[PREV - STANDARDS_OF_PROOF]    [TOP]

MOTIVATIONAL_BIND

                                                July 10, 2004

The problem of motivations...

 
 At some in any exposition of a
 theory of What's Really Going On,
 someone is bound to come up 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    
completely invented...                       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.             
                                                                   
                                                                   
        http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/12/23/1450216
                                          


--------
[NEXT - UR_CONSPIRACY]