Summary
We have now followed 60 newsgroup messages nominally on the theme of
“Whose Predictions Have Come True?” The good news is that so many posters
were interested enough to submit messages. The bad news, which far outweighs the
good, is one of opportunity lost—virtually none of the messages concerned
themselves with the core issue of the essay, that for the last 36 years the
basic predictions of the lone-gunman theory have held true while the
corresponding predictions of the conspiracy theories have not. The few posters
who tried fell flat because of logical and factual errors of the most obvious
kinds. Even though many protested the essay, not one person recognized the
obvious fact that the continuing debate over conspiracy theories, as strong
today as it ever was, proves the basic proposition of the essay.
None of these results are good news for
the JFK research movement, of course. To the extent that these posters typify
the population of JFK researchers, they show why the critical movement has
gotten nowhere—its members lack the thinking skills necessary to evaluate the
extant data. Without being able to deal with these data, the continual cries for
ever-more evidence ring hollow.
I want to reassure all readers that the
prime goal of this paper was not to show how badly the critical movement
thinks—I don’t like negatives like that standing alone. It was rather to use
the result as a prod to a positive end—call it carrot or stick, whichever you
prefer—to raise the level of scholarship within the movement. Until that
happens, the critical community will remain marginalized by the outside world,
and properly so. Worse, the community will not reach its goal of understanding
the truth about the JFK assassination.
I fully expect strong reactions to this
blunt article. They won’t bother me if they are reasoned carefully and stated
civilly. But if they consist of knee-jerk attacks, I will be disappointed at
another opportunity lost by the community.
I close by offering a way to view this
paper. Consider the whole thing an exercise in using the scientific method. The
question was whether discussions in the newsgroups were as low-grade when
examined closely as when judged informally. My evidence was these 60 posts. My
provisional answer, or working hypothesis, was that they are every bit as bad as
I had suspected. My predictions are at least twofold: (1) other threads examined
in this way will prove essentially as bad; and (2) as long as the level of
scholarship does not improve, the community will continue to flounder and to
produce hypotheses that get nowhere because they do not conform to the physical
evidence. In other words, the critical movement will continue its failed mission
as long as it forswears the tools necessary to reorient itself. I invite
everyone to judge the validity of this paper, as we judge the validity of any
hypothesis, by how well its predictions come true.