Except that I haven't interpreted anyone's person, including Grusch's, anywhere
near the "least charitable light possible", which is rather your consistent misreading of what I've been suggesting. I've been consistent in accepting his sincerity for the most part. You mischaracterize and caricaturize my words, and then respond to your own mischaracterizations. Whilst in fact you appear to be the one assuming a derogatory attitude behind every skeptics' term intended as descriptive due to your own seeming bias towards the 'condescending skeptic'. Maybe I'm wrong, but that's how it comes across.
Your argument and epistemological premise seems to also exhibit false balance a.k.a bothsidesism whilst thinking it's a measure of impartiality as opposed to the 'skeptic' on one side and the 'ufologist' on the other.
False balance, also
bothsidesism, is a
media bias in which
journalists present an issue as being more balanced between opposing viewpoints than the
evidence supports.
I'm not accusing you of characterizing him as being insincere. You have pointed out many times that you can in fact accept his sincerity. But not being charitable to someone comes in other forms as well, such as portraying someone's actions as being naive, attributing beliefs to them that we are in no position to attribute to them given how little we know about them, and characterizing their belief as "blind".
In your earlier comment about religious belief you mentioned you're not an atheist. I haven't read any of the conversation in the religious belief post you mentioned, so I have no idea what your religious beliefs are nor if you
do have any religious beliefs what your basis for said beliefs are. It would be mighty rude and uncharitable of me if I were to assume that if you do have a religious affiliation of some sort then you must be a blind believer simply because in my view there are no good compelling arguments for God's existence.
I'm not going to assume that I know what you believe, nor am going to assume on what basis you form those beliefs, and even less am I going to assume that whatever basis your beliefs have they are unjustified and therefore your belief is "blind".
I have absolutely no idea on what basis Grusch holds his beliefs. I'm not even exactly sure what the extent of his beliefs are given the generally vague nature of many of his statements and his inability to go into detail for much of the rest. Not only do I barely know what he believes, but I'm in even worse of a position to have any idea on what
basis he has those beliefs. To assign the term "blind belief" to someone we know almost nothing about, much less know on what basis he even has arrived at his conclusions is unwarranted and every bit as unkind as if I were to use the label to describe you.
The rule for this website that we should "assume good faith" doesn't just mean assume people are generally being honest, it also means we shouldn't assume the people we're talking about are complete idiots.
One example that routinely comes up here is the assumption that some of the information Grusch has come to believe comes from individuals in the government who are "true believers". The assumption seems to be that these folks may genuinely believe the government is hiding bodies of aliens somewhere, and in the course of interviewing these people David Grusch never bothered to ask them if that claim is just something they personally believe or something they personally and directly have knowledge of. Even the most hardcore believer, when being interviewed, knows the difference between "What I believe is true" vs "what I know to be true because of directly being involved with the thing in question".
Grusch could have spoken to a thousand true believers inside of the DoD who believe all sorts of ridiculous shit. But the moment he asks the obvious "now tell me, on what basis are you claiming these things are true?" he would immediately rule out every single one of those people if their answer was anything other than "because I work in that program and I literally work with these bodies/corpses/technologies myself" or could provide him at least some official documentation for their claims.
This is what I was alluding to earlier when I posted the "idiot ball" trope. The general idea seems to be that this could all just be a huge misunderstanding that could easily have been cleared up if Grusch had been smart enough to know the difference between what his interviewees believe vs what they
know.
But anyway, if you don't think there's a filter through which you're negatively interpreting much of what Grusch does and says then that's fine. I'm not going to convince you of it by just continuing to point it out.
I'm just calling attention to something I notice in your posts that you don't do with other people like Fravor or Graves. There's something about Grusch
specifically that's bringing out a less charitable part of you than other people seem to.
I see it because this is literally what I do every day as a therapist. I've pointed it out several times and obviously there's nothing to be gained by continuing to do so, so I'm not going to after this.