Here I thought it would look at the topic of a rogue agency monitoring your online actions, or how there are backdoors in our electronic devices. But instead it's about pizza.
I remember when this movie first came out, I was just getting into the internet. I was about 11 at the time and I'd had a PC for a year or so, but no internet connection. My dad was really, really paranoid about the government (and he was kind of right, which is funny now that I think about it). Anyway, he did some illegal stuff out of our house and didn't want anything to do with the internet, but I begged him and begged him and finally he got a dedicated line for it and everything. So like a few months later, I'm deep into the original Diablo. It had just come out and around that same time this fucking movie was on VHS or whatever and we watched it.
Fuck me, man, it took weeks to convince him that the internet wasn't like that at all and the movie was basically sci-fi. All I can remember is Diablo withdrawals.
Edit: Now I'm wondering if he was right about anything else during his drug fueled paranoid rants...
I find it unsettling that we're taught to outright dismiss skeptics as "conspiracy theorists," but sometimes they are just drug fueled paranoid rants.
I think that misrepresents what skepticism is. A skeptic isn't someone who has made up their mind and won't be moved the way conspiracy theorists are. A skeptic is someone who keeps an open mind and accepts the possibility that what they think they know could be wrong. We dismiss conspiracy theorists when they provide complicated explanations for why something happened or works the way it does and dismiss any criticism of their explanations as gullibility or apathy.
I'm not a skeptic when I can debunk your ideas. I'm a skeptic when I can debunk my own.
I mean that, when a skeptic says, "The government has been lying to us about this 'NSA spying' thing," the average taxpayer will instead call them a conspiracy theorist and ignore what they're saying. And that this knee jerk reaction comes from media, news, movies, etc.
To be fair, my dad was the "FBI is watching me all the time" kind of guy. He was genuinely right about it sometimes because he was actually doing some really illegal shit; locals and feds definitely sent people undercover to him and even me. So his paranoia was this weird mix of reality and fantasy. He was doing a lot of coke in his "prime" and, towards the end, meth. Both are known for inducing paranoia, so it was like taking a normally skeptical guy with a problem with authority and amplifying it ten-fold, but then actually having some of the delusions become reality or be reality all along. I don't think most of it was based on evidence or anything, he just kind of got lucky.
Hell, before he got busted he was so out of his fucking mind that he fired FOUR lawyers in a row because he thought they were working with the feds. The reason he thought this is because one of them very well might have been.
I had originally typed a lot more than this, but I'm not exactly sober right now and no one wants to read my ramblings about this shit. I am actually thinking about writing a book about my dad and growing up around him, though. He went from the projects to the suburbs and being incredibly wealthy (especially considering he had 5 kids), but then wasted it all on drugs and women and went to prison for the first time in his life at 66. He's this weird version of rags-to-riches-to-rags.
Wow, that wasn't at all what I expected.
Here I thought it would look at the topic of a rogue agency monitoring your online actions, or how there are backdoors in our electronic devices. But instead it's about pizza.
We cant forget the Praetorians!
I remember when this movie first came out, I was just getting into the internet. I was about 11 at the time and I'd had a PC for a year or so, but no internet connection. My dad was really, really paranoid about the government (and he was kind of right, which is funny now that I think about it). Anyway, he did some illegal stuff out of our house and didn't want anything to do with the internet, but I begged him and begged him and finally he got a dedicated line for it and everything. So like a few months later, I'm deep into the original Diablo. It had just come out and around that same time this fucking movie was on VHS or whatever and we watched it.
Fuck me, man, it took weeks to convince him that the internet wasn't like that at all and the movie was basically sci-fi. All I can remember is Diablo withdrawals.
Edit: Now I'm wondering if he was right about anything else during his drug fueled paranoid rants...
I find it unsettling that we're taught to outright dismiss skeptics as "conspiracy theorists," but sometimes they are just drug fueled paranoid rants.
And I was also addicted to Diablo. Damn, what a game.
I think that misrepresents what skepticism is. A skeptic isn't someone who has made up their mind and won't be moved the way conspiracy theorists are. A skeptic is someone who keeps an open mind and accepts the possibility that what they think they know could be wrong. We dismiss conspiracy theorists when they provide complicated explanations for why something happened or works the way it does and dismiss any criticism of their explanations as gullibility or apathy.
I'm not a skeptic when I can debunk your ideas. I'm a skeptic when I can debunk my own.
Totally agree.
I mean that, when a skeptic says, "The government has been lying to us about this 'NSA spying' thing," the average taxpayer will instead call them a conspiracy theorist and ignore what they're saying. And that this knee jerk reaction comes from media, news, movies, etc.
To be fair, my dad was the "FBI is watching me all the time" kind of guy. He was genuinely right about it sometimes because he was actually doing some really illegal shit; locals and feds definitely sent people undercover to him and even me. So his paranoia was this weird mix of reality and fantasy. He was doing a lot of coke in his "prime" and, towards the end, meth. Both are known for inducing paranoia, so it was like taking a normally skeptical guy with a problem with authority and amplifying it ten-fold, but then actually having some of the delusions become reality or be reality all along. I don't think most of it was based on evidence or anything, he just kind of got lucky.
Hell, before he got busted he was so out of his fucking mind that he fired FOUR lawyers in a row because he thought they were working with the feds. The reason he thought this is because one of them very well might have been.
I had originally typed a lot more than this, but I'm not exactly sober right now and no one wants to read my ramblings about this shit. I am actually thinking about writing a book about my dad and growing up around him, though. He went from the projects to the suburbs and being incredibly wealthy (especially considering he had 5 kids), but then wasted it all on drugs and women and went to prison for the first time in his life at 66. He's this weird version of rags-to-riches-to-rags.
Yeah, that sounds like a Scorcese film.