to generate power from water --- as long as the water is uphill from you.

Scalable?

Sure:

https://resources.stuff.co.nz/content/d ... 696759.jpg

[sue858]

AnOwlCalledSage: I thought you were referring to the 'Jet Fuel can't melt steel beams!' crowd. But this is even nuttier: "Planes don't need fuel; they run entirely on compressed air and an SSFEM." I almost fell for the SSFEM nonsense because I don't know the answer to questions like "How does a magnet stay on the side of a fridge? If all energy gets 'used up' sooner or later, why doesn't it eventually fall to the floor?" For someone with only a basic knowledge of magnetism, this question is a very good one. Charlatans ask such questions as a way to open the door to filling their subject's head with the nonsense of the charlatan's choice. "How do fridge magnets work?" is an opener to all those SSFEM blueprints which are variations on a 'Reverse electromagnetic motor' theme - the type where a bunch of magnets (be they permanent or electro) are affixed such that they form a 'propeller' or 'windmill'. Some semi-plausible trickery is applied and - voila! - a perpetual motion machine. If you're not getting out ten times the energy you're putting in, then it's your fault for building/using the machine wrong, of course.

Looking back now, with the benefits of hindsight and no longer living with a human Gish Gallop, I can easily see the flaw. For a start, the premise is flawed. Energy isn't 'used up', it's converted from one form to another. The fridge magnet gained potential energy when you picked it up. Magnetism, which I don't fully understand but which I think in this case could better be compared to a boulder teetering atop a hill than to a motor running, effectively acts as a way to store that potential energy. That's what almost sucked me in. The SSFEM crowd conflate 'using' and 'converting' energy; this confuses the layman into believing that maybe there is something to this Free Energy stuff. They also ignore or deny things like friction which prevent any conversion method from being 100% efficient.

The thing I always wondered: why do certain 'gurus' promote such things? I understand why those who charge for their designs would do that; they're just running a variation of a straight 419 scam - pay me a small upfront fee and you'll have free energy for the rest of your life. Plenty of people out there with more greed than conscience - that fact isn't news. Then there are the lay members like Ash who just want to believe because if it's true then they're morally justified in trying to get something for nothing. But what about those who come up with various 'perpetual motion' designs and post them on the net for free? I don't see what they get out of it. They're not asking for money, and any fame they achieve will be short-lived once their followers realise that their designs don't work.

[TheNewSaint]

But what about those who come up with various 'perpetual motion' designs and post them on the net for free? I don't see what they get out of it. They're not asking for money, and any fame they achieve will be short-lived once their followers realise that their designs don't work.

Ego. There's a lot of wannabes out there who just like to be told what super-geniuses they are. Judge Anna von Reitz is one of those (though she does pseudolaw and pseudohistory rather than pseudoscience). And sufficiently impressed people will donate money with little or no prodding.

[hucknallred]

I think my next post will be ‘Breatharians’.

Ooh, can't wait. Our old friend Dave Murphy had a go at this after drinking his piss, after he lost his car, after he proved the Earth was flat.

[The Seventh String]

Magnetism is explained pretty well by Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetism

Magnetised/magnetic materials such as iron and some magnetised alloys can lose strength over time, but it’s generally a very slow process taking many years unless they are somehow demagnetised by methods other than just waiting. Iron-based magnets for example can be demagnetised by hitting them hard enough lots of times.

I’m not at all surprised that someone who is deeply into one crank conspiracy shows a tendency to buy into others. It’s a sadly common phenomena, sometimes called “crank magnetism” because the more nonsense someone buys into the more willing they tend to become to accept even greater nonsense. Unfortunately that kind of magnetism can persist for a very long time as well, unless given a firm enough wallop by reality.

As for “free energy machines” if one were to be invented, proved to work and patented the amount of money to be made out of selling and maintaining the things would be enormous. Believing the perpetual motion free energy machines exist but “they” keep the machines secret to “protect their profits” is about as realistic as the 19th century’s “big steam power” managing to conceal the discovery of electricity or the invention of the internal combustion engine.

[AndyK]

If anyone is interested in serious debunking, The Amazing Randi has devoted years to disproving everything from water dowsing to breatharians.

The site is worth a visit.

[The Seventh String]

A Yorkshire chap called Lumley Kettlewell (deceased 1819) did a thorough practical study of the breatharian concept.

He was quite sure neither people nor any other animal needed to eat, eating simply being a very bad habit that we somehow acquired in infancy and never managed to break. He experimented on himself, but found he couldn’t manage to get over his addiction to food. Also on his horse, which unlike Lumley couldn’t pop down to the shops to get a bite to eat when the cold turkey approach to breaking its eating addiction proved too much to handle.

Apparently he was quite surprised and mystified when, after a while not eating, the horse for some reason or another wasted away and expired.

[Hyrion]

I don't see what they get out of it.

Ego.

As usual: there's many different reasons. I'll add another:

• Prank

I'm sure at least one of them did so for the humor value to see how many people would be suckered in to try it. The humor/vidiction-it-was-a-good-prank coming from the various comments added to the youtube entry.

I think my favorite in the prank category is that Di-Hydrogen* Monoxide is really-really-not-goodTM... although if I remember correctly, that actually started out as a paper covering something along the lines "how an innocent situation can be worded into causing panic in the under-educated" or something like that:

http://www.dhmo.org/facts.html

Or maybe I'm just assuming the authors of that meant it as satire/prank

*Pardon my chemical nomenclature... it's been a long time since high school when that knowledge was used.

[NYGman]

Au contraire. It is possible to generate power from water --- as long as the water is uphill from you.

Scalable?

Sure:

https://resources.stuff.co.nz/content/d ... 696759.jpg

I was thinking the other way. You shrink down the vat of water and the wheel, then add three more wheels, and a collection vat connected on a pivot. Pour the water over the drive wheel, and it moves the car. When the water vat runs out you turn the vat over, so it becomes the collection vat, and a now full water vat. A Car powered by water, and the human that turns the vat over when it empties.

Is that what they are hiding?

[longdog]

There's a two word argument that puts all but the most delusional 'water powered car' proponent on the back foot and that argument is "Hydrogen ash"

Burn coal you get coal ash.

Burn cigarettes you get fag ash.

Burn hydrogen you hydrogen ash... Water.

If you can run a car on water you can smoke fag ash and burn coal ash... Ipso facto Q.E.D.

[grixit]

Water powered cars.

The most brief Internet search will turn up hundreds of results for that -- along with the 200 MPG carburetors and the ilk.

I wouldn't be surprised if those stories were already around when Henry Ford was still learning how to use a wrench.

[grixit]

Gish Gallop

Good to see this phrase getting use.

[sue858]

Grixit: That was the best way I could think of to describe Ash, and to explain why I soon gave up trying to debate with him. You know how when you're debating with someone online, if it quickly becomes apparent that they're not going to attempt to engage in reasonable civilised discourse but are going to keep moving the goalposts, changing the subject, etc etc etc, you can just block and ignore them? Yeah, not so easy when you're living with that person. Trying to debate with someone who adamantly refuses to change their minds on a given topic, no matter what evidence you cite to back yourself up, that's bad enough. But add to that an opponent who has mastered the art of seamlessly jumping around from topic to topic so, even if you do manage to pin them down on something, they'll switch subjects so quickly you won't even have time to realise that you actually won that debate. A typical debate with Ash went something like this:

Ash: Tap water is poisonous because it's contaminated with fluoride.
Me: Why do you think fluoride is poison?
Ash: Here are studies showing that rats who were given doses of fluoride many orders higher than a human could ever possibly receive from drinking fluoridated water developed health problems.
Me: *Explains why those studies are limited in their applicability to the health effects of fluoridated water on humans*
Ash: But how do you know that the levels in water are as low as They say?
Me: ???
Ash: They might be added higher levels of fluoride than They say they are. Or They might be minimising the harms caused by lower doses.

And, just like that, we've gone from fluoride to the Illuminati. Any evidence presented in my favour was dismissed out of hand as being created by member of The Grand Conspiracy. Likewise, whenever I tried to argue against the existence of any such shadowy cabal, Ash would bring up various plots They'd allegedly hatched as evidence of their existence, and we'd be talking about that particular 'plot' instead. The best way I could describe Ash is therefore as the living embodiment of the Gish Gallop, and living with him was exhausting. I would not be surprised if someone told me that cult leaders often engage in such tactics with new recruits.

Longdog: Your post was intended to be somewhat humorous, but it's actually very good. Not so much because it's a good argument in itself (though it is), but because it's a good way to stop their usual intentional conflation of hydrogen and water power in its tracks. Maybe we should blame the hydrogen car marketers for calling their cars 'water-powered', since that's allowed the water-powered car crowd to piggyback on the legitimacy of the phrase. Having praised your 'hydrogen ash' argument, though, if I were on the woos' side, I'd respond by challenging you to make coal from coal ash and a little electricity ...

[sue858]

Breatharians

Based on the ‘I can’t wait!’ posts, I fear I may have built expectations up regarding my post on Breatharians such that I’ll be unable to deliver. I’ll only be touching on Breatharianism itself since Ash and I only had 1 or 2 short conversations on the matter; ‘Breatharianism’ is going to be more about exploring Ash’s hypocrisies, specifically the disconnect between the lifestyle he advocated and the one he actually lived.

Ash spoke of a ‘wise man’, a ‘guru’ of some sort. I can’t remember what kind of guru; perhaps a Buddhist monk, perhaps a Hindu Fakir, perhaps Ash never specified what kind of guru and just spoke of a generic hermit. In any case, one can easily guess the tropes Ash invoked; the cave atop a mountain, the solitary existence devoted to prayer, the cliched asceticism. The guru had not eaten any food at all for many years; he subsisted entirely on the occasional sip of water. When asked how he dealt with hunger, the Guru said that, a few weeks or months after he stopped eating, his saliva began to taste sweet. Whenever he suffered a pang of hunger, the Guru would suck on his cheeks to produce nectar; this would satisfy the Guru’s hunger.

Aside from the usual Freeman desire to get something for nothing (in this case, food), there was another surprising theme here. Ash spoke of such men as that mythical hermit with reverence; he admired them for getting off the grid and living the simple life. Yet his life was far from simple. He didn’t live in the stereotypical Freeman Hovel. His (non-rented) house was easily worth £200k, if not 300. His living room featured a huge flat screen TV. By ‘huge’, I mean ‘pointlessly, ridiculously huge’; so big, you’d need 2 people to move it. And back then, such a TV would’ve cost more than a small lightly-used car. He refused to wear any clothes which didn’t bear an expensive brand name. The same applied to food: only Heinz beans, Coca-Cola and Kellogg's cereal were good enough for him.

This made for an interesting paradox. Ash said that one of the reasons he was so keen to move our relationship forwards at lightning speed was because he was impressed by my spartan lifestyle. However, he quickly grew weary of my “How much?” face. My eyes embarrassed him by widening at the sight of the price tags in the establishments he liked to frequent. Next to Ash’s immaculate designer suits, I always looked scruffy in my hand-repaired clothes. I had to keep reminding myself that Ash was within his rights to spend his own money frivolously if he wished, but it was hard to keep my poker face when he was dropping (what for me was) a week’s wages on a pair of jeans. Ash railed against materialism; consumerism, he believed, was pushed on the masses by TPTB to keep the populace enslaved to the rat race. But he didn’t much appreciate it when I castigated his profligacy.

I wonder why a Freeman who believes that everything in life can be A4V’d would revere an ascetic hermit? Seems like a contradiction to me, but I’m sure I’m missing a common link which is staring me right in the face.

A slight tangent, but I think it’s worth mentioning because it’s another example of Ash’s internal contradictions. That car that he called his ‘P**sy magnet’? I didn’t see it till I’d already agreed to ‘go back to his place’. My reaction: “How the heck do you fit anything in that?!” Ash liked that reaction at first, because he was “Sick of girls who just want a ride in my car.” Other women would, according to Ash, ‘waste his time/lead him on’ by implying that they’d put out if he let them cruise around with him enough. In other words: Ash bought a petrol-powered midlife crisis to attract women, then complained about having to deal with the kind of women who would flirt with a man solely because he drove an expensive impractical toy.

[sue858]

Warning: Religion

I've been a bit busy these last few days, and I only have time for a quick post today. So I decided that today would be good to outline Ash's religious views. I know that the forum rules here forbid discussing politics and religion; today's time constraints will prevent me from going in to too much detail. I will do my best to keep the religious side to a bare minimum, but it does need to be mentioned because there was a lot of intersect with the Freemanism; Ash's religious beliefs informed his Freemanism and vice versa. I've seen brief mentions of the religious views of Belanger and his followers, so I'm taking that as a hint that discussions on religion are OK here, so long as those discussions are only to the point where those religious views are used as the basis (or excuse) for Freemanism. I will humbly apologise in advance to The Mods That Be if I stray too far down the 'religion and politics' path. Please bear in mind that I'm trying to avoid this, so I hope I won't be insta-banned or anything. A warning from a mod that I'm veering in to dangerous territory will be enough to get me to cease all references to religion, I promise!

Ash was (is, as far as I know) a Sunni Muslim. In the same way that Belanger and his lot went on about their 'God-given rights', so did Ash. Ash's God was Allah (though strangely, he still always said 'God-given rights', never 'Allah-given rights') and he referred to the Qur'an, but otherwise the rhetoric was pretty much the same. Since Christians and Jews are 'People of the Book', Ash referred to the Bible as well when it suited his argument. But he had the bonus that, should another Bible verse contradict his point, he could counter with, "Well, of course the Bible isn't perfect; that's why God needed to write the Qur'an." Whereas the Qur'an was dictated directly by Allah Himself and its original Arabic form is still around to this day, the Bible was merely written by various prophets who were indirectly 'inspired' by God, and lots of imperfections were added along the way, especially when translations were made.

Ash subscribed to an interesting inversion of the 'King James Only' movement. He mistrusted any translation as being liable to contain errors, but he was particularly suspicious of the King James Version. Ash believed that the KJV was put together by TPTB to indoctrinate the lowly serfs. To this end, intentional mistranslations were introduced to soften - if not outright reverse - the meaning of certain verses. One particular example that Ash often banged on about: 'Kings' should've been translated as 'Tyrants'. I can't remember which verses Ash talked about, but they were supposedly used by TPTB to support their then-useful 'Divine Right of Kings' doctrine when, properly translated, they condemn 'Kings' as 'tyrants'. "If you want to know whether a translation is faithful to the original or not," said Ash, "Check [some verse I can't remember]. If it says 'Tyrants', then that translation is legit; if it says 'Kings', then it's either translated by TPTB, or at best translated by someone who was somehow unwittingly influenced by TPTB."

On one occasion, when I wanted to prove a point with some Bible verse or other (I can recall neither the point nor the verse now), I pulled up BibleGateway and found the verse in question, then went to that verse in the Hebrew version. I called Ash and told him, "There's that verse I was talking about."
"But I don't speak Hebrew!" protested Ash.
"You're always complaining that translations of the Bible are inaccurate; there's the original in all its glory right in front of you. If you can't read it, that's really your problem. If you object to translations that much, you'll learn Hebrew."

I was half-expecting Ash to respond with something like, "How do we know that the Hebrew version on that website hasn't been meddled with by TPTB." But, to my pleasant surprise, he ceded the point and agreed to read an English translation, so long as it was 'anything but KJV' and I agreed to reasonable quibbles with Ash regarding the intended meaning/proper translation of certain words. I've never come across a 'TPTB are behind KJV' conspiracy theory anywhere else; only it's direct opposite ('The ONLY legitimate English translation is KJV'). I didn't even know Belanger et al existed till I started reading about Freemanism on the web recently; I believe he's part of the KJV Only crowd? I dearly wish I could've somehow arranged a meeting between them - I suspect some of you would've paid good money for a recording of that meeting!

An example of Ash's religion intersecting with his Conspiracism: he believed that most, if not all, of TPTB were Jews. He was Antisemitic, but covered that bald fact up with more palatable labels like 'Anti-Zionist' or 'Anti-Capitalist'. The recent Labour Party Antisemitism scandal came as little surprise to me. It's been going on for years; Labour only needed to look to that unholy alliance of Leftists and Islamists which made up the Respect Party to see that Antisemitism can be a problem among certain factions on the left. Antisemitism wasn’t just an ‘Ash/Conspiracist Loon’ thing; it was common among Ash’s (comparatively) normal friends.

Ash got more religious the longer I was with him. When I met him, he was basically an 'Eid-only' Muslim (the Islamic equivalent of the 'C&E [Christmas & Easter] Christian'). I'm afraid I'm somewhat to blame for his descent into Islamism. When he first told me that he was a Muslim, I expressed shock; “You can’t be a Muslim! If you were, you wouldn’t have participated in last night’s debauchery with me.” It was meant to be a joke; a friendly ribbing. He took it seriously and became more and more pious.

I might make one more (much shorter) post as I’m out of time for now. Then after that, I promise I’ll mostly keep religion out of my future posts, aside from quick references.I’m not trying to start a flamewar!

[grixit]

[Ash's God was Allah (though strangely, he still always said 'God-given rights', never 'Allah-given rights')

"Allah" is just the arabic name for the supreme deity, just as "God" is the english one, "Dieu" is the french one and so on. It isn't just moslems, but arabic speaking christians also say "Allah".