You’re right, Jonathan!

“Dick” is inappropriate.

“Arrogant dick” isn’t.

Yadayada.

Rolling eyes.

I have not stooped to such name-calling once and certainly will not now. I do agree with you, however, that people can read the progress – or devolution – of the exchange between us for themselves. Because you see, on this side of the planet a whole range of people following this debate have been repulsed by your infantile apoplexy; your affont at being challenged and the consequent deterioration in your manners – and they have perjoratively described you, mate, using much earthier terms than “dick”.

For me, it is your ignorance rather than arrogance I find so dreary; History is not set in concrete. Rather it is a moving debate – it is rewritten or revised all the time. You have done it yourself, brilliantly and informatively. If it is written by humans (and not AI) then dispassionate analysis will always be influenced by emotion – the question is are the proportions harmonious and productive or too biased and/or speculative. Where sources are incomplete and contradictory, is the theory an educated/informed guess or just fantasy unmoored from the surviving fragments? Such judgements are up to indvidual readers.

Jonathan, you started being a dick before I called you on being a dick. You can’t rewrite history. Everyone can read the thread and see how it progressed.

This attempt at an ad hominem and petty high school drama move is precisely why you are not competent to do history. You need to behave more rationally and attend to things that actually matter, like method and logic, not your “feels.”

I don’t use “stats” to get rid of.

That you don’t know the difference between statistics and statements of probability is why you can never do competent history.

It’s just all the worse that you don’t know that you yourself are always using statements of probability. Just because you hide what you mean behind fuzzy words (like probable or very improbable or somewhat likely or more likely) does not mean you are not referring to numbers. You always are. The difference between me and you is that I admit this, and make clear what I mean when I say such things—and why.

Because then I can do another thing you can’t: I can vet the logic of my own inferences (and thus demonstrate whether my conclusions actually do follow from my premises), because I am actually stating checkable premises, and correctly deriving the conclusions from them (which can only be done with probabilistic logic, because history is not subject to deductive logic).

I do not get the impression you actually care about being logical or admitting the mathematical content of your sentences or anything else, so I hardly see a point in speaking further on this, but in the extremely unlikely chance you actually do care (or someone else reading this does), see:

Bayesian Statistics vs. Bayesian Epistemology

We Are All Bayesians Now: Some Bayes for Beginners

Advice on Probabilistic Reasoning

A completely irrelevant point.

This is getting tedious.

Emotional attachment to a theory is folly.

Disregard of the logic of probability is fatal.

You are committed to both. Which means you can never really do history.

Consider the late Arthur M Schlesinger Jr, a very accomplished historian. He was not close to JFK, but he worked in the latter’s White House. After the assassination he wrote the best seller “A Thousand Days”; his account of the President’s three years from both the inside and the outside. It remains a good read. But it is from beginning to end “historical fiction”. The author’s agenda was to turn the man he had served and adored into a superhero, a contemporary Lincoln, and an idealistic progressive. This embarrassing hagiography does not make it worthless, though it is far from accurate – let alone definitive.

Yet Schlesinger’s essential portrait, that of Kennedy as a Cold War sceptic and cautious centrist, remains both valid and validated by the release of subsequent sources and memoirs.