Voice from the grave?

This came to me from the deceased Bruce Duensing on October 29, 2014, but never saw the light of day, sadly, as it was among a batch (1000+) of comments that Blogger didn't notify me were waiting for moderation.

"I think his material both hits and misses the crux of the phenomenon. The UFO community largely commits the same error of critical thinking. The axis of the fallacies surrounding both sides is interpreting everything on a literal basis. His criticism is well pointed but he throws the baby out with the bathwater as much as the UFO community has relentlessly done by digging itself into a dead end. The subject is lodged between fantasies and entertainment and manages to hand the knife by the handle to skeptics. The skeptics rightfully point this out. A well-versed skeptic is invaluable but not all skeptics are created equal. Its a series of false arguments and set of postulates on both sides for the majority. Another word that seems appropriate to describe this is babble."

I placed it online a while ago because it's a good summary of material that is spewed by some in the UFO community.

Bruce was a brilliant commentator and blogger, followed by those who actually thought (and think) intelligently about the UFO topic.

He remains missed, by me and by those who loved to learn things.

The above, from him, was in response to a posting I had about a "skeptics skeptic." And no, it isn't my pal Zoam Chomsky, but it is someone who has appeared here in a recent posting I needed help with.

May Bruce continue to rest in peace. A few of us don't lose track of those we admired and continue to admire.

RR

Black Mass USO steals torpedo?

https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/navy-ships/a29400304/navy-pilot-dark-mass-torpedo-disappear/?source=nl&utm_source=nl_pop&utm_medium=email&date=100819
&utm_campaign=nl18262024&src=nl

Pathologies!

Copyright 2019, InterAmerica, Inc.

While looking for other qualifications of folie à deux (to throw Matty’s way), I’ve caroused books at hand: Symptoms of Psychopathology: A Handbook, Edited by Charles G. Costello (Professor of Psychology, University of Calgary [John Wiley & Sons, Inc. 1970] and my desk copy of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5^th Edition [American Psychiatric Association].

But perusing these books and others, I’m inclined, more than ever, to believe that humankind is saddled with a pathological overlay that is more striking in some societal communities than others: sport, music, politics, economics, et cetera.

(No, Ufology is not one of them, although there are overt smidgens of pathology in the UFO community, and some reading this know what I mean.)

I have a slew of books on and about philosophy and astronomy and physics books here, and keep getting more, foolishly.

Philosophy is a topic of mind and academia that, since The Enlightenment, has become estranged from logic and sense, the very things that philosophy strives to use and explain.

Physics, while delving into the vast mysteries of the Universe, has become almost hysterical because of the unexplainable attributes of our surrounding reality, mathematics becoming the babbling of scientists, just as babbling is the lingua franca of schizophrenics.

Philosophy is adrift in a sea of muddled thinking as physical science hides its pathology behind mathematical symbolism that only makes sense to others besotted by the zany bafflement of what appears to be the nature of the physical universe and reality itself.

In the UFO world (community), when someone raises a philosophical aside to explain what a witness thinks they’ve seen or encountered, you can ignore the aside as a piece of discardable nonsense from a practitioner of mental madness.

Even psychology can’t help when it comes to UFOs, the phenomenon outside the realm of it, just as the phenomenon is outside the dictates of philosophy or physics.

I don’t know what discipline can be applied to UFOs; it’s not those noted above, but what else is there?

Parapsychology? That’s more mad than philosophy or physics.

We who find UFOs (flying saucers) grist for discourse and study are hamstrung by the phenomenon itself. It eludes and has eluded investigation for over 70 years. How can we hope to explain or even understand the things? And are they things?

The pathologies rampant in the so-called scholarly world not only do not help us but also take us into the weeds of the Madness of Knowledge, exacerbating the infuriating demeanor of the enigma.

RR