Transsexual Pedophile Joe Martino of 'Collective Evolution' & 'The Puls
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All on Mon Jan 31 23:30:16 2022
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Dr. Michael Shermer, the founding publisher of Skeptic magazine and a
career debunker of bad science, doesn’t think Joe Martino is living up to
those responsibilities.
Shermer has known his fair share of what he calls peddlers of “woo,” a
term used among devotees of the scientific method to describe
pseudoscientific explanations. (The word is thought to stem from the sound
of audiences going “woooo!” in reaction to magic tricks.) Woo is appealing because it offers explanations for things people either don’t understand
or don’t accept. Collective Evolution, he says, is “woo-woo central.”
“Come on. Come on,” says Shermer as he scrolls through a Collective
Evolution story titled “500 Kilometers On 1 Litre: Brazilian Man Shows Us
Why We Don’t Need Gas Stations.” “Stories like these guys are legion, and they’re all fraud. Or they’re deluded. They never, ever, ever, ever turn
out to be true.” He scoffs at the idea that big business suppresses revolutionary inventions, like the water-based engine mentioned in the
article. “They always make that argument,” he says. “How do you explain
Elon Musk and Tesla and all the other electric cars? The conspiracy is apparently not working very well.”
But Shermer isn’t just bemused by Joe. He’s a little bit scared of him.
Shermer points to an article about a U.S. Congressman, Bill Posey, who
dropped a “bombshell” about data fraud in vaccine science — much to the
delight of anti-vaxxers. “This is a hundred percent out of phase with
reality,” he says. “Who the hell is a congressman? We should be talking to
the CDC. Somebody from JAMA, somebody from the American Medical
Association. Oh gosh, this is terrible.” Vaccines, medicine, cancer cures, AIDS, even creationism: These are public health issues that require both thoughtful and reasonable policy prescriptions. Mistrust of institutions
makes advocating for those policies difficult or possible.
“This is where it becomes dangerous,” says Shermer. “Not all ideas are
equal. And therein lies the rub.”
Shermer’s problem with Collective Evolution isn’t that it’s actively
immoral but that it’s completely passive, unwilling to do the hard work of sorting the good ideas and information from the bad. Shermer believes in
the institutions and credentialled people traditionally responsible for
the sorting process. He doesn’t doubt that Joe wants “moral progress,” but
he believes that he’s opting out of the testing phase of the scientific process.
Joe doesn’t really disagree with that assessment.
“We don’t choose sides,” he says. “Our thing with the vaccine movement is always, ‘It’s not about anti-vaxx.’ It’s just being pro-information.” He enforces a strict “emotionally neutral” policy at the site. Keeping
potentially partisan feelings out of the reporting, he says, lets readers
form their own opinions.
“I’m not saying nobody should go out there and get vaccinated,” he says.
“I’m saying, let’s give people the proper information, let’s look at this
as a humanity.”
To Joe, the prevailing wisdom is always up for debate. Everything is up
for debate. His sheet of paper is unfolded and pure white. He knows that,
like him, Bill Gates dropped out of college and that the Ph.D.s have been
wrong before. This is certainly true, but I have two degrees in biology,
and one thing that got drilled home during lab work was the difference
between correlation and causation.
“They laughed at the Wright brothers,” says Shermer. “Well, they laughed
at the Marx Brothers. Being laughed at doesn’t make you right.”
I don’t think Joe runs Collective Evolution to enrich himself, but I do
think his concerns are notably earthly for a good Catholic boy. What
becomes clear talking to him is that he wants. He’s not greedy or at all unhappy — the smile is apparently permanent — but he believes that he, and
the rest of us, deserve more and better. It’s this almost religious
conviction, like belief in the New World Order, that seems to bond him to
his audience. And he’s introspective enough to understand this, which is
why he’s eager to recall a session he had with a psychiatrist back when he
was trying to make it in the conventional world to a woman he knew almost
a decade ago.
“There was a terrifying moment,” he says. “She had the look on her face
saying, ‘I don’t know how to help you.’ But she didn’t say it. I was like,
oh fuck, she’s lost, what am I gonna do?”
In essence, Joe didn’t solve this problem: He relocated it. Rather than struggling to live in the world our parents, church, government, and government-financed scientists built for us, Joe chose an alternative
route. “It’s sad that we need to call it that, but the whole purpose of
the ‘alternative’ movement is to say, ‘Look, this was established, but
this may not have been established for the right reasons,’” he says.
In his TEDx talk, Joe discusses why he thinks the site blew up the way it
did. People are unhappy, he says, and they’re frustrated they can’t do
anything about it. “There are revolutions, there are protests, there are
people all over the place who are asking for change,” he says, gazing out
into the crowd, the sky-blue Collective Evolution logo splashed out on a
huge screen behind him.
For casual readers, Collective Evolution is a neatly packaged collection
of parables attempting to explain the world’s ills. But for its devoted followers, it’s much more than that: With its catchphrase, “Be Change,” it offers people a chance to bring about their own salvation. Evolve with us,
the site seems to say, and gain control over your future — everyone’s
future. As Joe, smiling away on the couch in the sunny hangout room,
recounts every step of his difficult journey from depression to
introspection to liberation, he is the picture of a man in control.
He pauses every few sentences to look me straight in the eye, as if to
ask, “You follow what I’m saying, right?” Despite my doubts, I find myself overwhelmed by the strength of his conviction, nodding along in agreement.
“It’s not science or pseudoscience, like a switch that’s on-off,” says Dr. Michael Gordin, author of The Pseudoscience Wars and professor of
contemporary history at Princeton’s brick-and-ivy Dickinson Hall. “You are closer or further from the consensus. And being closer to the consensus
isn’t always a good thing because sometimes the consensus is wrong.”
And he’s not at all surprised that Joe has an audience. Guys like Joe have always had an audience. People keep coming back to the fringe, Gordin
says, because “there’s something compelling in some aspect of it.” He
prefers this term — fringe — because it carries less judgment than “pseudoscience,” which he says scientists have started using as a “term of abuse.”
“Exploring an unorthodox theory is like having an unorthodox lifestyle, an unorthodox politics,” says Gordin. “It’s just another unorthodox thing
that is part of people’s self-inquiry.”
The ideas that Collective Evolution champions sit far from the scientific center by design, not by accident. There’s a Collective Evolution article describing a set of one-off studies that prove telepathy is real,
illustrated with an image of two blue men locked in an electric stare-off
like a pair of Dr. Manhattans. This seems insane, but it is scientific to
the extent that someone did an experiment and made a conclusion based on
the results. String theory and Einstein’s special theory of relativity,
Gordin points out, were once derided. They were at the fringe but moved,
over time, towards the middle. And theories can move through the rings of scientific truth in two directions. Eugenics, anyone?
It’s an intellectual challenge to believe that the anti-vaxxers might be
right. To do so is to imply that the scientific establishment has a
massive blind spot, that highly credentialled people have made systematic errors or are caught up in a grand conspiracy. It requires believing that
the whole system the scientific community has been built on, the one that awarded me my two college diplomas, is a totalitarian state rather than a benevolent democracy. On this level, Joe is a sort of lab rat guerilla
fighting towards a capital defended by, among many others, the American
Medical Association, the CDC, NASA, Caltech, and the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics.
“People who are fringe feel like an injustice has been done,” Gordin says. “They have a claim, and evidence.”
The evidence is the rub. Collective Evolution’s writers lean heavily on
places in airy Northern California like the HeartMath Institute and the Institute of Noetic Science, founded by former NASA astronaut Edgar
Mitchell, which most scientists have never heard of or dismiss out of
hand.
And that’s the problem, according to Gordin, who says that if there’s even
some evidence there — of a vaccine-autism link, or a water-powered engine
— credentialled scientists should be eager to check it out. It’s
impossible, of course, to chase down every lead, so scientists default to
a sort of triage process Gordin thinks is ill-considered. If scientists
remain convinced that “the weirder the idea is, the less likely it is to
be right,” Gordin thinks they’ll miss opportunities. If we didn’t have
people willing to investigate the weirder ideas, he says, we wouldn’t have quantum theory or antibacterial treatments for ulcers.
Gordin’s careful to mention that there is, of course, a “bright line,”
beyond which ideas are totally delusional. We just don’t always know where
that line is.
“It’s not a fight,” sighs Joe, who sees himself as more pacifist than revolutionary. He’s simply trying to showcase the science that mainstream
media won’t — or can’t — present. And who can judge the quality of that science, wonders Joe, when “these quote-unquote legit scientists” are
being exposed for fraud?
He does not cite specific examples.
It is perhaps unsurprising that a person whose view of the scientific
community is informed by a distrust of the institutions that run it overestimates the resources of those institutions. Joe’s plan for putting
an end to the scientific debates — whether on vaccination, GMOs, free
energy, or any of the other hot topics that keep readers coming back to
his site — is pretty simple: “Let’s truly put this to the test,
clinically.” Like Gordin, he thinks we need to be experimental; unlike
Gordin, he doesn’t acknowledge that resources are limited. And he refuses
to understand why people have their doubts about the feasibility — and
morality — of his approach.
“It’s kind of shocking to hear a guy like Shermer, who’s in the field and
knows — He knows how it works,” he says. “He’s not a dumb man. He’s intelligent. He knows that there’s corruption. He knows that things can be hand-picked.”
In the world Joe wants to live in — the world we’re all supposed to be
evolving toward — there is no need for skeptics because it’s possible to
test every shaky claim. It’s possible to treat illness with natural
products because pharmaceutical companies don’t obsess over profits. Cars
would run on water, criminals would be cared for, and road rage would be nothing more than a Wikipedia entry. We’d all be a little bit kinder. We’d
all be more open.
There’s a distinct high-schooliness to walking with Joe through the grass toward the parking lot and trying to make sense of the world in a big
holistic way. Back then, we’d watch trippy movies like The Matrix to
expand our minds; even now, Joe thinks it’s a pretty spot-on metaphor for
what we’re all going through. Those talks were always fun for me, a nice
way to pass the time. The thing I realize as we get closer to the parking
lot is that Joe believes he actually gets it. That had never occurred to
me as a possibility or the point.
“Every year it gets greater and greater,” he says proudly, pleased with
the growth of his community. Collective evolution, he says, is already happening.
Before I leave, I ask him what is in the mason jar.
“It’s special water,” he says. “It doesn’t contain fluoride or chlorine or anything like that.” If he puts something in his body, he wants it to be
pure. We say goodbye and he smiles as I walk away. I don’t doubt that he’s smiling as he walks back into the airy environs of the Kingbridge
compound.
Crammed in my dad’s Mitsubishi, the one he still leases from his boss, I
head home, straight into the blare of rush hour traffic. I take the
Neilson Road exit off Highway 401, the same exit that leads to our old
high school, Pope. Last year, it was renamed Saint John Paul II Catholic Secondary School, to the fanfare of our still-religious community.
In the distance, the Yellow Pages tower looms over the squat concrete
buildings of Scarborough’s business district. It’s not pretty, but it’s comforting in a way. It reminds me of being a kid. Even back then, I
didn’t live in a world of infinite possibility. Unlike Joe, I still
don’t.
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)
From
The Pulse@21:1/5 to
All on Sat Feb 5 22:40:56 2022
XPost: alt.survival, alt.fan.rush-limbaugh, can.politics
XPost: rec.arts.tv, alt.politics, alt.atheism
XPost: talk.politics.guns, alt.abortion, alt.global-warming
XPost: alt.journalism.criticism, alt.news-media, alt.checkmate
XPost: can.politics
Dr. Michael Shermer, the founding publisher of Skeptic magazine and a
career debunker of bad science, doesn’t think Joe Martino is living up to
those responsibilities.
Shermer has known his fair share of what he calls peddlers of “woo,” a
term used among devotees of the scientific method to describe
pseudoscientific explanations. (The word is thought to stem from the sound
of audiences going “woooo!” in reaction to magic tricks.) Woo is appealing because it offers explanations for things people either don’t understand
or don’t accept. Collective Evolution, he says, is “woo-woo central.”
“Come on. Come on,” says Shermer as he scrolls through a Collective
Evolution story titled “500 Kilometers On 1 Litre: Brazilian Man Shows Us
Why We Don’t Need Gas Stations.” “Stories like these guys are legion, and they’re all fraud. Or they’re deluded. They never, ever, ever, ever turn
out to be true.” He scoffs at the idea that big business suppresses revolutionary inventions, like the water-based engine mentioned in the
article. “They always make that argument,” he says. “How do you explain
Elon Musk and Tesla and all the other electric cars? The conspiracy is apparently not working very well.”
But Shermer isn’t just bemused by Joe. He’s a little bit scared of him.
Shermer points to an article about a U.S. Congressman, Bill Posey, who
dropped a “bombshell” about data fraud in vaccine science — much to the
delight of anti-vaxxers. “This is a hundred percent out of phase with
reality,” he says. “Who the hell is a congressman? We should be talking to
the CDC. Somebody from JAMA, somebody from the American Medical
Association. Oh gosh, this is terrible.” Vaccines, medicine, cancer cures, AIDS, even creationism: These are public health issues that require both thoughtful and reasonable policy prescriptions. Mistrust of institutions
makes advocating for those policies difficult or possible.
“This is where it becomes dangerous,” says Shermer. “Not all ideas are
equal. And therein lies the rub.”
Shermer’s problem with Collective Evolution isn’t that it’s actively
immoral but that it’s completely passive, unwilling to do the hard work of sorting the good ideas and information from the bad. Shermer believes in
the institutions and credentialled people traditionally responsible for
the sorting process. He doesn’t doubt that Joe wants “moral progress,” but
he believes that he’s opting out of the testing phase of the scientific process.
Joe doesn’t really disagree with that assessment.
“We don’t choose sides,” he says. “Our thing with the vaccine movement is always, ‘It’s not about anti-vaxx.’ It’s just being pro-information.” He enforces a strict “emotionally neutral” policy at the site. Keeping
potentially partisan feelings out of the reporting, he says, lets readers
form their own opinions.
“I’m not saying nobody should go out there and get vaccinated,” he says.
“I’m saying, let’s give people the proper information, let’s look at this
as a humanity.”
To Joe, the prevailing wisdom is always up for debate. Everything is up
for debate. His sheet of paper is unfolded and pure white. He knows that,
like him, Bill Gates dropped out of college and that the Ph.D.s have been
wrong before. This is certainly true, but I have two degrees in biology,
and one thing that got drilled home during lab work was the difference
between correlation and causation.
“They laughed at the Wright brothers,” says Shermer. “Well, they laughed
at the Marx Brothers. Being laughed at doesn’t make you right.”
I don’t think Joe runs Collective Evolution to enrich himself, but I do
think his concerns are notably earthly for a good Catholic boy. What
becomes clear talking to him is that he wants. He’s not greedy or at all unhappy — the smile is apparently permanent — but he believes that he, and
the rest of us, deserve more and better. It’s this almost religious
conviction, like belief in the New World Order, that seems to bond him to
his audience. And he’s introspective enough to understand this, which is
why he’s eager to recall a session he had with a psychiatrist back when he
was trying to make it in the conventional world to a woman he knew almost
a decade ago.
“There was a terrifying moment,” he says. “She had the look on her face
saying, ‘I don’t know how to help you.’ But she didn’t say it. I was like,
oh fuck, she’s lost, what am I gonna do?”
In essence, Joe didn’t solve this problem: He relocated it. Rather than struggling to live in the world our parents, church, government, and government-financed scientists built for us, Joe chose an alternative
route. “It’s sad that we need to call it that, but the whole purpose of
the ‘alternative’ movement is to say, ‘Look, this was established, but
this may not have been established for the right reasons,’” he says.
In his TEDx talk, Joe discusses why he thinks the site blew up the way it
did. People are unhappy, he says, and they’re frustrated they can’t do
anything about it. “There are revolutions, there are protests, there are
people all over the place who are asking for change,” he says, gazing out
into the crowd, the sky-blue Collective Evolution logo splashed out on a
huge screen behind him.
For casual readers, Collective Evolution is a neatly packaged collection
of parables attempting to explain the world’s ills. But for its devoted followers, it’s much more than that: With its catchphrase, “Be Change,” it offers people a chance to bring about their own salvation. Evolve with us,
the site seems to say, and gain control over your future — everyone’s
future. As Joe, smiling away on the couch in the sunny hangout room,
recounts every step of his difficult journey from depression to
introspection to liberation, he is the picture of a man in control.
He pauses every few sentences to look me straight in the eye, as if to
ask, “You follow what I’m saying, right?” Despite my doubts, I find myself overwhelmed by the strength of his conviction, nodding along in agreement.
“It’s not science or pseudoscience, like a switch that’s on-off,” says Dr. Michael Gordin, author of The Pseudoscience Wars and professor of
contemporary history at Princeton’s brick-and-ivy Dickinson Hall. “You are closer or further from the consensus. And being closer to the consensus
isn’t always a good thing because sometimes the consensus is wrong.”
And he’s not at all surprised that Joe has an audience. Guys like Joe have always had an audience. People keep coming back to the fringe, Gordin
says, because “there’s something compelling in some aspect of it.” He
prefers this term — fringe — because it carries less judgment than “pseudoscience,” which he says scientists have started using as a “term of abuse.”
“Exploring an unorthodox theory is like having an unorthodox lifestyle, an unorthodox politics,” says Gordin. “It’s just another unorthodox thing
that is part of people’s self-inquiry.”
The ideas that Collective Evolution champions sit far from the scientific center by design, not by accident. There’s a Collective Evolution article describing a set of one-off studies that prove telepathy is real,
illustrated with an image of two blue men locked in an electric stare-off
like a pair of Dr. Manhattans. This seems insane, but it is scientific to
the extent that someone did an experiment and made a conclusion based on
the results. String theory and Einstein’s special theory of relativity,
Gordin points out, were once derided. They were at the fringe but moved,
over time, towards the middle. And theories can move through the rings of scientific truth in two directions. Eugenics, anyone?
It’s an intellectual challenge to believe that the anti-vaxxers might be
right. To do so is to imply that the scientific establishment has a
massive blind spot, that highly credentialled people have made systematic errors or are caught up in a grand conspiracy. It requires believing that
the whole system the scientific community has been built on, the one that awarded me my two college diplomas, is a totalitarian state rather than a benevolent democracy. On this level, Joe is a sort of lab rat guerilla
fighting towards a capital defended by, among many others, the American
Medical Association, the CDC, NASA, Caltech, and the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics.
“People who are fringe feel like an injustice has been done,” Gordin says. “They have a claim, and evidence.”
The evidence is the rub. Collective Evolution’s writers lean heavily on
places in airy Northern California like the HeartMath Institute and the Institute of Noetic Science, founded by former NASA astronaut Edgar
Mitchell, which most scientists have never heard of or dismiss out of
hand.
And that’s the problem, according to Gordin, who says that if there’s even
some evidence there — of a vaccine-autism link, or a water-powered engine
— credentialled scientists should be eager to check it out. It’s
impossible, of course, to chase down every lead, so scientists default to
a sort of triage process Gordin thinks is ill-considered. If scientists
remain convinced that “the weirder the idea is, the less likely it is to
be right,” Gordin thinks they’ll miss opportunities. If we didn’t have
people willing to investigate the weirder ideas, he says, we wouldn’t have quantum theory or antibacterial treatments for ulcers.
Gordin’s careful to mention that there is, of course, a “bright line,”
beyond which ideas are totally delusional. We just don’t always know where
that line is.
“It’s not a fight,” sighs Joe, who sees himself as more pacifist than revolutionary. He’s simply trying to showcase the science that mainstream
media won’t — or can’t — present. And who can judge the quality of that science, wonders Joe, when “these quote-unquote legit scientists” are
being exposed for fraud?
He does not cite specific examples.
It is perhaps unsurprising that a person whose view of the scientific
community is informed by a distrust of the institutions that run it overestimates the resources of those institutions. Joe’s plan for putting
an end to the scientific debates — whether on vaccination, GMOs, free
energy, or any of the other hot topics that keep readers coming back to
his site — is pretty simple: “Let’s truly put this to the test,
clinically.” Like Gordin, he thinks we need to be experimental; unlike
Gordin, he doesn’t acknowledge that resources are limited. And he refuses
to understand why people have their doubts about the feasibility — and
morality — of his approach.
“It’s kind of shocking to hear a guy like Shermer, who’s in the field and
knows — He knows how it works,” he says. “He’s not a dumb man. He’s intelligent. He knows that there’s corruption. He knows that things can be hand-picked.”
In the world Joe wants to live in — the world we’re all supposed to be
evolving toward — there is no need for skeptics because it’s possible to
test every shaky claim. It’s possible to treat illness with natural
products because pharmaceutical companies don’t obsess over profits. Cars
would run on water, criminals would be cared for, and road rage would be nothing more than a Wikipedia entry. We’d all be a little bit kinder. We’d
all be more open.
There’s a distinct high-schooliness to walking with Joe through the grass toward the parking lot and trying to make sense of the world in a big
holistic way. Back then, we’d watch trippy movies like The Matrix to
expand our minds; even now, Joe thinks it’s a pretty spot-on metaphor for
what we’re all going through. Those talks were always fun for me, a nice
way to pass the time. The thing I realize as we get closer to the parking
lot is that Joe believes he actually gets it. That had never occurred to
me as a possibility or the point.
“Every year it gets greater and greater,” he says proudly, pleased with
the growth of his community. Collective evolution, he says, is already happening.
Before I leave, I ask him what is in the mason jar.
“It’s special water,” he says. “It doesn’t contain fluoride or chlorine or anything like that.” If he puts something in his body, he wants it to be
pure. We say goodbye and he smiles as I walk away. I don’t doubt that he’s smiling as he walks back into the airy environs of the Kingbridge
compound.
Crammed in my dad’s Mitsubishi, the one he still leases from his boss, I
head home, straight into the blare of rush hour traffic. I take the
Neilson Road exit off Highway 401, the same exit that leads to our old
high school, Pope. Last year, it was renamed Saint John Paul II Catholic Secondary School, to the fanfare of our still-religious community.
In the distance, the Yellow Pages tower looms over the squat concrete
buildings of Scarborough’s business district. It’s not pretty, but it’s comforting in a way. It reminds me of being a kid. Even back then, I
didn’t live in a world of infinite possibility. Unlike Joe, I still
don’t.
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)