Yazata,
I'm not interested in getting sucked into your little emotional flame-war with MR. If you want to argue with me, you need to argue with me.
My post to you was aimed squarely at what
you wrote. I even quoted you. In your post, you referred to MR and to river, so I also referred to them. I also used both of them as examples to show where the thinking (if that's what you want to call it) of the True Believers goes wrong.
Except that I've never argued that they are "aliens" in the extraterrestrial spaceships sense. So your whole argument is tangential to mine at best. (At worst, it isn't even relevant.)
I've said it to MR before, so now I'll say it to you. When I write "aliens" in the context of UFOs - in the current thread at least - you can take it that I include all of MR's suggestions about extradimensional beings, human time travellers from the future, spirits from another dimension - the lot of them. If
you want to complain that I'm fixated on extraterrestrial intelligences then you're missing the point in the same way that MR consistently does.
The fact is, if you
assume from the start, as MR does, that anything you see in the sky must have a non-mundane origin then you're making an unwarranted assumption right from the word go.
What I am arguing for is keeping open the possibility that ufos are "aliens" (outsiders) simply in the sense of their being anomalies, evidence of something unexpected, something that doesn't easily fit in our existing conceptual scheme. Something truly new.
I don't really know whether any of them will actually rise to that level. My point is merely that I don't want to prematurely close off the possibility that a few might.
After everything I've written about this, do you seriously think for one moment that I've closed off the possibility that some of them might be something truly new?
Never mind that the more stable UFO believers admit that 95%+ of UFO sightings turn out to have mundane explanations, leaving only a few "difficult" cases that remain unsolved. Never mind that in the 70 years that flying saucers have been a fad, nobody has managed to produce really convincing evidence that there's anything "new" in the skies.
The point is this: if you want to assert that a given UFO is something truly
new, then you have to have established
in advance of making that claim that your UFO sighting is, with high confidence,
not something "old" - i.e. not something mundane or explainable in light of what we already know about our world.
Sure, anything is
possible. But you're not justified in making the positive claim that there's something "new" until you have ruled out conventional explanations. And here's the thing: even in the
best UFO cases, like the "tic tac" thing we've been discussing, conventional explanations have very much
not been ruled out.
Has he ever said that? Or are those words that you are putting into his mouth, more indicative of your disdain for him?
I'm exaggerating, of course, but not very much. Have you actually read MR's posts on the topic?
I sense that you are getting emotional again. And once again, you aren't arguing against my position, you seem to be arguing against some straw-man in your head. (The believer in alien spaceships.)
When I argue against MR, I'm arguing against the believer in alien spaceships (/time travellers/extradimensional fairies/etc.).
My beef with
you here is you are apparently ready to accept MR's lie (also the lie of many similar True Believers) that skeptics like myself make an
a priori assumption that all UFOs can be explained with reference to conventional explanations. I make no such assumption. I never have. All I say is what I said at the start of my previous reply to you: if you think a UFO is something "new", the onus is on you to show that it is "new" (i.e. unexplainable in conventional terms).
Showing that a UFO is something "new" is
not simply a matter of saying "we can't tell what this thing is, so there's a mystery here". We
both agree there is mystery, from the start. That is why we need to investigate UFO cases in the first place. That's why they are UFOs - they are unidentified (at this time).
If, after extensive investigation, we can't pin down what a particular UFO is, then the correct conclusion is not "It was an extraterrestrial craft" or "It was interdimensional fairies". The correct conclusion is "We haven't solved the mystery at this time."
There can be all kinds of reasons why UFO cases remain unsolved. Only
one of those reasons is that we might be dealing with something "new". Much more commonly, the reason it is unsolved is because there isn't enough evidence, or the necessary evidence we'd need to solve the mystery is no longer available, or the evidence is of questionable quality and/or provenance. It is simply shoddy thinking to assume that any case that suffers from these evidential problems must point to something "new" by default.
Because I see [MR] getting abused and ridiculed by people that I perceive as internet bullies. I don't like bullies and I kind of enjoy constructing intellectual speed-bumps in front of them.
You think I'm one of those internet bullies you're referring to? I'm going too hard on poor fragile Magical Realist and his faith-based beliefs?
I completely understand that you might feel that MR is entitled to believe whatever crap he wants to believe in, and therefore I have no right to challenge his beliefs. I agree with you that he is free to believe whatever he likes. However, he doesn't stop there. He makes strident claims that his beliefs are objectively verifiable with reference to evidence, and that's utterly wrong. Moreover, he is dishonest in all discussions about his claims. He selectively ignores all evidence that tends to refute his claims. He refuses to consider reasonable explanations that tend to undermine his claims. He refuses even to acknowledge the realities about the kind of evidence he most commonly presents - anecdote, unrealiable eyewitness testimony, fuzzy videos and photos of unverifiable origin, etc. etc. You've seen how he conducts himself in these discussions. Why would you defend him? He's a troll.
Maybe you think that MR is intellectually limited, so that its a bullying act for me to ask him to think critically, or to analyse anything he presents as evidence. I don't think that. What I find most frustrating about MR is that he has the capacity to think but actively chooses not to do so. The underlying psychology of that fascinates me, however. It's really the most interesting thing about MR, and I have yet to get to the bottom of it. I wonder what the real reasons are for why he believes in all the woo he believes in: the ghosts and the monsters and the conspiracy theories and the UFOs and the rest of it.
I'm not interested in your moral judgments, James. I'm perfectly capable of making moral judgments of my own.
Then open your eyes. Look at how MR conducts himself in these discussions. He's a troll.
