Hard News: Miracles just rate better, okay?
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Joe - she's not my precious Deb Webber. I was just wondering whether there had in fact been any behind the scenes discussions between her and the police team.
If I was a cop, and a psychic had an ACCURATE idea of where a body was, I would reach for my handcuffs -- anyone who has that information is far more likely to be know it because they put they body there, than because they somehow pulled the information out of the ether.
Someone at TVNZ should swing by their thumbs for this -- this woman is (at the very best) an entertainer, and inserting her into some poor family's tragedy is beyond repulsive.
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I don't think everyone was "assuming" that so much as that was what was being reported as the week went on. The police searched nearby waterways on the night she went missing, and searched the drain twice -- they just couldn't find her.
Exactly. Which led police to the assumption -- and it was never more than that -- that she had been abducted. The Herald's front page stories on both Wednesday and Thursday have that angle. And the suggestion came from the police -- in Thursday's story, "police believed she could be with a stranger". I'm not trying to make a case for Deb Webber, just stressing that as the dominant story was kidnapping, and all the drains and waterways were searched, Webber's psychic guess wasn't as "vague" as someone suggested. I think Webber believes in the reality of what she does. If she was really a charlatan who was just making it up, isn't it just as likely that she would run with the Asian woman abduction line?
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Joe - 'familiar manner'. I couldn't even remember her name at first and then provided it in the thread above - her name is Deb Webber (doesn't seem to be Deborah). Doesn't seem overly familiar to me. 'Vulture-like opportunism' - as far as I know - from the Breakfast interview - she only offered to help if asked. It might seem strange but some people would be very happy for a psychic to be brought in if someone they loved went missing. Part of the 'toolkit'.
Nigel Latta was the sceptical psychologist Sensing Murder brought in to observe on one of their programmes and he provided an interesting perspective.
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Oh Legbreak. Surely you know that psychics are ethical people who would never do anything so venal and wrong as use their skills to cheat in a wager.
Ah, of course.
What a waste of a talent.
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she only offered to help if asked
TVNZ employees hooked her up with the family, didn't they? I can only hope that they did so out of some misguided sense of kindness. Unfortunately, I can also imagine that their motives might not necessarily be so pure. To which I say: feh.
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philip: I repeat, the interview with Webber was on the morning on the 7th, barely two days after the disappearance, but the "Asian woman" sightings weren't reported until the 9th. So there is no particular reason for Webber to have guessed anything other than what she did.
She may not be a charlatan. She may be deluded into thinking that hunches and intuitions come from spirits rather than random brain activity. I'll grant that. I can imagine that if you start thinking that all your guesses that turn out to be true are divinely guided, whereas the others are just your own weak thoughts, you could end up where Webber is quite innocently.
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TVNZ employees hooked her up with the family, didn't they?
To be fair, the family called TVNZ after the interview aired, apparently wanting to talk to Webber. TVNZ risked looking churlish if it refused to provide a contact.
But that doesn't excuse:
- Paul Henry deliberately raising the story in the interview.
- A TVNZ reporter raising it at the police press conference.
- Webber being on TV at all -
I can imagine that if you start thinking that all your guesses that turn out to be true are divinely guided, whereas the others are just your own weak thoughts, you could end up where Webber is quite innocently.
I find that a lot easier to believe in the mediums who engage in conversation with people and divine things about them, or their loved ones, often quite successfully. They might pick up on all sorts of subtle clues and be actually talented in that regard, then if their belief system allows them to consider this talent a supernatural gift, that's fine by me. (I feel the same way about tarot readers, I've met a couple of brilliant ones - a conversation mediated by symbols is not a million miles from Freudian psychology after all.) People who divine things at a distance, without any connection with the subject, and things of this nature... I find it really hard to believe that they might do it with honesty.
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To be fair, the family called TVNZ after the interview aired, apparently wanting to talk to Webber
Can I ask where that came from? It doesn't really gel with this is all:
On a Facebook page dedicated to finding Aisling, a Symes family spokesperson said they were not interested in hearing from psychics.
"Please do not suggest psychics, the family are a strong Christian family, and will not consider this under any circumstances," they said.
"I know you are all just trying to think of anything to help but it's not helpful for us to see that on here, sorry," the message said.
http://www.3news.co.nz/Home/Story/tabid/209/articleID/125143/cat/525/Default.aspx
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philip: I repeat, the interview with Webber was on the morning on the 7th, barely two days after the disappearance, but the "Asian woman" sightings weren't reported until the 9th. So there is no particular reason for Webber to have guessed anything other than what she did.
I'm sorry Stephen, but you're wrong. We have the hard copies of the NZ Herald here. On the front page of the Herald, Wednesday, October 7, this is the standfirst beneath the main headline: "Police seek mystery woman as fears for Aisling intensify." This is a link to an online Herald story from last Wednesday without the standfirst but with the abduction angle. You'll note that it has the Asian woman in it:
http://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&objectid=10601788
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To have this charlatan of a woman effectively saying "she's probably dead" on TVNZ makes me so freakin angry...
I don't know why, but I find both sides of this discussion of physics and Deb Webber over this little girl's body distasteful. I didn't really connect with the story until last night when it was clear that they'd found her. To raise anger at anyone at that point... man.
If the family are unhappy with TVNZ, Paul Henry, Deb Webber, they have every right to say so. Doesn't feel like it has anything to do with the rest of us, we're not the ones whose daughter was missing.
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OK, so that came out later in the day on the same day.
Thank you for checking in the actual paper to correct me -- my foo with Google News let me down :(
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Can I ask where that came from? It doesn't really gel with this is all:
Actually, I could be wrong. I was thinking of Matt Nippert's follow-up story, which said this:
Webber said she had been contacted by the Symes family after appearing on Breakfast but didn't know whether Aisling was alive.
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I would have liked to see Feyerabend and Dawkins communicating in the current context - I like the ideas of both but from time to time they are both guilty of pulling out straw men and bogey monsters to lend impetus to what they write, which IMHO masks the analysis of good ideas.
That's actually a tough question. Certainly straw men should not be your only way of arguing, but they do serve a purpose of showing what one side's misconceptions about the other side's position is. In a funny kind of way, straw men are hypotheses about the position of the other person, and are useful if you are misunderstanding them. I don't think you should seek to make straw men deliberately (ie deliberate misconception), but you should seek to make explicit what you believe the other person to be saying, thus giving them a chance to show where they are missing you. There's only so much you can get just by listening to people, sometimes you have to talk, in order to understand what people are saying. Personally, I'd rather err on the side of talking too much, so that people can totally see where I'm in error. The only downside is that you constantly risk looking like an idiot, but I'd rather be an idiot with a chance of understanding than one who remains silently idiotic. I'm also helping the silent idiots, who may just be struggling with the same straw man, and unwilling to speak up. Which makes me feel good, from a karma point of view.
As I see it, it's analogous to experimentation in science. The world you are examining is the inner space of other people's minds, and you do it through observation (listening), hypothesis (thinking about it), experiment (saying what you think they said and what it might mean and then more listening), refine and repeat. Quite often you can't start with observation, because people won't talk, or they're not talking about what you want to know. So you have to just start with the hypothesis. Often the bolder, the better. It's much more likely to get the dialogue started. The more readily disproved you are, the more likely people are to speak up.
The hard part is that it comes across as incredibly arrogant and ignorant a lot of the time. I think that's a good characterization of the ideal scientific attitude - it's arrogant enough to think that it could understand, and it works mostly on things about which we are currently ignorant. In that way it pushes the boundaries of knowledge back constantly. It's a rough and rude form of pushing, and much can be harmed in the process, but it does work. Things are discovered.
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Doesn't feel like it has anything to do with the rest of us, we're not the ones whose daughter was missing.
Well my apologies Kyle but I'll call exploitive bullshit like that any time. And yes, it angers me that people can show such little empathy and thought for a family going through something so awful.
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Well my apologies Kyle but I'll call exploitive bullshit like that any time.
Up to you. Just feels like standing over a body saying "see look, psychics are crap!"/"psychics can be right!" Dead two year olds shouldn't be part of anyone's causes, except maybe their families.
Time and place and all that.
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Parent - "my child has a [cough], I think he needs antibiotics"
Doctor's reply options
a) No he/she needs a more sleep.
(gets seen as insensitive arrogant and incompetent)
or.
b) Okay.
(is blamed for the ineffectiveness antiobiotics worldwide - merely seen as incompetent)
Or, c) Antibiotics won't work on this cough, and come with other side-effects. It wouldn't be responsible medicine for me to prescribe them, and the cough will very likely clear up in a couple of days if your child gets plenty of rest and fluids.
Doctors are entirely responsible for the over-prescription of antibiotics. How can anyone else take the blame, given that only doctors can prescribe? If the medical profession won't stand up to patients who think that antibiotics are some kind of magical cure (and there are plenty of otherwise intelligent people out there who think that antibiotics should be prescribed for everything), who will? Big Pharma sure as hell won't.
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Time and place and all that.
Precisely. Nobody came in here using the tragedy to discredit psychics, though. Quite the opposite.
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Time and place and all that.
OK, I see what you're getting at - my issue isn't really with the accuracy/success/skills of psychics though, it's the specific fact that one stood there "proclaiming" on national TV the fate of this child in a pretty damn unsensitive manner. Psychic or not.
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Nobody came in here using the tragedy to discredit psychics, though. Quite the opposite.
Yeah, my comment went both ways.
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I think I did this last time we had a thread on the topic of alternative medicines/psychics/etc, but Tim Minchin's "Storm" is always worth a read/listen.
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I think Webber believes in the reality of what she does. If she was really a charlatan who was just making it up, isn't it just as likely that she would run with the Asian woman abduction line?
There were always doubts about the abduction theory. I don't think Deb Webber deserves any more credit than anyone else who guessed that perhaps the police search might have missed something, and that drowning or a fall was also a likely cause of death.
Making superficially informed guesses in public is Deb's stock in trade. She took a four-word incoherent stab at what may have happened, which was couched so broadly that it could be stretched far enough to fit an accidental or foul play death of almost any kind - possibly even far enough to fit if Aisling was found alive, depending on circumstances. "Ditch, hole, in, fallen". What if someone had rescued the lost Aisling after, or just before, she fell down somewhere, and taken her home?
So, an intelligent, experienced fraud with probably a good grasp of likely causes of death for toddlers, but a fraud all the same, and one surfing a publicity wave in the midst of tragedy.
If she's managed to delude herself to the point where she believes her own nonsense - which is the most charitable explanation I can think of for her behaviour - perhaps she needs some time away from TV cameras and murder scenes so she doesn't wind up further destroying her own dignity and perhaps harming incredibly vulnerable people in the process.
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Doctors are entirely responsible for the over-prescription of antibiotics. How can anyone else take the blame, given that only doctors can prescribe? If the medical profession won't stand up to patients who think that antibiotics are some kind of magical cure (and there are plenty of otherwise intelligent people out there who think that antibiotics should be prescribed for everything), who will?
I've had a doctor try and prescribe my daughter antibiotics for something that he clearly told me was viral. When I said "well if it's viral, antibiotics won't do a thing will they?", he muttered something about how they might help her general health and assist her with fighting the virus.
I shook my head, took the script, didn't fill it, and she was better three days later.
I suspect as much as pressure from patients, it's just something doctors do as part of their business. People come to you for treatment, they should walk out the door with some medicine. Telling them there isn't any medicine, doesn't make for good business. Sad.
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Apropos doctors: one of things I like about my GP is he is disinclined to prescribe. I don't hold it against him -- I find it reassuring.
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There were always doubts about the abduction theory. I don't think Deb Webber deserves any more credit than anyone else who guessed that perhaps the police search might have missed something, and that drowning or a fall was also a likely cause of death.
It all sounds like yet another cynical attempt by the usual suspects to find a scapegoat. If it bleeds, it leads - especially if the bleeding is done with a weapon.
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