UFOs exist and everyone needs to adjust to that fact

[grantcart]

263. Pedestrian, uninformed and uninspired

There are three gaping holes in your position that reduce it to the level of Junior High "whatifisms" that obviously do not measure to either graduate or post graduate work. In my field there were similar attempted by self appointed Magna cum laude pretenders who were dismantled with great hilarity much in the same way that Dr. Kingsfield destroys the simple but ambitious in the movie Paper Chase.

Life is limited and it is necessary to establish a minimum standard or you just end up wasting your time.

I will outline three very obvious ways that detail that you are not close to that standard and then use the features that the site has to ensure I don't have to accidentally bump into your product again.

I) You use words you don't understand and you cite people who use words that they don't understand, namely an attack on your philosophical premises and logic is not an ad hominem attack no matter how embarrassed you are by the attack:

a) Your use of the word ad hominem is incorrect. My attack may be not be tasteful to you but it isn't ad hominem.

Ad hominem (Latin for "to the person"[1]), short for argumentum ad hominem, is a fallacious argumentative strategy whereby genuine discussion of the topic at hand is avoided by instead attacking the character, motive, or other attribute of the person making the argument, or persons associated with the argument, rather than attacking the substance of the argument itself.

At no point did I attack any attribute of the person but rather the architecture of your argument, and as such it is in fact the opposite of an ad hominem. I attacked your methodology of constructing the basis of your argument by stating that your epistemology is the level of a 7th grader. That is not an attack on your character, motive or attribute, it is an attack on your argument. Got that Magna (sic).

b) You cite people that don't understand the words that they use.

We start the hilarity with the obnoxiously idiotic

In that paper, eventually published in the journal Political Theory, Wendt and Duvall argued that state sovereignty as we understand it is anthropocentric, or “constituted and organized by reference to human beings alone.”

State sovereignty is organized to establish a government to define power between the people it governs and the different state organs that are defined explicitly or implicitly in a constitutional arrangement. Those constitutions are meant to solve the problems within the sovereign territory only. The establishment of the US Constitution articulates an order for the people within the geography of the US. If it was anthropocentric it would then attempt to define the natural order of dogs, dolphins or other species like Extraterrestrial life in human terms.

Rather than being anthropocentric defined state sovereignty is anthro "exclusive" applying only to the order of homo sapiens. For a political constitution to be anthropocentric it would, by definition, attempt to define, for example, how Martians or Dolphins be incorporated into the political system.

II) It is the entire history of Ufology that is classical anthropomorphic projection. Early humans projected human traits onto the various gods that they imagined. As society got more sophisticated so did the gods. James Michener's The Source brilliantly displays just how this anthropomorphic projection evolves by studying the various levels of an archaeological tell that goes back to the stone ages and defines each new iteration.

Beginning with the Cult of El we see humans developing their understanding all the way through to the modern Judeo/Christian/Muslim tradition.

The examination of that development has been examined in exquisite detail through the development of The Higher Criticisms which include various philosophical tools to examine the premise and logic of an idea through history. The useful tool for this discussion is called "The Redaction Criticism".

For example should we be sceptical or not that Joseph Smith discovered extra terrestrial (yes the book of Mormon is claimed to be an extra terrestrial work having been "written" elsewhere and brought here for translation). Redaction criticism would point out that the fact that Egyptian hieroglyphics were first translated in 1822 by Champollion and then quickly followed by Joseph Smith's finding of an extra terrestrial tablets that used hieroglyphics is beyond suspicious and that one event influenced the production of the other.

The entire history of UFO sightings follows the exact same suspicious path. Fiction writers write about flying saucers and then magically people start seeing flying saucers.

Here is how the progression works:

1) Phillip Nowlan writes a fictional work about Buck Rogers "Armageddon 2419 and its Amazing Stories". It is very popular and Nowlan sells the idea of a serialized cartoon about Buck Rogers.

2) As it grows in popularity Nowlan reaches out to modern engineers, especially Buckminister Fuller for inspiration on design ideas for his cartoon space ships.

3) Fuller shows his futuristic car the Dymaxion Car at the 1933 World's Fair



4) Nowlan uses that basic idea to create the image of "flying saucers"




5) Magically people start seeing flying saucers that are remarkably similar to those imagined in fiction, what a coincidence.




Now we can all laugh at the early attempts by hoaxers to use primitive images from comic books but the progressive evolution of the sophistication of sightings by UFO fans exactly parallels the evolution of sophistication of publications in fictional media, that is how you know it to be contrived.

Now if the first sightings of UFOs were sophisticated in the same way your example is, that would be proof of something. That it now parallels what you can see this Saturday in the movie theatre simply proves that it is following the same anthropomorphic projection that humans have been doing since they projected their traits onto the god UR 5,000 years ago.

The reason that I say that your epistemology is undeveloped because you approach the question not as a sceptic but as a believer. Just as the simple uneducated rural Mormon believes that the book was delivered by an angel and can see relevant proofs all around him in the field you already believe that there are UFOs and search for confirmations rather than apply appropriate scientific sceptical analysis.

You find proof that confirms what you already believe. Another word for that is Republicanism.

III) The fundamental premises of the idea of UFO sightings simply doesn't make any sense.

Some of this is covered by the well discussed "Fermi Paradox" but let me be more specific.

In order for us to see UFOs certain assumptions have to be made and these assumptions are highly contradictory.

First the reality: The space between us and any other possible life form capable of space travel is not huge it is almost unmanageable. Not only is it vast it is growing larger literally by the second.

Now for life to be able to evolve in intelligence requires a billion lucky breaks in chemistry, biology, etc but also a great amount of luck. Not only does it have to evolve with critical thinking abilities these creatures have to have something nimble like an opposable thumb. There could be worlds with dolphins that have construct melodies that would shame Mozart and plays that would surpass Shakespeare but without digits that work in a particular way they aren't building space ships.

Then they have to have the right ingredients for propulsion and they can't have their planetary evolution interrupted by heavy meteor showers.

So we give all of the above and have these absolutely brilliant space travellers who have figured out how to manipulate black holes so that instead of wasting 1000 generations to get here they only spend 10.

They are brilliant, but once they get here they don't expose themselves. Why? The only answer is that they want to observe first, maybe interact incognito.

So if they are so brilliant and don't want to interact then why don't they just observe without being seen?

We have that technology and these guys are a million times smarter than us so why don't they just watch the TV, or intercept our communication or send hard to see drones, or use stealth technology to hide their aircraft.

See this is the irreducible problem for UFO sightings: These guys are brilliant beyond our comprehension because they were able to get here but once they got here didn't want to be seen but we were able to capture them on our cave man like filming system because they fucked up.

It doesn't make sense. If they came all of this way they would either a) reveal themselves or (because they didn't want to interfere) make sure that they observed us without getting caught on our cameras. Obviously they were able to travel that kind of distance they would be able to send some type of observation device that would be hidden, something akin to a "nanny cam".

Your line of discussion is dated, two dimensional, pedestrian and uninspired.

You have no objective epistemological discipline because you keep finding the evidence you want to find.

Now here is my question. You just joined Democratic Underground and are attempting to drag it into areas that have nothing to do with developing progressive policies, supporting Democratic candidates or supporting the Democratic Party.

So why do you post here?

You may be sincere but as you can see I am sceptical. A few years ago we had similar visitors who would, shortly after joining make similar silly threads and then go to their cave and write humorous stories about how gullible DUers are.

If you are sincere then I am sure that you can find UFO fan sites that will confirm that you have found the Rosetta Stone that you were looking for. How wonderfully coincidental. Had you proferred this type of theory in any of the graduate classes the Professor would have spent the hour asking you questions that would have exposed your bias and your desire to prove what you believe rather than to make an objective analysis. One ended the torturous questioning by asking if his mother had brought him to class today and when he answered in the negative he told him, in a thick German accent "Well let me give you a dollar for lunch. I am terribly afraid that without your mother's assistance I am afraid you will starve to death before you reach home". Apparently you attended a University where they were so impressed with your Magna they didn't stretch your analytical capabilities.