[simiones]

Recently my grandmother, whom I had just helped out of an ambulance and back into her apartment, told me that she had just come back home after meeting with a neighbor. I was not "accusing" her of something, nor insulting her, when I called her doctor to let them know she was having delusions.

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).

[gadf]

- thanks for proving my point. you doubt granny because you know her to already be of inconstant and diseased mind, and you are involved in and know the facts of what actually happened, because you were there. so you're in a reasonable position of authroity to dispute her suggested history as well as label it as a delusion. but wrong that you equate this with your unfair, unreasonable, arrogant and abusive criticism of people with alien/UFO stories as deluded, or delusions. equivalently, you place yourself above them, pretend with zero justification you knew better, were somehow ahold of the facts of the situation or were there, you weren't, and have zero klnowledge of their mental state but blanket critcize humiliate and dismiss them. yet insiste you were still right to do so, because you care for you granny? sickening to abuse the love for you granny to try to pass of your abusive behaviour on others as okay. also sickening that this analogy is one where the power imbalance is great, you are in a carer position for granny, you have power in relation to her, and you are deciding things for her. sickening and revealing how you think about these people whose stories you trashed.

it's not disrespectful to true UFO experiencers, or abductees, nor to true victims of drug abuse, sexual assault and rape to comapare their claims to UFO and alien witnesses, and to each other, because it's about evidence and the truth. if we discount the standard of evidence we undermine justice which is the very thing that can strive to protect and remedy real victims. it is disrespectful to undermine the standards of truth and evidence underlying criminal culpability and conviction by applying a biased standard to some and not others because you're saying we'll believe you because of our pre-existing beliefs not because of the facts of the case and your story, applying this discount to the standards required is totally disrespectful to true victims of crime because it lowers the percieved quality of evidence and allows the true claims to be swamped by false ones. It's false to believe something occurs because in general you believe it to occur therefore in a specific instance it is more likely. Each case must be considered on its evidence and merits. Even tho your opinins have no legal impact, they risk damaging the public narrative and discourse around these topics by degrading the reliability of real witnesses by demonstrating a bias toward believing claimaints that align with particular beliefs versus otherwise. This essentially reduces rape (and sexual abuse, etc) to a culturally relative, temporally relative, belief relative consturct, rather than the rock solid legal position it can be to solidly prosecutre and punish true perpetrators, and bring justice to real victims. You don't seem to see that degrading the standards of evidence by giving preferential treatment to those things you believe, rather than taking cases on their merits and comparing them equally regardless of the topic of the story or its current status in the cultural milieu is the best way to bring justice to victims and their families, everyone involved, and society as a whole. That's the empathic and compassionate position to take: to hear everyone's story, but adjudicate each claim in a balanced and unbiased way free of discrimination (based on belief) or prejudgement. That's the essence of judgement, and under the guise of you thinking you're being just you're just undermining it.

looking at that honestly is the ebst way to respect true victims of sexual abuse, parental abuse, accusations of drug abuse (vs planted evidence). again, you're so deluded or deliberately deceptive in that you think you're being good, but were actually being abusive, and protest when people stand up against that, and also think that trashing that value of witness testimony, while holding up a biased standard because you have reason to think that in "general" these things happen, therefore specifically it happened -- that's not the weight of testimony at all! that's undermining everything. you have reason to think that in "general" alien things happen because of the preponderance of evidence, but you're biased, revealing a lack of even handedness that's actually harmful and disrespectful to true victims and to justice. casting doubt on stories because people look at it preferentially or in a biased way. that's not the weight of testimony at all, that undermines it. you casually disregard the pain and fear of people sharing UFO stories while ignoring the obvious humiliation and abuse and dismissals and disbelief they are subjected to, just as you wanted to subject them to, yet you stand there and pretend to be for victims of sexual abuse. so disrespectful, and disingenuous! you may have pesonal experience but that doesn't mean you stand for victims and justice when you undermine people like this in these biased and unfair ways.