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I don't know where you get the idea that a daycare center can't sound quiet from the outside? If the kids aren't out in the playground I don't hear them. Our preschool is actually insulated on account of the very cold winters here.
My argument is not, "he's right, but he didn't say it in Good Faith." My argument is the evidence in the video is not sufficient to support his claims. He didn't systematically eliminate other possibilities. It's going to backfire, because it's easy to just show children getting dropped off in these places and Voila! debunked.
Dropping children off in these places after a major expose doesn't debunk. The lack of children despite parents being in on it was the easily visible indicator of fraud that- having been explicitly identified- is easily rectified afterwards to obfuscate follow-on attention and allow motivated individuals to claim that children were always there.
The sort of motivated people who believe this sort of video 'debunks' are also the sort of people who wouldn't be persuaded by 'systematically eliminating other possibilities,' since motivated reason is under no obligation to conceed that other possibilities were properly eliminated based on whatever trivial grounds they have. They could even invent their own grounds of dismissal, like claiming that the videos were made on holidays or weekends where there would be no children.
It's not like such motivated reasoning against anti-progressive activist exposes are unknown. I'm sure you remember when the planned parenthood videos were dismissed as bad faith and misleading for editing techniques that many of the media organizations critiquing it were using, even as the activists posted the full videos which the media organizations rarely do and went out of their way to ignore in order to insinuate deception without, you know, showing the deception.
I don't believe that showing kids being dropped off debunks but it has equal weight as the Shirley video. That's the whole point.
I will say that I was surprised that the kids being dropped off knew where they were going. They weren't dragged in by their mothers. They walked calmly to the door as if they've done it before. First day drop off of all the daycare/preschools Ive seen were no where near as calm.
That's another example of the sort of motivated reasoning will let people accept and spread as a counter-veiling evidence and a basis to dismiss earlier information, yes. Appeals to personal credulity / experience are easy ways to implicitly dismiss something without having to formally make a claim- it's just another form of 'just asking questions' to raise skepticism, except without the quesitons.
Someone posts a video of a Marian Apparition. It could also be a weather balloon. Even if you believe the Marian Apparition is taking place, you might still be frustrated that the weather balloon video is what's blowing up and not the miraculous healing of an amputated limb documented by 12 medical personnel.
It's like the Right is deliberately strawmanning itself. I don't have to like it.
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