> Probably if you're about to comment on this post, you've got some motivated reasoning behind it that has nothing to do with finding out what really happened.

I'm not sure that's true in this case. I remember 9/11, but I wasn't even born yet when the Kennedy assassination happened. I doubt that many people under age 70 remember that personally. It doesn't really have emotional salience for most people now. For me, it's merely a curiosity, and I can't say that the truth of the matter is important to me either way.

Even if there was a conspiracy to kill JFK, I don't see how it's relevant to current politics, and the possible players involved are no longer relevant either. Joe Biden himself, old as he is, was only 21 at the time and still in college.

> Even if there was a conspiracy to kill JFK, I don't see how it's relevant to current politics...

A group with that much power - to kill a president then get it covered up - is not going to just fade away quietly. It'd have to be a powerful group and powerful groups have a habit of lasting beyond the lives of the members.

If it turned out that there was a conspiracy it is actually quite likely that the group that organised it are still active. Picking on one from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_F._Kennedy_assassination_... that would make a good story ... if it was the Israelis there'd be no reason to believe they stopped. It'd put Jeff Epstein's kompromat operation in a new light if they were trying to manage US politics.

> A group with that much power - to kill a president then get it covered up - is not going to just fade away quietly. It'd have to be a powerful group and powerful groups have a habit of lasting beyond the lives of the members.

> If it turned out that there was a conspiracy it is actually quite likely that the group that organised it are still active.

I don't think these are correct assumptions. Sixty years is a long time, and the world has changed a lot. The Soviet Union is a shell of its former self (hence the current Ukraine conflict), Fidel Castro is dead, etc.

> if it was the Israelis

IMO this is one of the dumber and least plausible of the conspiracy theories.

What are we even to conclude from this, though? Of course Israel still exists, but what exactly are you trying to imply about the current situation? Netanyahu, by the way, was 14 years old in 1963 and was actually living in Pennsylvania, US at the time.

> there'd be no reason to believe they stopped

Stopped what?

If the JFK and RFK assassinations were done by secret services it seems to make a lot of sense (psychologically) that they'd use people that were the "opposite" of themselves as patsies.

So some right-wing CIA people (and their Mafia/Anti-Castro helpers) used a left-wing communist Oswald as the patsy for JFK. There was a lot of motive for these people to kill JFK

And then some Jewish Israel Mossad people copycatted for the RFK assassination, using a Muslim Palestinian as their patsy. There was a lot of motive for these people to kill RFK. (And I shouldn't have to say this, but I'm Jewish, so this isn't an antisemitic thing.)

But I agree with the point that it mostly doesn't have much impact on the modern world. Whoever was involved in these assassinations doesn't hold power any more. They're dead.

No kind of reconciliation process is truly required to prevent this kind of thing in the future. The world has changed and that's why these kind of political assassinations aren't used in the west today.

Not because there aren't people that wouldn't love to have this tool. It's just not as viable as it was in the time before mass surveillance and uncontrollable information flows.

Try to imagine pulling off the RFK or JFK assassinations with a large number of uncontrolled smartphones posting and even live streaming to the internet.

Shinzo Abe was killed last year.

It's not some grand conspiracy, just some guy with a gun.

I can imagine pulling off JFK 2.0... but I don't want to.

Surveillance cements consequences.

If it was Israel, then who cares? Are we doing diplomacy by assassination now? The reality of politically motivated, err, unpleasantness, has existed forever.

Let's not forget the 20yr war that happened straight after 9/11. Less killing the better, and a death in cabinet doesn't always get the change 'the powerful group' may want.

I'd be more worried about getting on a submarine with a console controller now.

Of course actual unhinged will try to assassinate people. That's to be expected in a world with so many people.

What has changed is that covert political assassinations by the secret services of nation states is no longer a viable strategy the way it was when JFK and RFK were killed.

Not even the Mossad is good enough to pull it off these days, and they're probably the best in the world: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_of_Mahmoud_Al-Ma...

True, Mossad directly is probably a stretch. Though if they do it right, we should never know that they did it.

Soo.. an intelligence firm that needs to be advertized or spoken of.. is a little strange.

As catch rates go up, the more unhinged your assassin needs to be, so why not take a step back and influence the 'unhinged' single adult male, via the internet and never even raise an eyebrow?

The atmosphere of ambiguity around the world, is thick and dense lately...

The problem with the unhinged is that they're also incompetent, generally. Abe was only susceptible to an unhinged assassin because its Japan and violence/guns are so rare, security is/was so lax. Getting close to Abe, even when he as the PM, was incredibly easy. Hopefully the lesson has been learned there, as it already has been in most other countries.

I'm sure the secret services have come up with creative things. The Russians sometimes use poison when abroad, but even that is usually discovered now due to sophisticated hospitals.

The old tricks of discrediting, bribing, and blackmailing are probably still just as effective as ever. Maybe more so.

> I doubt that many people under age 70 remember that personally.

I think OP's point is that personal remembrance, direct knowledge/witness, or subject matter expertise is not a requirement when it comes to defending one's strongly invested world view. Instead of looking at evidence, people start with a vague belief about the world and then draw the lines between everything that happens and that world view.

For example: "There are inscrutable elites that operate in secret to control the world." This is a vague and close to impossible-to-prove assertion, but people believe it strongly, and they use this world view to explain everything they have questions about. JFK was obviously assassinated for going against the Shadowy Elite! If you take your belief as a given, many wild explanations simply follow logically. 9/11 was orchestrated by this Elite to [do whatever The Elite does, there are a wide range of speculation even among the "shadowy elite" believers]. COVID was planned by The Elite. It goes on and on, and everything makes sense when you're working from that one assumption.

If you argue with someone against any of these particular things, you're not going to get anywhere because disproving even one of these calls into question the world view that all his other beliefs are pinned to.

EDIT: Parent commenter I see what you're saying now and yea I totally agree!

> If you argue with someone against any of these particular things, you're not going to get anywhere because disproving even one of these calls into question the world view that all his other beliefs are pinned to.

I don't dispute that there are people like this. What I was disputing, specifically, was the overgeneralization, applying this characterization to everyone: "Nobody is going to be arguing in good faith about it. Probably if you're about to comment on this post, you've got some motivated reasoning behind it that has nothing to do with finding out what really happened."

Even among those who are into a "Shadowy Elite" conspiracy theory, I don't see a lot of emotional investment remaining nowadays in the JFK conspiracy specifically. Of course they're obsessed now with Covid, for example. JFK is old news, not salient.

I think the issue is not one of expertise, but that many people are arguing without being aware of facts contrary to their own view. For instance a critical component to the conspiratorial view is Operation Northwoods [1]. And it tends to paint a far different than picture than you are claiming. Operation Northwoods was a planned CIA operation where they were going to carry out terrorist attacks against both civilian and military US targets (notably they even proposed the use of remote controlled civilian aircraft) and blame it on Cuba, so we could start a war with them. This plan successfully made its way all the way up the chain of the command and was one signature away from being executed. The problem is that JFK rejected it, vigorously.

The CIA and the military wanted global escalation and military conflict. Kennedy, by contrast, was working more towards reconciliation and global peace through good faith. Just prior to Operation Northwoods, he had recently removed the head of the CIA (following the Bay of Pigs catastrophe), and following the Joint Chief of Staffs presentation of Operation Northwoods to him, JFK also removed him from power as well. JFK would then go to on to pass a unilateral nuclear test ban as a show of good faith to the USSR, and was reportedly not only looking to withdraw from Vietnam, but also to completely dismantle the CIA. Less than 6 months later, he would be assassinated.

That's hardly a tale of some 'shadowy elite trying to control the world.' In fact the assassination becomes so utterly predictable in this context that one has to consider that if it was a simple lone-wolf then the CIA and military effectively won some sort of one in a quadrillion type lottery (at least from their rather sociopathic worldviews). For that assassin to then to be assassinated, after initially claiming he was a "patsy", and all the other weirdness around it all, I think Occam's Razor starts pointing in a pretty clear direction.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods

The thing about the shadowy elite is that it's non-falsifiable.

We can certainly have a discussion, but it's outside the realm of logic, because there's no possible evidence that could disprove it. That doesn't make it true or false, but it does make it useless to discuss in the terms of logic, and trying will just lead to frustration.

What would we do differently if the shadowy elite was behind JFK's death? What would we do differently if the shadowy elite wasn't behind it? What ends were gotten by the shadowy elite through the means of mysterious assasinations to help the Rolling Stones sell records?

These are all reasonable questions to ask, but the philosophy of logic won't help us come to answers.

Minor quibble, logic is generally perfectly fine with things that are non-falsifiable, so long as a truth value can be hypothesized, we can use logic just fine.

It's science that doesn't have anything to say about unfalsifiable situations (metaphysics, negative statements, etc).

We've really left the realm of empiricism, not logic.

> Even if there was a conspiracy to kill JFK

He's dead, so...what?

Rewriting: "He's dead so: what?"

because obviously(?) there was someone conspiring to kill him.

>the possible players involved are no longer relevant either.

If the conspiracy was on the part of the spy agencies, as claimed, then the agencies involved are absolutely still relevant. If the CIA or whatever back then was willing to kill someone because he threatened to reduce their power, given the intelligence agencies have even more power now than they did back then there's no reason to think they wouldn't do it again if threatened.

> I doubt that many people under age 70 remember that personally.

Jesus of Nazarath was reportedly crucified in Judea almost 2000 years ago, and people have all sorts of opinions on that event.

Events like these just have a way of getting out of hand. Honestly, I think my grandma, who was a JFK fan-girl, would probably be incredibly confused by the ideology of modern JFK conspiracy theorists.

And sadly the list of topics for which this is an excellent description of human behaviour seems to grow steadily.

Exactly. How a CIA faction used Cuban exiles to assassinate him is far less interesting than why.

The "why" (motive) is the most clear part: JFK was not willing to invade Cuba and depose Castro. To say this this really pissed off the DoD, CIA, Mafia, and Cuban rebels is putting it extremely mildly. They hated JFK with a murderous passion.

Eh, at this point with all of the myths and legends surrounding the JFK assassination, it would be novel if even something as banal as the friendly fire theory turned out to be true.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/accidental-assassin-jfk...

"Nobody is going to be arguing in good faith about it."

Saying that "nobody" is willing to discuss this in good faith is going way too far. Just because I don't expect anyone to be able to convince me that it wasn't a conspiracy doesn't mean I'm not open to the possibility.

All good faith means, in this context, is that one is willing to maintain intellectual honesty. That may be hard for many but far from all.

> Probably if you're about to comment on this post, you've got some motivated reasoning behind it that has nothing to do with finding out what really happened.

Is that a recursive statement or are you somehow the only one with clean hands?

That's true of most topics. This one is just more heated because of the historical significance and lack of direct evidence.

Not one word of what you just wrote is accurate. Source: [0]

[0] I pulled it out of my ass, same as you did.

This seems like one outlook but either case wouldn't drastically change my skepticism of government. That it happened exactly as the official report says or it turns out that the CIA lied and there was a second shooter. I've seen an attempted coup (and the GOP attempt to minimize that and continued support of the dictator-in-waiting) which I thought would never happen in my lifetime despite noticing the polarization we're all seeing. Nothing really surprises me much any longer when it comes to politics and how dirty it can be or if they didn't lie at all.