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Wow, you're trying to get out of what you did. You didn't insult the people, you insulted the claims? No you did not. "as they are all either delusions, lying, false memories etc."... "the various crackpots and deluded people who claim"... You don't think it's an insult to a person to call their experience, sincerely recounted, a delusion, a lie, a false memory? Of course it is. Then as you admit, honorably, you do call them crackpots and deluded. Fair enough, but just because some people have been proven liars (or in the rape case, fake accusers), does not mean we should doubt other people coming forward, does it? and certainly does mean we should blanket call those people crackpots, or deluded or pretend they're lying, does it? "Finally, I didn't insult you, so I don't expect to be insulted in return." You don't expect to be insulted in return for accusing others in this abusive way of being without credibility? Exactly what I said, You expect silence in response to your abuse. Reform yourself. I saw you pushing down on people, and I pushed back. You can't take it? Don't dish it out. That's the way it is, focker. You may firmly believe it, but then you're blind (or empathically missing the point) that accusing someone of having a mental illness, or hallucinating something you haven't experienced and have no frame for, is an insult, and more than that. You're saying you know their mind better than they do. You're saying their experience, of their life, is trumped by your opinion. And is less valuable than your "in the stands" commentary on it. You are not involved at all in what they experienced, yet you denigrate it, and claim you're not insulting them. Abusive insulting practice hiding behind veneer of being legitimate. All I'm saying about physics is we don't know it all yet, and can't assume we do. Science admits as much, but few on the inside are courageous enough to take that to its logical conclusion. Comparing evidence for rape, abuse, etc, to evidence for aliens is not disgusting, and you're certainly okay with doing that because you're okay to claim that all these millions of people with their stories and experiences must have simply imagined it, implanted a false memory, lied, etc. It's not about reporting being one-sided, it's about reporting consisting solely of witness testimony, often just of one person. That's true both for the alien case, and the rape and abuse case. You don't quite seem to see what you're doing when you want to doubt so many people for telling their story. It wasn't a long time in the past when people were laughed at or dismissed for telling their stories of rape and abuse, just like you'd have people do with those with stories of aliens today. It seems you have not been acquainted with enough stories, I suggest you do some research and read up on people discussing abduction stories, and so on. Enter it as a skeptic, full of confidence you'll be able to explain it away. Talk to people involved. Give them a chance to be heard. Empathize with them. Instead of pretending you're "disgusted" by the very same comparative dismissal you yourself are hawking, while somehow laying claim to a moral grounding in this when you've been behaving anything but about it. |
Similarly, when someone is reporting something we know to be impossible or extremely improbable from other considerations, we are not accusing them of something when we say that their experience or memory of that experience was delusional (or mistaken, depending on the details). Again, I was insulting when I called such people "delusional", as it implies they often have such hallucinations, which of course I can't know and don't believe - and, again, for this I apologize.
Now, the major difference to accusations of sexual assault is the plausibility of the claim. I of course do not personally know if Harvey Weinstein assaulted any of the women that accused him. However, I know that such accusations are painful and risky for the person making them; and I know that sexual assault is something that can absolutely happen; so, the witness testimony carries a lot of weight.
If on the other hand the exact same women accused Harvey Weinstein of stealing their souls through satanic rituals, I would not think much of these claims, and I would believe, and feel justified in believing, that the women are either lying or have had some hallucinations that have convinced them of this (or are having false memories).
Of course, if you tend to believe that aliens (or angels, curses etc) are plausible, you may lend more credence to these testimonies, even without scientific style evidence for what may have happened.
I still believe that comparing the certainty we can have that sexual assault is a real thing that real men and women may experience to the certainty that aliens (or demons and ghosts) are real is deeply insulting to victims of sexual assault.
I also don't believe there are millions of people claiming to have experienced alien abductions. Looking around a bit, I assume this claim is coming from a Roper Poll that found 119 out of some 6000 respondents had experiences which were considered typical of alien abduction, which would be extrapolated to 3.7 million out of the 185 million people for which the poll was representative. Crucially, the respondents were not claiming that they had had an experience of being abducted by aliens, they were claiming that they had had some experiences like "waking up paralyzed and feeling a presence in the room", "finding puzzling scars on your body", "seeing unexplained lights in a room" - all of which require a significant jump to conclude "ALIENS!". In the best case, they could be used to claim unknown phenomena are real, but to pick any specific posited phenomenon would be deeply wrong: these are as likely to be signs of aliens as they are of being fairies or ancestor spirits or mind/body dualism or anything else; including altered mental states (especially as the poll didn't even ask about the respondent's belief that the experience was real - for all we know, some of those 119 people could have sought psychiatric help themselves after these experiences).