How do you know no protestor has admiited such a thing?
That sounds like I’m placing the burden on you, and I’m not. I agree to establish that a particular spitting incident happened, the burden is on me to show it.
But it sounds like you’re arguing that absent such documentation, we know, strongly, that such a thing never happened. That’s not true either.
And of course, when I offer up individuals that remember being spat upon, you discount that as mere anecdotal evidence. Which is what led me to ask what evidence would be acceptable as proof.
Why is the evidence mention in my post #55 insufficient?
I think the claim that ‘nope, it never ever ever happened, not even once, it’s an urban myth created to defame the anti-war people’ as strange as the claim that it happened all the time.
I realize it’s anecdotal and unprovable to all of you, but what I saw (Post #5) was, IMO, much worse than spit.
There were well over a million people in the Military. There were over a million anti-war radicals. It’s very probable that there was the occasional spitting incident. The question is whether it was widespread. It doesn’t seem like it was.
He is referring to the meme/urban legend that signifies that protesters spitting on returning Vietnam veterans was commonplace - not the possibility that somewhere, at sometime, someone did this.
Since you’re citing a columnist’s poll of servicement as evidence that such actions did habitually occur (in the absence of police reports or any similar solid evidence), your complaint about use of the word “habitually” has been rendered moot.
I don’t, of course. However, lacking anyone coming forward and admitting such a thing, I maintain my right to disbelieve vets who say it happened. 1,000 people saying it happened is just 1,000 separate anecdotes from people who likely feel they need some sort of validation. Five protesters (or GIs) from the same crowd swearing they observed it on the same day is evidence, however weak. We hold people to this standard in thread after thread, but for some reason it doesn’t seem to apply to this particular subject.
At any rate, it’s pointless to argue it further, IMO.
I 1,000 people saying it happened is just 1,000 separate anecdotes from people who likely feel they need some sort of validation. QUOTE]
In an aggregate of sufficient size, anecdotal evidence is still valid evidence.
My real question, though, is slightly OT, but I’d like to make sure I understand. There are repeated calls for verification in this particular thread. In GQ, there’s a pretty clear cut standard that claims be cited and verified. Does that same standard apply to IMHO? I’d been thinking that since this is the opinion/poll board, perhaps the standards are different, but maybe it depends more on the statement made in a thread than on the board where it’s posted. I don’t want to screw up.
Hmm. Here’s an account of a support group for victims of alien abduction, which boasted 1,500 members.
By your standard of “valid evidence”, the claims of both the veteran spittees and the alien abductees are both valid. The reports from the alien abductees might even be said to be 1.5 times as valid as those of the veterans Bob Greene says he heard from.
Or we can recognize that unsupported anecdotes are a pitifully weak form of evidence.
OK, that’s fair. I didn’t intend to speak to “habitually,” but rather simply to say that it’s unlikely that it NEVER happened.
But you’re correct to point out that the theme of the thread was the meme, not the existence of a single or few isolated instances. I should have been clear about my own distinction.
I, like most folks, have an instinct for self preservation.
Even If I hated troops returning from combat (which would be just stupid, BTW), I would certainly think twice before I spat upon someone who was *trained to kill *and may have done it recently. I would expect someone to open a can of whoop-ass. The idea that peace\love\hippie types would be so aggressive and military types would be so passive in the face of it…
This comparison fails to recognize the dictum that “claims require proof, and the more extraordinary the claim, the more extraordinary the proof.”
If those same 1,500 people claimed to have exceeded the speed limit on Interstate 95, none of us would blink at their claims – because we know that it’s perfectly plausible to imagine someone speeding on an interstate highway, and assuming the claim is true requires no great leap of either imagination or supposition.
We doubt the claims of the 1,500 supposed alien abductees because their claim is so much more extraordinary, so outside our picture of what a normal human experience is, that we rightly demand high levels of proof.
When we hear of one human being spitting on another, I contend that’s much closer to speeding on I-95 than it is to alien abduction in terms of raw mathematical likelihood.
It is difficult for me to credit the certainty that no spitting incident ever happened anywhere. At the same time, given the lack of documented incidents, it’s difficult for me to believe it was anything approaching a widespread phenomenon.
