Skeptic Project

I'm making a separate topic for this, based upon some comments I made this morning in the never-ending "is Venus Project different?" topic because I want to expand on something here. Sorry for the redundancy.

Thanks to Brenton's insistence that conspiracy and the claims of P.J. Merola (or whatever his name is) in "Zeitgeist I" play no significant role in the Zeitgeist Movement or Venus Project, I tried to quantify this today to determine whether my theory that the Zeitgeist Movement uses conspiracy theory as a recruiting tool has any quantifiable merit. Admittedly these results are unscientific, as anything on the web is, but here's what I found playing around with Google and various statistics.

Number of times Zeitgest I (the conspiracy movie) has been viewed: 100,000,000
(source: Zeitgeist's own numbers, at http://zeitgeistmovie.com/q&a.htm)

Number of times "Zeitgeist: Addendum," which was not focused on conspiracy theories, has been viewed: 10,000,000
(source: Zeitgeist's own numbers again: http://thezeitgeistmovement.com/wiki/index.php?title=Peter_Joseph#Zeitgeist:_Addendum)

Number of fewer views of the non-conspiracy Zeitgeist than the conspiracy one: 90,000,000.

Admittedly unscientific, and perhaps my math is wrong, but doesn't it seem like Zeitgeist's viewership dropped by 900% when they stopped talking about Jesus not existing, 9/11 being an inside job or Federal Reserve and banker conspiracies? Even with a fudge factor for the numbers themselves and other factors that may have turned off people to Addendum vs. the conspiracy Zeitgeist, it's still quite a significant shortfall.

I did a few Google searches too.

Number of hits for the word "Zeitgeist": 9,030,000
Number of hits for the word "Zeitgeist" together with "Movement": 1,420,000

The second number is crucial, because it tells us how many web pages are out there talking not about the movies, but about the movement. (Incidentally, the phrase "Venus project" only comes up with 233,000 hits).

Number of hits for "Zeitgeist" together with "conspiracy": 6,620,000.

Considering there are very few circumstances in which somebody who had never heard of Zeitgeist: The Movie would be searching for those two words together, this means that there are 5,200,000 more web pages out there discussing Zeitgeist conspiracy theories than there are discussing the Zeitgeist Movement! And it also means that 73.3%, or almost three quarters, of the people who made a web page containing the word "Zeitgeist" want to talk about conspiracies of one type or another.

What exactly are they discussing? Can't be sure, but here are a couple of others:

"Zeitgeist" + "9/11" (not a phrase together): 711,000 hits
"Zeitgeist" + "Jesus" (not a phrase together): 768,000 hits
"Zeitgeist" + the phrase "Federal Reserve"): 232,000 hits

I also did some searching on the Zeitgeist forums using the fairly primitive search feature.

Total posts mentioning "9/11": 2272
Total posts mentioning "Christianity": 1519
Total posts mentioning "conspiracy": 2787
Total posts mentioning all three words: 13.

Total posts mentioning the word "Movement": 27,318 (assume for the sake of argument that those discussing the movement are at least using that word in their posts, which I realize may not be totally accurate)

Total number of posts mentioning 9/11, Christianity, or conspiracy: 6,566 (2272 + 1519 + 2787 - 12 duplicates)

That's the equivalent of 24%, nearly a quarter, of the people discussing the movement. (May not be the same people, but interesting for comparison purposes)

Most interesting statistic, for my money:

Total posts mentioning "Venus": 1645

Yes, only 1645 people on the forums even mention the word "Venus" in their posts; assume the people who intend to talk about the Venus Project at least use that word. That's significantly less than the number of posts discussing "9/11" alone!

What can we conclude from this? Obviously you can't take these numbers to the bank, but here's what I see:

~ 90 million (900%) drop in viewership when you make a non-conspiracy Zeitgeist movie compared to a conspiracy one.
~ 73% of the web pages on Google mentioning the word "Zeitgeist" also contain the word "conspiracy."
~ The number of web pages containing the phrase "Venus Project" is barely more than the number of pages mentioning Zeitgeist's Federal Reserve theory ALONE.
~ Significant number, perhaps even a quarter, of the discussions on the Zeitgeist Movement forums--which you would presume would be largely composed of hard-core ZM people--are talking about conspiracies in some fashion, and that's LESS than the number of people talking about the Venus Project.

If anyone disagrees with me that these numbers show that conspiracy theories, if not THE single most powerful factor motivating interest in Zeitgest-related stuff certainly an extremely important factor, please explain your position.

Sorry for the long post.

"Have you seen the second Zeitgeist? It promotes all of the same basic conspiracy theories as the first movie, it just spends less time on them."

I am aware of that, but I did this experiment assuming just for the sake of the experiment that Brenton is right that Z1 is the only Zeitgeist film that promotes conspiracy theories. He's wrong about that, of course, but it's much easier to focus on that one rather than try to figure out how many people watched Z2 for non-conspiracy reasons.

""Number of hits for the word "Zeitgeist": 9,030,000"

The word Zeitgeist exists outside this movie, and is more common than you might think. There is a Smashing Pumpkin's album called Zeitgeist, and Google has a tool called 'Google Zeitgeist'."

Yes, Sky, which is why I searched for "Zeitgeist" plus the word "conspiracy" which produced 6,620,000 hits. Fudging the number, let's say, generously, 500,000 of the pages that contain both of those words have nothing to do with the Zeitgeist movies, that's still a staggering percentage--well more than half--of the total number of web pages that contain the word "Zeitgeist" in ANY context, includng the Smashing Pumpkins album or the Google app, that also contain the word "conspiracy" and can be reasonably estimated to be referring to the movies.

Why would anyone make a web page containing those two words together if they weren't talking about the movie(s)? That's how I arrive at the ballpark of 73%--even COUNTING the web pages about Smashing Pumpkins or the Google ad, or German webpages where "zeitgeist" is a legitimate word, 73% of those pages contain the word "conspiracy!" You have to see a significant correlation there.

"Have you seen the second Zeitgeist? It promotes all of the same basic conspiracy theories as the first movie, it just spends less time on them."

About 3 minutes tops, unless you could pt 1 as promoting conspiracy theory, which I don't think it is (at least not as the same way that pt 3 of zeitgeist 1 did). It might be WRONG economic theory, but I don't think I can call it conspiracy unless it links it with jewish bankers starting WW1/WW2/etc. Maybe in the literal meaning of the word (banks colluding to make money via debt).

What, no Zeitgeist apologists want to join this topic and explain to me why conspiracies "aren't the real movement?"

If Brenton's one of their moderators, as I understand he is, I'm sure the right people know about us...after all isn't Merola (Mercola? Mercorla? I don't know how to spell the name he hates to use) on record as believing Edward has some sort of grudge against him?

I'm sure Brenton will be back after "Z-Day" or whatever he was talking about, which I assume is the date Merola ascends to Heaven accompanied by harp music and fawning angels to save mankind from the evils of the Federal Reserve and those bad bad men who did 9/11 and blamed it on poor innocent Osama.

"Pretty cynical."

Well, they think anyone who doesn't want to live in their utopian future should be treated as "patients."

I mean what can you expect from folks who really view anyone who doesn't agree with them as some sort of subhuman sheeple creature. Those forums show the utmost disdain for humanity, but I am supposed to come away from it thinking they have the best intentions in mind for my species? Their discussions read like fascist, misanthropic navel gazing.

>> There you have it, from a Zeitgeister himself: 400,000 people have joined because of conspiracy theories.

But I think they've already hit the peak as to how much support they'll get from CTs. Considering that Alex Jones has something like 3 million listeners, most reject Zeitgeist, not just because Alex Jones doesn't like it, but from what I've seen, usually because of the anti-religious qualities.

Most conspiracy theorists I've run into are religious (typically Christian/protestant), and as I've said before, it's hard enough selling something like The Venus Project, but add the same baggage which sank the far left in America during the great depression (atheism/anti-religion), AND conspiracy theories, you've basically made it to where both conspiracy theorists and average people think you're off the wall.

Peter Joseph wants 50 million members, but I don't even think there are that many conspiracy theorists, probably not more than 10 - 15 million. Even world-word communist movements have more members than all of the conspiracy theorists, and even more success as far as changing things (not so much in the US, but all over the world.)

Even after the CPRF (Communist Party of the Russian Federation) abandoned atheism, their power in Russia is about 16% of overall votes (~13 million), and while it has gone up some, it's still no where near a majority.

I've already gone into all of the reasons I think TZM is bound to fall apart and drag down TVP with it, so I won't get into it again, but just the idea they have zero plans to do anything (or help anyone) and prefer to wait until they control large regions in order to start implementing their ideas, I believe, shows that most people won't ever take them seriously.

Good points, Edward and Ed. I also think the conspiracy crowd is self-limiting. Merola seems to want to co-opt the conspiracy crowd without underscoring that he himself is a conspiracist so he can please both sides, the Brentons who insist "the ZM is not about conspiracy" and the faceless conspiradroid masses who signed up only because they thought ZM was a conspiracy movement.

@ Matt: the good thing is that I don't think we have to worry too much about the ZM achieving any real stature in the world, so their "misanthropic navel gazing" is happening pretty much in a vacuum. This is a train wreck of a movement headed by an angry conspiracy theorist and a 90-year-old Age of Aquarius utopian. By no means do I think the Venus Project's motives and ideas (once decoupled from the conspiracy aspects) are all bad, but this sure as hell isn't the way to go about it. As I said earlier, I feel a little sorry for Fresco, whose utopian ideas, if they are remembered at all, will be remembered solely for their association with an Internet conspiracy movie.