Moderated JFK conspiracy theories: it never ends III

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I see this all the time looking into accidents etc. as part of my job. The hydraulics on a lift fail, and in the course of investigating you discover one of the floor guys is dealing weed on the side. That's why he doesn't want you going through his locker, but that uncomfortable fact has nothing to do with the real cause of the hydraulic failure, which turns out to be worn hoses or fittings. You don't put the weed-dealing in your official report to the client. But someone following up later may decide to make something out of "Mr. Doe refused to allow a search of his locker," and concoct a scenario that he sabotaged the lift.
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Excellent example!
 
The thing is that so many CTists seem bent on solving the assassination purely on the basis of "cui bono?" without the imagination to consider that Oswald himself may have had his own reasons, on his own individual level, to see profit in his action. That the profit wasn't on the grand scale that CTists demand signifies nothing besides their failure to think on small scales as well; it's just begging the question to reject an answer because their pre-conceptions of the "profit" won't let them consider Oswald as a proper fit for the "who."
 
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turingtest said:
The thing is that so many CTists seem bent on solving the assassination purely on the basis of "cui bono?" without the imagination to consider that Oswald himself may have had his own reasons, on his own individual level, to see profit in his action. That the profit wasn't on the grand scale that CTists demand signifies nothing besides their failure to think on small scales as well; it's just begging the question to reject an answer because their pre-conceptions of the "profit" won't let them consider Oswald as a proper fit for the "who."
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"Cui bono" is the stupidest of conspiracist memes. Guy in NY dies, you get his apartment. You must have killed him. Many other examples abound. A windfall for one is not evidence of culpability for anyone else's woe, without substantial supporting facts.
 
You guys have it all wrong. The conspirators had patsies posted on every single possible route the presidential motorcade could possible take along with an army of shooters.
 
KDLarsen said:
It also comes up in a more recent piece: What the Warren Commission Didn’t Know: A member of the panel that investigated JFK’s death now worries he was a victim of a “massive cover-up.”
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The "massive cover-up" being that the WC wasn't made aware of an FBI memo which quoted a "confidential informant" quoting Fidel Castro quoting Oswald as having said, during his visit to the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City, "I’m going to kill Kennedy for this"- "for this" apparently referring to the Cuban refusal of his visa. Slawson
...now believes that other people probably knew about Oswald’s plans to kill the president and encouraged him, raising the possibility that there was a conspiracy in Kennedy’s death—at least according to the common legal definition of the word conspiracy, which requires simply that at least two people plot to do wrongdoing.
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But
Slawson is not describing the sort of elaborate, far-fetched assassination plot that most conspiracy theorists like to claim occurred, with a roster of suspects including the Mafia, Texas oilmen, anti-Castro Cuban exiles, southern segregationists, elements of the CIA and FBI, and even President Johnson. Slawson did not believe in 1964, and does not believe now, that Fidel Castro or the leaders of the Soviet Union or of any other foreign government were involved in the president’s murder. And he is certain that Oswald was the only gunman in Dealey Plaza.
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Of course, none of that will keep the usual suspects from weaving their elaborate fantasies around Slawson's reservations. "Back and to the left!"
 
turingtest said:
The "massive cover-up" being that the WC wasn't made aware of an FBI memo which quoted a "confidential informant" quoting Fidel Castro quoting Oswald as having said, during his visit to the Cuban Embassy in Mexico City, "I’m going to kill Kennedy for this"- "for this" apparently referring to the Cuban refusal of his visa. Slawson


But


Of course, none of that will keep the usual suspects from weaving their elaborate fantasies around Slawson's reservations. "Back and to the left!"
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It's been my opinion for a long time, that the evidence that Oswald was the one and only shooter is pretty solid, and that if there was a conspiracy, it involved Oswald. It is not completely implausible that somebody in the Cuban diplomatic corps encouraged Oswald, and maybe even supported him financially. However, there is little in the way of evidence to support this notion.
 
Allen773 said:
Again with your half-baked sociopolitical speculation regarding the motives of "the government" or "the media." I noticed that your only piece of evidence (evidence" being used very loosely here) is "back and to the left." That red herring was debunked decades ago. I thought conspiracy theorists were supposed to be "cutting edge".
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How? By who?
 
Jango said:
How? By who?
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How the 'back and to the left' thing debunked? And when?

Just to clarify the claim does not need to be debunked, as it was never proven as accurate.

Pretty much the moment Jim Garrison showed the film in court and anybody who wasn't Jim Garrison watched it the rest of the world could see it was tosh.

Just look at the film.

The head is moving back and to the left because the bullet is blasting out brain tissue, blood, flesh and bone forwards and to the right. Unless you are suggesting the bullet from the front sucked all of this tissue out against the impact, common sense and basic physics suggests that if the movement is caused by an impact (and not just JFK going limp and slumping back), then it is because of the ejecta being blasted from the head.


Think of the slow motion images they use all the time in CSI or Mythbusters of bullets hitting ballistic jelly, apples, cartons of milk, etc. The bullet makes a small hole on the way in, but the trauma wave of the bullet passing through something makes it push a wave ahead of it. There is a huge big hole when it leaves. That hole is made by something being pushed out of the body. Ejecta. Counter intuitive as it may seem when you have the idea of a bullet pushing somebody over in your head, the body is thrown towards the shooter and away from the ejecta being blasted out of it.
 
Jango said:
How? By who?
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Hello Jango, long time no see. What's your subject this time?
By the way, anything posited without evidence may be dismissed without evidence. On this forum they try to educate and elucidate though, as a public service.
But anyhow, laws of physics and seeing actual gunshot deaths not Hollywood gunshot deaths refute the 'back and to the left' as well.
 
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CORed said:
It's been my opinion for a long time, that the evidence that Oswald was the one and only shooter is pretty solid, and that if there was a conspiracy, it involved Oswald. It is not completely implausible that somebody in the Cuban diplomatic corps encouraged Oswald, and maybe even supported him financially. However, there is little in the way of evidence to support this notion.
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Agreed, this is strictly a "could be" with no evidence to make it any more than that. "Encouraged" is probably impossible to quantify- I don't know how you could ever prove (or disprove) the possibility that, in response to Oswald's "I’m going to kill Kennedy for this,"* someone (or several someones) said something like "yeah, that's a good idea! Go for it, we'll help!" outside of showing a help that went beyond mere encouragement. As for the financial support...that would be easier to quantify, since all you'd need to show is that he did something that he couldn't have done without it. CTists have been barking up that tree for fifty years without ever scaring down any evidence he did; he lived on a financial ragged edge pretty much the whole time after he returned to Texas from Russia, and there's nothing to show he ever had or did anything outside what his own limited means could accomplish.

*And this is taking for granted he really said this. I actually gave his words a better evidential provenance than they deserved when I said "an FBI memo which quoted a 'confidential informant' quoting Fidel Castro quoting Oswald as having said...," since, unless we assume Castro was there in the Embassy to hear Oswald's words himself, the correct formulation would be "an FBI memo which quoted a 'confidential informant' quoting Fidel Castro quoting an unknown source quoting Oswald as having said..."- hearsay at least twice removed.
 
turingtest said:
Agreed, this is strictly a "could be" with no evidence to make it any more than that. "Encouraged" is probably impossible to quantify- I don't know how you could ever prove (or disprove) the possibility that, in response to Oswald's "I’m going to kill Kennedy for this,"* someone (or several someones) said something like "yeah, that's a good idea! Go for it, we'll help!" outside of showing a help that went beyond mere encouragement. As for the financial support...that would be easier to quantify, since all you'd need to show is that he did something that he couldn't have done without it. CTists have been barking up that tree for fifty years without ever scaring down any evidence he did; he lived on a financial ragged edge pretty much the whole time after he returned to Texas from Russia, and there's nothing to show he ever had or did anything outside what his own limited means could accomplish.

*And this is taking for granted he really said this. I actually gave his words a better evidential provenance than they deserved when I said "an FBI memo which quoted a 'confidential informant' quoting Fidel Castro quoting Oswald as having said...," since, unless we assume Castro was there in the Embassy to hear Oswald's words himself, the correct formulation would be "an FBI memo which quoted a 'confidential informant' quoting Fidel Castro quoting an unknown source quoting Oswald as having said..."- hearsay at least twice removed.
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It is equally likely that LHO believed they would take him seriously when they knew what he had done 'for the cause'.
 
Willy Ekerslike said:
Hello Jango, long time no see. What's your subject this time?
By the way, anything posited without evidence may be dismissed without evidence. On this forum they try to educate and elucidate though, as a public service.
But anyhow, laws of physics and seeing actual gunshot deaths not Hollywood gunshot deaths refute the 'back and to the left' as well.
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I think this is a key point. So many commentators on the Zapruder film are comparing their expectations to that of movie gunshot reactions. How many times have we seen bad guys fly backwards from getting shot in the chest? Real life is very different. There are some disturbing videos of actual gun shot deaths. For example, the footage from Bud Dwyer's suicide and also a suicide from a man while in a police interrogation room. Both shot themselves in the head, and the result is graphic but far from Hollywood depictions.
 
Tomtomkent said:
It is equally likely that LHO believed they would take him seriously when they knew what he had done 'for the cause'.
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That's a good point that speaks to his motive, I think. Oswald's whole life was marked by a sort of Dunning-Kruger approach to politics; he sincerely believed himself to be a political genius unappreciated by the movers-and-shakers of the world. He needed badly to be taken seriously at his self-estimated worth; JFK presented an opportunity not to be missed.

Sometimes the unreasonable motives of small men have huge results- Charles Guiteau comes to mind. Prudential Finance has a TV commercial that kind of illustrates this (while making a different point of their own)- a normal-sized domino is the first in a chain of toppling whose end result is the falling over of one 30 feet high. It doesn't take a giant to knock over a giant, or to have gigantic results; to insist otherwise is a failure of imagination.
 
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