Anyone wanting to be amazed/aggravated by where our tax dollars go, try apollohoax.net then look up my thread, 'allancw.' Hundreds of man hours (and tax dollars), it appears, went into defending the official Apollo story against my little assault... Why would all these 'educated' professionals take the time and effort if they were not getting paid?
An argument aimed purely at ego-reinforcement. From the ebullient résumé posted here to the rack of self-published books (complete with Amazon review counts), what we have here in this poster is someone frantically desperate for
any degree of approval or accolade. This is exactly the sort of person who gets drawn into conspiracism as a way to lash out against the Establishment (which is typically blamed for that person's perceived lack of progress or recognition) and to wear the costume of erudition without actually achieving it. Having presumed his critics are paid government shills, having failed utterly to establish any viable technical basis for a hoax, and having his ham-fisted rhetorical trap slammed shut on his own fingers, the only place he has left to backpedal is the coup-counting proposition.
He downplays his best effort as a "little assault" so that it doesn't seem a big deal that it was entirely overthrown, and that he patently doesn't know what he's talking about. But in order to deploy that argument has to accept, at least in part, that his effort was unsuccessful. He seems to admit that he was rebutted, but that it took enormous well-funded effort to do so. He has shifted the goalposts again, this time to disconnect the skill of his argument from the very visible outcome. With his ego thus insulated, he can quite happily direct others to the thread. His claim is now that the government expends resources to stop him, so the fact that he was stopped becomes not an embarrassment but rather a premise to his new claim.
"Hundreds of hours" is quite the exaggeration. I spent more time last week on Halloween costumes than in reading and posting here. And I can point to hundreds of hours I've donated to local efforts, simply because I like what they do. But it has to be that monumental an effort in order to feed Allan's effort. One of many hidden subtexts is that he would have been successful in proving a hoax were it not for the all-out "government" effort to stop him. Nevermind that he was never able to provide any actual evidence that any of the criticism against him was anything other than idle volunteerism -- just people doing what they do. Nevermind that this isn't a high-traffic site. It just
has to be a well-funded government disinformation site, in his mind: that's the only explanation his ego will accept for failure.
Hence he greatly exaggerates the level of effort required to debunk his decades-old borrowed claims, then begs a further question that no one would expend that effort uncompensated. From that he arrives at a dubious inference that it "must" be a shill site. Yes, it's an inference. Almost all conspiracy arguments, when faced with an abject inability to show what
is the case, resort to trying to show what
must be the case.
