Countdown to 2012: aliens are coming to get us!

Warren Ellis points us to what he describes as a "bullshit-artist cage match" between Daniel Pinchbeck and Whitley Strieber, who apparently got all aggro on a recent radio program about whether 2012 is going to be all sweetness and light or the complete desolation of the human race. Or something. As Alterati noted:

The interview became quite heated – unusual for paranormal radio – because Daniel objected to Whitley’s negative prognostications about a planetary die off, among other things. The gist of Daniel’s argument is that one can never know for sure what is going to happen in the future, and our thoughts create reality, so that promoting negative future scenarios instead of more healthy and positive ones is irresponsible, especially when one has a platform that reaches as many as Whitley’s. Of course it deteriorated from there, with Daniel speculating that Whitley had come under the negative influence of the Grey aliens and Whitley hurt and claiming that he never would be Daniel’s friend etc.

Or, as Strieber says in his post-argument rebuttal:

They are here because we are at a period of transition in the life of our species, and they are hoping to assist us without destroying us in the process, and that is going to be a very near thing.

Pinchbeck accuses me of bringing on a dark future by predicting it. That’s magical thinking, and just as impotent as its opposite—that you can create a positive future by believing in it.

I say in the program that I believe that mankind is going to experience a dieback, and this makes Pinchbeck furious because he fears that just by saying something like that, it will become true. I don’t want to put words in another man’s mouth, but I had the impression that he sees me as a sort of viral particle of negativism, and that my perspective is designed to bring on the destructions of which I warn—presumably, so that my evil alien masters can inherit the ruined planet, I suppose.

Goodness gracious me! I'm not sure what the bookies in Vegas think about the likelihood of each outcome, but I can definitely say that if my thoughts actually created reality, there'd be a lot more MDMA coming out of my water faucets. At any rate, it's nice to see such serious and weighty topics like "planetary dieback" being given the radio air time it needs. If we here at DoseNation can contribute even slightly to such a deserving notion, it makes it all worthwhile. (Of course, we'll be in our space ark, on our way to our gold-plated mansion on the moon when the dieback happens, thanks to the power of our positive thoughts!)