In the other great debates board, you know, the one with profanity called the BBQ pit, Airman Doors describes a discussion with one of his coworkers: Link
Now for a couple of reasons I believe that the moon landing was real and that the plane crashes on 9/11 were real as well. But the way Oswald was shot in the courtroom and a few other things about the Kennedy assassination do reek fishy. I don’t know whether there was someone else behind it, but there sure are certain groups who take an interest in offing a president. So the possiblity for a conspiracy is certainly there, especially with the surrounding circumstances.
Not having the proof yet and dismissing it as “yet another tin foil hattery” limits your perception. I think people should be more aware and take everything that isn’t quickly dismissable with hard facts into consideration at least. Otherwise things like the presentation of false evidence to the UN would have been waved away as tin foil hattery in 20 years, if it hadn’t been exposed right away.
[quibble]Lee was shot in a parking garage, I think.[/quibble]
As far as tin-foil haberdashery goes, it isn’t the subject matter so much as the methodology that defines some as nutters. Conspiracy nuts will reject the scientifically explainable (as all aspects of the Kennedy case have been explained), in favor of wild theories, conjecture, fabricated anecdotal stories, and any number of non-rational means of explaining the event.
Denouncing tinfoil-hattery properly requires one to delve into and critically examine the evidence for both propositions, conspiracy and not, and present one’s conclusions based on a reasonable consideration of all the facts. This does not “blind” one to possible real conspiracies, indeed it is the very process by which one dismisses or accepts a conspiracy at all.
As a ‘default’ starting point, I consider large-scale conspiracies involving large numbers of people at many different levels to be rather dubious a priori. Not one of those people has a strong enough conscience or sense of honest decency to blow the whistle, and convincingly? However, it is entirely possible for such a conspiracy to exist - I would merely require some convincing evidence for such. Our minds should be open, but not so open that our brains fall out, as the saying goes.
The problem with Colin Powell’s “evidence” was that it did not exist, or at least was over a decade out of date. As for JFK nonsense: spend an afternoon at this site, and then come back and tell us if you still believe that a communist defector and trained sharpshooter called Lee Harvey Oswald was not the lone gunman.
The problem with conspiracies is that the evidence required as proof has in most cases been covered, concealed, destroyed etc.
When a possible conspiracy is discovered the evidence is rarely “proof”. However, the skeptics will often dismiss the possibility without even considering the possibility. One reason is because most of the time they seem so outlandish and improbable that they appear impossible.
Many skeptics dismiss the “evidence” as mere coincidence or just outright deny the evidence as being real. Then there are those who see conspiracies everywhere. The two extreme or radical positions usually overshadow the moderates that might actually have a civilized discussion about a possible conspiracy.
I didn’t spend an afternoon on it, I just browsed through it. I still find it a bit hard to swallow that it’s just supposed to be a sad string of unlucky circumstances. I could believe Oswald deciding all by himself “Oh gee, let’s kill the president”, but his own murder afterwards is what’s so strange.
If the case simply had gone to court, the whole conspiracy theory wouldn’t hold much merit to me, but since Oswald was killed and thus silenced, the doubt whether someone else was behind it remains. It could be chance, but it could also be a conspiracy.
As I contemplate it more and more over the years, it seems quite possible that the murder of JFK was part of a massive conspiracy.
I cannot prove it, but it seems likely. It is a historical fact that the US military had an Operation NORTHWOOD that envisioned provoking a war with Cuba by planting bombs in the US. When you add in how upset some segments of the military was with the change from stable Grandfather Ike to the Hippie Kennedy, you have to think more than a few people were thinking along those lines.
When I was younger, I rejected all conspiracy theories. "There is no way our government would do that.’ As I age, I become cynical.
Any sad event is a string of circumstances. We must ask whether that string is feasible while, of course, avoiding the fallacy of seeing a string of cars with different number plates and remarking “Wow! How unlikely was that sequence?!”
You could not believe an angry Jack Ruby deciding “Oh gee, let’s kill that little commie who killed the President”?
Of course. But if Oswald was acting under the direction of someone else, do you admit that he wove an incredibly convincing tapestry of evidence suggesting that he acted alone?
When someone presents an irrational argument based on demonstrably false or non-documented evidence, the proper response is to point that out.
“Let’s have a civilized discussion” is not the reasonable middle ground when one is faced with flagrant tinfoil-hattery. It is the claimant’s responsibility to make a halfway reasonable argument that can then be discussed.
Here’s a good example of a claim that did not meet the “halfway reasonable” standard and was treated appropriately.
But not cynical enough. You should be saying to yourself: “There is no way our government can do that”. There is no way on earth that your government, or my government, or any government in the history of the world can carry out such a large scale, multilayered conspiracy and then keep it a secret after the fact. You’re ex-military, aren’t you? Then you know how people relax and let their guard down after an operation, and you also know how people like to talk about stuff they did 20 years ago, no matter how secret they were at the time. With any consipracy involving more than a handfull of people, sooner or later someone’s going to talk. Never, never underestimate the power of incompetance. If beaurocracies had the level of organization and dedication to carry out conspiracies the world would be in a much better place.
As for your “Operation NORTHWOOD” - the fact of the matter is, it didn’t happen. If it had happened, you can be sure that the people who prevented it from actually happening would have eventually spilled the beans. Secrecy has its own system of checks and balances, because basically, anyone involved it a potential conspiracy has the ability to veto it before it’s carried out. All they have to do is open their mouths.
I don’t buy the Jack Ruby story one bit. Not only does he kill JFK’s assasin, he then goes to commit suicide in jail (is there evidence it was a suicide?).
If it wasn’t for Jack Ruby, it would be easy to accept the official JFK story. With Jack Ruby, the whole story becomes much more messy, and makes the official version a bit less likely.
Sure, that’s possible. It’s also possible that Saddam tries to break out of custody and is shot on the run before he reaches the courtroom. However, if that were to happen, I would raise an eyebrow and buy into conspiracy-stock once more. It’s possible that Oswald was murdered for no good reason, but since Oswald didn’t kill Joe Average, but the president of the USA, I think it’s fair to be a bit skeptical instead of thinking “Oh well, things happen, it’s just a string of unrelated circumstances”.
I disagree. I am sorry to drag out the tired 3rd Reich once more for debating purposes, but I think history has shown that bureaucracy is very well capable of carrying out plans of horrible and mind boggling magnitude that would be instantly dismissed as tinfoil hattery if they hadn’t already been proven true.
This would be another debate, but for that historical fact, I am wary of all forms of bureaucracy. Questions about religion or my family’s possible medical conditions will not be answered by me when they are coming from some sort of government body.
But anyway, just to clarify things, I didn’t want to draw parallels to the Kennedy Assassination here, I just wanted to point out that history has shown that big conspiracies that seem ludicrous at the time, can exist. In this case we are aware of a conspiracy, but it is not unthinkable that conspiracies exist that are never conclusively revealed to the public.
I have the basic assumption that most people are lazy and stupid. Events like 9/11 or the Kenedy assassination are usually the results of a lot of things going wrong, not of a complex plan going right. They have certainly had enough scrutiny over the years.
The fact that evidence may have been conceiled does mean that one can simply ignore evidence in favor of wild conjecture.
Ok now it’s time to break out the tin foil hats for real: I once heard that the cancer was already diagnosed, so he took a lot of money from unknown sources to kill Oswald, because he knew that he was going to die anyway and didn’t have anything to lose by killing Oswald.
Even if Saddam’s killer confessed outright to be acting on his own, to the point where he did not fess up even on his very death bed?
But the point is that that conspiracy didn’t last long at all: many whistles were being blown straight from the off and Allied intelligence knew a great deal about it eve before the end of the war, when the cat was let right out of the bag and into the German people’s immediate consciousness.
Neither is it “unthinkable” that the Holocaust did not happen, nor that the Earth is 6000 years old. The evidence simply suggests, overwhelmingly, that these propositions are erroneous. I do not say that large-scale, multilayered conspiracies are impossible, merely that keeping them secret indefinitely is incredibly difficult.
The case of the Third Reich is a good example of how coverups don’t work. There was a lot of scurrying around at the end to hide evidence of atrocities and eliminate witnesses, but the truth came out anyway.
This I’d argue differently: Since the evidence is overwhelming in these 2 cases, I think it’s obvious that any claim to the contrary is indeed tinfoil hattery. But the mad assassin, who is in turn assassinated by an equally mad person, seems to be the unlikely scenario here. At the very least, it’s a scenario that isn’t as obvious - to me, it isn’t as clear cut as Carbon dating or having millions of corpses as proof.
What we have going for the theory of the madman without an agenda is that many politicians are attacked by or have fallen victim to people who are later identified as mentally unstable (sorry for the correct terms, I am not a doctor). Anna Lind is the most recent example that springs to mind here.
If it had been just Oswald, then I’d be in your boat, but the fact that he was killed opens the door for the speculation that someone wanted to silence him. I fear that without conclusive proof either way, the doubt will always remain.
Ah, but there isn’t millions of corpses - most of them were incinerated. And Carbon dating only works over thousands (not millions) of years, and can be corrupted if (as believers would say) the Great Flood scoured the Earth to its very basement rocks. These quackeries do have supporting evidence, it is simply utterly eclipsed when all evidence is considered.
Unlikely compared to what? What is the evidence for your alternative scenario?
There are, as I’m sure you appreciate, quacks for whom no proof is conclusive.
I guess it’s a highly subjective matter: For the both of us the holocaust and that the earth is older than a few thousand years are conclusively proven. Apparently we drift apart on the JFK issue - while the case is closed for you, I am not yet convinced.
I guess it’s a matter of the personal threshold of when something is proven to one’s satisfaction. The JFK case isn’t clear to me thanks to the murder of Oswald. I’m not saying that it was a conspiracy, I am saying it may have been one. I’ll concede that the lack of further evidence to substantiate the charge of a possible conspiracy over the last couple of decades is lending weight to the non-conspiracy theory though.
Those were examples, but the point remains that unless something has been proven for a person - people or “quacks” who never accept any form of proof aside - it shouldn’t be out of the question to debate or consider the possibilities of more complicated and often times less likely scenarios.
And of course, there’s the problem that one needs to weed out red herrings and concentrate on what the more conclusive proof is. If I buy a yoghurt today and the best before date says it’s good, I shouldn’t trust the best before date, if I can see a mold growing on the surface. This yoghurt example was not related to the JFK issue by the way, it’s intended as more of a food (hah) for thought to further the point that allegations of tin foil hattery should be carefully weighed against the possibility that some truth might be to it.