Right, I've gone back over Tim's recent posts and I now see where the misunderstanding arises.
First of all, I wasn't actually debunking anything. When Reagan said "What if there were an external alien threat?" he clearly wanted to evoke a
literal alien threat, as a metaphor. Then when he said, "But isn't there an actual universal threat?" I thought he was talking about AIDS, but he was apparently talking about war. Obviously if he was
really talking about aliens at this point, they'd have just gotten him off the podium and into a straitjacket! I then said:
Silas said:
Yes, yes, sorry, I totally understand now. Of course the answer to the conundrum is Ronald Reagan's speech didn't actually make any sense. He's talking to the United Nations, to friend and foe alike, and he says, "We'd unite if we had an
outside threat. So let's band together as one people and fight the
outside threat of...... War!"
This was not me disbelieving or debunking. Reagan saying "What if there were a universal threat?" and then saying that the universal threat is war - doesn't make any sense. But what I meant was not that it didn't make sense for Reagan to say that, I meant that Reagan said that and it didn't make any sense!
btimsah said:
Silas, perhaps you could put you're fanatical debunkery attempts to the side for a second.. Okay? Just try it. Because, the key quote you seem to have missed....
I come in here and express my views that those things without evidence do not exist. I do it because I enjoy forming arguments in my head and then typing them into the screen. I'm not a "fanatical" debunker - I'm not a fanatical anything. I simply express my opinions, as everybody here is entitled to do.
btimsah said:
No, he said what Reagan said did not make any sense. Because he wanted to remove any "extraterrestrial" reference too it. So he created the hypotheticals, in an effort to do just that.
What he said made sense, was appropriote and simple to understand. There's no need for what-if's or hypotheticals.
I think you're making up some weird argument of your own here. First of all, I wasn't actually denying anything that Reagan said. Secondly you're dangerously close to implying that Reagan meant the following: "Imagine the world was under threat from aliens, we would put aside our differences and unite to defeat the common foe. But in fact the world
is under threat from aliens! Watch the skies! Watch the skies!"
No, in fact what he did was use alien attack (something that is easy to understand, since it has formed the basis of a great deal of entertainment throughout the last century - despite btimsah's fantasies that the phrase "alien threat" in a speech means that Reagan must have seen secret files about aliens) as a metaphor for something that would unite the world, and then said that indeed there is a threat (a real one, not a hypothetical alien one) so the world should unite. But apparently the universal threat he was talking about was War itself. It is this that made no sense to me. How can the whole world unite to eliminate war? You have to eliminate war first in order to unite the world, because if war exists, clearly the world is not united yet!