Do those who espouse crackpot astronomy truly not understand astronomy?

What triggered me to start this thread is this post, by icebear, in the Why is there so much crackpot physics? thread. Here's an extract (bold added):

Quote:

Originally Posted by icebear (Post 9514844) Don't get me wrong... It's not like there isn't crackpottery on the fringe or anything like that; just that much of the last century's worth of mainstream science isn't much better. A few Example: The "Big Bang(TM)" idea. BB should have been rejected on day one on purely philosophical grounds. Having all the mas of the universe collapsed to a point would be the mother of all black holes; nothing would ever "bang" its way out of that. BB was never based on anything other than an interpretation of cosmic redshift as distance and velocity, which turns out to be wrong. Halton Arp has shown examples of very high and very low redhift objects which are very clearly part and parcel of the same things, often with obvious connecting material between them. For his troubles, Arp was banned from observatories in the US and subsequently picked up by the Max Planck Institute, sort of like the story of the "Ugly Duckling" which children read. [snip] Relativity (deformable time). What could be stupider than claiming that when two Volkswagens pass each other at light speed (or at any other speed for that matter...), time for each slows down WRT the other?? Aside from every other problem with Relativity, there is the fact that when Dayton Miller reran the MM experiment with much better equipment and at higher altitude, it did not fail...

I could, of course, have chosen any of dozens of other posts from this part of the JREF forum, over the past year or so.



In the example above, icebear summarizes what s/he thinks Halton Arp has established - close, physical-distance, proximity of objects with very different redshifts - without having any idea what "redshift" actually is, much less how an astronomer like Arp would go about measuring it. Yet icebear chose to post these opinions, here, in this part of the JREF forum, in a manner which suggests s/he is very certain of the validity of this result.



I have no problem with someone challenging 'the mainstream' understanding of anything in astronomy (or cosmology); but I do expect that, at the very least, they'd have taken the trouble to understand - even at a high level - just what the astronomical observations are, that their challenge relies on.



Yet, in every case I can recall I've seen here, those challenges have quickly been shown to be based on very weak understanding of what the astronomy actually is: what astronomers did, how they took data obtained from instruments attached to telescopes (for example) and converted them into things like 'redshift' or 'distance', what physics theories these steps totally depend on, and so on.



Which is then a good segue to the topic of this thread: Do those who espouse crackpot astronomy truly not understand astronomy?

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