MacCruiskeen wrote:JackRiddler wrote:But we can all believe what we like, long as we know nothing.
Personally, I do know a few things. I know, for example that we have still been offered no proof whatsoever, no forensic evidence whatsoever, no motive whatsoever, no eyewitness identification whatsoever, in support of the assertion that Adam Lanza Dunnit.
It's an epistemological quandary, isn't it? I mean, there's a distinct difference between "no evidence" and "evidence I refuse to accept". For example, according to the police and published reports, there were several eyewitnesses. However, none of them have spoken to me personally, or given publicly available interviews with trustworthy journalists. I'm sort of forced to either accept that in a typical police investigation, the detectives on the case would have spoken to such persons and satisfied themselves that the person they saw corresponded to the actual perpetrator, who was wearing a mask (nice touch), and couldn't be identified by them anyway! And according to investigators, police officers supposedly found Lanza's body with his dead mother's gun nearby, his pockets filled with magazines, earplugs in his ears, dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. But I didn't see that myself, and I haven't seen any high quality, unretouched photographs of his body swathed in black, lying in a pool of blood, his mask removed and his face revealed in such a way that I could definitively identify the person in the picture as the same gaunt and insect-like Adam Lanza the police claim to have committed the murders, whose face has been plastered on the front of every tabloid in the land. (In fact, I have no way of confirming that the picture I've seen of Lanza is truely representative of his features, or is a strange anomaly, or is a picture of him at all. Why should I accept that?) But realistically (let's not kid each other here), there's no photographic evidence that could possibly and conclusively confirm his identity, because such things can be faked, and at this point it's far too long since the event to trust the products of the police state, whose output I wouldn't trust in any case, at all, because they're notorious liars. Where's the high-def, full color video stream of the event? None of the victims had time for a cel phone camera vid that they could email to a trustworthy media outlet? Why haven't police released photos of the victims and the shooter,
in situ that have been authenticated by independent experts? Why haven't independent internet journalists been allowed to interview the adult victims in the hospital, or the juvenile survivors? But I guess they could just be actors anyway. Or maybe
Tony Hawk, champion skateboarder.I wasn't there, so you can't prove that it happened. You can't. So it probably didn't. At least certainly not in the way anyone says it did. And any evidence that will be brought forth will never be subjected to the stringent demands of a courtroom legal process. So it won't be real evidence.
On the other hand, how do I know it didn't go down just as the newspapers claim? How do I know he didn't kill his mom, shoot his way in through the school's front door, gun down the principal, and then proceed to the classrooms for further slaughter? There's no way for me to know that he didn't do it either, I guess. It's like a shooting at Schrödinger Elementary, with no way to collapse the waveform, no way to open the box.
I also know that he's dead, his mother is dead
How do you know this? What's your evidence? Oh yeah,
you read it on the internet. Sounds highly conclusive. Where's the
proof?