30-05-2012, 06:59 PM
Charles Drago Wrote:I've deliberately stayed away from this prolonged exercise in self-defeatism, but now it's time to offer three observations in the form of questions:
1. How might our studies of the doppelganger tactic, long established as a prime component in the JFK meta-conspiracy, help place the Oswald/Lovelady controversy in deep political perspective?
2. How might appreciation of the so-called "trickster" phenomenon, observable throughout history and across cultures, help us to make sense of the Oswald/Lovelady puzzle?
3. How might the creation and testing of the hypothesis that the Oswald/Lovelady conundrum is in fact a "false dilemma" help us to resolve the issue at hand?
In re Question 3 above, I quote from The Third Alternative, by Eliezer Yudkowsky ( http://lesswrong.com/lw/hu/the_third_alternative/ )
"[A] false dilemma [is] the fallacy of the excluded middle, or the package-deal fallacy.
"How can we obtain Third Alternatives? The first step in obtaining a Third Alternative is deciding to look for one, and the last step is the decision to accept it. This sounds obvious, and yet most people fail on these two steps, rather than within the search process. Where do false dilemmas come from? Some arise honestly, because superior alternatives are cognitively hard to see. But one factory for false dilemmas is justifying a questionable policy by pointing to a supposed benefit over the null action.
"The best is the enemy of the good. If the goal is really to help people, then a superior alternative is cause for celebrationonce we find this better strategy, we can help people more effectively. But if the goal is to justify a particular strategy by claiming that it helps people, a Third Alternative is an enemy argument, a competitor."
False dilemma is the key for me. So many have been created in this case and have lead to so many waste -of -time arguments. And falling for these arguments helps in no way to resolve the issue at hand. It's like a kid's top, spinning aimlessly, leading nowhere. I totally question the motives of Cinque and Fetzer. For some time I believed it was all ego, now it has gone way past that point. Bottom line for me is that it does not matter who is in the doorway. It's a totally false dilemma and tells us nothing of substance about this case. Yet they go on and on and on...as if it actually lead somewhere.
Dawn