As Robert has yet to show me his rule in the MA...
...nor justify why he gets to impose arbitrary rules on his critics while at the same time maintaining that they are intellectually beneath him. You don't handicap the horse with the fat jockey. Nor to justify why this particular rule exempting him from attention to criticism, while at the same time he insists no one has rebutted his claims. If your fingers are in your ears you don't get to tell everyone the phone never rang.
...I will remind him that I do not believe I ever have claimed nobody confessed, nor have I tried to "have it both ways".
Nor I. I didn't mention a confession or even address the concept of it. What I said was that in all the decades of JFK "scholarship," the conspiracy theorists have yet to paint a picture of evidence that points decidedly in a new direction. Rather, their pictures point in all different directions -- or more precisely, in no particular direction. They are a laundry list of nit-picks, inconsistencies, and irrelevant tidbits that they say erodes faith in some particular other theory.
In my experience, the inability to come to any better specific conclusion after an exhaustive survey of all available evidence indicates that no comparatively better conclusion is likely to exist. Hence the prevailing conclusion, as injured as it may seem from all the frantic nit-picking, remains the
best conclusion, even if it is momentarily made to seem unlike an objectively
good conclusion.
Of course Robert maintains that he
has stated and supported a conclusion, that of a case "for conspiracy." But this is woefully non-specific. It's essentially a wildcard conclusion into which any of a set of dissimilar evidence can be made to fit. That is, it's not a conclusion drawn on the basis of evidence, but rather a wussy predetermined conclusion into which almost any picture of evidence can fall.
The typical fringe argument (UFOs, JFK, Moon hoax -- you name it) goes like this: "Here is the standard of proof the 'official story' must meet. According to me, and by these nit-picky handwaving criticisms, the official story fails to meet the standard of proof I arbitrarily set for it. Therefore my vague, broadly defined alternative must be true by default, and all the details will simply work themselves out -- I don't have time to mess with all the evidence since I know by inference that it has to be false somehow."
So Robert makes a case "for conspiracy" without being willing or able to state any testable hypothesis along those lines. He asserts that he has proven there had to have been more than one shooter, even though his proof is merely an inference from some cherry-picked evidence. And rather than shoulder the burden of proof for his extraordinary claims, he says his critics must somehow prove an affirmative case that somehow precludes his claims.
But what would that affirmative counterclaim be? If the claim is "some conspiracy" (with no further detail) then the counterclaim would be "no conspiracy." And since there is no specific conspiracy claim Robert is willing to make, then the affirmative counterclaim would be "no
possible conspiracy." In other words, Robert wishes to saddle his critics not only with affirmatively proving that some given conspiracy (i.e., shooter on the Grassy Knoll) did
not occur, but that no conspiracy anyone could ever possibly conceive could have occurred.
Again that's what most fringe theorists do for an argument. They set the bar absurdly low for themselves, declaring that "some conspiracy" need only be suggested by some evidence, or that "that light in the sky cannot be natural." Then they try to turn the tables and set a superfluous bar absurdly high for their critics, to preclude even speculative claims: "you must prove only one shooter," or "we will need to document this candidate's citizenship more than any other human." Then the desired conclusion is said to hold by default, "You can't tell me what that light in the sky was, therefore aliens." "You can't explain this speck in this photo, therefore another shooter."
