How Many People Here are Cranks?

C

Charles_Wong

Registered Senior Member
The genuine crank is the one who refuses to debate his opponents, who arrogantly dismisses their arguments and denies their credibility, who approves of the suppresson of opinion different from his own, who typically appeals to authority or consensus rather than to facts and logic, whose emotional temperature rises noticeably in the presence of embarrassing counter-arguments, and, above all, who typically labels his opponents as 'cranks'. In contrast, the genuine truth seeker is one who is eager for debate, who is courteous to his opponents, who remains calm in the face of counter-arguments, who does not seek to silence anyone, and above all who does not describe his opponents with epithets, particularly including 'crank', altho their behavior may strongly suggest the aptness of the description.

--John Bryant
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Have a nice day :)
 
I think people who talk shit and are out of their depth are way more interesting that people who arnt.
I do come across alot of people who are really uninformed alot of the time on any number of topics, but at least theyre giving me their opinion.
The chances are that they'll mature, do some growing up, and get some proper knowledge under their belt and go on to invent some genuinely well-formed and interesting opinions!
You cant buy that kind of creative thirst, any old fool can memorise facts and align themselves with the consensus, but thats not interesting and requires no personal creativity.
Go cranks!
 
heliocentric said:
I think people who talk shit and are out of their depth are way more interesting that people who arnt.
I do come across alot of people who are really uninformed alot of the time on any number of topics, but at least theyre giving me their opinion.
The chances are that they'll mature, do some growing up, and get some proper knowledge under their belt and go on to invent some genuinely well-formed and interesting opinions!
You cant buy that kind of creative thirst, any old fool can memorise facts and align themselves with the consensus, but thats not interesting and requires no personal creativity.
Go cranks!
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Wow!:D
 
Genji said:
:( I think I'm a crank.
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I don't know.
Do you believe perpetual motion is possible?
Does tin foil block out radio waves?
Is there some secret conspiracy group out to rip you off of your latest invention that butters toast?
 
According to Crank.net, anyone that holds a view not officially supported by the Democrat or Republican Party is a crank. It's an effective method of keeping the masses under ideological control: "Either you agree with me, or you're insane."

The Jewish Frankfurt School of Social Research originated in Germany but was shut down by Hitler. So they re-opened at either the University of California, Berkely, or Columbia university. They promoted the view that anyone that disagreed with their Marxist ideology was psychologically insane and required Jewish Freud's psychoanalysis in order to be cured:

http://www.amren.com/993issue/993issue.html#article3

But according to Prof. MacDonald, it is precisely the kind of group loyalty, respect for tradition, and consciousness of differences central to Jewish identity that Horkheimer and Adorno described as mental illness in gentiles. These writers adopted what eventually became a favorite Soviet tactic against dissidents: Anyone whose political views were different from theirs was insane. As Prof. MacDonald explains, the Frankfurt school never criticized or even described Jewish group identity – only that of gentiles: “behavior that is critical to Judaism as a successful group evolutionary strategy is conceptualized as pathological in gentiles.”

For these Jewish intellectuals, anti-Semitism was also a sign of mental illness: They concluded that Christian self-denial and especially sexual repression caused hatred of Jews. The Frankfurt school was enthu- siastic about psychoanalysis, according to which “Oedipal ambivalence toward the father and anal-sadistic relations in early childhood are the anti-Semite's irrevocable inheritance.”

[ . . . ]

As Christopher Lasch has written, the book leads to the conclusion that prejudice “could be eradicated only by subjecting the American people to what amounted to collective psychotherapy – by treating them as inmates of an insane asylum.”
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Hi Charles,
I think the real problem begins when a person identifies to strongly with his/her beliefs. This makes it difficult to objectively appraise or accept the views of others, and forces one to hang on to his opinions, often to the point of violence or abuse.
John
 
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