08-08-2013, 07:49 PM
Steve Minnerly Wrote:For a guy thats supposedly really smart Ive often wondered why he can't see the fairly obvious evidence of conspiracy. Makes one wonder if hes purposely trying to thwart the effort to find the truth.
Chomskys logic is basically that the conspirators would have realized that trying to assassinate Kennedy was way too risky so they would never have tried it.
This is an attempt to claim that everyone is cautious and that there are no people out there that engage in dangerous behavior. A simple look at the wide spectrum of behaviors that humans engage in would show this to be incorrect.
When you look at Operation Northwoods its hard to imagine a more risky plan yet the joint chiefs were willing to try it and they even signed their names to the documents. Curtis Lemay was known to have overflown Russian airspace during the 1950s in an attempt to provoke the Russians and had advocated the use of of a nuke strike. Talk about risky.
Chomskys logic fall flat. There are and have been crazy people out there in high positions of power that are not risk averse in the least.
Steve, if you haven't read it, take a look at:
http://www.ctka.net/reviews/Chomsky_Sick...genio.html
It's not about the assassination per se, but about his resistance to any notion that JFK's policies differed from those of other "liberals" of his time. It's an old argument, reinforced by Halberstam's The Best and the Brightest (see http://www.ctka.net/2011/Halberstam_pt1.html, http://www.ctka.net/2011/Halberstam_Pt2.html); it's a line we have heard over and over again in The Nation (Alexander Cockburn). Chomsky and Cockburn represent its most extreme forms.
I really have such mixed feelings about his politics, much of which I agree with. And of course, being in computer science, the debt which programming lanugage theory owes him is very big as well.