Maybe we should extend that same insight into understanding some of our political anomalists?

A stalker’s kind of love, to be sure.

You see it in a typical trajectory, starting with starry-eyed hero worship and a burning desire to “contribute” (puppy love), followed by rejection and bitterness (growing up); and in some people, graduation to the passion to prove themselves worthy of their unrequited lover’s regard (obsession). The impulse to demonstrate scientific cred in an emotional atmosphere of resentment has a way of leading to cargo cult science.

Dr. Joseph’s web site is a brilliant example of the genre of somebody sincerely and passionately at the fringe. I’d be careful about calling somebody with a doctorate a “pseudoscientist” for fear of a lawsuit, but I think that given the amount of material on his site having to do with NASA conspiracies and persecution of “heretics”, Joseph might be comfortable being labelled on the “fringe”.

But I came away from a half hour at his web site and following google links convinced of one thing: The guy is sincere. He’s not one of hank’s cynical hucksters. He believe in his ideas, and while he seems to be making money from book sales and the like, activities like that don’t come close to making the case for fraud. Being supported by your work isn’t prima-facie proof of bad faith.

So hank’s not wrong, scientific hucksters exists. And so do the sincere ones like Dr. Joseph. I find the latter far more interesting than the hucksters, because hucksters just recycle other peoples’ ideas far enough to make a buck. At least the folks like Joseph are giving me their own best efforts.

Its a lot easier than untangling all the connections and relationships and long history that make up reality. What gives them away is that when you press them, they invariably fall back on some conspiracy that is trying to “keep the truth from us”, and they (the whistleblower), and only they, know what’s really happening.

The world is full of these people: the Chariots of the Gods, the Bermuda Triangle, Atlantis, UFOs, Bigfoot, the Masons, the Bilderbergs, the Rothschilds, Area 51, the Reptile Overlords, the flouridators, the vaccinators, the Philadelphia Experimenters, the mercury in the dental appliances, the contrails and so on. Some, like Scientology, get very powerful and rich and dangerous. They are like self-fulfilling prophecies. Some are just sci-fi fairy tales and essentially harmless, others are political and racial slurs and potentially deadly. But they all seem to have one thing in common, some “elite” (governmental, corporate, religious or academic) which is desperately trying to hide the truth from us for some not too clear reason.

And unfortunately, there is just enough truth to this, it happens just often enough for real, that the story, or others like it, refuses to go die a natural death and go away. And alas, there are real conspiracies in the world, just not as many as we’d like to think.

Basically, people would rather believe they are being manipulated by a vast and powerful secret society than that they are victims of a simple con man or their own ignorance and fear.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journal_of_Cosmology

Either that, or he’s trying to get to the truth and a conspiracy of government scientists is trying to silence him.

I think some people are just dismayed by the fact that there is so much that they don’t know, and that is is possibly threatening them.
I call them “Xfilers”. It gives them comfort to think that evil people are conspiring to keep the truth from them, because that provides them with a neat explanation, of sorts, of a world they don’t fully understand. These conspiracies usually originate with either sinister government agencies, or sinister megacorporations, depending on the political preferences of the Xfiler.

Now, I don’t doubt there are genuine evil conspirators in both government and business, I just don’t believe they explain everything that doesn’t make sense. Shit happens. And sometimes its weird shit. People don’t like to admit that to themselves, they want a world that makes sense, even if the sense involves a shadow government of supervillains.

A good rule of thumb is that governments lie to cover up their incompetence. Corporations lie to cover up their greed.