I liked, nay, I *loved* the first interview, I had never heard about the radiation issues with the whole Apollo mission, it was truly fascinating stuff.

However, I feel that Phil totally dropped the ball in the second interview. Joe is a very good speaker, and Phil (and Penn for that matter) weren't assertive enough to cut through the BS, but they let Joe go off on a tangent for half an hour on whether or not Werner von Braun was sufficiently evil to have wanted to fake the Moon landing.

To quote the Simpsons, "No one who speaks German could be an evil man."

I'm sure it's fascinating for the Moon hoax people to listen to a NASA-sympathiser like Phil get stumped by the great 'antarctic expedition revalation', but for any clear-thinking person listening to the program this was a totally, TOTALLY irrelevant subject.

To let Joe yell into the mic that he simply could not believe Phil didn't know anything about this made it sound like his entire Moon hoax conspiracy theory hinged on this one piece of information.
But even Joe's hyperbolic explanation of its importance couldn't make it sound relevant at all, in my ears. He's read Phil's website so he knows better than to ask about things that have already been debunked. He needs more obscure info that Phil doesn't know about.

I may be wrong about this, but the way I see it, in the Moon hoax debate you have to keep moving to cover more ground, because if you get bogged down with irrelevant trivia (which usually has a reasonable explanation if you just research it, like the parallel shadow thing), then you're just wasting everybody's time.

We all know that the Moon hoax conspiracy is like Intelligent Design. They have no theory, all they can do is poke holes in tiny, insignificant places of established wisdom where there are things we cannot readily explain.
All these tiny holes they then think sum up to a big picture of what's going on, but they're just plain wrong. It's not a big picture, it's just a lot of tiny holes. Only in religion and conspiracy theories do you have to dismiss the grand argument if you can find one tiny fault in it.

When I look at any conspiracy sites, like Joe has, yeah there are some things that sound plausible. Some things are mysterious and some of the sites are veeeery cunning in the way that they do not overly extrapolate information from it - like they don't go from one insignificant fact into "therefore space aliens assassinated JFK!", they like to plant a lot of tiny seeds of doubt.

But when someone actually researches some of these small things and explain them logically and you then go back to the site and read again, suddenly the whole thing just smacks of a disingenious presentation of facts. Even the stuff that hasn't been officially debunked yet.


It completely boggles my mind the very idea that Joe can say that he looks at conspiracy sites and disagrees with a lot of the obvious lies and ridiculous arguments they make, but that SOME OF IT MAKES SENSE.
How can the majority of an argument be complete, total, utter (and verifiable) bull****, but *some* of the smaller points are good?
Has Joe ever seen this happen with any scientific theory before?

I think he's just deluding himself into thinking that there are some golden grains of truth amidst a mountain of rubbish. It's fool's gold at best.

With all that nonsense wrapped around small unsolved mysteries, I find it simply astonishing that Joe can't bring himself to question the veracity of those smaller points as well.
Is it that difficult to tell yourself, "Okay, let's see, these people are wrong about 99% of what they say to an almost criminal degree. Maybe, just maybe, they could be wrong about this too even though I don't know the explanation."

Incidentally, ask Joe how he feels about the 9/11 conspiracy sites, because these have the exact same format. Lots of verifiable flaws and a few small things that cannot be explained. Does Joe embrace these with the same fervor?
If Joe doesn't adhere to these other kinds of conspiracies like 9/11, space aliens, JFK assassination, etc. then why does he believe in the Moon hoax? It's the same arguments, it's the same flawed, circular logic that they use. They too have a lot of small points that no one has adequately explained yet.


To return to the second interview on Penn's show, hindsight is 20/20 and all that, but the best thing Phil could have done, in my opinion, was to ask Joe, "Alright, what's your next argument?"
Because if it all hinges on Werner exhibiting 'suspicious' activities by going to the Antarctic, that's a pretty lame basis, and there are certainly more interesting points to discuss that actually teach the listeners something (as opposed to arguing about precisely how bad a nazi Werner really was, did anyone learn anything from that?).

Also, I don't know where Joe got his research. I can find the antarctic mission mentioned in relation with Werner on a few credible sites, but as soon as I try to get more information about what the expedition was about, all I get are conspiracy sites with names like "Nazi UFO!!!" and sites talking about the mysterious magnetic energy signature in the area.

Does anyone have more details about the goal of this expedition and what they were doing there?


Finally, I found on Wikipedia, a site that Joe cited himself a few times, this article:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_von_Braun

I point specifically to the section:
Arrest_by_the_Nazi_regime

Which says that "he was arrested for being a defeatist by saying the war was not going well. He was held in prison without knowing the charges against him for 2 weeks. It was only through the Abwehr in Berlin that Dornberger was able to obtain von Braun's conditional release and Albert Speer, Reichsminister for Munitions and War Production, convinced Hitler to release von Braun so that the V-2 program could continue."

Further down, "Forging a set of orders on SS stationery, von Braun authorized a convoy to move 5,000 personnel south through war-torn Germany toward the American lines. The SS had meanwhile been ordered to kill the German engineers and destroy their records. The engineers, however, had hidden these in a mineshaft and continued to evade their own troops."

If you want to renounce this man for being inherently 'evil' like Joe said repeatedly for helping invent the V2 rockets that killed a lot of innocent people, you'd have to do the same to every gun manufacturer in the world too. Past and present.

Joe is either being inflammatory or he has no clue about the realities of war. His country is at war right now, and I think he would agree that for a Muslim to view him, personally, as an inherently evil man despite of anything Joe does, just because of what his government is doing in the Middle East, is a matter of perspective.
But you can't just drop the 'evil' argument, and Joe knows he can use this against Phil because it's a sacred cow. You cannot possibly say on the radio that you think Werner was not a bad nazi, because everyone will stigmatise you for it. So Joe wins.

But the Nazi's were not super-evil in some magical way, they just had the technology to be more sinister than any previous age had. And I think it's been shown repeatedly that the kind of totalitarian fascism that went on in that regime are easily repeatable, even in democratic societies. (revoking habeas corpus, the patriot act, etc.)

And again, I fail to see what this has to do with the Moon hoax. Alright, so the guy went to antarctica on an expedition in the middle of a heated space race. Why is it that Joe and the conspiracy nuts read this and instantly assume he was up to no good, and people like me read it and go "huh.. that's peculiar, but I'm sure there's a reasonable explanation for it, that I simply don't know about."

Kind of the same approach I have towards quantum physics. I can't wrap my head around it, but that doesn't mean that some 100 scientists secretly got together and made the whole thing up just to mess with my head.


I hope Phil can bring more ammo to the next round of debate with Joe and tell him that just because he yells the loudest, doesn't necessarily mean he's right.