Practical Lawful Dissent FMOTL antics, continued...

[SteveUK]

OK.... So even assuming there were 50 webels present, which is a massive assume, there's no mention of the court case for poor old Dave Rowbotham, no mention of a court at all come to that, no building 'seized' and effectively no 'action' to speak of. They went to Brum, had some beer and went home... And???

Dave “only 6 plants” Robotham was active on FB 5 hours ago, so 6pm.i guess he escaped the noose.....

[longdog]

OK.... So even assuming there were 50 webels present, which is a massive assume, there's no mention of the court case for poor old Dave Rowbotham, no mention of a court at all come to that, no building 'seized' and effectively no 'action' to speak of. They went to Brum, had some beer and went home... And???

Dave “only 6 plants” Robotham was active on FB 5 hours ago, so 6pm.i guess he escaped the noose.....

I think that may have more to do with the fact he's in hiding than anything else

[Wakeman52]

Dreary Dave's report just seems to be the usual BS. What happened to the plan to distrain the building? Did they pick the wrong day or place? They were in any case foiled by 2 members of WMP, one of whom passed the time of day, whilst trying not to be too patronising.

[exiledscouser]

Well I'm HUGELY disappointed. No popcorn or pale ale for me this night.

I should have realised that, using the figures for the McRebel gathering (3) and extrapolating them to England this was never going to be anything more than two football sides at best. Connor says 25, Dismal doubles that number but the damage has been done

I mean, on a feckin wet cold Tuesday? In Brum? In the run up to Xmas with everyone counting the pennies to give the kids a good time?

Black Friday, Cyber Monday, Tosspot Tuesday.

Dismal Dave was surprised the cops had been tipped off but they too will have been equally disappointed;

"Ere Sarge, wots 'appenin then, I fought there was gonna be loads of these nutters commin?

"Careful now lad, we have hin-telligence that there's hundreds of these 'ere constitutional crackpots convergin' from all over.

Any...........minute...........now.

Just a few...............more............. moments

Can't be long now.............wait.......wait.........

Fuck this it's freezing, come on lads, we're off to Greggs".

I dunno how plod found out, nothing at all to do with the endless posts on a public forum urging the masses to gather in force in Birmingham in order to wreak havoc, a 'descent into dissent'. No, its a complete mystery - unless there was a shill in their midst. Maybe this is why Bones has gone quiet so as not to blow his cover.

So what's been achieved this monumental day? After a few hours boozing, in the end all Dismal and chums could salvage was a trip to the cop shop where they filed a report with bemused staff accusing as-yet unnamed court officials in some dusty Birmingham Magistrates court of seditious treasonous crimes unknown to law.

There, that'll do it.
Soon have this House of Cards brought to its knees.
That's all that was needed.

They could have saved themselves the travel and booze costs and just phoned it through FFS.

Those that did rock up will by now have finally slunk off home to nurse that horrible hangover only six pints of Stella Artois can give you leaving the rest of the apathetic movement to make their excuses.

I think this signals the end for this crew, sadly. Their big event, eyes of the world on them (well some Radio 5 jurno happy to get a few pints paid for on expenses), the future of the constitution and the very soul of the nation in their rebellious hands and they fecked it up.

They've entertained, distrained and now finally waned leaving me only the sodding Royal Wedding to look forward to.

I've been robbed.

[Burnaby49]

OK.... So even assuming there were 50 webels present, which is a massive assume, there's no mention of the court case for poor old Dave Rowbotham, no mention of a court at all come to that, no building 'seized' and effectively no 'action' to speak of. They went to Brum, had some beer and went home... And???

No 'action' to speak of? I must strongly disagree. They spoke to a police constable! And sent an email to the police! You might consider this just baby steps but they have to start somewhere and that is at least direct contact with the enemy's first line of defense. Seizing a court will come after a few years of digesting the lessons of today's monumental events during numerous pub meetings.

[Burnaby49]

Well I'm HUGELY disappointed. No popcorn or pale ale for me this night.

You can still have the pale ale, you'll just have to watch the telly instead of the news of a successful siege of the courhouse and the overthrow of the illegal order. And, as you say, there is always the Royal Wedding to keep you motivated to get up in the morning.

I watched the last one in the most British way possible. In a London pub having fish and chips and a pint or two. Just chance. We'd arrived from Canada that morning and stopped at the Lord John Russell for lunch and a beer on our walk from King's Cross to our hotel. Small pub, packed with wedding watchers, but it had one table free.

[rumpelstilzchen]

They spoke to a police constable!

Actually it was quite a bit more than that. They lobbied him.

[longdog]

Dismal Dave was surprised the cops had been tipped off but they too will have been equally disappointed

I'd take that with a Lot's wife sized pinch of salt. "Yeah.... We would've brought the whole treasonous system tumbling down if it hadn't been for those meddling cops". Pull the other one... It's got bells on. They went to Brum, had a drink and went home... I've done that plenty of times but at least I know how to find the Welly on Bennetts Hill http://www.thewellingtonrealale.co.uk/

[SteveUK]

For once we agree

This may possibly be the birth of a turning point.

[notorial dissent]

So quite literally, they couldn’t even organise a piss up?

Or even a good spin it would seem. Definitely takes a certain kind and type of talent.

[aesmith]

... I think this signals the end for this crew, sadly. ...

I wouldn't be too sure, they're patting each other on the back with congratulations about how great the "meeting" was, how good it was to be there or how much they wished they could have been. Nobody's asking "what about the seizure?" or "what about poor Dave R?"

[notorial dissent]

I think that's called avoiding the elephant in the room.

[montbelliard]

So they went to a pub, then the police station, and some of them talked to a copper and gave him some papers. This is not, as advertised, a distraint operation, or an "action". They may be talking it up amongst themselves now but what does Crab Bait think of it? He's the one ballyhooing it for weeks, the one for whom "the time for talking is over" (I paraphrase). He's not yet joined in the self-congratulation.

[Siegfried Shrink]

It must occour to even the most dedicated, after a while, that this is all a waste of time.

[Burnaby49]

It must occour to even the most dedicated, after a while, that this is all a waste of time.

A waste of time? How can you say that? They had a booze up at a Victorian pub that I missed although I spent two nights at a hotel just a few blocks away. That experience was as good as they could have reasonably expected so in my books time well spent.

[notorial dissent]

It must occour to even the most dedicated, after a while, that this is all a waste of time.

I think you are giving/assuming far too much cognitive function for that lot, when even en masse they barely rate as sentient. Turnips are objectively smarter.

[Siegfried Shrink]

I was thinking in more general terms.

I suspect that people's reactions to the PLD stuff and similar great revalations crackpot schemes must, like most human behaviour, occupy what I will call a spectrum of acceptance. Total belief would be at one end, total disbelief at the other.
Typically measurable human behaviour and mentation may be found to occupy a bell shaped curve, variously skewed depending on what is being measured and how.

It may be hypothesised that the conviction level of PLD supporters falls into the distribution one might expect from other experiments, so the majority of adherents would fall between the 25th and the 75th percentile of conviction.

The main thing likely to skew the distribution one way or the other would seem to me to be verifiable success or failure of the basic ideas (although I may be being too personal about this).
This would of course be subject to a counter effect by really convincing pep-talks.

I feel that the pep-talk effect would tend to diminish with repetition, wheras the failure/success effect would be a steady influence.

Since there have been no actual successes to report, any original adherents with a less than 50% conviction factor must be assumed to have now become people with no conviction whatsoever, making the sample size now much smaller and less convinced overall.
Some confusion in the picture must come from the tendency of people who have lost interest to simply move away quietly, leaving inactive 'ghost' IDs as an apparent part of the movement. There may be some recruitment, but as time goes by the history of futility will be easier to spot, making recruitment progressively more difficult.

Given the difficulty of getting decent data on the 'membership' without rounding them all up and testing them ( I am a great fan of empirical experiments)
one can only guess at what time the number of people with a conviction level of 60% or more (a number I deem to be needed to do anything active whatsoever) reaches single digits is hard to predict with accuracy but I concur with others that this time, if not already reached, must be quite soon.

In short, they must be getting tired of it.

[notorial dissent]

I would suspect that most, like 99.999% of the population would look at these nutters and write them off as total loons always assuming they would pay them any attention at all, I am of the opinion that they wouldn't. As to their place in the scheme of things I'd put them out about 4 SD at a minimum, and I don't feel like digging out the calculations for something so insignificant.

[TheNewSaint]

FMOTL is essentially a belief system. So when some bulletproof legal scheme fails, they don't think "maybe this stuff doesn't really work" but rather "that just proves how corrupt the system is, man." Once the marks sufficiently believe in the cause, no amount of contrary evidence will sway them. And the grifters know how to play to this.

I also suspect that these groups see a lot of churn, where people join and leave all the time. So some people do see that it's bullocks and leave, but are replaced by new suckers.

[notorial dissent]

FMOTL is essentially a belief system. So when some bulletproof legal scheme fails, they don't think "maybe this stuff doesn't really work" but rather "that just proves how corrupt the system is, man." Once the marks sufficiently believe in the cause, no amount of contrary evidence will sway them. And the grifters know how to play to this.

I also suspect that these groups see a lot of churn, where people join and leave all the time. So some people do see that it's bullocks and leave, but are replaced by new suckers.

Granted, there is a lot of churn, which is probably why the head count generally stays constant it's just that the heads change. The thing is I don't think the actual number of people catching a clue is ever very high, they don't lose faith in the woo, they just move on to a different woo, in the immortal words of Bullwinkel J Moose "because this time for sure" is always the mantra. There are a finite number of the seriously deluded, statistically, there are a seemingly infinite number of competing crazy "sure cures and remedies" out there.