There is every reason to suppose it was Obama
Well no. For instance, he has no idea what the man he met's name was.
Your doubts are the poor reasoning I was talking about.
Why?
As I said, he said very definitely that it was Obama.
Being sure of something isn't the same as something being definite. Though I guess you think faith is evidence, as long as it is faith in something you believe. Faith in things you don't believe is dismissed with your own doubts, of course.
This is the kind of poor reasoning I find a lot at EvC, this supposed bastion of evidence-based reasoning.
Skepticism isn't 'poor reasoning', and if it is - then you have exhibited plenty of your own here. Unless you can show why my doubts are poor reasoning I can safely dismiss your position on this.
Again, it's not "evidence"...
Exactly my point.
...it's his conclusion BASED on all the accumulated evidence
Yeah, I have no reason to trust his conclusions or his reasoning. The accumulated evidence has been entirely discredited.
Not young black foreign students who are light-skinned with ears that stick out,
Actually, yes there are lots of those. And as mentioned, we have no reason to suppose his memory of how a stranger he met from twenty years ago looked and you have not tackled the evidence regarding the unreliability of witness memory and the effect time has on memory. Without dealing with this, I can only be skeptical of someone who claims to remember something like that and be 'positive' about it 20 years later.
who are coming to thank the people who supported him through school, people who were related to Bill Ayers who is known to have been a big influence in Barack Obama's life, people who lived in the house where a Mary Ayers,
You're right - the Ayers' didn't know any other black people. They were known to be very quiet people who didn't organise or meet people.
whose name Hulton remembered so well probably because of this incident that fixed the whole scene in his mind
He didn't remember Obama's name at all. Just that it was strange. That's kind of important.
how he was going to become President of the US, which, again, would make the guy stand out in anyone's memory IMO.
Do you have anything besides your opinion? It doesn't appear so.
Trying to reduce this to "a lot of black people" is an absurd answer to all these known facts. What I meant by "poor reasoning."
What do you want me to do Faith? You asked 'who else could it be'? There are a lot of black people, I don't know them all. I can't be expected to eliminate all possible candidates, but I'm confident, based on how numbers and demographics work, I'd still end up with quite a list.
I consider such a strange combination of circumstances to be memorable. You don't. Shall we call this a wash because of our respective prejudices?
I consider rape and major terrorist attacks to be memorable. But I've shown you evidence that strongly states that people's memory of these events, just months after they occurred are pretty poor and subject to being altered.
It's not a wash as it isn't just two opposing prejudices. The studies I cited were not made with the intent of disproving this theory, so the prejudices of those that carried out the studies doesn't enter into it.
He probably did insert Obama's face into the memory, but his face fit well enough to BE a fit, the light skin, the stuck-out ears
If he inserted Obama's face into a hazy memory, then that face would have light skin and stuck out ears. Again, this has happened before.
The memory in combination with the known facts about Obama makes for a far better fit than the situations you describe such as the memory of a rapist, where there is ONLY the memory and nothing else known about the rapist to go on.
Well no, the not-actually-a-rapist I spoke did live in the area of the rape and other 'coincidences' that convinced a jury to convict him.
But in this case there are known facts about Obama that are completely independent of anything the mailman could make up that corroborate his memory, such as Obama's relationship with Bill Ayers, his foreign name and known time spent in foreign countries.
But he knew this when he made his statement. This only counts as 'independent' if he had made his statement ignorant that such an association existed.
This plus his coming to thank an Ayers family for putting him through school
Show me that the Ayers family 'put' Obama through school.
his foreign name
There *are* a lot of people with foreign names, Faith.
after Mary Ayers had told Hulton about the foreign student they were putting through school
But no evidence that the American accented individual Hulton spoke with was this foreign student. Did the Ayers only ever 'put' one person through school?
this fit is way too good to be dismissed as you dismiss it: poor reasoning.
I have good reason to doubt the fit even exists. The mailman of the parents of someone who Obama met several years after the time period in question is not a reliable or credible witness. There is no reason other than your prejudices to assume a light skinned man with ambitious dreams and sticky out ears and a funny name was Obama.
I'm getting very tired, I'll have to come back to this
No rush.
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