John Cotter

Would it be fair to say that neither Michael Griffith nor Chris Scally would be favourably disposed to the idea of RFK Jr becoming US president? While the moderation seems improved in some respects, Roger’s points about relevance, being wrongly accused of lying and the need for warnings before penalties are imposed seem valid to me. I got a one-day ban last week without warning for allegedly belittling another member. I didn’t make a fuss about it because I’d more or less decided to stop posting in the forum for the time being at least, for reasons touched on in my last post. But here I am again, possibly for reasons I adumbrate below. I wasn’t told the name of the member whom I allegedly belittled and I can only assume who it was. I could have explained – cogently I believe – why the member I allegedly belittled should have been banned before I was, but I think I’ve reached the stage of not caring enough any more to go to the effort of explaining things that really shouldn’t need to be explained. Unlike Yeats, I haven’t got the Sisyphean fortitude to be “content to live it all again/And yet again, if it be life to pitch/Into the frog-spawn of a blind man’s ditch/A blind man battering blind men”. Or have I? Much JFKA debating may have more to do with the psychological need to keep returning to the same old themes over and over again than with having anything new to say. In this regard, James Hillman referred to “…Plato’s and Plotinus’ description of the course of the soul as circular” and says that “Psychological reasoning tends to be circular, thriving on the repetition compulsion and cycles of return to the same insoluble themes.” (Re-Visioning Psychology) There is also the related “mysterious appeal of a labyrinth”, as in Jorge Luis Borges’ short story collection Labyrinths: “Borges specialised in short stories that fold in on themselves, that spiral, misidentify, mislead, magnify, falsify. His games with meaning are located in fantasy worlds, imagined realms tied to the unconscious. In his preface to the Penguin edition of Borges stories, Labyrinths, the writer André Maurois talks about the “interplay of the mirrors and mazes… of thought”; “In all these stories we find roads that fork, corridors that lead nowhere… and so on as far as the eye can see.” The allure of mazes, mysteries and wildernesses of mirrors is paradoxically intertwined with the desire to seek solutions and clues: “Because the labyrinth is vast and few people find their way back out, Theseus’s lover, Ariadne, gives him a ball of red thread to mark his way by unwinding it behind him. The Middle English word ‘clew’, meaning a ball of thread, has given us our word ‘clue’.” https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20201118-the-mysterious-appeal-of-a-labyrinth#:~:text=It%20is%20a%20story%20about%20an%20amnesiac%20man,patient%20with%20it%20you%20find%20that%20it%20isn%E2%80%99t. Insofar as much of this circular JFKA “debating” seems to have more of a poetic/psychological than a forensic function, TS Eliot’s words come to mind: “We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.” I trust the foregoing circumlocutory excursion clarifies everything.

“Certainly”? Have you got inside information which underpins your purported certainty? I previously refuted your suggestion that LHO hadn’t been marked out as a patsy before the assassination by reference to the “sheep dipping” of him as described by James Douglass and others. On that occasion you were caught out contradicting yourself. The accumulation of evidence clearly shows that the purpose of the sheep dipping was to paint LHO as a shooter in Dealey Plaza, the amphitheatre which facilitated the triangulated crossfire that would minimize JFK's chances of getting out of there alive. Now you’re back pontificating about what you claim to know, when in fact you don’t know it –unless of course you do have inside information which you’re not sharing, the implications of which I need not elaborate. The fragmentation and atomising of the evidence by you and lone nutters (it’s not at all clear that you’re not one of those) reduces the JFKA to a “blind men and the elephant” exercise in which debates about pieces of evidence in isolation from other pieces and their holistic implications can be pursued ad infinitum leading nowhere. In view of this kind of chronic disruption, it’s no wonder JFKA internet forums have achieved practically nothing during the decades of their existence. It’s now perfectly clear that the only possibility of any resolution of the case would be the election of RFK Jr as US president.

Amen.

Appalling vistas that self-styled infallible pontificators, like Lord Denning, refuse to see.

The whiner-in-chief whines about whining.

You seem to be feeling the pain already, Kirk. My heart goes out to you.

Actually, you missed by a country mile.

Happy birthday, USA. When are you going to grow up? Growing up often comes with disillusionment. But disillusionment is better than illusionment. For instance, it would be good if you could accept that you’re not America, that America was there before you, that you’re only one part of one part of America – the USA part – and it would be good if you could behave accordingly. Ever since I first heard this song back in the 1980s, it has reminded me of you. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xa2cQ46vAnA

That's not quite accurate, Matt. He would be committing political suicide if he didn't conform to the authoritarian norms of the mainstream Democratic Party, which includes a Manichean depiction of Trump as the devil incarnate. Bernie Sanders was shafted because he didn't conform to those authoritarian norms. The chief concern of the mainstream Democratic Party is to keep the US political Punch and Judy show on the road and thus keep the masses distracted from the reality of the militaristic plutocracy which disempowers and impoverishes them.

I've substantiated everything I've said by logic and facts, Sandy. I can't force you to see what you don't want to see.

Sandy, You seem to have never read the very entertaining and enlightening book by Leslie Sharp titled Born L-iars and subtitled Why We Can’t Live Without Deceit. The following blurb at the back of the book is an accurate synopsis of the book’s theme: “In Born L-iars, Ian Leslie takes the reader on an exhilarating tour of ideas that explores the role played by lies – both black and white – in our childhoods, our careers, and our health, as well as in advertising, politics, sport and war. “Drawing on thinkers as varied as Augustine, Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud and Joni Mitchell, the author argues that, far from being a bug in the human software, lying is central to who we are; that we cannot understand ourselves without first understanding the dynamics of deceit.” So, according to you, Sandy, Joseph Biden never lies. Do you think he got to where he is in the dirty game of politics (or indeed life itself) by never lying? Are you so incurably wedded to the mainstream Democratic Party, that you’re blinded to reality? Is that why you’re saying RFK Jr should do things which would almost certainly result in the failure of his presidential campaign?

Lawrence, Your reply is a strawman argument. Thomas Szazs has pointed out the crucial distinction between contractual psychiatry and institutional psychiatry. The former is where someone who feels distressed by the vicissitudes of life, is interested in self-exploration, or even just curious about the "psychotherapeutic" process, decides voluntarily to consult a therapist. This is perfectly legitimate and rational. The latter is where other people or an institution has decided that someone needs "psychotherapy" and that person is legally compelled to comply with that decision on pain of being penalised for non-compliance. Clearly, your situation was contractual, not institutional. The situation whereby William has taken it upon himself to "diagnose" RFK Jr without the latter's knowledge or consent is fundamentally different. For that and other reasons, William's professional association, the American Psychiatric Association, deemed it impermissible and explicitly prohibited it under the so-called Goldwater rule. Have you not read my previous posts on this thread about this?

William, Thanks for again validating what I said by more of your ad hominem drivel vis-à-vis both RFK Jr and me. You’ve again failed to logically refute any of RFK Jr’s political views, including his stance on vaccines which he explained in that video I posted upthread. Instead, you persist in flouting the rules of your professional association and abusing your role as a psychiatrist by attacking RFK Jr personally in stigmatising him as “mentally ill”. This again illustrates psychiatry professor Thomas Szasz’s point that a modern psychiatrist can “diagnose” anything as symptomatic of “mental illness”. Thus, all the good work RFK Jr has done and proposes to do can be dismissed as, effectively, the tomfoolery of a madman. Anyone who cannot see the utter depravity and absurdity of such a diabolical “diagnosis” is either an institutional psychiatrist or a useful idiot brainwashed by authoritarian mumbo jumbo.

So you want RFK Jr to commit political suicide.

William, You don’t need to be a shrink of any kind to know that the families of JFK and RFK were deeply traumatised by the JFKA and RFKA – and further traumatised by other manifestations of the “Kennedy curse”. The last thing any of these people need is the “help” of a psychiatrist who can’t even adhere to the rules of his own professional association, notwithstanding the intrinsic perversity of mainstream psychiatry. The one Kennedy scion who least needs any such help is RFK Jr, since he has courageously confronted the terrible reality of the murders of his father and uncle and publicly declared his intention to seek justice in their respects. The suggestion that RFK Jr needs the help of a shrink is utterly despicable. It typifies the worst kind of illogical and unethical psychobabble. What would such shrinkage entail? “Counselling” RFK Jr to be not courageous and to not acknowledge reality – in other words to be a coward and a l-i-a-r? Perhaps you need to have a good chat with the little green men of your imagination. They might help you to think straight.

William, You're still flailing about in the quagmire I see.

You’ve walked yourself into a quagmire of your own making here, William, and your desperate flailing about is just making matters worse. You invoked your “authority” as a psychiatrist in “diagnosing” RFK Jr. That authority derives from your membership of the American Psychiatric Association, not the American Psychoanalytic Association. The former association is the leading such association on the planet and the publisher of the “bible” of psychiatry, the DSM. You know – the manual by reference to which you “diagnosed” the “mentally ill”, incarcerated them, lorded over them in their dehumanised degraded state and treated them accordingly. The latter association is concerned with more ostensibly respectful, humane and enlightened practises such as the “talking cure”. Your saying that this association rejected the Goldwater rule is a dodge, a misdirection. One association rejecting one of the rules of another association is irrelevant to the fact that it is your “authority” as a member of the latter association that you invoked in “diagnosing” RFK. But nice try. Contrary to what you say, Erik Erikson was not a psychiatrist. He was a psychologist and psychoanalyst. As for Anthony Storr, I’ve read his books on creativity (The Dynamics of Creation) and Jung. As you say, Storr “analyzed historical figures”, but as far as I’m aware, he didn’t abuse his position as a psychiatrist by using it to denigrate a contemporary political figure. People often comment on the mental state of politicians and other public figures as apparently manifested by their behaviour. There’s nothing wrong with that. We can all see what’s in front of our eyes, and we don’t need self-styled intellectual geniuses with lots of letters after their names to tell us what we’re seeing. That’s completely different from what you’ve done in invoking your role as a psychiatrist to promulgate a supposedly authoritative “diagnosis”. It’s an abuse of your position and a breach of the relevant ethical rule of the association whose prestige you’ve hijacked to weaponise your political prejudice. Essentially, your “diagnosis” of RFK Jr is a particularly despicable ad hominem attack on him. It arises from the desperation caused by your inability to logically rebut his political views.

Give it a rest, William. How many posts about this have you cluttered the forum with now? All these posts tell us is that you’re a fanatical supporter of the mainstream Democratic Party, the purportedly “left” side of the duopoly which has imposed plutocracy in the US and throughout the world by ultimately violent means and which has demonised any nation that tries to resist it. As for your “diagnosis” of RFK Jr, your inability to legitimately criticise him has apparently rendered you so desperate as to abuse your position as a former psychiatrist in breaching the professional ethics pertaining to that “profession”. I refer to your apparent breach of the Goldwater rule: The Goldwater rule is Section 7 in the American Psychiatric Association's (APA) Principles of Medical Ethics,[1] which states that psychiatrists have a responsibility to participate in activities contributing to the improvement of the community and the betterment of public health, but they should not give a professional opinion about public figures whom they have not examined in person, and from whom they have not obtained consent to discuss their mental health in public statements. It is named after former US Senator and 1964 presidential nominee Barry Goldwater. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goldwater_rule

This is bad news, but it’s quite predictable, since Biden is very much a creature of the US political establishment. It’s all the more reason for anyone interested in JFKA transparency to support RFK Jr’s presidential campaign.

Mark, You're misrepresenting my position. As far as I can recall, I've never posted about current US tax policy, affirmative action, gun control, the Mafia or US immigration policy. If I did, it was only a glancing reference at most. I've never begun a thread in this forum, and if I ever posted about anything not directly relevant to the JFKA, it was in reply to someone else. Regarding RFK Jr's presidential campaign, it seems obvious to me that it's highly relevant in many ways to the JFKA, and I would suggest that keeping one thread devoted to RFK Jr in this section of the forum might be a solution acceptable to everyone.

Anyone who condemns RFK Jr for his stance on vaccines needs to watch this. https://twitter.com/DireReport/status/1674248850180288518

You need to look in the mirror, William. An occupational hazard I guess.

William sees only what he wants to see.

You seem to find my posts very diuretic.

Malachy Petrovich McGillicuddy, but don’t tell anyone.