Moderated JFK conspiracy theories: it never ends III

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I'm still struggling to understand Robert's game here.

It's a very interesting conundrum because, whilst strictly adhering to the rules of the game, he's either made an honest mistake by attempting to play it here of all places or is attempting to update the 1994 rule book.

Truly fascinating.

The evil HSienzant stole my Groundhog Day beauty but I'll let him claim ownership, providing he understands Copyright Law and doesn't sing more than three seconds of "Happy Birthday" on film, television or in a paid public appearance.

It is, however, a rather beautiful analogy, in my humble opinion.

The ISF terminology would be "Fringe Reset".
However, taking into account Roberts veering from the expected, and using his twenty year old examples of how to reverse engineer a topic to reach the verdict you dream of, I offer the following:

The Groundhog Day Effect.
By simply reading Robert's replies to the "discussion" he constantly demands it is very apparent that he forgets to delete outdated ideas and notions whilst copy-pasting from his ancient texts.
I offer you his quaint ideas that you must give time for his animated .gifs to download before you can view them properly on second playing.
His cute idea, posted in his bio on a woo site, that his amazing spy-like abilities allowed him to obtain a copy of the Zapruder Film, apparently very difficult to do in those days, even though most people found it a rather easy task.
Sheer nonsense enjoyed by the Armchair Detective.

The screenplay of this poorly written movie is as follows:
(It's the best I can come up with and to not upset movie buffs I'll call it Groundhog Day IV)

Robert Harris, tireless chaser of the truth, wakes up each morning in a Mexican computer shop in 1994. He is oblivious to the fact that, in his future, he wasted twenty years of his life endlessly repeating the same nonsense.
A charity has been set up to help fund the replacement of his C and V keys.
But the future is a cruel beast. Robert didn't receive the memo from room number 28 in FutureHQ.. his internetz iz 2 slow and he is continually thwarted by those pesky FBI folk.

One might be tempted at this point to jump in and say' "But Robert, surely your extensive re (hyphen) search handed you your dream on a plate. If the magic mafia were involved then surely illegal financial payments were involved. Is there a reason why you are avoiding spoiling a cheesy 1970s spy thriller? Get to the cliffhanger Robert you literary tease."

You'd go down in history as being the Sherlock Holmes of 1994. As to why you don't simply waddle down the road to your local Policey people and request that Interpol examine your .. stuff one can only guess. I suppose Interpol have to be nice to the FBI otherwise they can't borrow the black helicopters to go paint balling in.
-
False claims of having expertise in fields you don't understand.

For me, personally, I get a big giggle watching you guys bumble your way through "analysing" video etc. It's truly hilarious.

A handy tip that has always served me well is:
As I'm clueless about fixing cars, I don't pretend to be an expert and I take advice from those who know better.

If I had the patience I'd give you some very boring numbers and calculations required to make an 18.3 frames per second 8mm film look acceptable without introducing more artefacts than necessary on a video standard, and then discuss how many frames, in a real video format, the applied interpretation actually used.

But I think doing so would be no different to me being asked "where is the decombulator on an inline woof woof internal combustion engine on a Tuesday"

Your Texas Instruments 8 digit calculator would be adequate to do the sums but in the future we have calculators on our screens. Lazy perhaps but why call McFly on phones we can't fit in our pockets?

--
<self snip>

There's nothing wrong with having an interest or hobby.
But when it becomes an obsession it's unhealthy.
And, to be honest, cringeworthy for others to view.

I've no idea what hobby could replace your obsession.
You're a member of that demographic that is pretty much a waste of time trying to engage in adult conversation with.

Photography is relatively easy to get into at entry level.
You'd get much more satisfaction from the learning process, and if you enjoy it you can attempt the real stuff. You'd have to learn to accept real world rules, pesky rules of physics and such, but no ones watching so you can still pretend to be better than everyone.

Hopefully your trigger happy wah wah finger won't reappear and make this another waste of my time. Despite the mocking I would go out on a limb and suggest that there are folks here who would, possibly, find you to be a nice chap who's nice you have a chat with.

Keep well.
 
Robert Harris said:
Tell everyone about your theory, Jay. Do you go with Posner and Bugliosi or have you come up with something else?
Click to expand...
I'll jump in here to offer a repeat of something I mentioned earlier (which may have been missed).

This a thread discussing various issues and ideas with regard to a possible conspiracy in the death of President Kennedy. It, along with its predecessors, appears in a conspiracy subforum on this site. That's the discussion. Oswald as a lone actor in the event has been talked about, sure. But no one is obligated to do so. Any case for conspiracy succeeds or fails on its own.

Put another way, I don't have to bake you a cake in order to pass judgment on how edible or tasty your cake is.
 
Regnad Kcin said:
...I don't have to bake you a cake in order to pass judgment on how edible or tasty your cake is.
Click to expand...

Exactly. A person may be utterly undecided about whether Oswald might have been part of something bigger and still decide whether any particular theory is convincing that purports to prove that he was—without having to come up with another theory to counter it.
 
Sandy McCroskey said:
Yep.
A couple somewhat random Google results:
http://alt.assassination.jfk.narkive.com/vIx8vz6R/oswald-i-am-not-a-communist
http://alt.assassination.jfk.uncensored.narkive.com/I2cbmYKl/more-on-that-silly-storm-drain
Click to expand...

From that second link, this classic bit of BobLogicTM:
But it seems to me that if William Bonanno wanted to sell books, he
would have conjured up a much more saleable, grassy knoll shooter.
Click to expand...

Bonnano claimed, in one of those "crime-insider tell all" books that people buy for exciting (and bloody) details to gasp over, that Johnny Roselli told him, in a prison yard, that he (Roselli) shot JFK from a storm-drain. The "logic" here by Bob seems to be that an indication that this is true is that the kind of book that sells on confessional sensation would have sold more copies with less sensation, the staid old grassy-knoll guy instead of an obscure shot from a stranger location. I'll bet tabloid editors make these kinds of rational decisions all the time- "Dave, Dave! Can we dial it back a little here, be a little more reasonable, please? 'Aliens Sired My Love Child'?!!?!? C'mon, man, nobody's gonna buy that- make it Bigfoot, ok?"
 
JayUtah said:
Kindly do not pester me for attention if I do not respond within three minutes. You have the burden to show you're here for more than just demanding attention be paid to you.
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Indeed.

Echo chamber: failed.
Shifting the bruden of proof: failed
Threatening to leave in a huff: failed
Goading: failed
Submission through repetition: failed
Altering other people's arguments: failed

Now the game's more obvious.
 
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Belz... said:
Now the game's more obvious.
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Starkly so. These threads are frequented almost exclusively by people who treat the forum as a side pursuit, an interesting diversion at best from things that otherwise must occupy their time. As such we allow absences as long as days without criticizing people for it. To expect a response literally within 3 minutes of a post declares a quite frantic ploy for personal attention -- all while poor HSienzant's more pertinent posts languished unregarded. Harris could have availed himself of my brief few minutes' absence to address those rebuttals offered against his theory.
 
RoboTimbo said:
That and suicide by mod have been the preferred methods. Is there anything from the fringe playbook that he's not used?
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Good question.

Leave in a huff should be the favourite.
I forgot about suicide by mod, interesting.

I would suggest suicide by mod after he remembers to initiate plan 43-x.

Or ... We all wake up tomorrow and start again.




Assumi

ETA: ^ I have no idea why Apple thought it necessary to append "Assumi" to this.
 
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ComfySlippers said:
The evil HSienzant stole my Groundhog Day beauty but I'll let him claim ownership, providing he understands Copyright Law and doesn't sing more than three seconds of "Happy Birthday" on film, television or in a paid public appearance.
Click to expand...

Does singing it in a youtube video count? With that exception, I'll agree to those terms. ;)

Hank
 
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JayUtah said:
I would have characterized it more as that desperate for attention. It's fairly apparent at this point that Harris' approach is purely theater.
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Jay, I presume you have seen Sondheim's Assassins. I saw it again over the weekend and this thread was on my mind. The parallels between the character's motivations and those of JFK conspiracy theorists were striking.
 
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Sandy McCroskey said:
—without having to come up with another theory to counter it.
Click to expand...

In all conspiracy genres, proponents try one method or another to shift the burden of proof, often in the form of insisting that only an affirmative rebuttal falsifies the conspiracy theory. An affirmative rebuttal is of the form, "No, what you say happened couldn't have happened because I can show this other thing happened instead." Even in court, an affirmative defense carries the burden of proof, in contrast to the overall presumption of innocence.

But a defendant is not bound to an affirmative defense. The claimant prosecutor still has the overall burden of proof, and it is possible (in fact, most common) to show by relatively straightforward means that he has not met it in that case. Similarly a conspiracy claimant doesn't get to demand that only an affirmative counterclaim will defeat his theory.

Harris wants to frame it as each claimant being responsible for his own affirmative case. He doesn't understand that someone who merely listens to a theory and asks questions to test its reliability is not a claimant, even if he has previously answered questions about his own present beliefs. Thence Harris' increasingly frantic scramble to draw people in as litigants rather than observers.

The JFK and 9/11 genres in particular are infamous for trying to place explicit burdens of proof on skeptics to uphold specific expressions of the common narrative such as the Warren Commission and NIST/FEMA. These are at best straw-man arguments, and at worst blatant shifts of the burden of proof. To avoid the latter, most proponents scrupulously avoid making any affirmative claim whatsoever. They are content merely to "question the official story," even when its abundantly clear they have some alternate theory waiting in the wings. Harris, however, has a theory. He's had it and advocated it for years. Regardless of his tap-dance coming out of the gate, the proponent has the burden of proof and, as with any such claim, it can be validly refuted without an affirmative counterclaim.
 
Pooneil said:
Jay, I presume you have seen Sondheim's Assassins.
Click to expand...

Participated in a production of it, a number of years ago. Not onstage talent this time, however. But yes

The parallels between the character's motivations and those of JFK conspiracy theorists were striking.
Click to expand...

Ironically so. Assassination, as dramatized by Sondheim, is a form of cultural vandalism in which ordinary citizens who believe they have been deprived of their due achieve fame by "vandalizing" the lives of the prominent people they attacked. Similarly, self-proclaimed historians or scholars who believe they have been deprived of their due attempt to achieve fame by attaching themselves as noisy, maverick claimants to noteworthy historical events. That those events in some cases are assassinations is the irony.

When a proponent's motive starts to look like the accumulation of personal notoriety, not the discovery of truth, the test of reason, or the furtherance of knowledge, then it becomes useless to address the instrument of notoriety -- i.e., his public claim. It, and the pseudo-debate that may surround it, are intended at that point only to achieve the maximum shrillness.
 
But we've seen it so many times and each time the fringe think they're being unique. Even when they're warned at the outset that nobody here is going to fall for it, they have no fallback plan. Thus we see the ever more frantic and childish "Look at meeeeee! Pay attention to meeeeee!"

Wow, 20 years and that's the crowning achievement.
 
turingtest said:
From that second link, this classic bit of BobLogicTM:
Click to expand...

In all conspiracy genres, the primary means of identifying "anomalies" in the conventional narrative or sidestepping contrary evidence is to measure it against expectations which invariably amount to begged premises or straw men. The goal in the rhetorical side of the game is to keep those expectations from being evaluated, at all costs.

We've examined lately several means by which that prevention may be attempted. Appropriation of expertise has occurred, whereby the mere citation of an authority is meant to justify the proponent's own judgment. And we've seen lately a wall of sheer denial. The inability or unwillingness to distinguish among assumptions, interpretations, and facts defeats any hope of rational debate. A proponent who clings stubbornly to his own beliefs, unable to see that they are not self-evident facts, is as entrenched as a person can be. And when real life is expected to rise to meet those contrived expectations, the proponent will always find a problem with "real life.
 
ComfySlippers said:
I'm still struggling to understand Robert's game here.

It's a very interesting conundrum because, whilst strictly adhering to the rules of the game, he's either made an honest mistake by attempting to play it here of all places or is attempting to update the 1994 rule book.

Truly fascinating.

The evil HSienzant stole my Groundhog Day beauty but I'll let him claim ownership, providing he understands Copyright Law and doesn't sing more than three seconds of "Happy Birthday" on film, television or in a paid public appearance.

It is, however, a rather beautiful analogy, in my humble opinion.

The ISF terminology would be "Fringe Reset".
Click to expand...


Actually, what's called a "fringe reset" here is commonly called a "Harris Award" on alt.assassination.jfk where Bob does some of his "best work". What's kind of surprising, however, is that he's even stepped up his resets. Generally, on a.a.jfk, he won't post for a day or two after he's proven wrong before reposting his exact same theory again as if it's brand new information. Here, he won't even let it go a couple of hours for some reason.
 
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