ATS Is Increasingly A Place Where People Come To Believe Anything & Panic About It

Provocative, I know, and everyone is welcome to their own opinion. However, increasingly it seems people are confusing their opinions with solid facts. Clearly a fact has some basis in provable reality and an opinion is simply a personal belief which may have, but doesn't necessarily require, any basis in reality.

Facts and opinions are not the same and yet more and more often I see threads that start 'I heard...(fill in with unverified information on any subject you choose, but Gulf evacuation threads have a lot of this)' which is then followed with posts that so often start 'Star and flag OP, I believe...(fill in more unverified opinion, not fact).

Cue a bunch of posters who all take each others beliefs as unreserved facts, agree wholeheartedly for no factual reason, and then throw in a few new beliefs for the next poster to believe.

Before the bottom of the first page normally there will be people then professing to serious panic with regard to the totally opinion based pieces they have just read, regardless of how obviously false/silly/deranged the above posts may have been.

ATS, I thought, was a place to investigate and discuss, not to swallow any old BS that is printed and then panic like headless chickens. Of course opinions are important, we all have them, but they are not facts and carry no more weight than the amount of thought and research behind them. So often that level is next to zero, it seems.

Or am I wrong? Am I being totally unreasonable and unfairly maligning people? Like I said, the title is provocative, but it's not meant to be an insult to anyone, simply to promote a bit of thought. Ok, roll on the flamers...

Do you believe, or think?

Ya I agree, opinions are important but opinions and facts are different, Anytime you get on a controversial subject like say religion the coment get the sign and the thumbs down sign and the personal attacks start rolling! I agree with you so S&F for you!

[edit on 2-7-2010 by XxRagingxPandaxX]

I think ATS is a place where you can freely share ideas, even dumb ones. I dont really care if other people panic over opinions posted on here, if they want to panic let em, I still enjoy reading the opinions. A lot of people do make sensationalist threads, but its still up to the reader to decide if the ideas are stupid, most of us are intelligent enough to recognize fear mongering. Your right, people shouldn't take others opinions as facts, that's why you got to fact check and use your own discretion. We also have the "ignore" button, and if someone is really off base you can just post a reply with solid information. I think there still is a lot of quality content on the site, its a forum so anyone can post, so your gonna see a lot of crap and a lot of good stuff.

That is exactly correct!
I think that's why members seem to post here a while, then leave.
ATS seems to have become the site for teenage boys fantasies about various doomsday scenarios! From swine flu, to "socialist" Obama, to the current fad "we are all gonna die BP/oil spill", members seem downright anxious for death and destruction.
Gullibility is at an all time high, housewives gossiping over a backyard fence have a higher standard than ATS members!
But, hey, what do know!

[edit on 2-7-2010 by OldDragger]

ATS is a site dedicated to speculative analysis, discussing the possible, the probable and the unlikely. You will find as many agree with you as don't.

You cannot judge anything without information, if people are disinclined to speculate, consider, and theorize, share and evaluate information sources, they may as well just watch TV. There, they do it all for you.

Insofar as panicking... I have yet to see an instance of that.

Unless you define passionate concern as panic.

Sadly, people gravitate to both extremes... either complacent disregard, or over-anxious fretting; it comes with the subject matter.

By the way, unless you visit every forum, and every thread, how can you generalize like this? I am going to presume that you are mainly referring to the focus on recent disasters...

the other day I had this chat with a good friend. it is not just ATS.

this period in time is analogous to the few instances leading up to a major event. I’ll give an example:

You are in a car, about to collide with another. For many people there is this period of 3-5 seconds where eternity is available and everything is occurring in slow motion. Athletes call this "the zone". For many people they are seeing everything on the playing field moments before the event.

The challenge I see is that the globe has mental atrophy from years of being manipulated, dumbed down through fluoride and pharmacology, etc. For almost 70 years the “civilized” world has been programmed via the television and media to remain docile, to serve as livestock and to give all of our safety over to the governing bodies. As an emergency becomes real and we realize the governing body is our capture we panic and that brings us to your post.

It is as if we are lying on the hospital bed, watching a tornado come at us and we cannot get our muscles to respond to the instructions from our mind. If the world were in a flask we would notice the separation of materials occurring as the heat rises in the base of the container.

Time to give up the MSM, Facebook and Reality TV. These are our daily regimen of psychotropic drugs being issued by the institution we call *insert your nation here*. Once the drugs wear off we’ll regain our natural faculties and some of this will subside.

reply to post by OldDragger


The majority of us are level headed intelligent individuals with a high standard of information and sources. I've noticed a recent influx of new members recently which might be the culprit behind the recent flood of BS here lately.

(enough BS to plug the BOP that's for sure)

However, many people are still holding a higher standard of information (which is followed by the fear mongering BS granted). We will get through the bs influx. We always do.

yup, thats what happens on a conspiracy thread!

its just fun for me to read. the crazy predictions, religious fanatics, and completely baseless claims are my entertainment when waitin for a good thread to come up, so i dont really mind it.

its kind of what got me interested in this website in the first place.

"OMG...reptillians? BASES ON THE MOON?" way more fun to read about than economics.

I have to agree with you.

It's one thing to speculate on a particular scenario but it seems like many people can't distinguish between speculation and fact.

We're seeing doom predicted almost daily. We've had a number of predictions about TEOTWAWKI which, thankfully, haven't panned out.

I don't know what has happened unless it' s just a feeling of hopelessness setting into the population.

Although many people enjoy running around like headless chickens, there is also a large community that likes to share rational thought and seek explanations that can calm us down.

There are typically more ways to view an incident than merely panicking, and yes many people panic often (even i do) but we need to just sit down and think about things more logically.

There are many voices of reason on ATS and if you will just hear them out maybe you will not fall prey to the fear mongering that permeates our world so often these days.

In the mainstream media, fear mongering usually has no counter. But here at ATS there are many members who think critically that are willing to speak out and do whatever they can to bring sense and reason to a topic being taken out of context or exaggerated.

So I like ATS. At least here we can hear the other side of the story.

[color=C6AEC7]I thoroughly agree, OP. There does lately seem to be more and more threads with dramatic titles and full of panic.

Which wouldnt be so much of a problem, I mean everyone is entitled to their opinion, except I have noticed that if someone responds to one of these threads and tries to bring in some rationality, they are more often than not either ignored or called a disinfo agent, or government employee, or BP employee, or whatever. Which I find quite insulting, actually.

Everyone should be allowed to post their points of view, surely, without fear of being called the names that Ive mentioned?