It’s not about assumptions. The two competing possibilities are not equally likely, after all. My position is that the lawyer is a lawyer, and the parent is a parent.
The competing position is that the lawyer and the parent are both played by a single actor.
My position is one that is true virtually 100% of the time. In fact, I can’t come up with a single case in the past 10 years where we have learned an actor pretended to be a lawyer and got away with it, and at the same time also pretended to be another public figure.
So, when judging between these two “competing” ideas, you don’t say “well, we don’t have proof either way, so anything is possible. What you say is “well, there are very strong reasons to NOT believe the person is an actor, and absolutely no reason to believe they are. And then you judge the picture that clearly is of two different people in light of the logical basis for the claim, and the insanity is clear.
What are the good logical reasons for this story to be complete fiction? Here are a half-dozen.
One: There is no benefit to the lawyer being an actor — There are thousands of real lawyers who are great at public appearances and who would support the gun control cause.
Two: Holmes apparently has money, or his father does, so they would have the means to hire a real lawyer. And the law firm they went to would know that they had a real lawyer.
Three: It is a crime to practice law without a license, so pretending to be a lawyer is a risky proposition, and hard to pull off; this being a highly public case, there is no way someone would think they could get away with it.
Four: If you were trying to get away with pretending to be a lawyer, you’d be stupid to ALSO try to publicly appear as ANOTHER person. If you were that stupid, you’d never be able to pass yourself off as a lawyer.
Five: There is a real dead child, with real parents. Those parents would know if an actress was pretending to be them publicly. So would their family, and friends, and likely others involved in the school and the investigation. The police have certainly talked with all the victims, so they would also know who the real mother was.
Six: No matter what their opinion on gun control, the media likes nothing more than a story. And an actress pretending to be a grieving parent would be a huge story, and not something that would significantly put off their push for gun control. There are certainly enough mothers of dead children who would be convinced that gun control would have saved their kids, who would be willing to talk, that you wouldn’t need an actress.
Note that you might be new to this story, but we’ve been putting up with crazy conspiracists for months now, telling us that the parents are actors, that the children aren’t really dead, that John Goodman played the sheriff, that the kids couldn’t be evacuated because we don’t see them in the video, that the whole story was made up, that there were other shooters or Adam wasn’t the shooter, and that the government committed the shooting with the parents help in order to push gun control.
So if it seems I jumped on you, it is only because I am tired of the illogical, insane rantings of so-called conservatives on this point. SOmetimes, the media doesn’t have to work hard to make us look like idiots, we do it to ourselves.
ok. ok. i will disbelive the story and get off the fence just for your sake. does that lay it to rest? and you’re right about one thing, the fact that i’m not following this story and don’t care much about what the media is putting out. i can predict (my type of probablistic argument) what the leftists are going to do and how they are going to do it from long history and motivation. if i really needed my kind of answer to this question, i’d just go check the roster of parents for these people and make sure they exist and had a child at the school. period. end of discussion about impersonators. your way is way to prone to error for my liking.
but, i’ll say you’ve given me some insight into the way you (i’ll call you “probalistic” thinkers) like to puzzle. and you’ve also giving me some new insight into what you derisively call “conspiracy theories.” for me any criminal activity involving a coverup of two or more people (i.e., most of all economic or political crime) is by definition a conspiracy. it’s only a theory because there is no evidence or facts to support it. those generally come with time if they come at all. all you have initially is just motivation and history to create suspicion. you apparantly stack up probablities to get your answers. btw, anything that is not a fact, taken for philosophical ground, truth or a first proposition, or proven by the rules of logic from the previous is exactly an assumption.