I recently picked up Vincent Bugliosi’s book arguing against the conspiracy theories around the JFK assassination, titled Four Days in November. It’s over 600 pages with index and endnotes, making it a hefty trade paperback and keeping it about equal with Gerald Posner’s Case Closed.
Of course, Four Days is really just a précis, a mere summary of Bugliosi’s real work: Reclaiming History. This clocks in at over 1,600 pages and weighs over five pounds – without endnotes, which come on a CD that ships with the book and add another 1,000+ pages. It’s a work guaranteed to end any debate with a conspiracist, provided you can hit them with it.
The Atlantic called it “a magnificent and, in many ways, appalling achievement, ” which the publishers used as a blurb with some well placed ellipses.
If you total up all the pages written and research done, I suspect that those few minutes at the Daley Plaza are the most closely examined minutes in human history. More work has been done to determine exactly what happened during those minutes than any other moment, ever. And yet, we’re even more divided on what happened today than we were back then.
It’s disturbing how difficult it can be to convince people of even the simplest detail when they don’t want to hear it. Take, for example, the question of what religion the American president belongs to. Given the flap over his former preacher, you’d think most people would remember that he’s a Christian. Yet, according to the New York Times (quoting Pew Research), 18% of America now believes he’s a Muslim.
What can you do to convince people of a thing they don’t wish to believe?
What can you do to convince people of a thing they don’t wish to believe?
Nothing. The need to believe in something is too great a force to be overcome by logic, facts, and rational discourse.
The thing that people don’t get about the president’s faith is that it doesn’t matter one bit whether he’s a Christian, Muslim, or Pagan. The matter of who Obama worships (or if he does) is between him and his God and no one else.
Personally, I couldn’t care less as it’s none of my business who he bends knee to. I’ve got my own problems to worry about.
What, you mean that the president also has freedom of (and even from) religion, just like it says in the constitution? That can’t be right. [/sarcasm]
Only in so far as it has no actual bearing on his policies, since they’re supposed to be secular (according to the Constitution).
Of course, the people who claim Obama is a Muslim with a subversive religious agenda generally also fall in the group who claims that America is a Christian nation and who advocates mixing religion and governance. To them, these two should mix, but only when the religion in question is Christianity, of course. It’s what the Founding Fathers intended, etc etc.
Or to put it another way – the people who claim Obama is a Muslim tend to be Christian zealots and people who are not very bright. That’s my hypothesis anyway. Am I wrong?
Wouldn’t it be great if one day the fact that a politician believe in fairytales, regardless of the brand, will be considered a weakness.
You’re not wrong.
It matters somewhat, because belief in any god indicates a willingness to suspend reason. I’d far prefer a president who doesn’t believe in any god(s).
To quote a friend of mine, you might as well talk to them about astrophysics. They just don’t get it.
When that thing that they do not wish to believe is reality or a fact, there’s not much you can do on their end. On your end, you can try to get as far away from the results of mass-intellectual dishonesty/denial of reality as possible. The fallout will certainly be deadly.
Actually, some headway can be made if you can separate the bamboozled individual from his group of believers. This could be as dramatic as deprogramming, or as gradual as having them hang out in a different church or bar. At least, it used to be easier, before the deluded one could seek instant reinforcement on the internet.
“A person is smart. People are panicky, dumb animals, and you know it.” J – Men In Black.
Actually wasn’t it K that said that? J was Will Smith’s character.
I thought that the JFK assassination was wrapped up in Watchmen. It was the Comedian (Edward Blake). Or did I miss something?
It was also wrapped up in the X-Files too, along with the MLK assassination. It was Mulder’s boss. I forget if he had a name.
the Daley Plaza
It’s Dealey Plaza. As someone who spent nearly three decades within thirty miles of the Daley Regime in Chicago and now resides in Dallas, this is something of which I am acutely aware…
Calling it Daley Plaza is just one more inconsistency in the story! Who’s he trying to fool?
Seriously, though, if I could convince people of one thing it would be that conspiracies do happen. I’m not a wingnut, but every single story of conspiracy has its adherents in the face of all logic and its sneering opponents who feel they are better than other people just because they have a subset to dismiss as conspiracy nuts. Neither group can be right 100% of the time, and we know from the news and from political history that conspiracies can and do happen. We just tend to argue about which ones. I don’t think the moon landing was faked or Obama is a Muslim (or Muslin, as I have seen him described in scribbled signs, which would be even more difficult for him). But I do think the Warren Commission’s botching of the investigation into what happened to Kennedy, and the murder of his alleged assassin, gives enough room for questions that I think it’s unfair to suggest anyone believing in any of the JFK theories deserves to be whacked in the head with a five pound book.
I think it’s important to recognise and discuss if and how some conspiracies happen, rather than turning on each other like rabid wolves, distracted by the scent of someone who is WRONG and needs to be set RIGHT. Sometimes, there are people out there willing to take advantage of anyone and everyone for their own gain, and recognising that (correctly, of course) is the first step in combating it.
Only while the matter is still reasonably in question. I have no interest in discussing the moon landings with a moon hoaxer, because in my (fairly well informed) opinion, there is nothing left to discuss.
Discourse on issues still in doubt is good, as it leads to an increase in total information. Endlessly rehashing issues that are resolved has exactly the opposite effect.
Exactly… I think this is the agenda of social conservatives– we can never have any progress as long as we are continually rehashing old (and resolved) issues. That way, they get to conserve their bullsh*t “moral absolute” ideas– by refusing to move forward. Even though they know they are lying, they win because they get to be conservative rather than progressive.
Ty, your first sentenced ties in with an argument I see all the time in discussions of Hitchens and Dawkins et al debating Believers in formal, public forums, the quesiton being whether this is counter-productive, as it lends the other side a sense of “there IS something to debate.” Perhaps ’tis better to simply “not play?”
That’s exactly why Dawkins refuses to debate creationists, especially in a pubic made for TV type debate.
People i.e. mass impression and that too for the president comes influenced by the immense sphere the position of president involves. Certainly people would have as many opinions as their are seconds in a minute, every minute!!
This is what we call the masses.
I heard about this gigantic conspiracy theory.
According to these particular conspiracy theorists, billions of people living today have been, often cynically, deceived into believing their lives are directed by a fictional character and that they should spend a certain portion of theirs lives and their wealth worshiping this fictional character. They believe it is a conspiracy so pervasive that only a small minority of the people on earth, have managed to discover it.
That makes sense only if you also believe that no one knew about germ theory until 1700 because of a conspiracy to keep that information from them.
Or if people conspire to perpetuate a false reality.
“Conspiracy theory” is an arbitrary label used to marginalize a certain set of ideas. Turn about is fair play.
For a lot of folks, there is NOTHING you can do. If someone has a strong enough emotional attachment to whatever his/her wingnut theory is, they cannot be dislodged from it by anything. In many cases, any attempt to convince them otherwise … no matter how compelling or incontrovertible it might be … actually reinforces the erroneous belief, and the person will grip it even harder than s/he did previously.
Whenever emotion and intellect struggle for a person’s attention and loyalty, emotion always wins. Count on it. Humanity is doomed.
No wonder my wife always win in argument with me.
There’s a lot of emphasis in trusting your gut and feeling things in your heart. You can tell someone something true if they believe something false, show them all the evidence to back it up, and they might even say it makes a lot of sense, but they have to go with their gut and/or heart feelings. The more evidence you can show them, the more their gut and/or heart will counter you with someone is lying, that the truth is well-arranged to fool people into believing it is true, e.g. the scientific community is conspiratorial. It all fits together neatly, but um, gonna have to listen to my gut and/or heart on this. They have all believed utter nonsense and obfuscated well the truth of god, they avoid answering questions like the missing missing missing link, and what happened right before the big bang, so you can’t really trust anything they all agree with, they’re all victims of the mastermind satan who has arranged the whole universe to appear this way only to fools who don’t believe in god.
If you know something in your gut or heart, you are not willing to admit that hearts and guts are not reliable, and find any way to accept the truth, even if you agree it makes a lot of sense on the surface. There’s always something shady about it or incomplete or just doesn’t match up… doesn’t match up with the gut and/or heart.
… any way to avoid accepting the truth, is what I meant to say. Darn missing words!
I used to argue occasionally with nutcases online on politicalcrossfire.com. One guy in particular was so crazy it was almost impossible to interpret what he was saying. Imagine having a debate with Gene Ray about telepathy and you will begin to understand my frustration.
It looks like the worst of his threads have been deleted, but he had so many that were amusing, from insisting that the Earth was shaped like a toroid to stating that the pyramids served as anchors for a floating city to discovering that the real cause of obesity was the increase in the planet’s mass from cometary debris.
He also has a blog: resuscitatehumanity.blogspot.com.
Getting people to change their minds about what they believe is easy. Just make them afraid. This is a lesson the right wing has learned well–you get more votes when you play on people’s fear than by common sense and well-reasoned arguments. Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh are getting rich by doing this.
Sometimes I think that progressive should do the same thing, but I don’t know if I want to be a part of stooping to such a loathsome tactic.
Re: “Getting people to change their minds about what they believe is easy. Just make them afraid.”
Sure, this tactic works. It’s been known for a long time. The Nazis did a pretty good job of exploiting it. Which is ironic, since it’s guys like Beck and Limbaugh who also love to accuse Obama and Democrats of being latter-day Hitlers.
Of course, just by pointing this out, I’ve tripped over Godwin’s Law. Oh well.
Anyway, I should also point out that the Left has also used “appeals to fear” in its own manner. All the talk about how Bush and Cheney were fascists who were trying to turn the US into a police state … well, it goes without saying that it’s all pretty much the same crap, just tucked inside a different wrapper.
Just goes to show how true it is that “there’s nothing new under the sun” (Eccl 1:9c). (Not that I put much stock in the veracity of Bible verses … that one verse turns out to be very true.)
“the Left has also used “appeals to fear” in its own manner. All the talk about how Bush and Cheney were fascists who were trying to turn the US into a police state … ”
Was this a fear tactic or a fair assessment of the situation? The scales don’t always balance that way. Fear and obstruction. These are associated most with the greater of the two evils.
I don’t see how the Left accusing Bush & Cheney of creating a “police state” can possibly be a “fair assessment,” since — quite obviously — they never actually turned the US into a police state. It’s an appeal to fear, based on Leftist extrapolations of things that Bush & Cheney actually did (e.g. the “enemy combatants” captured abroad and held at Guantanamo Bay).
I’m not saying that Bush & Cheney never did anything wrong. Nor am I saying the Left was wrong to say so. What I am saying is that some on the Left purposely overstated the facts in order to play on people’s fears, and wove delusional scenarios that never actually occurred.
It’s all very similar to what the Right is doing now, when it declares that Obama and the Dems are “socialists” who want to “destroy” businesses and “take over” the US. As I said … same crap, different wrapper.
And Americans, by and large, tend to fall for it.
I agree with you to an extent, but while both sides are flinging feces, the biggest pile of shit is clearly on the right, at least in the U.S. I have never seen anything coming out of the left–even at their most extreme–that can compare to what I have seen from the Tea Party, for example.
Here we go with the equivocating, measuring, parsing, and relativizing. Honestly, I don’t give a crap which side lies “more” than any other. It doesn’t become OK for one side to lie, because they happen to do a little less lying than another.
That kind of thinking amounts to a permission slip for EVERYONE to lie, as much as they want, whenever they want … because at any moment, it’s always possible to find some lies being told by one’s opponents, and then use them as an excuse for one’s own lies.
None of that matters. Lying is lying. Period. A little less lying is still lying. The amount of it does not matter. NO lying from public officials is ever permissible or acceptable. It’s just not. The American public has, for WAY too long, accepted disingenuity from public officials … on the grounds that “the ends justify the means” or “the other side is doing it too” or the corollary “the other side is doing more of it than we are.” They find it emotionally satisfying to hear lies that support their own subjective beliefs … but that does not grant the lies any veracity, nor does it make the lying moral.
It needs to stop. And it needs to stop now. One side or the other is going to have to be the first to stop doing it. If it’s not going to start with the Right, then it needs to start with the Left. Yes, I know, that will appear to put them at a disadvantage initially … but too bad. As I said, it has to start somewhere. And the Left is hardly guiltless. So if there’s a price to be paid for changing their policy of lying, they need to “man up,” take their lumps, pay that price, and then move forward.
The alternative is an endless escalation of lying, because “the other side’s” ramped-up lying is viewed as granting permission to one’s own to lie more often … which in turn encourages even more lying by the other side … and on and on it goes.
If that’s what you prefer, be my guest. But I’m not going to play that game.
I think you are missing my point. I never said that the absurdity of the right justified mendacity from the left, I just said that it’s not fair to blame all sides equally. Similarly, I don’t think Palestine’s attacks on Israel justifies Israel’s inhumane retaliations, but I also don’t think the two are equally wrong.
I guess I was objecting to your equating the tactics on the left and right, because I really don’t think they are equivalent.
I agree with you PsiCop that the lies by all sides need to stop. I think both the left and right would die out if honesty became the way of people. Both sides seem to be more about control then rights. It is a nice dream to hope that the lies will stop but for that to happen power must be given up and we know many enjoy that power more then they believe in the rights of others.
As to the disagreement about Homeland security and the SS, look at what they are doing not what the words translate to. No the Homeland hasn’t been as bad as the SS but how many members of it would like to do these things? Were the abuses that were committed by the torturers of muslims doing so on orders from Homeland and the Executive branch?
ditto
” they never actually turned the US into a police state.”
It wasn’t from lack of trying.
Irrelevant. It never happened. Therefore the scaremongering was disingenuous.
They were on their way. Homeland Security, when translated into German is Schutzstaffel–S.S.
And now that I’ve broken Godwin’s Law, maybe we can let this discussion finally die.
When is telling the truth scaremongering? The Bush/Cheney agenda was scary. Their opponents were not making it up. On the other hand Kang uses wedge issues more so than Kronos.
My father would say that trying to convince people of something they did not want to believer was like teaching pigs to sing – it wastes your time and annoys the pig. I discuss with those who are open to another viewpoint but try not to waste my time by working on those whose minds are fully closed. I have a customer who is very religious and who also believes every conspiracy theory he hears. I usually just let him rant on about his latest obsession but I know I will not convert him to any more sensible beliefs. The poorly named History Channel has him as a captive. He watches every UFO, every Kennedy conspiracy story that they run and argues it must be true because they are the history channel. A few times I tried to explain critical listening to him but gave up and just enjoy hearing the latest nonsense.
I’ve always found Bugliosi interesting. His first book, Helter Skelter, would be a great primer for a lawyer who wanted to handle an appeal for Manson. I may check it out if it makes into the fictionware library so I can read it on my Treo.
As a side note, I also find Bugliosi interesting … if also a bit bombastic. I read his book about the O.J. Simpson trial, in which he rips everyone involved a new one; it was enlightening, but there was more than a whiff of “if I had been the prosecutor on this case, O.J. would have been fried already,” and that was slightly off-putting. (I dislike “armchair quarterbacking.”) At any rate, aside from this distasteful angle, Bugliosi did a fair job of articulating the several failures in the O.J. case, and did so in ways the rest of the mass media would not have dared suggest.
Re: Dee Brown: “They were on their way. Homeland Security, when translated into German is Schutzstaffel–S.S.
And now that I’ve broken Godwin’s Law, maybe we can let this discussion finally die.”
Thank you! You’ve just made my point for me, in a way I never could have hoped for. “They were on their way?” Who, exactly, was this “they”? From where, exactly, were they coming? What, exactly, were they going to do once they arrived?
Details matter, you see. You cannot accuse people of doing something — or merely of wanting to do something — without offering specifics about their plans. Generalities are cheap, useless, and have no meaning. Weaving generalized fantasies about people, without offering specifics or any tangible evidence, is exactly the kind of “appeal to fear” that I’m talking about. It’s dishonest, and it needs to stop.
As for the translation of “Schutzstaffel” … it has typically been translated as “protection squadron.” Now, this might — metaphorically — refer to “homeland security,” but strictly speaking, it doesn’t. So there, again, you exaggerate, in order to support your beliefs.
I am not saying Bush and Cheney were angels. I am also not saying they did nothing wrong. I’ve said that already, and I’m repeating it, because I predict accusations of “BUSHCO APOLOGIST!” being leveled at me. I am no apologist for Bush or Cheney or any of their militant crew.
What I am saying is that the Left HAS lied about them, and that this lying continues (because, you see, you just did it! Twice!). What I am saying is that ALL IDEOLOGIES are guilty of lying about their opponents. ALL of them. ALL the time. EVERY time. An ideologue CAN NEVER tell the truth about his/her opponents … not even at gunpoint. They are neurophysiologically incapable of it.
I am also saying that it needs to stop. Lying by the Left … no matter how little of it there may be … is NOT acceptable, merely because the Right lies more than they do.
First off, it was my husband, a native speaker of German, who told me that S. S. translated to Homeland Security.
Sigh. I should have known you couldn’t let this go. Whenever someone gets shrill and starts saying the same thing over and over, and adding all caps and italics, it’s time to pat him on the head and return to adult conversations.
Sigh. You just proved the point of the article, which is that people refuse to let go of irrational beliefs, even after having contrary facts explained to them.
As for the translation of “Schutzstaffel” … I got that from a native German in my own family — one who actually lived in that country during the Third Reich when the S.S. was active. You will also find the same translation in any reference work you care to look at.
So … I simply do not believe you on the matter. I just don’t.
Lastly … calling me “shrill” is a childish antic. It does not make me any less correct than I am, nor does it grant your delusions any veracity. It does, however, demonstrate that you’ve been infantilized by lunatic Leftist rants, and no longer know any better. That doesn’t mean lunatic Rightist rants are any better; as far as I’m concerned, as someone who refuses to get in bed with any ideology, it means the whole bunch of you — both Left and Right — deserve each other.
Have fun in the playpen of ideology.
You cannot change an irrational person’s mind with reason and logic. They are irrational because they reject reason and logic. And by definition, fundies in whatever religion is irrational because they have to suspend reason and logic to believe whatever skydaddy they choose.
I’ve learned a long time ago not to “debate” fundies any more, becuase it is just painfully pointless. my fellow free thinkers, you may feel that you have facts and evidence on your side, but to the fundies, anything, no matter how factual, reasonable, logical you may present to them, no matter how good of an intention you may have in presenting it to them, they will only see it as an attack on their faith and make them retreat into that little hard shelf they have constructed.
I was quoting Bible verses where it supports and instruct the proper keeping of slaves as proof that the slavery is allowed by God. The response I got from my fundie friend was not a feww verses indicating otherwise, it was “we will have to agree to disagree”. That was pretty much when I saw the light and stopped engaging him in anything intellectual.