Hello everyone, I hope this thread can serve as a means of explaining myself in case there ever arises an issue in a thread; namely ones where you are not allowed to argue against the very premise of the thread itself. Thus, "I disagree with your premise!"

This thread has its own ground rules, but they are not designed to limit the amount of disagreement I can receive; in fact, I hope to promote disagreement so that we may have a healthy discourse. Although it should be implied, the rules for the forum still apply to this thread, I just have an additional subset I would like to add to that. The rules for my thread are simple and short:

1. As per the forum rules, responses to this thread must be intelligent. Therefore, each post must have a coherent argument. This isn't so much a rule as it is me making a conclusion using the forum rules. This will also save us a lot of time trying to figure out what you're trying to say.

2. Don't post if you are not prepared to have your argument analyzed, critiqued, and possibly refuted. You don't necessarily have to follow this rule, but you have been warned!

Now that we have that out of the way, let's get started!

Today I'm going to talk about this thread: Is 2012 getting close or what?

Now, as it is stated in the first post:

As per the author of the thread, you cannot argue against the concept of 2012 being the end of the world. That is the author's intentions and I will respect that. However, this does not mean I can't argue against it in my own thread, right?

What I find really funny is this comment about the author's thread being more "mature." We'll come back to that. For now we will have to explore how such a thread can be more mature than debating whether or not the end of the world is upon us based on...what evidence?

And now we get to the heart of the matter.

Floods happen. Earthquakes occur. That attention is brought to them by the media is inevitable, and that they happen is nothing significant. Yes, these events are all environmental hazards, but that's not to say that there have never been any in the past that were not even greater in intensity than what we are currently seeing today.

That "many people are getting killed" comes as no surprise. When a country with such a poor infrastructure like Haiti, death is the most likely to occur when a natural disaster strikes!

Another thing that we should remember is that it's not like these events are unpredictable. Read this article for more information on the subject of the Haiti earthquake being anticipated by scientists.

As for the increase in the number of natural disasters, this is merely a matter of perception. Reading these articles, we can see that there is a perfectly logical explanation for the seeming increase in frequency of natural disasters. As I said earlier, media coverage is one reason there is an apparent increase in natural disasters. Second, there are more people living in disaster prone areas! With more property to be damaged by storms, it only APPEARS there are more storms, when in fact the same storms are simply damaging more property, since there are more people with more property.

So can we really say it's mature to automatically deny arguing against your premise of 2012 being the end of the world? Sorry, but silencing dissent is pretty immature if you ask me.

The only thing "2012" means to me is the next Presidential election, along with the elections for a fair few number of Congressmen and Senators. But politics can be discussed another day.

The Spirit of Time, I invite you to defend yourself here, even though you had no interest in defending your argument in your own thread. If anybody has anything to add feel free to reply!

Um, I would just like to humbly point out that I do not believe Spirit believes in the 2010 apocalypse. From what I can see, he was just saying what other people think will happen.

I like what this thread is about, but I just wanted to throw that out there to show this isn't exactly Spirit's "point"...

Whether or not The Spirit of Time believes their own argument in favor of the 2012 apocalypse is not really relevant here;

The point I'm really driving here is the automatic denial of debating against the "evidence" presented throughout the thread. Without any way of combating the suggestions made in that topic, the thread amounts to little more than a way of collecting fringe conspiracy theories.

Now whether you consider it mature to prematurely deny people the opportunity to discuss the ridiculousness of 2012 theories is based, I suppose, on the sincerity of the author of the thread. It is possible to believe that The Spirit of Time is being cynical, which is not at all uncommon on the Internet. If we are to say that this is the reason for the initial dismissal of arguing against the crackpot theories and circumstantial evidence the thread is left to beg for, then I -STILL- have a counter-argument to it!

Cynicism and satire have ways of misleading those incapable of considering it as such. If we are to push the belief of 2012 really being the end of the world without any means of countering that with even a simple "no it isn't," as the thread would have us believe, then those who are incapable of reading what is posted as satire, through either being gullible or less intelligent (those are really the same thing though, no?), may be at risk of taking actions which one would otherwise abstain from.

What are such actions, you may ask? Well, if one is to believe they are going to die no matter what they do, they're likely to be liberated completely from their conscious. Cheating, stealing, and killing, basal human actions we tend to suppress with our conscious, are free to be committed. Most particularly, a person who fears the end of the world is upon them may take their life.

So follow this with me: A thread on www.victoryroad.net that stated "This isn't a nice thread saying about whether you believe this theory or not. It is more mature." leads people to be more likely to believe 2012 really is the end of the world, which will lead to a higher tendency of suicides. And thus with this conclusion, such a thread effectively applies Darwin's theory of natural selection on the human population--selecting against the less intelligent humans within the population.

If you agree with such premises, then you will see that 2012 is but a positive boon for the human race; the less intelligent will decrease in number and thus we as a whole will become smarter! If you are for pushing this agenda as you appear to be doing, The Spirit of Time, then I am all for it! Full steam ahead! Please channel Glenn Beck's inner irrational, illogical missteps calculated to further an agenda!

Now let's see if you see things *my* way.