@JimJesus @justintempler TZm shit storm begins.— The Burger King (@TVPMovieTracker) June 8, 2014
Open Letter to Bully Peter Joseph Merolahttp://t.co/Du2ZS04XM4
"In this paranoid and patronising video Peter Joseph publicly insults me and my work (from 09:15m). I have never attacked him or his yet he has called my peer reviewed hard work “bullshit”, “lazy” and “really, really pathetic” – amongst other insults.
Peter Joseph libelously levels “exceptional academic fallibility” (17:43mm) at me and my co-author Professor David Voas, whose CV In May 2014 evidences 75 examples of exceptional academic infallibility.
The video was made in 2012. I have only just seen it (in 2014). Peter had Skyped me in 2012 to whinge that he was being bullied on the internet by Zeitgeist debunkers who were citing my article to claim that Zeitgeist was a faith-based religion; as I recall he was hoping to sue them but did not know who they were. I told him that while I sympathised – as Zeitgeist is clearly not a faith-based religion – I could not help because I did not know the people concerned or what I could do about it. But having been alerted to this video about me I’m going to take him up on his invitation in it to “Stop the Bullshit” (sic):
If you want to Stop the Bullshit you are going to have to come in and counter it, says Peter.
OK then!
But I warn you now, Peter, steel yourself as I have not minced the words in the reply you are about to read. They are not intended to abuse or debunk you but to answer your accusations then draw attention to certain aspects of your personality in the cause of your personal wellbeing and the wellbeing of others. These defects would not matter if you were not a figurehead, but as you enjoy that status you must take responsibility for them and their effects. I believe that your shoddy arrogance sets an irresponsible and – I will argue – dangerous example. And sorry, I’m going to relish using profanities, put downs and asides: you set the standard by throwing all of those at me and my work first – the first reason why you are not a good example to your young followers.
Just to make clear – I am not a figurehead. You can see what I do on this website and in this repost. As a nobody I once posted a couple of critical and defensive conspiracy videos on YouTube so I know how really easy it is to hurl abuse and personality stuff from the safety of your bedroom. But the difference here is that no one was listening to or influenced by my defects. Not like Peter Joseph, who has gained a dangerous influence over thousands of young minds internationally and is about to be taken to task for his words and actions.
A very brief defence of The Zeitgeist Movement (TZM)
Zeitgeist the Movie (2007) was watched by millions. Currently, according to Similarweb.com (April 2014), its website is getting 95K individual visitors per month and the TZM website 160K (although this would suggest that the Movement is flagging: to be a real game changer you would be looking at numbers like David Icke (4m), Global Research (4.5m), Natural News (5m) or Infowars (7m)).
At the moment the world is churning with new ideas, examples of creative destruction to challenge the status quo: people are collaborating to address problems, innovating and pushing forward all manner of alternative understandings on and off the internet. The web movement I identified, Conspirituality and TZM sit alongside many other new and valid perspectives.
Right – that’s that out of the way.
Peter, in 2014 your video informs 55K viewers that you do not benefit from a mature or integrated personality. You are not pleased, humbled or even interested by the fact that TZM has been noted in a peer reviewed article. You don’t even seek politely to correct its inclusion or make good an honest, inconsequential mistake. Instead you video a cocky sneering “essay” inflating the error, rubbishing the article and stating that its authors have malicious intent. If this is the state of peer review today, you mince – you are terrified! (No need to be paranoid, Peter – no one is going to be peer reviewing your bullshit.) And apparently, my work is lazy and really really pathetic.
But that’s not what a respected British Sociology journal, its reviewers and a Professor had to say, Peter. Have you ever had an article peer reviewed? (Spewing out opinionated bullshit into the alternative media doesn’t count.)
In your ignorance and inexperience you clearly have no idea how difficult it is for someone like me, who is not an academic or a sociologist, to have a sociological article accepted for peer review and publication in a journal. Especially when she has been honest about the fact that she is a conspiracy theorist who is into alternative spirituality and her article is supportive of conspiracy theorists. I have achieved the near-impossible! I, a lay person, have managed to have endorsed by mainstream academia the facts that not all conspiracy theorists are racist or anti-Semitic, that lots of us are sane professionals into alternative spirituality who propose a variety of active and responsible solutions to the shadow government (Davids Wilcock and Icke, for example, both of whom air facts about Israel and Zionism – yet have nothing against Jewish people) – and that the conspiracist viewpoint is becoming more respectable! (The latter was recently substantiated by other academic research into conspiracy theory, although that was in the context of 911 and not alternative spirituality.) Do you understand what a step forward from Hofstadter this is starting to represent? The fact that you clearly don’t locks you out from any of its potential.
To be able to write this article I spent months collating and cross-referencing large volumes of information and doing background reading. I started with a blank slate, my brain and a huge phenomenon I could see on the internet – and ended up with a measurable web movement. Thanks to my work (see this website) I am able to attempt to measure the “global awakening” – or at least one part of it. But one of the immeasurable differences between you and me is that I am politely inviting the debunkers in, not running to Mummy about their calling me names. I note their keen minds and commitment to ferreting out the truth of what is really going on. Even better – they loathe conspiracy theory as much as they loathe TZM so they would balance out the confirmation bias in my interpretations. You see, Peter, my work attempts to be based in fact, integrity and the quest for truth, not lies – and this is what true, living sociology is about.
Being peer reviewed was a privilege. It’s inspiring and invigorating to have your work torn apart by your intellectual superiors. I was writing for a year and the reviewers were scrutinising the article over nearly two years, which is an unusually long time. In the article I thank and credit them politely and respectfully. I gave them 73 endnotes and a bunch of other references – imagine having to check those for accuracy when internet conspiracy is probably not your favourite subject! I noted and acted upon all their helpful, constructive comments and after all that the article had to wait in a very long queue to be published. So you haven’t a clue, you sneering bombast.
At 9:45mm you contribute your sociological expertise with: the entire paper is based upon a series of self-defining self-referring extremely subjective circumstantial presuppositions that haphazardly and crudely categorise a large number of counter-culture type groups in the world today.
What? Are you suffering from some kind of mental illness? You wouldn’t get through the first hurdle, mate. It’s the done thing in academia to communicate clearly, considering not only your readers but your reviewers and the requirements of the journals (which is usually not to publish incomprehensible bullshit, which is why your work’s not in them). And, as I said, I was identifying and defining a large new web philosophy/movement, which is not something you do every day (although it seems you are continually tweaking your small one) – and you imagine that there might be structural rules to be observed in breaking new ground like this? Get some respect, jerk – zoom out from your narrow, peter-focused perspective. I wasmaking the rules! I had to – because I was the first one to do this, I believe – ever. And I hope that this small, well-meaning contribution will give better brains than mine something interesting to build on – destroy, even, in the future.
Still, when you are writing for an academic journal there are a few behavioural mores which exist to filter out bullshit like your own. For example:
Humility (try it). I had never published before so I needed the mentorship of a co-author gracious enough to give me his time – and was lucky enough to find one. Professor David Voas does not do “lazy research” as you libelously state. (How dare you – he’s a Professor – who are you?) And he does not have an agenda to destroy TZM, Peter. David is well-known for his contributions but has only ever even heard of you because he was good enough to help me with my article.
Another rule (surely obvious to the thickest conspiracy theorist but not to paranoid Peter) is that when publishing in academia it is de rigeur to use the terminology “conspiracy theorist”, the definition of which (like it or not) is widely understood – you don’t barge in claiming that it’s not conspiracy because you and everyone else except academics knows the real Troof and can identify the roots of humanity’s problems….OK guys? (Another reason we don’t see any of your bullshit in journals.)
And it is standard practice to back up what you say using experts’ work so, rather than being arrogant enough to attempt to define the new age I drew on the work of experts Gordon Melton and Michael Barkun, whose quote you read out in a derogatory tone. It took me a long time and a lot of reading to find that quote. Probably about the most comprehensive book to define the new age is by Wouter Haanegraaf, an expert in esotericism at the University of Amsterdam – 600 pages. I’ve given you the link to his Wikipedia entry here as an example of somebody who, unlike you, does not have to worry about what’s in his entry! (Tip: that’s not because he’s an Illuminati gatekeeper, it’s because he’s real.) I like many am a fan of this intellectual giant and would have liked to cite his work, which I credit, but his definitions were too concise for my broad spectrum. So you can’t just conjure up any old bullshit in peer review territory, Peter – not like you can on the TZM website or being prostituted by RT. Like it or not, this is how the real world changes.
But because peer review really is about changing the real world (not that you would know much about that), there’s a limited extent to which the academic platform can be used to promote conspiracy theory. And rightly so! In fact, I believe that I pushed it to the limit. I was able to do this because what I wrote was real and I did not need funding, I was not on anybody’s payroll – I was working for love. Anyone who reads my article, whether or not they like or agree with it, will note that I kept my tone positive and respectful.
Working for love, I was on my own. Literally on my own. I spent over a year researching and writing that article 4-5 hours a day in a rented room in North London. There was no funding, no library, no Department of Conspiracy Theory, no Professor in Agenda 21 Manipulation Studies to support me. So I faced unusual problems researching. You see, most academic funding issues from institutions that are only interested in rubbishing conspiracy theories and steering objective young minds away from them. In my experience the party line within academia is that conspiracy theorists and people who are into alternative spirituality (people like me) are certifiably insane and that conspiracy theory is a “career killer”. So even if there are young people in academia sympathetic to these viewpoints, they probably only get on if they keep quiet about their views – and obviously, very little pro-conspiracy peer reviewed material exists to reference. I could find nothing to reference on internet conspiracy theory, very little on web movements and nothing unbiased on the history of conspiracy theory in general. All I could find were a few psychology articles diagnosing people like me as dysfunctional and a few scaremongering treatises about gun-toting “Patriots” and the “radical Christian right”. So I had to reference these.
This meant that another unique problem arose: I had to divide the genre (internet conspiracy theory) I was discussing before anyone had even defined it. As I was a committed listener to Patriot talk radio I knew that that its owners, broadcasters and most readers and listeners would not welcome my associating them with alternative spirituality: to their minds I and all the other Conspirituality proponents would have classified as Luciferians! So out of respect for this fact and their sensibilities, even though I see us all as working towards the same goal, I had to separate my Christian fellows out of Conspirituality. So this section of the article is a little messy.
Finally, Peter, on my “lazy” and “exceptionally fallible” work, I had no idea what the academics would want to see in the introduction to my paper so I had to ask David Voas for help. He wrote it for me. So thank you, atheist and non-conspiracist Professor David Voas for helping to get published a conspiracy theorist who is into alternative spirituality. (David did this because he could see I was talking facts and the topic was fresh and new, which is another qualification for peer review – not like recycling and dumbing down for consumption by young idealists neo-Marxist bullshit.)
And in calling my intent malicious, Peter it is you who is a paranoid conspiracy theorist with malicious intent – and trust me, oh great and mighty figurehead, you could not come across as less empathetic towards a fellow human’s efforts if you tried!
I challenge anyone to find one malicious word written by me about conspiracy theorists in either the article or my website, which consolidates my independent work (interpreting facts) over the past few years. Even now, my intent in writing this essay is not malicious – I am forced to respond to your attack on me and my work.
And as for my daring to include Zeitgeist as an example of Conspirituality and for shattering the reputation of British peer review single-handedly by getting Jacque Fresco’s (whose?) job description wrong, picture this:
It is late 2007. I am researching for my article which identifies and defines a new and increasingly widespread politico-spiritual philosophy on the internet. Proponents discuss spiritual solutions to the shadow government and spiritual awakening. I am taking this responsibility seriously. A diligent researcher, I manage to make it through to the end of Zeitgeist the Movie without slashing my wrists. As I recall (sorry – I can’t bear to watch it again to check these facts) it begins with Jiddu Krishnamurti and a Rinpoche – spirituality! After lecturing to Christians that they have all got it all so wrong it portrays a shadow government! I haul myself over to the Movie’s website and yes – there are the words spiritual awakening!
Trouble is, there’s hardly any information on the website. I recall staring frustrated at the nasty black background and red text. (Or was it yellow? Whatever, it was tasteless and difficult to read.) Here is the Wayback Machine’s record of Zeitgeist’s website in 2007 – notice how all the word salad (Molyneux, 2013) seems to get stuffed in at the end of 2008:
(By which time the article was nearly finished.)
So sorry, Peter – it was early days and I was confused. I didn’t realise you were lying to recruit innocent lambs into Agenda 21 holding-pens! How short-sighted of me. Just like lots of other people I missed the Disclaimer on your website saying that Zeitgeist had absolutely nothing to do with Zeitgeist. And I had somehow (can’t imagine how) gained the strong impression that Zeitgeist was about 911 being an inside job and knocking Christianity – but then somewhere down the line sustainability and some other Agenda 21 stuff rises woo woo like Venus out of the waters and the letters ement suddenly replace ie after the Zeitgeist the Mov bit (pick a card – any card). And then that weirdy beardy architect and that woman popped up with Legoland models and Weebly monorails – what was it that they did? It was all a bit like a bad acid trip! So sorry that I was confused about things with you repeatedly changing your story and goalposts and colleague swapping and having quarrels and talking claptrap and one moment 911 was an inside job and the next moment it wasn’t, sorry that I was not obsessed enough with your bloody boring Movie/Movement’s progress to keep a closer eye on it, never mind all my other 50+ URLs belonging to high quality Conspirituality providers with integrity, real game-changers like Dr Steven Greer and Dr Rauni Lena Kilde who are so much more popular and successful than you…..and so much nicer.
Ironically, I didn’t even want to include it in my article – it said nothing new, insulted Christianity and paled in comparison to the higher content and research standards being set by Red Ice, Mike Adams, David Icke or the fascinating Project Camelot team. To my mind I was being meticulous – I included Zeitgeist as an example of Conspirituality because there was not enough information available to rule it out! (The same goes for John Perkins but that’s for another time.)
Now onto your personality.
To increase your self awareness and improve your reputation as a figurehead I would strongly suggest that you read (the real) Ozymandias then apply yourself to the phenomenon of projection: your considerable psychological baggage can be seen hanging out like a bag of intestines by anyone who has the vaguest understanding of the mind. For example, you claim (10:25m): The human blame game…. simply bores me to death. When the whole – extremely boring – video is about you blaming humans – and encouraging your young human followers to do the same! You are stultifyingly self-referential, blind to your diminutions by superiors. Your faux insouciance, it seems obvious, conceals a temper coiled like a spring: you come across as the kind of person who would take out his bad day at work on the dog. And at 24:06mm you’re projecting yet again: Our supposed academic researchers don’t do any tangible research at all – they are sourcing bullshit!
In 2014 David Voas’ CV lists 75 items of tangible scholarly research. How many are on your CV, Peter? And I’m not an academic researcher – the article states clearly that I am an independent researcher.
Your actions in so rudely and casually demeaning me and my work (and the career of Professor David Voas) in public were dangerously irresponsible. Did you consider your example to others or the possible emotional effects of your diatribe upon me, a complete stranger? Or that you might be sued and lose? Obviously not. But TZM appeals to young people who need to see kind and dignified role models, not narcissistic bootboys. When influencing young people it is important to be self-aware: what kind of a person are you? How would you behave if someone criticised you? Would you boot them out? (I see you would) What if they made a mistake in front of you? Do you set the example of being tolerant, humble and kind? (If you ask David Voas’ students they will all tell you that he has all those qualities.)
As if all that were not dangerous enough, even worse; as you admit, many young minds are lured into TZM by your conspiracy material – even though you now wash your hands of it! Here’s a Polish Conspirituality site that, like many others in Eastern Europe, uses your movie to illustrate that 911 was an inside job. In your responsible effort to correct this I hope that you will approach the site’s creators tactfully, with a kind acknowledgement of your turnaround and the difficulties inherent to conveying alternative ideas in multiple languages. Please also use humble respect as in April 2014 this site is getting 570K visitors a month – nearly four times as many as your TZM website!
As further evidence of the continuing conspiracy influence of your movie on TZM we can see in the web analytics one or two conspiracy Sites Also Visited by visitors to the TZM website:
So TZM continues to reap the benefit of your movie’s conspiracy theories in terms of publicity and, of course, recruitment.
(You will also find on your website and the Zeitgeist UK website a couple of references to Jiddu Krishnamurti, child of the heart of the – real – new age and other spiritual teachers so your claims that your movement is atheistic and rejects alternative spirituality are evidently duplicitous hogwash. Either that or you haven’t a clue what’s going on within in.)
And some of TZM’s young followers come from countries that in recent decades have experienced deep deep wounds such as war with genocide and political and financial oppression. More than a few will be carrying in their hearts and minds the grief, fear and anger of a couple of generations – and understandably so, bless them. There are many who are healing and moving on, as evidenced by the considerable popularity of Conspirituality websites in these countries. But there will be many who are not. As an unfortunate consequence of this, in Europe we see a real rise in racial hatred and anti-Semitism. And these hatreds, if they have not already will soon rear their ugly heads in TZM: the slower curve of internet penetration into the countries concerned means that more and more newcomers are discovering your movie after the event. And no matter how far you attempt to distance yourself from its conspiratorial content, some of its new viewers will be angrily (or fearfully) hating the shadow government your movie portrays and, thirsting for new solutions – revenge, even – transferring onto you, Zeitgeist the Muppet as Messiah/Avenger.
Oh dear. This is deep and heavy shadow stuff. A figurehead who is, like you, unconsciously projecting his unresolved psychological baggage right left and centre can be dangerous or at risk in such a situation, especially when his messages are mixed (like it or not, Peter, they are – you will reap the karma of your turnaround). Ego inflation seems to be occurring: figurehead’s ego bloating as he starts to believe his own myth (ref your superior tone in the video belittling my work and throwaway reference to “some intern” as if that person is obviously a lower life form). A bullying dynamic has arisen (ref the video). It has probably already happened that counter projection and personality cult have formed with grovelling followers vying for their figurehead’s approval, assuming his swellheaded, intolerant, bullshit-spewing personality defects and so on. Some young followers will bring low self esteem and other issues – tongue lashings, jostlings for approval and bullying can have dire consequences on vulnerable young people. Basically – and I base this on your video – you seem to have become the abusive guru of your cult and you are playing with fire.
You will deny this (of course you will – do some reading up on denial, you need to). You will tell yourself and others that this is not true because TZM states clearly that it does not have leaders. But really, if you were honest and would take responsibility, you would admit that your ego is really getting off on all that attention from those attractive young honeypots at RT and young people hungry for change swallowing your clods of leaderly bullshit.
In consolation, you are not that dangerous: TZM will fizzle out – because it is based on lies. And the evolutionary Path does have built into it a phase involving the shattering of illusions about the “teacher/figurehead”: the fact that you offer this opportunity to young people who may need to evolve through this phase could be seen as a Good Thing……kind of.
Finally, Peter, in a way you were right about my work:
The Emergence of Conspirituality nestles like a little diamond in the mine, waiting to be picked up, a million miles away from your coarse and insulting Zeitgeist the Movie and its weedy, inchoate follow-ups. I will never turn my back on my work – as you did on yours (and will again when you get bored or it droops). I will never get myself into a fix and have to squirm in uncomfortable arguments because I exploited followers to garner fame and fortune. I will never have to keep backtracking on and denying responsibility for my words. So I made a couple of inconsequential mistakes, still I used my words economically and truthfully and polished them – with love. While I was writing my article I meditated gratefully upon all the good and brave people I was writing about, real people who are working so hard from different standpoints to offer conscious solutions to the shadow government, including our Christian brothers and sisters who, probably, have made the greatest historical contribution of all to the conspiracy field. Even if there are one or two flaws in my diamond and even if no one ever picks it up it will shine forever as a truthful contribution to the real and grounded body of work that is establishment academia and never be flushed away like your bullshit will be….so yes, thank you so much for pointing it out – TZM is definitely not Conspirituality."