Further Ranting About A Twitter Rant

Today I got blocked on Twitter by some dumb c*** who accused me of defending Jimmy Savile. NOT what I was doing. I was defending, as usual, the principles of due process and 'innocent until proven guilty' - pointing out that there can't be a case against Savile because he is dead as the dead cannot present a defence.

More to the point, the row started because of nasty allegations calling Prince Andrew a proven sex offender.
1. He had an acquaintanceship with a man who was later convicted of sexual offences - which is not a crime
2. He has since also been accused - which does not make him guilty
3. He has not even yet been questioned

I have tweeted at length about this too.
An ordinary person will spend time with hundreds of people in a lifetime, a person in Prince Andrew's role will encounter thousands. If you think you KNOW the people around you, you're an idiot. Every rapist, murderer, child molester, whatever was someone's relative, friend, co-worker. If you think that "they must have known" you have got to be crazy.
I've lived a fairly sheltered life - I have spent years stuck at home as a full-time mum and now as a carer. When I have worked it has never been with lots and lots of people. But can I say I have never associated with a person who has groped, molested or raped? Of course I can't! I knew fairly little about most people I worked with. I didn't know if they were married or had kids or spent their weekends in babygros and adult diapers.
I've never done well with friendships but the few people I would count as true friends I know only a little better. I am aware I know what each person CHOOSES to present to me, that I only see the tip of the iceberg about another person's personality.
As for relationships I've done even worse but the fact I ended up as a single mother, twice over, is pretty indicative that you can be fully intimate with someone and still not know them.
There are allegations that Prince Andrew has failed to co-operate with the FBI...there are also counter claims that the FBI has not attempted to contact him. Either way, his co-operation is entirely voluntary at this point. Who knows where the truth lies?
Meanwhile, it's hard for the US to take the high ground after refusing to extradite Anne Sacoolas, wanted in connection with the death by dangerous driving of 19 year old Harry Dunn. Nations have a tendency to protect their own - just the way things are. Briton's expect the nation to come to their aid when they're jailed abroad or whatever - and I've tweeted at length about how dumb I think that is too.

The fact that Prince Andrew knew someone who turned out to be a sex offender is, imho, not particularly meaningful. You honestly expect any of the royal family to know everything about everyone they know?! That's not even a thing that regular people with far smaller circles of acquaintance can be expected to know.
As yet there's no proof he knew of any wrongdoing or committed any crimes himself, only allegations - hence my arguing for due process. The other tweeter brought Savile into it and I pointed out that the two cases are entirely unalike as Savile is dead and there can be no case brought against him...and that is where it all started - with the assertion that a complaint filed does not equal proof of guilt "that's what courts are for, not social media" - mind you, you can't argue with the type of idiot who actually believes 'there's no smoke without fire' (probably thinks they sank a real ship for the film Titanic an' all...)

My tweets on this read as follows (copied & pasted direct):

• I'm blocking you for defending witch-hunt and thinking due process is an optional extra. Moron.
• I have no sympathy for Savile but we have a legal process for a damn good reason. THAT is what I am defending.
• If YOU would expect a fair trial, a weight on evidence rather than hearsay, DEMAND that principle is applied for others
• Every person who supports trial by media deserves (IMHO) to be accused of heinous crimes they didn't commit.
• I think my abhorrence of this comes of being bullied at school. Especially by teachers whose word was law.
• My daughter too got punished for being in fights... as the victim of a persistent bullying campaign.
• [This tweet is edited as it involves an allegation of child sexual abuse as told to me but turned out to be false] I reported it, as you do. Police got back to me: Kid didn't have a stepfather. Kid had a history of not knowing fact from fiction, and a psychiatrist.
• I blocked the kid. But I know others who believed them.

"In the year to the end of March 2017, the Crime Survey for England and Wales (CSEW) estimated:

• 20% of women and 4% of men have experienced some type of sexual assault since the age of 16, equivalent to 3.4 million female and 631,000 male victims
• 3.1% of women (510,000) and 0.8% of men (138,000) aged 16 to 59 had experienced a sexual assault in the last year."

(Source: https://rapecrisis.org.uk/get-informed/about-sexual-violence/statistics-sexual-violence/)

So if one in five WOMEN will be sexually assaulted in their lifetime how likely do you think it is that those acts were perpetrated by just a handful of 'monsters' you personally will never encounter? I'm not going to go so far as to suggest each victim has a separate assailant but we're still not talking about a small group of serial rapist and gropers. We're talking about a significant number of people here - do you even know which of the women you know have been sexually assaulted? Do you even think they would share with you? An awful lot of people never tell their nearest and dearest such things. If you don't know the victims in your life how do you expect to know the perps? Do you think they're easily spotted by their sinister moustaches and black hats or what?!

I am an exceedingly opinionated potato and I believe a lot of things about a lot of people, usually based on little more than intuition. I try to be careful about how I express those opinions, if I even do.

I don't even have much faith in due process. But it's the best we have - we all deserve a fair hearing and assuming someone's guilt based on social media bullshit and the tabloid press is just DUMB.

On Truth and Perception...and Alien Abductions

Just found this in my drafts...no idea why it wasn't published when I wrote it nearly a year ago. 
PLEASE BE CAREFUL - TRIGGER WARNINGS: Abduction, sexual abuse, sexual violence, rape etc.

INTRODUCTION
Recently* I had a big set-to on Twitter because I have issues with transexuality being self-declared. For me it is a matter of the philosophy of identity which is a subject most perplexing. The individual is seen as the epicentre of identity BUT is the individual best placed to determine their own identity when by its very nature identity is how we are seen by others? 

To clarify for anyone not following me on Twitter I have zero problem with transexuality itself. Regularly I see online that self-awareness of depression or eating disorders is not enough, you must be formally diagnosed. This is not to liken transexuality with mental disorders - just a comparison to other situations where a self-identification is regularly denied despite being fairly straightforward matters of self-awareness. Whether we think of the fictional Adrian Mole and his false self-identification as an intellectual or the real-world Rachel Dolezal who faked being black because that is the ethnicity she identifies with - there are a host of reasons why individual perception is not a great way to define ANYTHING, much less an aspect of the self where the ego can warp perception enormously. Lets face it, Muhammad Ali's assertion that he was "the greatest" is itself immensely egotistical...but validated by popular consensus. Similarly Agatha Christie couldn't bring herself to self-identify as an author despite her demonstrable successes.

I mention this as a precursor to today's musings on truth and perception as they revolve around the idea that things are not always as we see, feel or otherwise experience them.

For example, I identify as an empath (chiefly in science fiction a person with the paranormal ability to perceive the mental or emotional state of another individual - see the Doctor Who episode "Hide") so I live by my intuition a fair bit. I don't expect anyone to acknowledge or believe my gut reactions on any subject, it is purely a matter of my self-perception.

I mention THAT as today's musings begin though with, what to me was, an empathic experience. That I was being told a series of highly dubious tales does not make my impression of the teller as untruthful an empathic experience, just as my 'feeling' on the subject could be easily attributed to paralinguistic attributes (intonation, facial expression etc) but - to my way of thinking - the identification of the root cause of untruthfulness IS a matter of empathic experience.

ON TRUTHFULNESS AND PERCEPTION
When we think of a person being untruthful we come up with synonyms such as 'lying' and 'deceptive' but these only address one form of untruthfulness and there are several.

• Lying - deliberate deceit for gain, attention, amusement (either for the act of telling stories or at the gullibility of of others) etc Perception is deceptive and / or defensive 
• Confusion - honest yet mistaken: repeating a story as heard as if true without verification, misremembering, etc Perception can be confused or truthful, not defensive
• Conviction - the self belief that the stories are true such as with conditions preventing a person from distinguishing fact from fiction, delusions, false memory syndrome (being a step up from a simple act of misremembering) and so forth Perception is truthful and / or defensive *

* Defensive perceptions can also be present in truth-tellers who, for whatever reasons, fear or expect to be disbelieved making truth and conviction difficult to distinguish at a perceptive level.

From my perception of myself as an empath I looked at my perceptions of the person who was telling the improbable-to-the-point-of-impossible tales to try to deduce what form of untruthfulness was at play. The stories in question should have fitted into the first category with the deliberate intent of gaining sympathy yet I was struck curiously by sensing no deceit in them. There were certainly elements whereby confusion could be the culprit - especially when it came to misidentifying medical conditions yet that did not fit particularly well to the whole. The third category I also ruled out. I got no sense that this person believed what they were saying.

For me this indicates a fourth category of untruthfulness: the moral lack of distinction between fact and fiction. Sometimes termed a 'compulsive liar' or 'fantasist' (both of which indicate deliberate acts) I feel this is a separate category as, rather than deliberate acts of deception, the concept of deception itself is actually lacking; a form of amorality. Perception is neutral - because truth is irrelevant.

I have encountered such people before but they are, thankfully, rare. In this case the stories were implausible and raised my suspicions but obviously untruths can be highly plausible too.

This led me to thinking...truth itself is a perception. If you believe that something is so it is so, to you. And this leads me to my...

ALIEN ABDUCTION THEORY

At this point I want to stress that if you have had an experience of alien abduction 

I do not recommend you read on; similarly, if you know someone who has 

please do NOT challenge them with my theory. You could do a lot of harm.

I dare say most people are familiar with stories of alien abductions but have you ever contemplated WHY it's a story that is repeated to a very familiar pattern? Unless you happen to ascribe to the idea that aliens ARE abducting humans you probably put it down to mass hysteria or suggestibility from science fiction sources.

Once upon a time I met someone who had experienced alien abduction and I was curious as to what my empathic tendencies would reveal about their story...and what hit me most was the genuine trauma they were experiencing. In terms of untruthfulness this would sit firmly in the the conviction category - they believed it, they felt it, the perceptions I had of them were honest and accurate to their claim.

So what was going on? Admittedly this happened at a time when The X-Files was very popular - so a lucid dream perhaps or the influence of drugs? Plausible but I wasn't convinced, the trauma was just too real. The fact that accounts of alien abduction are SO similar led me to a different conclusion.

What do these accounts have in common?

• Paralysis (almost always not restrained, yet unable to move)
• Partially conscious
• Probing (physical violation)

Do any solutions present themselves to your mind? 

My theory is that the phenomenon of alien abduction, aided by popular media, is the mind's way of coping with a genuine trauma - specifically rape, especially when drugs like rohypnol are involved. Hence the comments in red above - if the mind is protecting itself it's probably best left that way. If a person would rather believe their experience was alien abduction then that's fine.

This brings me back to the concept of self-identity - I don't want to CHALLENGE anyone's perception of themselves in any way cos how you see yourself is pretty much irrelevant. What is an issue to me is validating someone's opinion of themselves...if someone feels they have been abducted by aliens I will not challenge that, especially not with my theory, but nor do I need to validate their experience and declare that alien abduction is real. Truth is in your perception of it. It's never nice to be called a liar or to be told "you don't really think / feel / believe that" but why do people put so much value in external validation?