Steven Pinker explains the cognitive biases we all suffer from and how they can short-circuit rational thinking and lead us into believing stupid things. Skip to 12:15 to bypass the preamble.
Steven Pinker explains the cognitive biases we all suffer from and how they can short-circuit rational thinking and lead us into believing stupid things. Skip to 12:15 to bypass the preamble.
So who really killed Kennedy?
Likely Lee Harvey Oswald, but that doesn’t mean that he was acting alone. The fact that he was killed before he could testify could indicate a cover-up.
I believe that Dulles orchestrated the assassination. The CIA had been assassinating democratically elected leaders in every far corner of the globe, if they were willing to overthrow the government of Guatemala over some bananas, I find it hard to believe that they didn’t have a plan for what to do in the event that a US president went against their interests.
Dulles had both the means and motive to pull it off and cover it up afterwards, that doesn’t conclusively prove he did it, but it’s enough to establish reasonable suspicion.
So you genuinely believe the conspiracy theory that the CIA was behind the Kennedy assassination?
That’s got to be the OG of conspiracy theories.
I do. That something is a conspiracy theory does not make it false, conspiracies do happen. For a long time, it would’ve been a conspiracy theory to say that the CIA was behind the 1953 Iranian coup, for instance. They covered it up for decades before finally admitting to it. The person who first broke the Watergate story was a woman named Martha Mitchell, who was branded as crazy and delusional before it was revealed that she was right. The government’s illegal mass surveillance program was long dismissed as a conspiracy theory before Edward Snowden came forward with proof.
Placing these sorts of things on the same level as things that are scientifically proven to be false is harmful, both because it gives undue credibility to the government, and detracts from the credibility of science. There are scientific means of proving that the moon landing was real, that 9/11 was not faked, that the earth is not flat, that evolution happens, etc. But those things are categorically different from reasonable speculation about what intelligence agencies may be up to behind closed doors, in the absence of conclusive proof.