Thread by @electricalWSOP

Thread:
I work in an arcane field where the job requires specific technical knowledge, built on a ladder of understanding and breakthroughs going back over 100 years. It's not immunology but it's not nothing.

A couple decades ago there was a christian panic about something the press started calling "backmasking," an outgrowth of the similarly absurd panic about subliminal messaging and advertising, about which I could also talk about for too long but will not now.

According to the panic, Satanists were hiding messages in music by recording secret messages, only audible if the music were played backwards, but somehow still perceivable and persuasive on listeners. Such messages were blamed for drug abuse, teen suicides and cult behavior.

This became a Big Deal. There were articles and TV shows about it, proponents mounted conferences, did public demonstrations and lectures, and eventually there were a core of believers who were convinced of the problem and adamant in outrage.

There is an excellent inclusion of this in @mountain_goats John Darnielle's excellent novel Wolf in White Van. Of course people like me, professionals in the recording field intimately familiar with the process and technology of recording, knew it was all horseshit.

Regardless, "secret messages" retained popular appeal and a few lawsuits were even pursued, one against the band Judas Priest, lent credibility by the passion of the people who believed in it, despite that they had no expertise or evidence, and an unlearned and credulous public.

In order for something to appear on a record, forward or reverse, it would need to be recorded onto the master tape, and debunking it should be as simple as going through the tape track by track and demonstrating that there was no demonic message there.

So this is exactly what Judas Priest did. They played their master tapes in court, showed the track sheets and other documentation, had their engineer testify that he was never asked to record any satanic messages, all that. You would think that would put an end to it but no.

It was actually kinda close.
rollingstone.com/music/music-fe…

As an expert in analog recording, I know there is no way for these things to have been done surreptitiously or other than by the normal methods of recording, but lay people don't know any of that. They could be convinced there was some other, secret, conspiratorial way.

Judas Priest are a good example of why debating the willfully ignorant is a fool's errand. It's expensive and exhausting to have to disabuse people of patent bullshit they are attached to. You have to educate people who do not wish to learn and do not trust you.

You have to start with Maxwell's equations and the theory of electromagnetism, teach them about the persistence of polarity in magnetic domains, explain the mechanics and design of magnetic recorders, the process and handling of masters in a studio and the chain of custody...

for master tapes that represent an investment of sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars. You have to answer their ignorant objections continuously. And in the end they will just shrug and say, "I don't think so," and that will be that. They will remain unconvinced.

Okay, maybe that record didn't have backmasking and secret messages, but what about *this* one, or *this* one, or *this* one. Maybe that master tape didn't have a secret message track, but what about all the tapes we haven't examined?

You say there would be some evidence of the recording having been done, but couldn't it be done some other way? I recall a lawyer in the Judas Priest case arguing that the message in question was made as a composite of sounds including the vocal, guitar and hi-hat...

...ie the engineer did a cryptic reverse-speech soundscape collage, hidden within the apparently-normal recording of a rock band, for the purpose of inducing teen-agers to commit suicide. Every aspect of that argument is beyond absurd, yet it had its day in court. Literally.

So this fact-averse mindset persists, whether about evolution, vaccine efficacy, gun control or cryptic satanism. No matter how thoroughly an absurdity is shown to be bullshit and nonsense, its advocates will insist that didn't happen.

Indulging the "DEBATE ME!" shitheels does nothing to further the truth. It is exhausting because its purpose is to exhaust you and no credible person should do it.