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| Response to Newsgroup Discussion on Derren Brown's Seance TV Programme First Posted 5/6/04 |
| A response to a Newsgroup Discussion on Derren Brown's Seance TV Programme I personally think Derren Brown's talents are the best argument to debunk the paranormal with. But I must make the point that just because something just looks like something else doesn't mean it's the same thing. It's like saying that a very good impressionist is the same person as the person he is impersonating. The fact is, most things are faked sooner or later but it's only in the paranormal where there is only fake. Lots of smoke but no fire... Anyway I'm not interested in that tired old debate and what interests me far more is the ability he has to hypnotise without all the razamataz and it reminds me of a sceptical view that hypnotism isn't a special state it's just an extreme state of social compliance. I saw a man once eating an onion as if it was an apple, in a state of 'social compliance', he was not hypnotised we were told, but his senses where being overridden to a rather alarming degree. It seems to me that what we have here is a state that almost everybody would agree is different than our normal conscious state but which strangely can be got to without all that hypnotic flim flammery. And so the obvious question is - What is getting us to that state ? Well the hypnotists patter seems to be a ritual designed to ease the deliberate and conscious 'changeover of control' from one person to another, but it's natural home is in real social situations where it happens unrealisingly and imperceptibly to varying degrees. Now these hypnotic cues are much more subtle and people are responding to body language, tone of voice etc, but the core phenomena I believe, is the relationship between dominant and submissive minds which is the bedrock of our everyday lives. My explanation of what I think is happening is that peculiar ability we possess called 'mind over matter' (Some people can do extraordinary things to their body by their mind alone - stigmatics, control of heart rate etc) which has been stretched out a bit further to take control of another being. The 'dominant' need to control and the 'submissive' have an inbuilt tendency to comply and the hypnotic state then occurs without any true understanding of what is going by both parties, So yes I am arguing that Derren Brown is doing something paranormal without realising it, but so is anybody else who practises hypnotism. I know this is totally unacceptable to some people, but I would just like somebody to explain what exactly 'being hypnotised' is. And how and why do we shut down some 'master control' of our mind and body and hand it over to somebody else comparatively easily. |
| Hell's Kitchen As Hell's Kitchen finally and gratefully leaves our screens, my wife watches it and so I keep seeing bits of it....Honest ! It's all too easy for people like me to accuse it of being absolute rubbish, but the fact is it makes no difference, it's stiil very popular TV despite all the criticism. I personally don't like the sadistic element in these shows and the viewers no doubt justify this by saying the celebrities get what they deserve, because they go of the their own free will. So it's guilt free, voyeuristic enjoyment of mental and physical discomfort. So you would expect me to think this was just valueless, frothy TV just made for the acres of airtime that needs to be filled. But I see that something sociologically interesting is happening here. We in the West and particularly in the UK, have lost faith in leaders and 'heroes' in general and progammes like these, with 'ordinary' and particularly celebrity types being put through various ordeals with the obligatory final voting off ritual, seems to be a process were we are trying to figure out what we want from the people we 'look up to'. We want to know more than the public image of them and what, if any of their real qualities justifies our continued interest in them in general. I don't think that's what the makers had in mind though. The format, with it's phone in's, helps pay for the programme, whilst at the same time fills up lots of airtime and is simply exploitative TV. Also I think the phone in voting is fixed, in as much as they keep the controversial ones for about half way through ritual vote off, to keep the drama going, and then are finally allowed to be voted off to let the 'good guys' win. And finally, I approve of these programmes for ecological reasons because of the sterling work they are doing in recycling old, worn out celebrities. |
| Hell's Kitchen First Posted in June 2004 sometime |
| The Real Flying Saucers - Channel 5 9.00pm 16/6/04 The premise of this programme was to suggest that the U.S. military are involved in the promotion of belief in UFO's to create a smokescreen for their own secret technology. I will go along with the first part of that premise but the secret technology bit I'm less certain about, and what really interests me in these debunking programmes is the internal logic which starts to tie itself in knots in it's attempts to keep the thrust of it's arguement going. However I make no judgements on the validity of the information presented. OK so it rather controversially suggests that what Arnold saw, which kick started the whole UFO movement and coined the phrase 'Flying Saucers', were not clouds or geese or whatever in odd lighting conditions. But they were what Arnold said they were - UFO's, albeit of terrestial Russian design. This then interestingly, refutes a whole host of sceptics of various denominations, nationalities over the last fifty years or so, who've pontificated on this particular famous sighting, many of whom I assume having no connections with the American military. Thanks for that one, because that enables me to cast doubt on all the rest of these sceptic's elaborate explanations for UFO sightings in general, But let's look at that claim that what Arnold saw was supposedly made by the Russians. Now I'm no engineer but I kinda get the feeling that a round object might be a bit unstable, but these UFO's flew in formation, avoiding any radar all the way from Russia... quite a feat and all made with 1940's technology ! Now this is something the Americans tried to do with 50 - 60's technology and couldn't get it off the ground and nobody has, so far as we know it, done so since. However if the Russians did manage to do it, what have they also done with it since ? Such a technological advance would have given them a tremendous miltary advantage during the cold war. And surely we would have discovered by now that Flying Saucers emanate from Russia and once the secret was out, Russia would have been proud to show off it's technological prowess to the rest of the world. So concerning man made flying saucers, there's nothing, zilch, no evidence to reliably show flying saucers have ever worked, in fact the opposite is true. This programme's featured U.S. experiments suggest that Flying Saucer design is a none starter. This absence of any reliable proof that man made saucers exist at all was the reason why they had to, somewhere in the programme, point to some famous sighting and suggest that the UFO was real (but terrestial) and thus 'proving' within the programme the reality of the man made flying saucer. The programme's logic also drove it to find other 'proofs' that there were other weird man made objects out there, besides flying saucers, to explain for the multiplicity of UFO phenomena. So they found some expert to argue that the famous Gulf Breeze sightings were man made objects. But in doing so they have suggested that US military deliberately and irresponsibly put on a display for the witnesses many times over. Allowing them to take many pictures and videos of them and leading them to believe that some kind of extra terrestial contact had occurred. Infiltrating the Ufological commnity to muddy the water is 'OKish' if there are 'reasons of national security' to do so. But this, if true, was wreckless and was cruelly messing with people's minds. And if that's what the US military and intelligence have been up to over the last century then we are wandering into areas of human rights abuse and in the litigation culture of the U.S. ......... somebody might sue ! ''I was duped into believing in ET's by the American government and so I gave all my money to Space Brothers Inc'' Now that's one court case I wanna see. P.S. Yes I won't argue that triangular UFO's might have been the F-117 stealth fighter. First we had circles, triangles......so what next, squares ? |
| The Real Flying Saucers - Channel 5 9.00pm 16/6/04 |
| The Modern Paranormalist |