New research on colony collapse disorder

[Stromnessbees]

LOL. Doris has taught a new word to the entire beekeeping community of the UK and Ireland.
Not bad when English is not even your first language.

Thanks, Jon.

Actually it would have been better if I had known the full implications of the word myself before I posted it.


Anyway, my anti-shill strategies are very useful knowledge for anybody who reads internet fora or comments in newspapers.

Keeping those three strategies in mind and a few supplementary ones like

getting your statement in quickly,
the use of very emotive language and pictures,
playing good cop - bad cop or
lowering the tone of a forum by using racism or sexual terms

is essential when you want to find out what's really going on.


You can pick any internet forum you like, look for the 'hot' threads and see these strategies applied, and you'll know which topics the spin doctors are spinning you a yarn on.

Have fun!


The 3 main strategies are listed here:
http://www.sbai.org.uk/sbai_forum/sh...ull=1#post9661

[Jon]

Doris there has been some speculation that there are paid stooges on share dealing forums as markets are driven by positive or negative perceptions - a concept know as 'ramping' rather than shilling. An unscrupulous bunch of day traders could probably drive a share price up or down by a penny or two and make some gain from trading it.
However.......................the idea that there are paid stooges on the various bee forums is one of the most preposterous things I have ever heard in my entire life. And if you had friends like mine you would have heard a lot of ridiculous stuff over the years. Getting your statement in quickly is self evident as a discussion moves quickly and you need to keep up. Good cop bad cop I have never noticed on a bee forum and racism and/or and sexism should not be tolerated in my opinion. I remember a poster making racist comments about 'thick set Irish' on beekeeping forum some time ago and I could not believe that the comment was allowed to stand. One of the most prominent anti pesticide people on the old bbka forum got banned for calling an American poster who disagreed with him 'a Colonial'. Racism is ugly wherever it rears its head.

[Stromnessbees]

Doris there has been some speculation that there are paid stooges on share dealing forums as markets are driven by positive or negative perceptions - a concept know as 'ramping' rather than shilling. An unscrupulous bunch of day traders could probably drive a share price up or down by a penny or two and make some gain from trading it.
However.......................the idea that there are paid stooges on the various bee forums is one of the most preposterous things I have every heard in my entire life. And if you had friends like mine you would have heard a lot of ridiculous stuff over the years. Getting your statement in quickly is self evident as a discussion moves quickly and you need to keep up. Good cop bad cop I have never noticed on a bee forum and racism and/or and sexism should not be tolerated in my opinion. I remember a poster making racist comments about 'thick set Irish' on beekeeping forum some time ago and I could not believe that the comment was allowed to stand. One of the most prominent anti pesticide people on the old bbka forum got banned for calling an American poster who disagreed with him 'a Colonial'. Racism is ugly wherever it rears its head.

It's not that preposterous if you consider that we beekeepers can actually be a very powerful group:

Bees are very important and the public wants them protected. If beekeepers get together and protest they can get whole categories of pesticides banned like it happened in France and in Germany.

It's only good business sense of the corporations to invest money where opinions are being made - in magazines, on fora and on conferences - to influence the opinion of the beekeepers directly and to drive any suspicion away from their products.

If they can hire people in high positions or functions it's even better for them, all they need to do is promise them support for their respective interests in return.

[gavin]

A have to say here that a smallish Glaswegian tried to get the SBA membership to vote to put measures into place to keep a lookout for such stooges standing for office. I'm pleased to report that the vote was overwhelmingly for commonsense.

[Stromnessbees]

A have to say here that a smallish Glaswegian tried to get the SBA membership to vote to put measures into place to keep a lookout for such stooges standing for office. I'm pleased to report that the vote was overwhelmingly for commonsense.

Maybe you should consider changing your mind on that after what I have explained here.

The danger of paid lobbyists infiltrating beekeeping organisations is very real and the common sense action is to prevent against it.

[EmsE]

Maybe you should consider changing your mind on that after what I have explained here.

The danger of paid lobbyists infiltrating beekeeping organisations is very real and the common sense action is to prevent against it.

Hi Doris,
As a registered charity, the people on the executive are already covered by the legislation as shown on the OSCAR site. By voting to accept the proposal would have weakened this as the SBA members would be specifying just 1 issue that could be classed as a conflict of interest. There are many other things that could be classed as a conflict of interest and these may well change as the years go on.

[Jon]

Doris you need to get real. That is pure fantasy. The beekeeping community is quite cliquey. Beekeepers know each other off the forums as well. I sat beside you for two days at the bibba conference in Tipperary for gawd sakes and listened in amazement as Andrew Abrahams and yourself argued about which one of you lived on the bleakest island. The most relentless single issue poster I can think of is borderbeeman and I don't think he is being funded by anyone. Were that the case they would be looking their money back! There are a couple of others who are single issue guys but I think they are just obsessives rather than paid stooges for some cause or other. You get the same thing with some of the small cell devotees or the non-treatment beekeepers. Black bee men are exempt from that kind of behaviour of course!

What is your ethical stance on the drafting of a press release which you know to be inaccurate and/or misleading which ends up getting coverage in the UK press by our 'award winning' journalist friends. Now that is dodgy in my opinion.
I take people at face value and I do not consider myself to be naive.
I think latching on to every conspiracy theory doing the rounds is naive and a symptom of lazy thinking.
Seriously Doris, the world is not the cess pool of intrigue that you imagine. Not the bee part of it anyway.

[Stromnessbees]

Doris you need to get real. That is pure fantasy.
...
Seriously Doris, the world is not the cess pool of intrigue that you imagine. Not the bee part of it anyway.

I'm not alone with my opinion:

The president of the Association of Commercial Beekeepers of Germany, Walter Haefeker, has written an article with the title 'Betrayed and Sold Off' about the great bee monitoring study, which was supposed to clear up the mystery about the bee die-offs.

http://www.imkerdemo.de/hintergrundi...nenmonitoring/

Walter Haefeker, EPBA

Verraten und verkauft - das deutsche Bienenmonitoring!


Von Walter Haefeker, Präsident der Vereinigung der Europäischen Berufsimker

I recommend that you google translate it and read it, to get the picture of what's been going on.


I'll give you time to read this and will try to get back to the discussion later.

[Jon]

Birds of a feather flock together and so do conspiracy theorists.
There are a lot of them about but the majority grow out of it.
I am well aware that multinationals have a lobbying budget.
The US system in particular lends itself to special interest groups and corporations.
But I really do not think we have paid 'shills' on the bee forums.
As they say in Belfast, - catch yourself on.

What would be the collective noun for a conference of conspiracy theorists.

A school of whales
A paranoia of conspiracy theorists.

[Stromnessbees]

Just while I remember it: there's another technique that is used along with the other ones:

Whenever a genuine poster uncovers something very inconvenient and threatening to the team, they will call in people from the spare benches to create a flurry of activity on the forum, in order to burry the offending post and to get it off top position.
These spare forces are usually less well trained and keep to simpler lines of arguing or to alltogether unrelated topics.