JFK assassination: was any consensus ever reached as to who actually did it and why?

There was a documentary, maybe a couple of years ago, that pretty convincingly dealt with every doubt/conspiracy theory including the 'magic bullet' one. IIRC it was to do with the fact that the seats at the back were higher than the seats at the front, and that the front of the car was more narrow at the front. Or something. Anyway, by the end of the documentary I was completely won over to the Oswald-acting-along side.

1. Oswald did it and he was a lone gunman, without any assistance whatsoever.

2. Oswald was a patsy and INSERT CONSPIRACY HERE did it.

Why not

3. Oswald was solely responsible for physically shooting Kennedy, but he was aided/abetted/instructed in doing so by party or parties unknown.

I've always thought that this was the most likely explanation.

That's kinda what I believe too. With the CIA & FBI knowing all about it, but looking the other way.

wasn't like 30 minutes of Stone's JFK spent on this?

This documentary (that I mentioned earlier) looked into that as well, and the gist of it was that there had been so many supergrasses over the past 40 years that it was unthinkable that if the mob had been involved the truth wouldn't have come out by now.

I wouldn't necessarily agree with that. The conspiracy crowd likes to talk about the body count of mysterious deaths associated with the assassination, but what about the body count of just being a mid-level Mafia soldier in the 1960s? Most of those guys were probably dead or in jail by the mid-70s.

so did Oswald

So then, why did Jack Ruby whack Oswald?

There's a fair amount of errors in Case Closed though, which make it about as useful as the pro-conspiracy books. Posner is a dick forever though for his famous post-9/11 "focus and clarity" editorial in the Wall Street Journal where he reversed his opinion on Bush II and came out in support of him.

Still, I would have liked to have seen of his debates with Vincent Bugliosi.

-- xave (sl...), September 14th, 2006.

Deep Politics and the Death of JFK?

i agree, it's an interesting read.

for me, the most plausible scenario is the one discussed in this book:

Live By the Sword by Gus Russo

it more or less argues for Oswald acting alone, but creates context for his motivations.

here's the forward from the book for good measure.

Kennedy — An Unfinished Life, by Robert Dallek

You could also say much the same about 9/11.

The dude defected to the Soviet Union! Do people forget this? Also, some dude he was in the service with thought he was a fake commie working for the CIA to find real ones.

Kerry Thornley!

Later, the KGB figured that Oswald acted with potential mob help, and that the CIA and FBI didn't care since Kennedy was out of their hair.

Also the dude who wrote a BOOK about Oswald pre assasination!

Well, there's no convincing evidence for string theory, yet, and we're not giving up on that.

Berating conspiracy theorists for lacking evidence has always struck me as rather unscientific. You invent hypotheses and then gather evidence, right?, not the other way around. If you totally disregard hypotheses that lack evidence, no one would ever gather evidence and there'd be a moratorium on new ideas.

It's only been sixty years, and that's nuthin. Sometimes it takes centuries to solve a murder.

however, Squirrel Police OTFM about the scientific method

http://www.btinternet.com/~meirionhughes/Pub/images/jfk-peski.gif

45 years ago today

white album 40 yrs old vs JFK assassination 45 yrs old POLL

In re: thread title question. The Warren Commission Report was meant to lay the basis for a national consensus.

Obv it failed in its stated purpose. But it came close enough that it achieved its major unstated purpose, which was to quell the national grief and anger and prevent it from spilling into irrational mob action.

JFK was an inside job - wake up, sheeple!

Or maybe it wasn't and I'm mixing it up with that ninety-one one thing, I'm not sure.

the gunman is shooting from inside his head!

thats deep

The Wrong Guy, a dark comedy starring Dave Foley, includes a scene of a conspiracy theorist claiming no bullet struck Kennedy, insisting "his head just did that", and calls it "The No Bullet Theory".

OMG! Years later, people constructed urban legends based on that very JFK fact!

I forgot that the Weekly World News is no more.

this should be a poll

http://27.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m11iuxaeNV1qkuou9o1_1280.jpg

The Summers book is the most plausible; I appreciated how he didn't address every what-about. I told the story about the Silvia Odio incident in the other thread, still the eeriest of the purported Oswald encounters.

while he completely dismisses Oliver Stone and his theories, what's interesting is just what from the film he nails down as factual (such as the time when Oswald met a Cuban exile for a brief moment and later a phone call come to her, telling her things about Oswald she didn't even ask about.)

oh lol this is what I referred to -- I'm friends with her nephew!

i think it's kind of a shame that the jfk conspiracy has become the one conspiracy everybody in america apparently believes in some form or another. what interests me about conspiracy theories is less whether or not they're _true_ and more _why_ people believe them - and most of the time, the answer is "they're racist". in other words i feel like the legitimization of conspiracy theories the jfk conspiracy has enabled also enables racism and bigotry.

the thing i love about the jfk conspiracy theory is that the more you dig into it the less sense anything makes. it's like what happens if you repeat a word, any word, enough times. pharmacy, for instance. just say "pharmacy" enough times over and over and it becomes really strange and bizarre sounding. so that's what i like about it, it's a way to deconstruct the basic assumptions and associations we have about the nature of reality itself. i'm into that kinda shit.

we don't need no gates out there with that swamp! plenty of em gone in there. ain't none of em come out!

just say "pharmacy" enough times over and over and it becomes really strange and bizarre sounding.

specifically it loses meaning-- "semiotic satiation" iirc-- which might seem the opposite of the rabbit-hole disease (which is more like nabokov's "referential mania" in "signs and symbols")-- unless everything meaning the same thing and nothing meaning anything are on some mechanical level identical? (notes towards a horseshoe theory of conspiracy people / anti-conspiracy people.) anyway people in the mongoose/mob complex obviously had something to do w this lol

refs in the summers book to the stone movie are funny because he consistently condemns it in strong terms, laments its influence etc.; meanwhile i was scarcely turning a page without thinking "whoa i always assumed they made that up for the stone movie"

i feel like the legitimization of conspiracy theories the jfk conspiracy has enabled

I don't really know how to measure this but I think the effects of Iraq are far more consequential in terms of public trust or credulousness than the effects of JFK. 'Everything is fake' for me has its roots or at least its liftoff from Iraq. It existed before that, but far less prevalent. There are likely other factors like social media, like people knowing how to hone and weaponise this stuff, but Iraqs erosion of public trust meant the soil in which conspiratorial thinking could be watered reached almost all gardens

refs in the summers book to the stone movie are funny because he consistently condemns it in strong terms, laments its influence etc.; meanwhile i was scarcely turning a page without thinking "whoa i always assumed they made that up for the stone movie"

Haha yeah I mean based on having read that I believe fairly early in the book I thought it would be a takedown of conspiracy theory rather than an open-minded book musing about the possibilities. It does seem he draws the line with the specific named alleged conspirators in that film and the military industrial complex angle, but the other stuff that stone touches on he absolutely is willing to entertain as a likely possibility.

Specifically the mob, Cuban exiles, and Oswald floating like an unmoored buoy among all.

An inspired act of God shoo happen here and put a Texan in the White House!

I don't really know how to measure this but I think the effects of Iraq are far more consequential in terms of public trust or credulousness than the effects of JFK. 'Everything is fake' for me has its roots or at least its liftoff from Iraq. It existed before that, but far less prevalent. There are likely other factors like social media, like people knowing how to hone and weaponise this stuff, but Iraqs erosion of public trust meant the soil in which conspiratorial thinking could be watered reached almost all gardens

― anvil

i think it's different from person to person... for a lot of people iraq brought about that sort of shift in perspective, but for me it wasn't really until trump was elected president that i had that shift.

the complicated thing is that from a liberal perspective, a rejection of that worldview is... differences between us are _immaterial_ to them, i think that's where horseshoe theory comes from. the paradox is that material facts matter just as little to them as they do to any conspiracy-minded person.

i am at the point where i don't just ask myself _why_ people believe in conspiracies, but... whatever the term for it is, there's something in me that asks, you know, what even _is_ a conspiracy?

like, the thread revive about the bilderbergs, i'm looking at the alleged conspiracy and as far as i can tell it's literally just capitalism. is capitalism a conspiracy? i mean, there's an argument to be made!

three days after my egg cracked a lady named cassie labelle made a medium post titled "Being Trans Is Like Believing A Conspiracy Theory About Yourself". and maybe it's my background, i did the subgenius thing in the '90s, but i do have a tendency to look at it in those terms. like there was a coverup, right? some people knew the truth but they were dismissed as being "crazy" and didn't get listened to, and it was incredibly far-reaching, incredibly effective, it affected millions of lives, and one of them was mine. i was both a victim of this and complicit in the perpetuation of this state of affairs.

in some sense maybe the truth-value of a conspiracy theory _is_ relevant. believing a conspiracy theory like... there's a conspiracy theory, mia mulder did a video about it. it's a minor one, but it claims that every celebrity is secretly trans. except for elliot page who the conspiracy theory claims was amab and his "transition" was actually a detransition. anyway you look into it and you can kind of pretty clearly see the anxieties and insecurities that lead the person perpetuating it to believe it. believing something like that, or believing there was a cia conspiracy to kill jfk, to me that's different from saying something like "capitalism is bad", i mean you can't prove that in an absolute sense but there's a lot of evidence for that hypothesis, you know?

in some sense, just like what rumsfeld said about "known unknowns" basically makes sense, the idea of "alternative facts", i think there's a legitimate basis for that. it's a radical rejection of hegemonic narratives, and i've done that just as much as the people who say, i don't know, covid vaccines will turn you trans have done. the only way to differentiate the two is to take the truth-value of our respective beliefs into consideration.

idk. clearly i'm just rambling. hopefully some of that makes sense?

Back in 2002, during the build-up to the invasion of Iraq I heard Glenn Beck talking about how he'd been brought in to the Bush White House to look at evidence about Iraq's involvement in the Oklahoma City bombing. It was right then that I decided that all the talk about WMDs was bullshit, because if they had any actual evidence for that stuff then why would they be fucking around with conspiracy theories?

i think it's different from person to person... for a lot of people iraq brought about that sort of shift in perspective, but for me it wasn't really until trump was elected president that i had that shift

So far, I've lived through the bombing of Cambodia and the end of Vietnam, Iran-Contra, the CIA and cocaine trafficking, gaslighting of cancer victims downwind from nuclear tests, both Gulf Wars and dozens more I can't recall at the moment.. Go ahead, ask me about my perspective shift - worse every year and never once getting better.

like, the thread revive about the bilderbergs, i'm looking at the alleged conspiracy and as far as i can tell it's literally just capitalism. is capitalism a conspiracy? i mean, there's an argument to be made!

C. Wright Mills' The Power Elite to thread!