RE: Russia and Ukraine
December 21, 2022 at 2:57 am
(This post was last modified: December 21, 2022 at 3:33 am by Irreligious Atheist.)
Nope. The famous Hitchens quote was used by Hitch when discussing religion, but with religion not only is there a lack of evidence, but also the concept of a creator god is an illogical squared circle in the first place because of the who designed the designer question.
I can debunk the Hitchens quote right here with something the majority of the forum assumes/agrees to be true/almost certainly true. The existence of ETs in the universe. Overwhelmingly accepted by scientists as well, even though there is no hard evidence for ETs. Do you personally dismiss out of hand the possibility or extremely high probability of ETs existing in the universe, just because hard evidence hasn't been found yet? If so, that's the way many people used to think about ETs in the universe hundreds of years ago. They used to think that surely we were alone in the universe, and it wasn't hard evidence of ET life that changed people's minds to get to the point where we're at today. Now, let's take that a step further on the Kardashev scale. Dyson Spheres. Should we write off scientists who strongly suspect that Dyson Spheres exist out there somewhere, and call them whackjobs, because the evidence has yet to have been found? Logic tells us, I would say at least, that there are alien civilizations out there millions of years ahead of us, so yeah, personally I think there are probably Dyson Spheres out there.
Of course evidence matters. No one's saying that evidence doesn't matter. You are dismissing things out of hand, however, just because they wouldn't be able to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law. I wasn't there at the Zelenskyy Johnson meeting. I also wasn't there when Casey Anthony's daughter died, and the water destroyed the evidence of the exact method of the child's death, but I'd still bet my life on it that she either killed the child, or the child drowned in the pool. Do you have no strong opinion on the case, one way or the other, because certain evidence was not obtained in time, or do you think she probably played some role when it comes to the child's death? Is the logic behind Hitchens quote falling apart for you yet? I certainly see what Hitch was getting at, but he didn't even follow the own logic he was pushing in his own life. The much better quote, I think, is "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence", because in that case, an extraordinary claim like a god or ghosts or unicorns showing up in someone's bedroom certainly should be dismissed offhand, because those things go against our understanding of how the universe works. The West using less powerful countries (in this case, Ukraine) for their own gain is not an extraordinary claim in the least, because it happens time and again. You're just ignoring a shit load of circumstantial evidence, history and the present, and you're ignoring how geopolitics work. Maybe go look into that and do some studying up. Also, I'm not asserting that I know 100 % what happened at the Zelenskyy meeting. I'm just pointing out the obvious as I see it. I can't prove to you 100 % that Casey Anthony was involved in her child's death, but that much is obvious, to me. Maybe I'm wrong though. Maybe Casey was framed. There is a small chance of that. There's even a small chance that ghosts exist in the Universe. I can't disprove it afterall, right, so am I wrong to assert to a child that ghosts aren't real and need not be feared? Maybe so, but sometimes, the obvious is just beyond obvious, and I don't reckon that I need to prove the non-existence of ghosts in a court of law before I tell a child not to worry about them.
Jeff Epstein. 50 different things point to him being murdered, and the motive is clear as day as well, but some people try to pretend that the obvious isn't obvious because it can't be proven in a court of law. Can the Cosby victims all prove their cases? Nope. So do you just dismiss their individual stories, because they can't prove it to you? Because they didn't get a rape kit or a drug test soon enough? Is the sheer number of women who came forward not enough to say, we can't say for certain whether each woman is telling the truth, and there could be a couple of liars who just jumped into the fray to piggyback off of the real victims for publicity or something, but again, I'd bet my life that most of those women are telling the truth, despite the lack of hard evidence that Hitchens quote would demand if you take that quote ultra-literally. Bush and Cheney lying about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Some people defended them for years and said they probably were just fooled by faulty evidence coming out of the intelligence community. Well, it's years later, and politicians are finally starting to spill the beans and admit that it was all BS from the start. Sometimes the obvious can take decades to confirm, when it comes to politics or geo-politics, so again, you can continue wearing that blindfold, but NATO convinced Ukraine not to enter into the peace deal, and even you don't literally live by that Hitch quote.
I can debunk the Hitchens quote right here with something the majority of the forum assumes/agrees to be true/almost certainly true. The existence of ETs in the universe. Overwhelmingly accepted by scientists as well, even though there is no hard evidence for ETs. Do you personally dismiss out of hand the possibility or extremely high probability of ETs existing in the universe, just because hard evidence hasn't been found yet? If so, that's the way many people used to think about ETs in the universe hundreds of years ago. They used to think that surely we were alone in the universe, and it wasn't hard evidence of ET life that changed people's minds to get to the point where we're at today. Now, let's take that a step further on the Kardashev scale. Dyson Spheres. Should we write off scientists who strongly suspect that Dyson Spheres exist out there somewhere, and call them whackjobs, because the evidence has yet to have been found? Logic tells us, I would say at least, that there are alien civilizations out there millions of years ahead of us, so yeah, personally I think there are probably Dyson Spheres out there.
Of course evidence matters. No one's saying that evidence doesn't matter. You are dismissing things out of hand, however, just because they wouldn't be able to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law. I wasn't there at the Zelenskyy Johnson meeting. I also wasn't there when Casey Anthony's daughter died, and the water destroyed the evidence of the exact method of the child's death, but I'd still bet my life on it that she either killed the child, or the child drowned in the pool. Do you have no strong opinion on the case, one way or the other, because certain evidence was not obtained in time, or do you think she probably played some role when it comes to the child's death? Is the logic behind Hitchens quote falling apart for you yet? I certainly see what Hitch was getting at, but he didn't even follow the own logic he was pushing in his own life. The much better quote, I think, is "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence", because in that case, an extraordinary claim like a god or ghosts or unicorns showing up in someone's bedroom certainly should be dismissed offhand, because those things go against our understanding of how the universe works. The West using less powerful countries (in this case, Ukraine) for their own gain is not an extraordinary claim in the least, because it happens time and again. You're just ignoring a shit load of circumstantial evidence, history and the present, and you're ignoring how geopolitics work. Maybe go look into that and do some studying up. Also, I'm not asserting that I know 100 % what happened at the Zelenskyy meeting. I'm just pointing out the obvious as I see it. I can't prove to you 100 % that Casey Anthony was involved in her child's death, but that much is obvious, to me. Maybe I'm wrong though. Maybe Casey was framed. There is a small chance of that. There's even a small chance that ghosts exist in the Universe. I can't disprove it afterall, right, so am I wrong to assert to a child that ghosts aren't real and need not be feared? Maybe so, but sometimes, the obvious is just beyond obvious, and I don't reckon that I need to prove the non-existence of ghosts in a court of law before I tell a child not to worry about them.
Jeff Epstein. 50 different things point to him being murdered, and the motive is clear as day as well, but some people try to pretend that the obvious isn't obvious because it can't be proven in a court of law. Can the Cosby victims all prove their cases? Nope. So do you just dismiss their individual stories, because they can't prove it to you? Because they didn't get a rape kit or a drug test soon enough? Is the sheer number of women who came forward not enough to say, we can't say for certain whether each woman is telling the truth, and there could be a couple of liars who just jumped into the fray to piggyback off of the real victims for publicity or something, but again, I'd bet my life that most of those women are telling the truth, despite the lack of hard evidence that Hitchens quote would demand if you take that quote ultra-literally. Bush and Cheney lying about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Some people defended them for years and said they probably were just fooled by faulty evidence coming out of the intelligence community. Well, it's years later, and politicians are finally starting to spill the beans and admit that it was all BS from the start. Sometimes the obvious can take decades to confirm, when it comes to politics or geo-politics, so again, you can continue wearing that blindfold, but NATO convinced Ukraine not to enter into the peace deal, and even you don't literally live by that Hitch quote.
