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MOTIVATIONAL_BIND

                                                July 10, 2004

The problem of motivations...


 Just when you get going with your great
 theory of What's Really Going On, someone
 is bound to hit you with a line like:

     "Now why would they
     do something like that!"

But I, of course, don't actually
know what motivations "They" have.

    I'm not a mind
    reader.

    I have no bugs in
    their offices.

    I wouldn't even
    know which
    offices to bug.


If I were lured into
presenting speculation
about motives, then I
would risk looking
like even more of a crazy
conspiracy theorist:

  "How can he possibly know that!"           I can't.

                                             Even the "who
                                             what and where"
An interesting double-bind,                  is full of
eh?  The story seems                         guesswork.
implausible without motive,
but with motive, it seems                    The "why" is
incomplete and unbelievable.                 nearly hopeless.


     I see that Noam Chomsky
     is too experienced too
     fall into the trap:


     Dershowitz vs Chomsky, November 2005:

     NOAM CHOMSKY:   [...]
       In the first month of the Intifada-- I'm now using
       Israeli sources-- seventy-four Palestinians were
       killed, four Jews in the Occupied Territories. The first
       few days, this is reported in the press here, Boston
       Globe, Israel was using U.S. helicopters to attack
       apartment complexes. Clinton reacted with the biggest
       deal in a decade-- check it out. It's in the public
       record, not questioned by anyone-- to send military
       helicopters to Israel. There has been a database search
       of the U.S.-- it was reported in Europe. It was
       reported by Amnesty International. It's reported in
       Jane's Defence Weekly, the main military magazine in the
       world. There was a database search of the U.S. press,
       and they found nothing. I know of explicit cases, and I
       will be glad to tell them to you, where the press was
       approached and asked just to report the facts.

     ALAN DERSHOWITZ: Why didn't they? Chomsky, why didn't they
       report it? Are they bad reporters? What's their motive?
       Explain why the Times or the Post wouldn't report this
       great story from Planet Chomsky?

     BRIAN MANDELL: Gentlemen, if I could, as--

     NOAM CHOMSKY: It's from Jane's Defence Weekly, from the
       international press, and so on. Yeah. They wouldn't--
       you have to ask them why they didn't report it.


        [ref]



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