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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   31620 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 16, 2023

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I’d be very skeptical of any of these claims.

You should be skeptical of the claim that Lee Harvey Oswald was solely responsible for John Kennedy's assassination, and that Jacob Leon Rubenstein acted alone in killing him before he could defend himself or tell his side of the story.

Why do you call him Jacob Leon Rubenstein instead of Jack Ruby as he’s universally known?

For the same reason why I used John Kennedy, and John Hoover elsewhere. I like to refer to people differently than their commonly known moniker.

Same here, but I find it fascinating regardless of the veracity. Things don't have to be true to provide insight, and I often find that conspiracy theories, because they are based around one big outlandish claim, often put a lot of effort into getting other more mundane details correct - because it implies the big claim is correct too. You still have to verify the facts you've learned, but I find I get a lot of leads on interesting topics through conspiracies, if not the actual conspiracies themselves.

That said, and maybe it's just because I have seen some very seriously crazy conspiracy theories or maybe it's because I lean right, but I don't find those claims particularly outlandish. The public presentation of Nixon has always had an air of the 2 minute hate to me, even when I was left wing I didn't really understand it. Even with all the movies about Watergate and him, a lot of people seem to have no idea what he did wrong, only that he was bad. And while the idea that he was innocent is ludicrous, the idea that he was operating on a standard level of corruption for the environment isn't. Which is a roundabout way of saying I don't care about Nixon, but I do care about unelected and unaccountable officials meddling in the affairs of state to promote their own agendas.

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