The Friedman / Magaha Debate -- Part I of II

Inclusive Plato And An Exclusive Aristotle

The Friedman / Magaha Debate
by Alfred Lehmberg

A result of substantive ufological growth over the last couple of decades? I'd instituted a personal attitude shift for myself that was a little more subtle for me than it's going to be for another, perhaps. It was too slow in coming.  Truth should abide.  

Truly, I am tasked where I am not provoked by dishonor perceived, and, preferring efficacy and relevancy to this very real betrayal? My sensibilities are pushed hard to contrary port with regard to the regarded *other*. The way things are shaking down, this attitudinal shift seems the soul of rationality.  

Smug UFO denialists, I offer, prove only that enough is too much! Their science seems cheery picked.  Their demeanor too fearfully reductionist.  Their attitude unjustifiably hubristic.  Their imaginational horizons woefully narrow.  Number and measurement define their fundamentalist religion, they are the default arbiter of that which is not investigated, and an existentially holistic and inclusive Plato is entirely, if regressively, supplanted by a two color Aristotle with little art but the observation of "spin," "rate," and "electrical charge."     

The shift alluded to? I'm done apologizing.

That *other* (ET) to which I've referred is as sure as a handful of abundant back-fat on your garden variety boobis americanis, reflexive CSICOP adherent, or flaccid pelicanist. Intellectual back-fat you can wad, you know?  Such are the ultimately non-nutritious small-thinking fruits of klasskurtxia.

Be it for good or ill... three hots and a cot afforded by a small military pension has provided me a lot of time to think (...out of the box...) ...as I have endured a scurrilously imposed, decidedly unwanted, and ongoing unemployment! This is an unemployment, respected reader, informingly born of conventional high school clique pique, uninformed persecution, and an unjustified if condoned juvenilism... ...age discrimination prosecuted by reactionary attitudes to my perceived liberalism and creative eccentricity... religious bigotry even provoked by my very nonmilitant atheism, et al... and... none of it, reader, none of it, my manufacture. Not where it counts.  I'm live and let live... but if you can put Christian homilies on your public classroom walls and adorn your desk with a tabbed and indexed bible then I can ask you why you think it's supposed to be there!

Consider, in some of the places I taught? ...12-year-old girls were getting carelessly pregnant, but their teaching cadre was uncomfortable with me talking about the sex parts of FLOWERS for Christ's sake! I digress.

Science & Society fumble the ball, discredit themselves, and provide for their own invalidation. It's not me being obstinate, so much, I offer. It's society... ...being disrespectfully duplicitous and expecting the affected individual to just suck that up.

Wrong. Not at this station, reader.  No more.

I've come to some seriously interesting if tentative conclusions as a result of my aforementioned idle thinking (...God knows what the Devil makes of that, eh?)... 

Am I thinking more seriously about my vindicated cultural criticism to facilitate a more efficacious and productive reality around me? Yes.  I suspect that is what provides meaning sought for and the avoidance of an existential depression. 

Consequently, perhaps because efficacious thinking loves company, I unabashedly suggest my encouragement to as many individuals as I can... ...*Shift* with me, reader! 

I feel it's the future accelerating towards us, regardless. Really. I do. As I've written before, you don't catch a train by letting it run you down. 

Why not shift!?  New approaches to problems of division, fairness, and reach's grasp are begged for currently.  Each day that goes by seems to provide a little more external validation for this invigorating attitudinal *shift* we all will have to face inexorably, anyway,  so bear with me if you can (...and can decipher the "personal code" I've been accused of writing in...[eyeroll!]) because the result, I think, is the more timely acceptance of an unavoidable and quickly approaching ...future... that we are all largely ignorant of... kept so, and so... ...for which we are generally unprepared, myself included.  I'm not talking so much about cataclysm and catastrophe, mind... I'm talking about more "novelty" in a better sense.  See, I suspect there's some real optimistic meat on this conjectured bone, reader.  Communication, transportation, medical, environmental, power generation, Greenness and superior "quality of life" meat...

I think we would do well to prepare, more, for this future. Presently, as I've alluded, we are being denied, I suspect, by our conflicted culture (...its governments, agencies, and institutions...), the tools and materials for that alluded to "preparation"... less egregious superstition and more efficacious science even if celebrating more Plato for Aristotle.  Excelsior!

We have the staff of a McDonalds looking for near earth asteroids of threat and profit...

...That future alluded to could be wonderful, folks. We'd do well to be reasonably prepared for it to facilitate same.   The kingdom is at hand.  I digress, again.

Before my just specified "attitude adjustment," and while maintaining a general profile as a confident proponent for an *other*... (...some obliquely oriented form of the extraterrestrial hypothesis ... no apologies here! ..Jesus, grok Drake and pay attention to a night sky!!), I still endured an undercurrent of personal embarrassment, actually, regarding any discussion I might try to initiate with someone in the mainstream world I'm drowning in... ... regarding my ufological activities, projects, or concerns... ... ...excluding, for the moment, the off-line world of friends and acquaintances also sharing that *mainstream* world with me... real "meat-space" is the issue here.

...Prudence, locally practiced... seemed indicated? Lack of same, apparently, got me disqualified from a second career, after all... I was a tad gun-shy... but now I pull fewer and fewer punches, even with them, as the days go by... Life's short, you know?

On momentary side-bar ... If "the man" is going to deny a person a living wage for thinking out of the box or refusing to skip to a disrespectful tune... what will "he" do if a person persists in their rationality? Well, I intend to find out... and report it to you... reader.

...Anyway, I used to be oversensitive and demonstratively *understanding* (no seriously, and ironic, ~that~!) about the discomfort of persons around me regarding the subject of UFOs. I was*indulgent* of their lack of ufological interest, and *understanding* (more than is remotely appropriate) of their own lack of understanding ... or their pitying or scornful expressions and abrupt subject changes (...if I tried to bring the subject up cold?)...

What follows is a brief composite conversation with the "mainstream," over the years, for illustration...

.,¸¸,.»§«,¸¸,.·´¯`·.,¸¸,.»§«*¥*»§«,¸¸,.·´¯`·.,¸¸,.»§«·.,¸¸,.

"I saw a strange light in the sky this morning doing some really impossible things..." I might start...

A sidelong "Oh yeah...?" ...is the abruptly guarded response...

"Yeah... it looked like the shuttle or the space station going over, was brighter than Venus, and..."

"...It likely was the shuttle or the space station going over..." they might impatiently interrupt.

"I've got an animated schedule from the NASA site that ruled them out...," I'd counter.

"Well—it was some other satellite, then... there's hundreds, thousands of them up there..."

"Well... yeah," I'd concede, "but few as bright as Venus... I get forecasts on those too. Additionally, these lights..."

"...Still" He interrupts again, "...it had to be a satellite, or a plane or a balloon, or something..." He shakes an impatient head...

"Well—it changed speed and direction, stopped, and was traveling more or less due west..."

"So"?

"Well—it was comparatively erratic in flight and absolutely silent... with no navigation lights, ruling out a plane; balloons and satellites don't abruptly change direction, rate of speed, and... stop. Moreover, satellites generally don't go west."

"...Um-hmm... [...starts whistling the "Twilight Zone" theme...] ...so it must be aliens, then, huh?"

His pitying smirk begins its slow bloom. "Well, no, not necessarily... it just seems to be a logical thing to wonder given that as the *impossible* begins to be eliminated about UFOs... ...whatever remains, however improbable, might be the truth about UFOs..."

.,¸¸,.»§«,¸¸,.·´¯`·.,¸¸,.»§«*¥*»§«,¸¸,.·´¯`·.,¸¸,.»§«·.,¸¸,.

...Blank look from the addressed followed most usually by a subject change or retreat, or in one memorable case, even open hostility...

...Look. I know these people have lives—families, jobs, and mortgages. Further, I know that it's me making the waves, rocking their boat, or kicking at the last-century wooden spokes of the wheels on their aggregate cultural applecart!

I know that I can be discomfiting with regard to my ready willingness to question "general reality" or providing for a too ready invalidation of everyone's, too comfortable, status quo. I understand the need to believe in something rock solid so the night shadows are held at bay, and I can appreciate that it's difficult to contemplate the *other*...

Still, "...*Everything* one *knows* is *wrong*..."? A hard swallow... but true, still, for my money. It's where the data seems to be going. Screw your cloistered and conflicted peer review, Herr scientist. I'll do my own science. You seem to betray the trust of any respect I would extend to you. ...You are judged by the fruit produced, Sir.  

...And don't point at gadgets and toys!  To paraphrase MeKenna, that's like the snake oil salesman implying the elixir is good because his snappy patter and juggling about it was. 

... But that's what kept me at bay, generally, with regard to a more strident and challenging approach on my part to the persons refusing to even consider the ufological... ...in some chance discussion with the... ...call them, respectfully, the ufologically unwashed.  Catch the train.  Don't miss it because you couldn't haul your fat ass from the station lunch counter or tourist center!

This is what embarrassed me, reader, provided for my over-sensitivity to an another's arguably specious or contrived or unexamined sensibilities... ...compelled an understanding, an acceptance even (Jesus!), of their lack of intellectual bravery! I figured they were innocent and victims in the social duplicity... just like I was. I was worried about their feelings.

Hit the reset!  It's not that entirely that way anymore.  The one wounded for my trouble is me!

I would be remiss if I didn't voice my concern, express my opinion, or make my contribution to the thought pool available as it is. It's the least I can do, reader, when I have the manipulating and programming thoughts of scurrilous others imposed upon me in an even more forcefully disrespectful manner... ...and in an authoritarian two-faced way considerably less efficacious than I would ever dispense... or... have dispensed... to me.

I'm expected to be honest, forthright and dependable with regard to my society while my society is, plainly,clearly, transparently... ...not honest, not forthright or not dependable to me in return! TILT!

I have... difficulty... respecting a society that has no respect for me, and shan't, reader.  I have solid ethics, myself, but my society, seemingly, has no philosophical morals. This creates problems for me that are not of my manufacture...

You see, it's not my problem that I've paid attention and the scales have begun to fall from my own eyes. It's not my problem that I still possess a bravery honed, refined, and made baldly mandatory in the social conditionings of two decades of combat, combat aviation training, and troop leadership in the Armed Forces.

It's not my problem that another will choose to turn a blind eye to a substantially abundant ufological evidentiary base... and masquerade their equally blind ignorance with obligatory debunker-isms, spoon-fed CSICOPian platitudes, faux-intellectual talking points, and head-in-the-sand congested and bigoted worldviews!

I reject the obvious preceding!

It's not my problem that people prefer to trust the realities manufactured for them by a thoroughly corrupted lap-dog and bogus imposter *mainstream*, or that they put their faith and cognitive stock into the canted thinking contrived for them by those who would disrespectfully try to manipulate them... ...to dark ends we, the  folks "manipulated," would not appreciate if we knew what those ends were... No apologies here either!

And remember: It's not my song, folks! You'd be remiss shooting the piano player. Do enough of that and pretty soon you won't hear any music at all... with the exception of what's state approved! "Music" dry and uninspired as vapid chalk dust.

It's not my problem, friends and neighbors! Rather, it's a problem inflicted upon me by an imposed, encouraged, or even nurtured cultural naiveté (...I once gleefully supported...) that society was ultimately predisposed to provide the greatest good for the greatest number!

...Pause for squirty guffaws!

Upon discovering that the truth was more... uh... ...*oblique* than that (...that society was actually only interested in providing the credible [and grudging] illusion of "providing-the-greatest-good-for-the-greatest-number"...)? I'm compelled to hold the mainstream authorities, their representatives, and their faith-based apologists to the same fire that has been held to me, and protest, stridently (...if needs be!)... ...where they can be found to be breaking the *rules*, advantaging themselves in the codification of these *rules*, or selectively interpreting the *rules* to suit these aforementioned few!

...Piss on THEM, reader. Yea and verily and with prejudice!

Besides, that's a discredited CSIcopian charter! I'll have no part of that!

The arguments and the credibilities of the *mainstream* (and CSICOPia!) are dead, flatly (...become more decomposed and odiferous with each accelerating second...) and can no longer be counted upon to be the common-sense-retreat-to-traditional-solid-ground that a reflexive conservative apologist might shrilly advise that they *once* were. No. Steve Allen rolls in his grave...

They're decidedly not the "step back to better times," they suggest! When the coffee's perked? At the denouement? When you paid your money and took your chance? They're a step back to medieval times of neo-feudal social atrocity and the unrestricted lusts of cold-fish and elitist psychopaths legislating that sociopathy! Search your heart, damn it!

Devoid of any responsibility for fairness, and with zero regard for the sensibilities of individual persons ground up in the institutional machines of these new "neo-lords of the imposed and official ignorance"? They destroy the middle class, supplant the "freer republic" and replace it with an anti-individualist's "new theocracy" every bit as bad (for the rising and the advancing of the individual human spirit?) as fundamentalism of ANY stripe. ...Even worse in many ways, I fear...

Next:  THE DEBATE!