JFK Assassination Forum
JFK Assassination Plus General Discussion & Debate => JFK Assassination Plus General Discussion And Debate => Topic started by: Lance Payette on September 30, 2025, 07:55:15 PM
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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. :D Others, and you know who they are, are badly in need of an electrician. :D
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You have a typo of omission in your seventh sentence.
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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 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 the 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. :D Others, and you know who they are, are badly in need of an electrician. :D
Oh boy. . . . Just a timely reminder that YOU AND YOUR FELLOW WC BELIEVERS belong to a minority that constitutes only 1/4 of the 1/3 of the Western world when it comes to JFK case. 2/3 to 3/4 of the people in the Western world reject your version of the shooting.
I might add that the percentage of people who agree with your view of the JFK case is not very much higher than the percentage of people who believe that some government officials knew in advance that 9/11 was going to happen and let it happen, and who have expressed doubt about the Moon landings. Wow, what great company you guys are keeping.
Finally, I would remind you that the last government investigation into the JFK assassination, the 1977-1979 HSCA investigation, concluded there was a conspiracy, that there were two gunmen, that one of the gunmen fired from the grassy knoll, that the Warren Commission failed to adequately investigate evidence of conspiracy, that Jack Ruby had significant Mafia ties, that Ruby lied about why he shot Oswald, that Ruby lied about how he entered the police basement to shoot Oswald, that someone was rearranging boxes in the sniper's window within 2 minutes after the shooting at a time when Oswald could not have been there, that JFK was first hit by a shot that was fired when the sixth-floor gunman's view of JFK would have been obstructed by the intervening oak tree, that Silvia Odio's account was credible, and that the Mafia had the motive, the means, and the opportunity to kill JFK--among other findings.
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Thank you, Exhibit A. If folks like Michael didn't exist, I'd have to invent them.
Let's see, there are 8,200,000,000 people on earth. Michael's polling indicates 6,150,000,000 of them reject the LN narrative. Well, that is pretty impressive, I must admit. When polled, I would've thought 7.9 billion or so would have answered "Who the eff was JFK?" but Michael has done the polling and I must defer to his statistics. Just to doublecheck, I did a quick but statistically significant telephone poll of some 947 residents of Lower Ooga Booga (population 951, unless Shirley had her baby) and got the anticipated response. After I explained who JFK was, some 812 did indeed reject the LN narrative.
To be strictly accurate here, I am not a "WC believer," nor do I have "fellow" believers. I am JFKA iconoclast who, until presented with compelling evidence to the contrary, provisionally believes the LN narrative is fundamentally correct while finding Lee Harvey a sympathetic figure in many respects. (This is true: While I was a student at the University of Arizona in 1968, two years after Charles Whitman had killed 14 people from his perch in the clock tower at the University of Texas, I was voted by my peers in Apache Dorm as "the dorm resident most likely to go up in a tower and shoot people." I was deeply flattered.)
And thanks to punctilious Tom as well for noting the typo of omission. It shows he's reading carefully, as he should. :D
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You and your fellow believers belong to a minority that constitutes only 1/4 of the 1/3 of the Western world when it comes to JFK case. 2/3 to 3/4 of the people in the Western world reject your version of the shooting.
Dear Comrade Griffith,
You're absolutely right for once, and it shows that your beloved(?) KGB* has been very effective in zombifying oodles and gobs of gullible people (I used to be one, myself) virtually since Day One through the works of fellow travelers (or worse) like Joachim Joesten, Thomas G. Buchanan, Mark Lane, Oliver Stone, Jefferson Morley, and James DiEugenio, et al. ad nauseam.
*Today's SVR and FSB
-- Tom
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Thank you, Exhibit A. If folks like Michael didn't exist, I'd have to invent them.
Let's see, there are 8,200,000,000 people on earth. Michael's polling indicates 6,150,000,000 of them reject the LN narrative. Well, that is pretty impressive, I must admit. When polled, I would've thought 7.9 billion or so would have answered "Who the eff was JFK?" but Michael has done the polling and I must defer to his statistics. Just to doublecheck, I did a quick but statistically significant telephone poll of some 947 residents of Lower Ooga Booga (population 951, unless Shirley had her baby) and got the anticipated response. After I explained who JFK was, some 812 did indeed reject the LN narrative.
To be strictly accurate here, I am not a "WC believer," nor do I have "fellow" believers. I am JFKA iconoclast who, until presented with compelling evidence to the contrary, provisionally believes the LN narrative is fundamentally correct while finding Lee Harvey a sympathetic figure in many respects. (This is true: While I was a student at the University of Arizona in 1968, two years after Charles Whitman had killed 14 people from his perch in the clock tower at the University of Texas, I was voted by my peers in Apache Dorm as "the dorm resident most likely to go up in a tower and shoot people." I was deeply flattered.)
And thanks to punctilious Tom as well for noting the typo of omission. It shows he's reading carefully, as he should. :D
He said "of the Western world" and he's right (for the reasons I mention in my post).
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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'm a Christian who believes in the rapture of the Church, and sane. :)
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?
I believe in a conspiracy that involved Oswald. I may be in the minority, but he was no "patsy".
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 the 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. :D Others, and you know who they are, are badly in need of an electrician. :D
Hey, there are LN's who actually believe Jack Ruby was this nice guy who Killed Oswald to protect Jackie. It goes both ways.
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He said "of the Western world" and he's right (for the reasons I mention in my post).
Ah, indeed he did. "Western world" is kind of an imprecise term, but the always-reliable AI tells me there are about 1,200,000,000 people in the Western world. This means only 900,000,000 reject the LN narrative, which is much better. Since Lower Ooga Booga is in Upper Eurasia, I called back the residents and apologized for having bothered them (Shirley says hi to all). This means, according to my polling, that of the remaining 7,000,000,000 in the non-Western world, some 5.8 billion are firm WC believers and the rest are Muslim jihadists who don't believe anything that isn't in the Quran. 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.
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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. :D
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.
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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
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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.
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Did Shirley have her baby? This is what is most important right now.
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Did Shirley have her baby? This is what is most important right now.
:D :D :D
Shirley had TWINS, and the little punks have ALREADY rejected the LN narrative!
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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. :D Others, and you know who they are, are badly in need of an electrician. :D
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.
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You show yourself to have a juvenile, uncritical, and fringe mindset ...
And proud of it! It's one of my most endearing qualities. :D
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? :D
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! :D
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. Thumb1:
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And proud of it! It's one of my most endearing qualities. :D
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? :D
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! :D
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.
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Because I am in desperate fear that Michael might actually know something I don't, I asked two AI sources to provide me with data on the percentage of those in the Western world who believe a conspiracy was responsible for the death of JFK. Alas, AI couldn't even fake it. It noted that there are no statistics outside of the U.S., so we unfortunately do not have the opinions of approximately 900,000,000 non-U.S. residents of the Western world.
One AI source did offer this for the UK, which casts grave doubt on Michael's figures: "A 2012 YouGov poll found that 48% of Britons believed Oswald was the assassin, while 17% thought someone else was responsible. Another 35% were unsure." Oops - huh, Michael?
Just to be fair and try to get SOME idea, my team did a telephone poll of 875 residents of Finland, asking "Do you believe Oswald acted alone in killing JFK?" The responses broke down as follows:
Ya, for sure, George Clooney is my favorite actor - 12%
Ya, for sure, Oswald killed Nixon - 18%
No, for sure, Hickey killed JFK - 6%
Is JFK dead? - 12%
Mistä ihmeestä tässä on kyse? - 11% (Roughly, "What the hell is this all about?")
No, for sure, I don't like Trump - 9%
Ya, for sure, Trump is the best - 15%
How did you get my phone number? - 8%
What do I win if I say no? - 7%
What do I win if I say yes? - 3%
In short, just about as expected. If we extrapolate these figures to the entire Western World, approximately 72,000,000 people think Hickey killed JFK - which sounds about right, doesn't it?
The absurdity of all this, as previously noted, is that (1) there has been a constant drumbeat of "Conspiracy!" in the media for 62 years because "No conspiracy!" is not exactly breaking news; (2) most people know less about the JFKA than I know about your Aunt Tilly's second husband Fred; (3) when people agree with polls, they mean nothing more specific than "I've heard so much about so many different conspiracies that I suppose there must be something to at least one of them."
You might be amazed to learn that some 6%-10% of Americans actually think the Moon landing was faked. I had no idea ANYONE did. My eyes were opened last year on a now-defunct forum called White Horse Theology. The site owner was a very intelligent, very successful, theologically savvy guy with whom I had interacted and shared PMs on several other forums. To my utter astonishment, he revealed himself to be both a very serious Flat Earther and an equally serious Fake Moon Landing proponent. He became ENRAGED when I refused to believe he was serious. One more proof of the axiom which served me well throughout my legal career: "Just because someone is educated, successful, and seems sane and reasonable in every other area of life, do not assume that he is not completely insane in some corner of his mind."
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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.
BTW, just curious: Does this polemic apply to all the Democrats who still believe that Trump conspired with Putin to rig the 2016 election? Do they suffer from aberrant brain wiring? Does it apply to all the Democrats who still believe that Republicans stole the 2018 election for governor in Georgia from Stacey Abrams? Another example of an aberrant mindset? Does it apply to all the Democrats and Republicans who acknowledge the Iran-Contra conspiracy and attempted cover-up that Congress exposed in 1987? Were all the congressional and Justice Department investigators who concluded Iran-Contra was a large-scale conspiracy suffering from aberrant brain wiring?
Or, how about all the Democrats who continue to argue that Bush stole the 2000 election by colluding with Republicans on the U.S. Supreme Court to halt the recount in Florida? How about the Democrats who continue to claim that Bush stole the 2004 election by hacking the vote-counting software in Ohio? How about the Republicans who still believe that a massive voter-fraud conspiracy stole the 2020 election for Biden? How about all the Democrats, including Gov. Gavin Newsom of CA, who have been claiming that Trump is sending National Guard troops into blue states to prepare for cancelling the 2028 election? Are all these folks suffering from an aberrant mindset?
Or, how about all the California state and city investigators who concluded there was a massive conspiracy among many LAPD officers to frame blacks for crimes they didn't commit? I refer, of course, to the Rampart scandal that was exposed in the 1990s and early 2000s. Surely it's "aberrant" to think that so many police officers would conspire to frame innocent minorities! Oh, wait! This was actually proven, and the city of LA paid millions of dollars in damages to settle the lawsuits resulting from the exposure of the conspiracy. But, hey, when news reports on the scandal first surfaced, LAPD and LA city officials dismissed the reports as "baseless rumor," "conspiracy theory," "nuts," "crazy talk," etc.
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BTW, just curious: Does this polemic apply to all the Democrats who still believe that Trump conspired with Putin to rig the 2016 election? Do they suffer from aberrant brain wiring? Does it apply to all the Democrats who still believe that Republicans stole the 2018 election for governor in Georgia from Stacey Abrams? Another example of an aberrant mindset? Does it apply to all the Democrats and Republicans who acknowledge the Iran-Contra conspiracy and attempted cover-up that Congress exposed in 1987? Were all the congressional and Justice Department investigators who concluded Iran-Contra was a large-scale conspiracy suffering from aberrant brain wiring?
Or, how about all the Democrats who continue to argue that Bush stole the 2000 election by colluding with Republicans on the U.S. Supreme Court to halt the recount in Florida? How about the Democrats who continue to claim that Bush stole the 2004 election by hacking the vote-counting software in Ohio? How about the Republicans who still believe that a massive voter-fraud conspiracy stole the 2020 election for Biden? How about all the Democrats, including Gov. Gavin Newsom of CA, who have been claiming that Trump is sending National Guard troops into blue states to prepare for cancelling the 2028 election? Are all these folks suffering from an aberrant mindset?
Or, how about all the California state and city investigators who concluded there was a massive conspiracy among many LAPD officers to frame blacks for crimes they didn't commit? I refer, of course, to the Rampart scandal that was exposed in the 1990s and early 2000s. Surely it's "aberrant" to think that so many police officers would conspire to frame innocent minorities! Oh, wait! This was actually proven, and the city of LA paid millions of dollars in damages to settle the lawsuits resulting from the exposure of the conspiracy. But, hey, when news reports on the scandal first surfaced, LAPD and LA city officials dismissed the reports as "baseless rumor," "conspiracy theory," "nuts," "crazy talk," etc.
Mr. Griffith... Lance Payette's point, which may have went over your head, is that your percentage of those who believe Kennedy was assassinated as a result of a conspiracy means nothing when 98% of those polled have only heard terms like "grassy knoll" and "magic bullet" and have no idea who Ruth Paine and J.D. Tippit are.
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BTW, just curious: Does this polemic apply to all the Democrats who still believe that Trump conspired with Putin to rig the 2016 election? Do they suffer from aberrant brain wiring? Does it apply to all the Democrats who still believe that Republicans stole the 2018 election for governor in Georgia from Stacey Abrams? Another example of an aberrant mindset? Does it apply to all the Democrats and Republicans who acknowledge the Iran-Contra conspiracy and attempted cover-up that Congress exposed in 1987? Were all the congressional and Justice Department investigators who concluded Iran-Contra was a large-scale conspiracy suffering from aberrant brain wiring?
Or, how about all the Democrats who continue to argue that Bush stole the 2000 election by colluding with Republicans on the U.S. Supreme Court to halt the recount in Florida? How about the Democrats who continue to claim that Bush stole the 2004 election by hacking the vote-counting software in Ohio? How about the Republicans who still believe that a massive voter-fraud conspiracy stole the 2020 election for Biden? How about all the Democrats, including Gov. Gavin Newsom of CA, who have been claiming that Trump is sending National Guard troops into blue states to prepare for cancelling the 2028 election? Are all these folks suffering from an aberrant mindset?
Or, how about all the California state and city investigators who concluded there was a massive conspiracy among many LAPD officers to frame blacks for crimes they didn't commit? I refer, of course, to the Rampart scandal that was exposed in the 1990s and early 2000s. Surely it's "aberrant" to think that so many police officers would conspire to frame innocent minorities! Oh, wait! This was actually proven, and the city of LA paid millions of dollars in damages to settle the lawsuits resulting from the exposure of the conspiracy. But, hey, when news reports on the scandal first surfaced, LAPD and LA city officials dismissed the reports as "baseless rumor," "conspiracy theory," "nuts," "crazy talk," etc.
You are missing the point because you aren't familiar with the professional literature. Aberrant conspiratorial thinking is not determined by the conspiracies in which one believes. Not everyone who thinks a conspiracy was involved in the JFKA would be characterized as aberrant or conspiracy prone. The aberrant conspiratorial thinking that is of interest to neurologists, psychologists and sociologists is typified by specific characteristics. It's why many of those who would be characterized as aberrant or conspiracy prone believe in more than one conspiracy theory that the rest of us would regard as irrational. These folks apply the same aberrant thinking to multiple events or situations.
The term "conspiracy theorist" does not mean "anyone who believes in a conspiratorial explanation for an event that the majority think can be explained in non-conspiratorial terms." Pretty much everyone would qualify as a "conspiracy theorist" by that extremely broad definition. Richard's pithy post captures the sort of thinking that is of interest to neurologists, psychologists and sociologists:
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.
You have done on this thread exactly what the literature predicts: You insist your views are "normal," indeed they are the "majority" view, and it is those who disagree with you who are aberrant. Everything is fake, everything is manipulated, the absence of evidence is evidence, nothing is real, and on and on and on. When you insist the majority of people think there was a conspiracy in the JFKA, you lump everyone together and ignore that the vast majority of your supposed fellow conspiracy theorists would recognize thinking such as yours as extreme and aberrant if not irrational.
To amplify Richard's post, the following is pretty good. Even within the category of aberrant conspiracy thinking there are gradations and variations, but in general this is what neurologists, psychologists and sociologists are interested in studying:
Aberrant or extreme conspiratorial thinking is characterized by a combination of cognitive biases, personality traits, and emotional factors that lead to the unwarranted belief in secret plots by malevolent groups. This type of thinking is not only resistant to evidence but also often reinforces itself through a series of logical fallacies.
Cognitive and epistemic characteristics
Immunity to evidence: Aberrant conspiratorial thinking is resistant to contradictory evidence. Evidence against the conspiracy is reinterpreted as further proof that the cover-up is working. Likewise, a lack of evidence is seen as confirmation of a sophisticated plot.
Perceiving danger and threat: Individuals with aberrant conspiratorial thinking often have a heightened sense of threat and are prone to perceiving danger in their environment.
Overriding suspicion: There is a persistent and generalized suspicion of powerful entities, including government agencies, officials, and scientists, assuming they have nefarious intentions.
Monological belief system: This refers to a belief system in which multiple different conspiracy theories are linked together and support one another, creating an internally coherent but isolated view of the world. Belief in one conspiracy theory increases the likelihood of believing in others, even if they contradict.
Proportionality bias: A tendency to believe that significant events must have significant causes. For instance, a major event like a plane crash must have a complex, sinister explanation rather than a mundane one, like mechanical failure.
Intuitive processing: Believers often rely heavily on intuition and "gut feelings" rather than on analytical, rational problem-solving. They trust their own interpretations over expert consensus or official explanations.
Epistemic self-insulation: The belief system is constructed to be resistant to outside questioning. Any contradictory information is automatically dismissed as "disinformation" from the very conspiracy being theorized, effectively insulating the theory from neutral analysis.
Teleological thinking: The aberrant tendency to excessively believe that events happen for a specific reason rather than occurring randomly.
Personality and motivational characteristics
Paranoid ideation: High levels of excessive suspiciousness and paranoia are strongly correlated with conspiratorial beliefs. Believers often attribute hostile intent to others without sufficient evidence.
Antagonism and superiority: Many individuals who strongly believe in conspiracy theories feel a sense of antagonism toward others and a sense of superiority over those who do not share their "awakened" worldview.
Narcissism: Vulnerable narcissism, which involves a mix of grandiosity and insecurity, is associated with a belief in conspiracy theories.
Need for uniqueness: The desire to feel special or unique can be a driving factor. Adhering to a conspiracy theory allows one to feel they possess exclusive knowledge that others lack.
Distrust and alienation: Individuals with aberrant conspiratorial thinking are often alienated from social institutions and mainstream culture. Exposure to conspiracy theories can further erode trust and lead to a retreat from civic engagement.
Emotional characteristics
Anxiety and insecurity: Heightened feelings of anxiety, insecurity, and powerlessness are common in individuals drawn to conspiracy theories. The theories can provide a sense of making sense of a chaotic or frightening world, even if that explanation is false.
Emotional reasoning: Reliance on emotions, rather than logic or facts, to evaluate information. A theory that "feels" right may be accepted as truth.
Feeling victimized: Some conspiratorial beliefs are rooted in a sense of being victimized, either personally or as part of a group. This can motivate suspicion of powerful out-groups perceived as the source of the harm.
Anyway, enough. Have the last word if you like.
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Does this polemic apply to all the Democrats who still believe that Trump conspired with Putin to rig the 2016 election?
Your analogy is specious for the following, among other, reasons:
1) At a 27 July 2016 rally, Trump said, "Russia, if you're listening, I hope you're able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing, I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press." We know that Putin's GRU send phishing emails for the first time to accounts at a domain used by Hillary Clinton's personal office within five hours of that remark.
2) In early 2016, former Watergate attorney Douglas Caddy was asked by Harley Schlanger of the pro-Russia Lyndon LaRouche organization to be introduced to Caddy's former colleague, Roger Stone, shortly after Schlanger and some other Larouche members had returned from Moscow where they probably attended the infamous RT Dinner where Mike Flynn (who is probably "Q" in the QAnon cult) and Jill "Anti-Vax" Stein sat at the same table with Vladimir Putin. Caddy arranged for Schlanger and Stone to meet at a restaurant in Austin, Texas, in April 2016. After the meeting, Stone, who had been an adviser to Trump's 2016 presidential campaign before he left it on 8 August 2015, sent Caddy a "thank you" email in which he mentioned that he and Schlanger were "fighting the Globalists" and that he had "a back channel to Trump." Caddy notified Robert Mueller and James Comey of this in 2017, but apparently neither of them investigated it.
3) Trump's campaign chairman, Paul Manafort, gave Trump campaign polling data for three "swing" states to his pro-Yanukovich business partner, GRU officer Konstantine Kilimnik, to give to one of Putin's closest Oligarchs, Dmitry Polyakov. This polling data was probably used by Putin's professional St. Petersburg trolls to "target" voters in those states in order to either encourage them to vote for Trump, or, if they were pro-Hillary or Black, to not vote at all. Trump ended up "carrying" those states in the 2016 election by a total of 77,744 votes.
4) Under Trump, we are becoming more and more like Stalin-and-Putin's Russia every day.
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Mr. Griffith... Lance Payette's point, which may have went over your head, is that your percentage of those who believe Kennedy was assassinated as a result of a conspiracy means nothing when 98% of those polled have only heard terms like "grassy knoll" and "magic bullet" and have no idea who Ruth Paine and J.D. Tippit are.
Yeah this, the other day Griffith posted his JFKA poll statistics and I pointed out that barely anyone of those polled actually know this case and I'm guessing that less than 1% have even read the Warren Report, so the information they have isn't exactly balanced and comes primarily from CT lies like Stone's JFK movie. It's like Lance says, there's an anonymous phone poll and some uninformed citizen who is only aware of the CT side and has a basic mistrust of the Government will reply "sure there was a Conspiracy"
Even myself in the early days believed in conspiracy but as time went on and I did actual research, I came to another conclusion, for instance;
• Kennedy's head goes initially forward.
• A bullet lacks the kinetic energy to throw anyone around like a rag doll.
• The authenticated autopsy photos show no exit wound to the back of Kennedy's head.
• The backyard photos showing Oswald holding the murder weapon have been authenticated 7 ways to Sunday.
• Oswald ordered, purchased and possessed the murder weapon
• Oswald killed Tippit and if Oswald wasn't in flight, why would he feel the need to kill?
• Oswald's confirmable lies while in custody.
I literally have dozens more of these facts which refute any conspiracy.
The CT's use what is known as circular logic and based on their belief that Oswald is innocent come to their conclusion that every fact that convicts Oswald must be false and since there is a mountain of evidence convicting Oswald, in turn there must be a mountain of evidence which is the product of fakery and lies. Just for example look at Griffith who literally believes that practically every single piece of evidence has been faked, like the Zapruder film, backyard photos, autopsy photos, autopsy X-rays, rifle documents the list is near endless. But when Griffith is asked how it was done, how it was planned and who had the ability to alter this massive pile of evidence, he just stares at you blankly and then goes off in search of more fakery and then seeks confirmation bias from his equally Kooky mates.
JohnM
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I finally located the book that I read a few years ago and would highly recommend to all:
Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11, by Kathryn Olmstead, https://www.amazon.com/Real-Enemies-Conspiracy-Theories-Democracy/dp/0199753954.
The point she makes is that, in every instance, there actually was malfeasance and cover-up that gave rise to wild conspiracy theories - but the wild conspiracy theories were totally unrelated to the actual malfeasance and cover-up, and the folks who screwed up could have avoided a lot of grief and wild speculation just by being honest and transparent from the get-go.
These sorts of threads always - ALWAYS - immediately turn into ad hominem catfights because CTers think they are being attacked. Those who react most strongly are always - ALWAYS - precisely who and what the professional literature is describing (and at some level they realize this, which is why they kick and scream).
It is simply a scientific truth that there is such a thing as aberrant conspiratorial thinking, and it rears its head again and again on forums such as this. I think it behooves everyone to recognize that those who propound these wild theories and make these irrational arguments are simply not thinking the same way most of us do.
There are NUMEROUS scholarly but non-technical and non-argumentative books such as the above that examine conspiratorial thinking and explain the differences between aberrant and non-aberrant. The problem is, those who would benefit the most from reading them are the least likely to do so.
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[...]
In my humble opinion, before the Administrations of The Traitorous Orange Bird (rhymes with "Xxxx"), conspiracy theorists who hated the American government (can you say the evil, evil CIA?) did so largely because they didn't realize the nature of the Communist threat against us and our NATO allies since 1959, and even if they did have an inkling, thought we should be fighting against it according to Queensbury Rules.
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Yeah this, the other day Griffith posted his JFKA poll statistics and I pointed out that barely anyone of those polled actually know this case and I'm guessing that less than 1% have even read the Warren Report, so the information they have isn't exactly balanced and comes primarily from CT lies like Stone's JFK movie. It's like Lance says, there's an anonymous phone poll and some uninformed citizen who is only aware of the CT side and has a basic mistrust of the Government will reply "sure there was a Conspiracy"
Even myself in the early days believed in conspiracy but as time went on and I did actual research, I came to another conclusion, for instance;
• Kennedy's head goes initially forward.
• A bullet lacks the kinetic energy to throw anyone around like a rag doll.
• The authenticated autopsy photos show no exit wound to the back of Kennedy's head.
• The backyard photos showing Oswald holding the murder weapon have been authenticated 7 ways to Sunday.
• Oswald ordered, purchased and possessed the murder weapon
• Oswald killed Tippit and if Oswald wasn't in flight, why would he feel the need to kill?
• Oswald's confirmable lies while in custody.
I literally have dozens more of these facts which refute any conspiracy.
The CT's use what is known as circular logic and based on their belief that Oswald is innocent come to their conclusion that every fact that convicts Oswald must be false and since there is a mountain of evidence convicting Oswald, in turn there must be a mountain of evidence which is the product of fakery and lies. Just for example look at Griffith who literally believes that practically every single piece of evidence has been faked, like the Zapruder film, backyard photos, autopsy photos, autopsy X-rays, rifle documents the list is near endless. But when Griffith is asked how it was done, how it was planned and who had the ability to alter this massive pile of evidence, he just stares at you blankly and then goes off in search of more fakery and then seeks confirmation bias from his equally Kooky mates.
JohnM
Kennedy definitely had a hole in the back of his head, too many witnesses saw it. If you look at a good copy of the Moorman photo you can see the defect. I still think that back of the head picture was taken after the morticians started reconstructing the head.
(https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEikq2BuyXwoxxSYGNoCK7M-Ygou1WxKlt0uirePHQQXN8MtNNCnKpHuGCvGB1iPTFM2Zp93F5_qlop-zjVBtLDGxU0gO1RxgK_AyaFR52GLMjBGdErUDWm9gCWgPnlW6PBBacuhyphenhyphenCTlWKY/w1200-h630-p-k-no-nu/JFK_Autopsy_Photo_1.jpg)
(https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-5fEAuCutzUs/UMiVdLK8PoI/AAAAAAAABEI/0NBQZ3aBx8A/s1600/moorman.jpg)
Mr. Hill:
The right rear portion of his head was missing. It was lying the rear seat of the car.
His brain was exposed. There was blood and bits of brain all over the entire rear portion
of the car. Mrs. Kennedy was completely covered with blood. There was so much blood
you could not tell if there had been any other wound or not, except for the one large
gaping wound in the right rear portion of the head.