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

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

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

― anvil

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

C. Wright Mills' The Power Elite to thread!