Famed XKCD cartoon characterizing the smug, snotty version of agnosticism:
Which, before you get your Ger-animals in a bunch is not, by definition, an attack on people's religion, or the lack thereof, but against people who think they get brownie points for willful indecisiveness. Worse, are people who demand a place at the table for their pet ideas no matter how many times they've been wrong and keep right on with it.
The relevance, your honors, will be apparent.
So as not to refer to any posters by name, mostly because I can't remember, I periodically see people complaining about the barely concealed contemptuous attitude some people, myself included, have towards the defense team and, as a kind of parlay, not giving proper consideration to those to adhere to the theory of defense in whole or part.
In fact, just so as not to irritate the sensitive, I will admit upfront that no one ever posted anything of the sort and I'm just making this all up, this is a work of fiction and any similarity to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
First, even though we refer to the defense as a "team", this isn't a game. For the defendant there are life and death issues at stake and, for the victim and his family, they only got one of those options.
However, if the defense stuck to making a case for some sort of crime of passion (good luck with the premeditation) or even an attack based on an outlier physical conflict in the relationship between Jodi Arias and Travis Alexander, I might even give them a "nice try". But they haven't done that. Their strategy is to vilify the victim as a relentless abuser who, for good measure, was also a rapist and nascent pedophile. This, if you think about it, isn't so much a defense as a giving approval to an act of murder: Travis Alexander was a , he had it coming and why are you people so bent out of shape about it?
That tactic doesn't get a sporting "nice try", because it's an abomination, a concoction of people who presume everyone lacks their moral compass.
And I doubt this "defense" is Jodi Arias' "nice try". She basically had two stories: 1. I wasn't there and 2. It wasn't me.
I have no urge to parse ownership of this atrocity, but I think it's clear to me that the true facilitators of this defense are Dr. Samuels and, to a greater degree Alyce LaViolette, who fed Arias the information she needed to run through the checklist of PTSD and Battered Woman Syndrome (Aside: One thing I don't like about Martinez' questioning, was the possibility of someone thinking he was implying Battered Woman Syndrome isn't a real thing. If you want to see how a legitimately battered woman kills out of defending herself and her own, and the behaves after the fact, look up Amber Cummings).
I was in time-out at the time, but when it was revealed Alyce LaViolette gave a convention lecture of Snow White as a battered women that previously inexplicable doodle by Arias showing Snow White with a black eye made a piece fall into place with an audible thump.
I really don't care what part of the defense theory I am supposed to give deference to, because when it has come down to single disprovable facts, the defense claims have fallen apart and revealed to be inventions. Not big things, because reality is made up of little details, like whether pin shelving could support the leaping weight of a 125 lb person, the sums you get when you do the math of gas station receipts and the like.
For some bizarre reason some people seem to think that being somehow "objective" by sheer force of will even if it means they have to hold onto ideas regardless of how conter-factual they are puts them in a superior state of knowing which works something like this:
"I know many of you hold to the idea that the moon is made if igneous silicates formed when a planet-sized body has a near collision with the proto Earth, flinging ejecta into orbit that coalesced into the moon 4.5 billion years ago, but why are you so contemptuous of people who think it's made out of green cheese?"
Sorry, being "fair and balanced" for its own sake isn't a virtue depending on just how stupid one idea on the scales is and, in the case of entities like Fox News claims of objectivity are just a cover for being completely partisan.
You know who wants "equal time" and "teaching the controversy?" Creationists, that's who, because forced equivalency is the only way they can keep from losing. Actual scientists, people who do the hypothetical-deductive model for a living and are used to the idea of rejecting ideas for which there is no evidence have no problem letting it come down to an intellectual fight to the death. Hopefully we can include fact finders such as law enforcement and juries in that ideal.
So, yes, I understand how people like their opinions and how some people who like their opinions resort to tone-policing and cries of incivility as they claw their way off the cliff. And, no, I won't come right out and go ad hominem ----- which is not, as some think, "name calling", but irrelevant name calling. Calling Jodi Arias a liar whose claims should be judged as coming from a liar isn't ad hominem, it's inductive probability based on past experience or, to think of it this way, the probability Jodi Arias will lie tomorrow is about the same as the sun rising, if we can go by past experience -- on people, but I do reserve the right to call ideas unfounded, stupid or just plain evil. Whether the person making them is stupid or evil can only be implied.
Asking for unwarranted consideration of the defense case for Travis Alexander being an abuser, a pedophile, a user of women, a sex deviant who had it coming isn't being objective, it's being recalcitrant in the fact of fact because, regarding all of the above, their just no freaking evidence for it except the narrative of a known liar as filtered through some mercenary ideologue expert witnesses in the pay of a defense team who even John Wayne Gacy in his clown outfit would think is kind of tacky.
If rejecting things for which there's not only no evidence, but a lot of countering evidence, makes me close-minded in some people's eyes, I will just have to shed a little tear and live with it.
Variously attributed to many, including Carl Sagan: "We should keep an open mind, but that doesn't mean our minds should be so open that our brains fall out".
