The problem isn't you, CTers - it's your dang brain

[Lance Payette]

Hey, there are LN's who actually believe Jack Ruby was this nice guy who Killed Oswald to protect Jackie. It goes both ways.

But there are few LNers who don't think Ruby killed Oswald at all, or that the gunman was a fake Jack Ruby, or Leavelle actually shot Oswald, or the supposed Oswald wasn't really Oswald, or Oswald isn't really dead but is still living with Marina, or that sort of thing. 

I'm not sure I know of any LNers who are just flat irrational. The LN narrative doesn't really lend itself to that. I will concede that some LNers seem rather obsessive and to have an almost religious fervor for the LN narrative or even for the WR. That's a bit of a mystery to me as well. In the abstract, my attitude toward the JFKA is more in the vein of, "Why should I really care who killed him?" It's just a whodunnit with so many absurd twists and turns, even for a fervent LNer, that it's just kind of fascinating to play around with.

[Tom Graves]

I'm having just a teensy-weensy bit of difficulty following how the KGB is responsible for the Western world statistics, but I'll take your word for it since I feel sure your brain is better wired than mine for that sort of thing.

FPR,

Hint: In attempting to get your brain "wired properly," it would help for you to finally realize that fascistic / Stalin-loving mob boss and "former" KGB counterintelligence officer Vladimir Putin installed -- if not through actual COLLUSION with Roger "Rat You-Know-What-er / "I Have A Back Channel To Trump" Stone and his new "Globalist-Fighting" buddy, Lyndon Larouche org's Harley Schlanger (google the names Stone, Schlanger, and Caddy simultaneously) -- then through his KGB* and GRU hackers, professional St. Petersburg trolls, Julian Assange, Cambridge Analytica, GRU officer Konstantin Kilimnik, mobbed-up KGB*-connected Oligarchs, certain American money-grubbing "useful idiots," et al. ad nauseam, and oodles and gobs of zombified by sixty-six years of Sun Tzu-based "Master Plan" ops, gasp . . . The Traitorous Orange Bird (rhymes with "Xxxx") as our "President" on 20 January 2017.

*Today's SVR and FSB

-- Tom

[Richard Smith]

The CTer mind works in a different way.  They often do not view the totality of evidence and circumstances as a whole.  Nor do they take into consideration the implications of their own doubts having validity.  IF X didn't happen as they suggest after a pedantic interpretation of the evidence, they don't bother to consider any alternative such as Y occurring that must have happened to explain the known result.  The end of the line is analyzing the specific point under consideration and casting doubt on it.  Even if any other alternative to explain the result is wildly improbable perhaps even impossible not to mention baseless, they are undeterred by this.  Every piece of evidence exists in a vacuum to be addressed as though it were the only evidence in the case.  No attempt is even made to explain what must have happened if the accepted LNer interpretation is incorrect. 

[Bill Brown]

Did Shirley have her baby?  This is what is most important right now.

[Lance Payette]

Did Shirley have her baby?  This is what is most important right now.

Shirley had TWINS, and the little punks have ALREADY rejected the LN narrative!

[Michael T. Griffith]

Another of my highly unpopular (but I like 'em!) little essays on the epistemology of conspiracy belief. I did discover a new angle I hadn't previously explored. (Take heart, I am now in a walking boot and will soon be completely out of your hair.)

In my decades of debate with extremists on religion forums – with Flat Earthers, Young Earthers, Bible literalists, people who think they are going to be “raptured” off the toilet to meet Jesus in the air, possibly this afternoon – I long took the approach that “You don’t really believe this. No sane person could really believe this. You’re pretending. I don’t know exactly why you’re pretending, but you simply have to be.”

I finally had to admit I was wrong. I’m still not convinced that anyone, deep down at the most visceral level, actually believes these things. “Yes, I actually believe the earth is 6,500 years old!” But they have convinced themselves they believe these things, which may be functionally pretty much the same as actually believing them. The part of my brain that would quickly say "Lance, snap out of it, this is nuts!" never clicks in for some reason.

What is it? Is it a social thing, the fun of being part of a community of outsiders who irritate and befuddle normal people? No, just pretending would give you that – which is what I always wrongly assumed Flat Earthers were doing, just amusing themselves and us in a tongue-in-cheek way. How do you actually convince yourself the earth is flat or 6,500 years old? In the context of the JFKA, how do you convince yourself Lee Harvey Oswald was an innocent patsy and the mountain of evidence against him was all fabricated, faked, altered and planted?

Someone can sincerely believe the JFKA was a conspiracy of some sort without descending into irrationality, just as one can be a religious believer without thinking the earth is flat or 6,500 years old. But as we see here all the time, the descent into irrationality is prevalent.

To quote an article at the National Library of Medicine, “Conspiracy belief is correlated with lower levels of analytic thinking (Swami, Voracek, Stieger, Tran, & Furnham, 2014) and lower levels of education (Douglas, Sutton, Callan, Dawtry, & Harvey, 2016). It is also associated with the tendency to overestimate the likelihood of co-occurring events (Brotherton & French, 2014) and the tendency to perceive agency and intentionality where it does not exist (Douglas et al., 2016).” I have no doubt this is all true – but does it really explain believing obviously irrational things? (The article, “The Psychology of Conspiracy Theories,” is non-technical and well worth reading: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5724570/.)

When I have raised this issue within JFKA communities, the responses are always these:

1. Conspiracies have existed throughout history, bub. Yes, this is true – but they do not, never have and never will, look anything like the wilder JFKA theories. The JFKA conspiracies are the very antithesis of what actual conspiracies look like. I don't have to posit any basket of irrationalities to believe there was a Lincoln assassination conspiracy.

2. We are not like those other wackos, Flat Earthers and UFO believers and whatnot. We are serious researchers following the evidence wherever it leads. No, you aren’t. You are exactly like those other wackos. Your “epistemology, to use the term loosely, is exactly the same.

Could this be the answer (https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2025/06/conspiracy-theorists-unaware-their-beliefs-are-fringe):

"Overconfidence is a hallmark trait of people who believe in conspiracies, and they also significantly overestimate how much others agree with them, Cornell psychology researchers have found. The study indicates that belief in conspiracies may be less about a person’s needs and motivations and more about their failure to recognize that they might be wrong.

Conspiracy believers not only consistently overestimated their performance on numeracy and perception tests, revealing they tend to be less analytic in the way they think. They also are genuinely unaware that their beliefs are on the fringe, thinking themselves to be in the majority 93% of the time, according to the research. The work counters previous theories that people believe conspiracies essentially because they want to, out of narcissism or to appear unique."

The above article, from just a few months ago, summarizes research published earlier this year: “Overconfidently Conspiratorial: Conspiracy Believers are Dispositionally Overconfident and Massively Overestimate How Much Others Agree With Them,” https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/01461672251338358. The abstract explains, “Although conspiratorial claims were believed by a majority of participants only 12% of the time, believers thought themselves to be in the majority 93% of the time. This was evident even when asked to rate agreement among counter-partisans, indicating that conspiracists are genuinely unaware that their beliefs are on the fringe.”

Could that be the answer: People who believe irrational things think they’re normal, that most other people agree with them? No, I don’t think so. It would, however, explain why JFKA CTers love polls: “81% of Americans agree with us!” (Well, not really. The supposed agreement is only in the broadest sense, by uninformed people who have been fed a steady diet of media coverage and agree only at the very general level of, “Yeah, with all the noise, I guess there must’ve been some sort of conspiracy.”)

This, I believe, is closer to the real answer: CTers' brains are wired differently. It’s essentially physical: ”Scientists have found that the human brain's natural tendency to seek patterns—an evolutionary tool for survival—can go into overdrive, leading to ‘illusory pattern perception,’ where people perceive connections where none exist. This was evident in experiments where conspiracy believers were more likely to see order in random data, such as chaotic artwork or sequences of coin tosses.” The article, “Connecting the dots: Illusory pattern perception predicts belief in conspiracies and the supernatural,” is well worth downloading and reading: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/ejsp.2331.

The conclusion: “The answer that emerges from our data is that irrational beliefs are associated with a distortion of an otherwise normal and functional cognitive process, namely, pattern perception.”

And it’s not just overactive pattern recognition. Umpteen studies have shown that those prone to conspiracy thinking actually process information differently. For example, “A new brain imaging study published in Scientific Reports provides evidence that conspiracy beliefs are linked to distinct patterns of brain activity when people evaluate information. The research indicates that people who score high on conspiracy belief scales tend to engage different cognitive systems when reading conspiracy-related statements compared to factual ones. These individuals relied more heavily on regions associated with subjective value and belief uncertainty.” https://www.psypost.org/people-who-believe-in-conspiracy-theories-process-information-differently-at-the-neural-level/.

Or this: “Neurally, a double dissociation emerged: high conspiracy believers exhibited increased activation in the ventromedial and dorsomedial prefrontal cortices—regions implicated in value-based decision-making and belief uncertainty—when evaluating conspiracy-related content. In contrast, low conspiracy believers showed greater activation in the hippocampus and precuneus, areas associated with episodic and semantic memory retrieval.” “Neural correlates of conspiracy beliefs during information evaluation,” https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-025-03723-z. See also “Wired for Belief: The Neuroscience of Conspiracy Theory,” https://www.luc.edu/neuroscienceandsociety/hottopics/essays/archive/wiredforbelieftheneuroscienceofconspiracytheory.shtml.

In short, when I think “How can anyone believe that nonsense?” and one of the resident CTers thinks “Why can’t he see this, it’s so obvious?”, the disconnect is undoubtedly due to a variety of psychological and social factors but may be explainable largely in terms of “different wiring.” Most of us, I guess, are just lucky and got the non-CT wiring. Others, and you know who they are, are badly in need of an electrician.

This ridiculous, comical polemic shows that you are an unserious idealogue who is guilty of the very bias and confused thinking that you attribute to anyone who disagrees with you, which in this case is 2/3 to 3/4 of the Western world. You talk like your side is in the majority and that conspiracy theorists are some kind of societal fringe, when in fact poll after poll has consistently shown that 2/3 to 3/4 of the Western world does not buy your version of the JFK assassination.

You show yourself to have a juvenile, uncritical, and fringe mindset when you argue that those who reject your version of the JFK case must have brains with faulty wiring. That's the kind of silly argument you'd expect from a teenager or a cultist.

Do you have any idea, any clue, how many physicists, medical doctors, lawyers, college professors, radiology professionals, elected officials, forensic pathologists, expert riflemen, former federal agents, nurses, successful businessmen, former congressional investigators, former intelligence professionals, ballistics experts, neuroscientists, etc., have supported the conspiracy position and rejected the lone-gunman theory?

It is revealing that conspiracy theorists don't go to the extreme of suggesting that lone-gunman theorists suffer from faulty brain wiring. Many lone-gunman theorists do not make this suggestion about conspiracy theorists. But, extremist lone-gunman theorists do.

Finally, I think it is worth noting again that the percentage of the Western world that buys the lone-gunman theory is not very much higher than the percentage of people who believe Bush and Cheney et al knew in advance about the 9/11 attacks and allowed them to happen and the percentage of people who have expressed doubt about the Moon landings.

[Lance Payette]

You show yourself to have a juvenile, uncritical, and fringe mindset ...

And proud of it! It's one of my most endearing qualities. 

Do you have any idea, any clue, how many physicists, medical doctors, lawyers, college professors, radiology professionals, elected officials, forensic pathologists, expert riflemen, former federal agents, nurses, successful businessmen, former congressional investigators, former intelligence professionals, ballistics experts, neuroscientists, etc., have supported the conspiracy position and rejected the lone-gunman theory?

Ah, the "appeal to authority" fallacy! I like it!

"Support the conspiracy position" is rather a vague assertion. Do we know how many accept the LN verdict? No, we don't - but it is the verdict of history and I guarantee you it is accepted by the large majority of authorities who are actually informed about the case.

Show YOUR theories and posts on forums such as this to most of your CT-oriented authorities and they are going to say, "Fella, you need help. This is nutcase stuff."

Your "2/3 to 3/4 of the Western world" schtick was humorous the first time, but now you're overdoing the comedy. You do realize you're talking about close to a billion people across all of North America, all of Europe, Australia and New Zeakland? Just to nail this down, can you give us the data for Luxembourg and Finland? 

It is revealing that conspiracy theorists don't go to the extreme of suggesting that lone-gunman theorists suffer from faulty brain wiring. Many lone-gunman theorists do not make this suggestion about conspiracy theorists. But, extremist lone-gunman theorists do.

It is indeed interesting. You know why CTers don't do this? Because - wait for it - they don't have mountains of peer-reviewed neurological, psychological and sociological data to support such a claim. Neurologists, psychologists and sociiologists study the conspiracy mindset because it is recognized as ABERRANT. Not necessarily pathological, but distinctly aberrant.

Finally, I think it is worth noting again that the percentage of the Western world that buys the lone-gunman theory is not very much higher than the percentage of people who believe Bush and Cheney et al knew in advance about the 9/11 attacks and allowed them to happen and the percentage of people who have expressed doubt about the Moon landings.

You really need to present these "Western world" statistics you keeo citing. As Mark Twain famously said, there are lies, damn lies and statistics. Alas for you, the 9/11 Truthers and Fake Moon Landing folks are precisely the ones, along with JFKA conspiracy theorists of your sort, that neurologists, psychologists and sociologists are interested in studying. Oops! 

BTW, isn't this your second long post on this thread, saying little more than "Lance is a LN meanie"?

Actually, I'm quite kindly. The truth is, examining one's own thought processes, proclivities and confirmation biases can be extremely worthwhile. I've certainly done it. I merely point out that a vast body of peer-reviewed neurological, psychological and sociological literature is telling folks like you that you might do well to step back and examine whether you are thinking clearly.

The irony here is, you keep illustrating the very points I'm making. 

[Michael T. Griffith]

And proud of it! It's one of my most endearing qualities. 

Ah, the "appeal to authority" fallacy! I like it!

You appeal to authority all over the place. You avoid the point that since many successful, educated people reject the lone-gunman theory, it is therefore juvenile and unserious to claim that anyone who rejects the theory must have bad brain wiring. That's the kind of silly polemic you get from teenagers and cultists. Again, you keep pretending to be in the mainstream majority when actually you are in the minority--and are on the fringe of that minority.

"Support the conspiracy position" is rather a vague assertion. Do we know how many accept the LN verdict? No, we don't - but it is the verdict of history and I guarantee you it is accepted by the large majority of authorities who are actually informed about the case.

You can easily Google the polling dats in the U.S. and Europe on this issue.

Show YOUR theories and posts on forums such as this to most of your CT-oriented authorities and they are going to say, "Fella, you need help. This is nutcase stuff."

You know you have a weak position when you have to resort to such petty name-calling to describe those who disagree with you, especially when you're in the 1/4 to 1/3 minority in the Western world.

Your "2/3 to 3/4 of the Western world" schtick was humorous the first time, but now you're overdoing the comedy. You do realize you're talking about close to a billion people across all of North America, all of Europe, Australia and New Zeakland? Just to nail this down, can you give us the data for Luxembourg and Finland? 

Again, you can Google the polling data. It's readily available.

It is indeed interesting. You know why CTers don't do this? Because - wait for it - they don't have mountains of peer-reviewed neurological, psychological and sociological data to support such a claim. Neurologists, psychologists and sociiologists study the conspiracy mindset because it is recognized as ABERRANT. Not necessarily pathological, but distinctly aberrant.

Oh, so now the view that more than one gunman fired at JFK is "ABERRANT." Well, then, LBJ was "aberrant." He believed there was a conspiracy, and he rejected the SBT. Three members of the WC were "aberrant" because they didn't buy the single-assassin scenario and the SBT. The super majority of the House Select Committee on Assassinations were "aberrant" because they said there was a conspiracy, two gunmen, etc. Robert F. Kennedy himself was "aberrant" because he believed there was a conspiracy and that CIA elements were involved. And on and on and on we could go.

You really need to present these "Western world" statistics you keeo citing. As Mark Twain famously said, there are lies, damn lies and statistics.

Again, take a few minutes on Google and you can find polling data on this issue going back to the 1960s. 

Alas for you, the 9/11 Truthers and Fake Moon Landing folks are precisely the ones, along with JFKA conspiracy theorists of your sort, that neurologists, psychologists and sociologists are interested in studying. Oops!

Humm, that sounds like an appeal to authority, hey? BTW, several neuroscientists/psychologists argue that JFK was killed by a conspiracy, e.g., Dr. Joseph Riley, Dr. Michael Chesser, Dr. William Niederhut, Dr. Robert Livingston, Dr. Robert Zacharko, Dr. Robert Grossman, etc., etc.

And, again, the percentage of people who buy the 9/11 Truther nonsense and who doubt the Moon landings is in the ballpark of the percentage of people who agree with you on the JFK case. I'm in the substantial majority of people who disagree with you. Maybe those "neurologists, psychologists, and sociologists" should be studying you guys. The research you're citing has nothing to do with serious, educated people who posit a conspiracy in JFK's murder.

BTW, isn't this your second long post on this thread, saying little more than "Lance is a LN meanie"?

Nope, not at all. My post is saying that you show yourself to be extremely biased and unserious when you stoop to the nonsensical argument that those who disagree with suffer from brain issues. Responsible lone-gunman theorists do not stoop to spewing such discrediting nonsense.

Actually, I'm quite kindly. The truth is, examining one's own thought processes, proclivities and confirmation biases can be extremely worthwhile. I've certainly done it. I merely point out that a vast body of peer-reviewed neurological, psychological and sociological literature is telling folks like you that you might do well to step back and examine whether you are thinking clearly.

No one said you were "unkind." You keep hiding behind that strawman argument. Your "vast body" of research has nothing to do with serious, scholarly people who reject the lone-gunman theory and who posit a conspiracy in the JFK case, many of whom used to believe in the single-assassin scenario but who changed their minds after doing further research, including myself.

The irony here is, you keep illustrating the very points I'm making.

Oh, really? So pointing out your extreme bias, noting your fringe rhetoric, noting that your position's support is almost as low as the support for 9/11 Truther claims and Moon-landing denial/doubt, and noting that even many of your fellow lone-gunman theorists don't stoop to making your ridiculous argument--in your mind this somehow illustrates "the very points" you're making? I think that says volumes about your lack of critical thinking skills and fringe mindset.

Sensible, mainstream, educated people are going to conclude that you have discredited yourself and have proved yourself to be on the fringe of the pro-WC camp.