Posted by:
Cold-Dodger
(
)
Date: September 29, 2020 01:24PM
He was making a lot of sense and making me reconsider the harshness of my stances against his beliefs in some things... until he brought up Bigfoot.
He said, “you’re supposed to be the science guy, well you have to accept the science,” and he proceeded to dump a bunch of Sasquatch Hunter podcasts on me.
I asked him if anybody in any of these podcasts had actually found anything empirical worthy of my time, and he said, “well, no, but the sheer amount of anecdotal evidence is convincing.”
Convincing?
He got defensive in the same way he gets defensive about God (give him a break; he gets points for being the only momo that still talks to me) and he started talking about this guy who is an expert in footprints. He said this guy, whose name escapes me, has been sent hundreds of Bigfootprint casts by schmucks from all over the world and “a few them seemed to be genuine,” because there’s “certain things” about footprints that can’t be faked.
Ah. Very convincing. Well, I asked him if anyone had found an actual foot belonging to the creature that made these prints.
He said, no, but the lack of bones is actually evidence for the creature, because apex predator bones are not something you typically find in the woods.
And I’m thinking, well, they find them often enough to put them in museums, though. I will settle for no less than a genuine Bigfoot specimen or at least some video of one of these nine foot ape-men throwing rocks like the anecdotes describe. Seriously, he’s claiming there’s a whole continent full of these things, a whole species with families that hunt for food and live and grow old and die and have sex and make more little sasquatches, and no one can get a specimen?
But you’re just being close minded: how could all these anecdotes just be wrong? You think every single time someone sees something, it’s a conman in a monkey suit?
Well, no, I think most people could be liars. And I think there might be something like the “Brigham Young turning into Joseph Smith” effect happening to people’s memories. You see, humans are silly creatures that infer a lot of their perceived reality from the word of others and also they are intensely interested in obtaining status in the human dominance hierarchy. So, if everyone in town has seen Bigfoot, you’ve seen him too. You don’t want to be only weirdo who hasn’t seen Bigfoot or at least the only weirdo who remains skeptical when everybody else has seen him or knows someone who has. You can make whole communities of such beings believe the most incredible stupidities even when the source for the first incidence is known to be completely dubious and nobody has really seen anything since that we can show. We must not underestimate the human ability to lie for status and even to self-deceive for social acceptance. Also, how many knocks in the night are actually Bigfoot and not some other big animal we already know exists? If you need it to be the Squatch, perhaps that is how you will genuinely remember it, but that doesn’t mean the Squatch was there.
Well, his eyes begin to glaze over just like when we have any of our “liberal atheist versus conservative Mormon” debates. How can I be so dismissive? There’s so much evidence.
No, there’s no evidence. None. I know there’s occasionally a grainy video of a yellow dot up on the bill that we are supposed to believe is a long distance infrared of the Squatch at night or some large furry thing playing in the water behind the bushes, but no one who ever says it was “right there” ever goes the extra mile to get that video that we know was not faked. I’d settle for large boulder being thrown at someone in the woods accompanied by an inhuman roar. I mean, I’m reasonable: if footage exists that doesn’t completely suck dick, I’m all ears. The pentagon recently released intel that several UFO videos in viral circulation we genuine Air Force interceptions of real objects. That’s a huge boost in the credibility of UFO sightings, because we’ve got video made with state of the art military scopes tracking these things, how far away they were, how high they were flying, and how fast they were moving. What does Sasquatch get to make his case?
A few days later we were watching Survivorman: Sasquatch edition. He of course finds nothing, and all of his most convincing evidence happens off camera. I used to like Survivorman. I learned near the end of the episode that this was in fact the first episode of a whole season.
A whole season?
Yes.
Did they find it?
Well, um, no, but...
Alright then, let’s watch the next episode where he doesn’t find Sasquatch.
He was done talking Squatch with me after that.
He was starting to make me feel like maybe I was a bigot treating anti-intellectuals so harshly, and then he goes and gives me a live demonstration that I am absolutely right to despise anti-intellectual culture. I’m no offended by the idea that a hominid species is out there right now. If that was true, I would use it everyday to prove to the folks I grew up with that humans are evolved, not specially created. But this particular species doesn’t seem to exist and yet people insist on believing in it very much like God.