professorpan wrote:Well, if the body of an infant turns up in a box in the basement floor, a missing person's body is found on the property, and jars with the accusers' bad memories turn up -- any one of those things -- I will concede that my initial instincts were wrong. I've certainly been wrong in the past. But it seems to me that many of the allegations -- a man lured from a mall and murdered and buried on the property, a woman held captive in the basement, multiple pregnancies for one of the alleged victims, etc. -- should have left some evidence. And according to one report I read, there is no record of any missing person who fits the particulars of the man allegedly lured from the mall and stabbed by the 3 girls.
I'm also curious as to why the police are saying the focus is on the sexual abuse (much harder to prove) and not the more sensational and troubling accusations of infanticide and murder. Perhaps because they feel there isn't going to be any evidence . . . because it didn't happen?
Okay. First of all, my assertion was that what you know about this case is neither more nor less clear than what you know about Hasan. And so far, you haven't addressed the Hasan part of that equation at all.
Second of all, the above is the closest you've come so far to giving something resembling a reason for what you're calling caution. Which I'm sure it is, at least in part. I just don't know what justifies your cautiousness. Because you're not really giving any reasons for it. Because the above is not a reasoned but rather a rhetorical argument. And a skilled one, too, may I say. It's kind of like what would be synecdoche in the context of literary rhetoric, except that you're using it as a logical fallacy instead of as a figure of speech.
IOW, you're letting the part stand in for the whole. And in a way that totally violates the terms of the Hasan comparison. Because: You're only talking about crimes with which the suspects
haven't been charged. And which, as far as I'm aware, no poster to this thread has leapt to any conclusions about. Anyway. To allege that the police are "focusing" on sex crimes is a mighty strange -- as well as a flatly inaccurate -- way of saying that the police have charged the suspects with sex crimes. Because they have. From which I infer nothing more and nothing less than that that it's much easier and takes much less time for cops who have multiple live complaining witnesses to meet the evidentiary criteria necessary to sustain those charges in front of a judge than it is for them to bring a charge of murder when the crime, if there was one: (a) occurred years ago; (b) did not come to their attention when someone stumbled across the corpse; and (c) claimed the life of a victim whose identity is unknown to them.
Under any fucking circumstances, that's the crime that merits the "(hard to prove)" parenthetical, objectively speaking. Because under any fucking circumstances, it would be a lot harder to prove than sexual abuse. Also, the absence of murder charges (or evidence of the vaguely alleged murder) doesn't necessarily have any bearing on the credibility of the alleged sex crimes. Neither you nor I is in any position to say, because neither you nor I know whether the witnesses are generally credible or not, whether their allegations are corroborated by other evidence (and if so, what kind), or in what terms and in what context the alleged allegations of murder were made, or by whom.
Again, you're not asking questions or looking for alternative explanations in any way that's guided by reason. You're looking exclusively at the holes, not the evidence, and then plugging them up with default narrative assumptions. And pretty much at random, too. For example, if I were interested in questioning the rumored infanticide, which I'm not, my first question would be: Are concealed underage pregnancies that end in infanticide an unheard of or anomalous phenomenon? The answer to which is: No. They're not, like, routine occurrences, but it does happen. The next question would be: Under what circumstances, generally? The answer to which is: Hm. I don't actually know. I'll have to look into it. However, I've inadvertently reminded myself of something that
is potentially an anomaly worth looking into on the basis of available fact specific to
this case, to wit: To the best of my knowledge, infanticide is atypical in incestuous abuse cases that take place in a polygamous patriarchal sect setting, and there's some reason to believe that something of that nature may have been in play here. On the other hand, it's highly anomalous for members of a polygamous patriarchal sect to interact with the outside world as much as these suspects seem to have done. Which raises any number of reasonable longshot questions to which I don't have answers, including about what the police are up to.
But the thing is: Even then, I wouldn't have any basis for forming an opinion, one way or the other. I just would have done a few seconds of preliminary conjecture about what avenues of inquiry might lead me to an understanding of what went down that wasn't being dictated to me by the press and the cops, neither of whom I have any reason to regard as generally reliable on points of fact, or particularly well-informed on points of context, or exceptionally inclined to work up a sweat using their perceptual and analytic faculties in order to keep the levels of astute, perspicacious, and well-presented information in general circulation high, just out of pure dedication to the public good.
And I don't, in fact, have a very evolved opinion regarding this case. The only part of it I could speak to without fresh consideration is purely mathematical, owing to my having no need to review my grasp of the purely statistical likelihood of false rape claims, in general as well as in a few specific sub-demos. Because I just did that, two or three months ago, and haven't forgotten them yet. However, those are just odds, which like narratives, have no inherent explanatory properties. So that doesn't get me very far.
That does remind me, though. I have some problems with how reflexively plausible that hysterical, vengeful wife/hysterical, frightened sister scenario apparently was to you. Because if you're under the impression that shit happens often enough to be likelier than the scenario as alleged, you've been....I don't know. Watching too much John Stossel or something. But it's not exactly one of my favorite unexamined narrative assumptions, just FYI.
I guess I'll get to the Hasan stuff later. Or possibly never. But my general point is still: If you want to question shit for explanatory purposes, you really have to expend more mental energy on it than you're doing. If you just want to view the case from a perspective that's comfortable to you, on the other hand, there's nothing wrong with that. And your view might turn out to be correct. There just wouldn't be any relationship between your perspective and the outcome of the case that went any farther than coincidence. And it's not in your better interests or in anyone's to get too confused on that kind of point.
