Thread 1—Irrelevancies

Thread 1—Irrelevancies

 

2

 

 

A

Several irrelevant, wrong points.

 

 

3

 

A

Makes up to JM.

 

 

 

4

JM

She’s fine.

 

 

3

 

B

LHO was dupe and framed.

 

 

3

 

KR

A must read more carefully.

 

 

3

 

JM

Answers A’s points.

 

 

 

4

A

Tries to refute JM, fails.

      Thread 1 began with a message to JM from A. It is full of errors and irrelevancies. Its very first line diverged from the point of the essay to the irrelevancy of claiming that the Zapruder film is, to numerous people, a prediction of conspiracy that has come true:

First of all, to numerous people, the Zapruder film is a prediction that has come true. It establishes conspiracy, to some in more ways than one.

This thought was expressed very poorly. (It confused JM, as shown in her message below.) The Z-film is obviously a record of an event, not a prediction. It may contain information that others may use to predict something, but it by itself predicts nothing. Even granting A’s point for the moment, he didn’t state the prediction or how it has come true. His second sentence, about the film’s establishing conspiracy, was an allegation rather than a prediction. Had the Z film really established conspiracy, newsgroups would no longer be having discussions like this. So this thread started on a confusing note.
     
Then A took a major tangent about my supposedly having placed an arbitrary timetable on finding conspiracy (in another of my essays on the web site), which I did not:

Even if you reject that, there are problems with the arbitrary timetable KR places on this case. Is it 20 years, so the present case in the murder of Martha Moxley should have been thrown out the window? Is [it] 30 years-- so we should have dismissed the Medgar Evers case? Where does KR come up with his figure; what exactly is it?

A’s claims that (a) if my supposed timetable were 20 years, the murder of Martha Moxley would have been thrown out, and (b) if 30 years, the case of Medgar Evers would have been dismissed, are meaningless because there was no timetable in the first place. (See detailed discussion below.) My actual statement (in that other essay) referred to times but was not a timetable:

Let us be clear on one critical point. Nothing in this argument prohibits conspiracy. Perhaps tomorrow the smoking gun will be found and conspiracy will be proven. But for 33 years nothing like this has happened—that history of nonaccomplishment must count for a tremendous lot.

      A then erroneously stated that I would have had “a tough time” with the case of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings, whose relationship was found out 200 years after the fact. This claim is inconsistent with both essays, which speak clearly of declining probabilities rather than certainties. The posted essay states:

Every day that passes, the probability declines that anything significant [about conspiracy] remains to be found.

This obviously contains no time limit, stated or implied. The scientific idea that all knowledge is provisional clearly allows for understandings to change even after long times.
     
A’s last major point was the erroneous claim that 95% of my “strong evidence that Oswald acted alone” is really just strong evidence that “Oswald acted.” (See longer discussion below.) Valid or not, this point is also outside the realm of the essay, which speaks of nonconspiracy only in general terms and mentions neither Oswald nor specific evidence. A then closed with two smaller points, the first that a jury in JM’s town correctly convicted a serial killer from weak evidence alone (perhaps indirect evidence?) and the second that the strong evidence for only one shooter in the JFK case is weaker than I suggest, which may be why I avoid telling my class about criticism of it. The second point is flawed in that (a) there is no strong evidence in favor of only one shooter, and (b) to the maximum extent possible in one semester, my class hears pros and cons for all evidence. In summary, A’s points were wrong, irrelevant, or so vague as to be impossible to judge.
     
In the second message in the thread, A apologized to JM for the tone of previous posts that might have seemed offensive to her. This gesture, though kind, was also unrelated to this thread.
     
JM then replied in a third message that she was not mad at him.
     
The fourth message was from B. Moving still further from the original essay, he followed up on A’s reference to Oswald by stating that Oswald was just a dupe who had to be made to appear a lone assassin and then killed:

Oswald was nothing more than a dupe.... But.... he had inside knowledge about the conspiracy to murder JFK, and he knew the names of the conspiritors...

Since this is true... it's obvious that once they started pointing the finger at LHO they had to make it appear that he was “a lone nut assassin” and take drastic steps to prevent him from saying anything that would expose them.

Thankfully, no one replied to this off-point and unsupported message.
     
At this point, I replied to A (in the fifth message) and tried to straighten out his major mistakes:

   I think you're going to have to read my little essay more carefully. You have injected the idea of time limits, which it does not contain. You have forgotten that every theory is subject to modification, maybe even overthrow, by new evidence. This holds just as much for nonconspiracy in the JFK case as for anything in science. This point is made in my other essays as well. But most of all, please reread the section on theories surviving tests, and you will see that I am not claiming evidence for “Oswald acting alone,” as you allege. In fact, I don't know how you can have evidence for anyone acting alone—this is one of the points that we make early in the course. As for the possibility of evidence still being hidden, we obviously can only build explanations on evidence that is available because by definition we cannot know what, if anything, is hidden. This is another reason for keeping our options open by understanding the conjectural nature even of theories. 
  
I think you were just reacting a bit quickly to Judy's post. If you go back and read carefully, you will see what I am actually saying, and I think you will agree with more of it.

      The sixth message in Thread 1 was JM’s answer to the post from A that I had just addressed. She began by questioning his idea that the Z-film is a prediction:

Surely you do not mean that the Z-film was made before the assassination, thus predicting that there was going to be an assassination?

She then correctly rebutted his idea of a fixed timetable:

[A], this article has nothing to do about a time table. While he [KR] indicates the probability of finding new information is declining with each passing year, he does not say it is impossible.

In response to A’s claim that I had set a time limit for discovering conspiracy, she correctly noted:

No, he did not say that nor do I.

With regard to Jefferson and Hemmings, she wrote:

I will agree in the sense that we now have DNA testing which helped prove this. Also, again, [neither] he nor I am saying that it is impossible for something to come to light, but the chances are decreasing. Remember, the predictor in the Hemming situation that Jefferson had a child by Hemming was suspected a long time. There was never any info to disprove it, so it stayed a hypothesis. With DNA, it was proven, so now it is a fact, not just a theory.

Most of the rest of her reply focused on the serial killer mentioned by A. She showed that he was convicted on a mix of circumstantial (but strong) evidence and direct (but weak) evidence, as is often the case in murder trials. It was not the pure weak evidence that A thought:

…let us take this serial killer in TN. He finally received his 5th, 6th and 7th death sentence today. In the first trial, killed two (with a 25 cal gun) while robbing a fast food restaurant, the only two people there (left no witnesses), but his finger prints found on one of the victims personal belonging. Circumstantial evidence was increased funds and he had bought a hand gun recently for home protection but could not produce it, was never found. Second trial, again killed the two workers, no witnesses left. This time he abducted the two young females in his red car, took them to a lake to kill them. The fast food restaurant was near an interstate, too many passing by, esp to the gas station next door. This was actually the third robbery but the second one tried. Had no gun by this time, had used the two he had bought in the first two killings and apparently discarded so they could not be found. He tortured these girls for a long time (30-60 min) it appears, by cutting on them before he slashed their throats. The evidence was blood splatter on his shoes that matched the victims, even though he had washed them frequently. He also had replaced his new car mats, soon after he had bought the car, circumstantial, but I know of none who replaces them so quickly plus a red car was seen at the restaurant and the parking lot near the lake. But the blood splatter was the hard evidence.

Now the third trial but second robbery. This time there were 4 workers. He killed three with his small gun. The fourth he stabbed 17 times (ran out of bullets or gun jammed, only 4 bullets found) and left him for dead. No finger prints, no blood splatter, nothing but the eyewitness testimony of the lone survivor. Yes there was the circumstantial of the gun buying, increased funds and spending (several hundred dollars at Walmart) even though he had no job. The jury acknowledge that staring into the face of the killer while he stabbed you 17 times would make an impression on you. They accepted his identification. My qualms was I knew about all of the rest, the jury did not, that is why I wondered if I would have come to that conclusion. I had no doubts he was guilty because of the totality of the picture.

      The seventh and last message of this first thread was A’s trying to refute JM but failing. In response to her question about whether the Z-film was made before the assassination and actually predicted it, A clarified:

No I believe that the CT community predicted, accurately, that with the release of the Z-film, which didn't come until years after the assassination, we would have even more doubts about the official version of the case. I believe that has borne itself out.

This, of course, was very different from the Z film’s being a prediction.

      In response to JM’s correct contention that I did not rule out new information on conspiracy coming late, A submitted a paragraph that agreed with her while trying to disagree:

Read other posts on his site. He associates the finding of what is seemingly described as a smoking-gun pro-conspiracy item with the chance that his description of the events is true. In other words, since it's been a long-time and we haven't found a smoking gun pro-conspiracy, it means there probably wasn't a conspiracy

As to JM’s correct contention that I didn’t give a hard time limit for discovering conspiracy, A responded with the nonsensical paragraph:

No, he directly implies it. He argues that the lack of a what would have to be a smoking gun pro-conspiracy item (because there is scientific evidence as well as anecdotal pieces of evidence that do point to Oswald having assistance) as of TODAY, makes it a very unlikely proposition that there WAS a conspiracy. In other words--the expiration date he appears to argue for is approximately 40 years.

Note how the last sentence does not follow from those before it.
     
In the next exchange, A drew an invalid historical analogy. JM had previously written:

Also, again, he [KR] nor I am saying that it is impossible for something to come to light, but the chances are decreasing. Remember, the predictor in the Hemming situation that Jefferson had a child by Hemming was suspected a long time. There was never any info to disprove it, so it stayed a hypothesis. With DNA, it was proven, so now it is a fact, not just a theory.

A responded:

Jefferson denied having it. Historians couldn't find any documentary evidence to support it (a private confession by Jefferson or a document from a Jefferson friend admitting to it). In fact, pro-Jefferson-had-a-slave arguments were marginalized by the academy, in much the same way that CT arguments are often marginilized.

A was here attempting to draw a historical parallel between the skepticism to Jefferson-Hemming and toward CT arguments for JFK without any evidence that the CT arguments are true, which is of course fallacious. Projecting a future outcome doesn’t make it so.
     
A then committed a major blunder. In a nonresponse to JM’s:

There was never any info to disprove it [Jefferson-Hemmings], so it stayed a hypothesis. With DNA, it was proven, so now it is a fact, not just a theory.

he wrote:

Nothing has emerged to disprove the conspiracy theory either. This again is a problem with KR. Evidence of Oswald's guilt is not evidence that Oswald had to have acted alone.

A seemed unaware that nonconspiracy, by its very nature, is all but unprovable. Had he grasped the material from my web site or thought carefully, he would have realized that proving nonconspiracy is an example of the famous “proving a negative,” which is impossible. His reply was thus fallacious as well as nonresponsive.

      A then continued to attack the nonexistent timetable:

The timetable argument is one of the featured highlights of KR's site. Here is one quote:

"Thus the continuing lack of strong evidence specific to conspiracy makes it an increasingly untenable proposition. Slowly but surely, the probability of nonconspiracy is climbing ever-higher. Every tick of the clock raises it inexorably, as does every national meeting where reams of inconclusive and irrelevant "evidence" are presented at great length and their significance greatly exaggerated."

He actually uses the figure of 33 years. Apparently, given any historical event, no matter how much admitted effort has been played at CYA by the people responsible for actually contributing to the body of evidence, if you do not have a strong piece of evidence produced, you should think like Rahn does. That is an arbitrary time figure that does not take into account other events which took even longer time as well as the obstacles presented in actually obtaining the evidence to evaluate the case.

How arbitrary was the figure of 33 years? Here is the original paragraph that contained it, which immediately followed immediately A’s second-paragraph quote:

Let us be clear on one critical point. Nothing in this argument prohibits conspiracy. Perhaps tomorrow the smoking gun will be found and conspiracy will be proven. But for 33 years nothing like this has happened—that history of nonaccomplishment must count for a tremendous lot.

The figure of 33 years is obviously just the time from 1963 until I wrote the essay in 1996. The entire tenor of the above paragraph was continuing to look toward the future rather than to cutting anything off. Once again, A got it all wrong. He apparently did not take the time to think about the essays. His haste was shared by many others in these newsgroups, too.
     
A continued with several more responses to JM. Here is one that shows another kind of flawed reasoning. A was responding to this part of the essay quoted by JM:

None [of the conspiracy theories] has emerged [from the pack] because none of them have evidence enough to beat out the others, which is a polite way of saying that none are consistent with the physical evidence.

A countered with:

This depends on what conspiracy theory you are talking about. If you are talking about conspiracy theories that name monolithic perpetrators-- like the ones listed on KR's site (CIA, KGB, Mafia)-- that is much harder to associate with physical evidence. If you instead argue reductionist conspiracy theories-- like more than one person fired a shot, a conspirator was on the knoll or on the DalTex, it becomes a much more tenable position.

In other words, A claimed that vague, general theories like an unnamed conspirator firing from some second location violate the physical evidence less than specific theories (CIA, etc.) do. This idea is silly. Reductionist theories only seem to be simpler than those that name conspirators, but they are just as inconsistent with the physical evidence. Whether you say that a CIA person shot from the knoll or you claim ignorance about the shooter, it’s still a shooter on the knoll. The inconsistency with the physical evidence is the shooting from the knoll, not the identity of the shooter. Declining to name anyone does not make a theory more palatable.
     
So what have we seen in this first thread? To begin with, neither A nor B addressed the main point of the essay in their four posts. They talked around it, and nearly always wrongly. Lee Harvey Oswald was invoked where he didn’t belong. “Time limits” were manufactured. The difference between evidence consistent with nonconspiracy and evidence requiring it was ignored. Hidden evidence was appealed to even though no one can know about anything truly hidden. The Zapruder film was called a prediction. Vague conspiracy theories were considered more compatible with the evidence than specific theories. Overall, the first thread was a sorry beginning rather than a stimulating opening.

Ahead to Thread 2
Back to Introduction

Back to Anatomy Of A Newsgroup Discussion