> If you argue with someone against any of these particular things, you're not going to get anywhere because disproving even one of these calls into question the world view that all his other beliefs are pinned to.

I don't dispute that there are people like this. What I was disputing, specifically, was the overgeneralization, applying this characterization to everyone: "Nobody is going to be arguing in good faith about it. Probably if you're about to comment on this post, you've got some motivated reasoning behind it that has nothing to do with finding out what really happened."

Even among those who are into a "Shadowy Elite" conspiracy theory, I don't see a lot of emotional investment remaining nowadays in the JFK conspiracy specifically. Of course they're obsessed now with Covid, for example. JFK is old news, not salient.

The thing about the shadowy elite is that it's non-falsifiable.

We can certainly have a discussion, but it's outside the realm of logic, because there's no possible evidence that could disprove it. That doesn't make it true or false, but it does make it useless to discuss in the terms of logic, and trying will just lead to frustration.

What would we do differently if the shadowy elite was behind JFK's death? What would we do differently if the shadowy elite wasn't behind it? What ends were gotten by the shadowy elite through the means of mysterious assasinations to help the Rolling Stones sell records?

These are all reasonable questions to ask, but the philosophy of logic won't help us come to answers.

I think the issue is not one of expertise, but that many people are arguing without being aware of facts contrary to their own view. For instance a critical component to the conspiratorial view is Operation Northwoods [1]. And it tends to paint a far different than picture than you are claiming. Operation Northwoods was a planned CIA operation where they were going to carry out terrorist attacks against both civilian and military US targets (notably they even proposed the use of remote controlled civilian aircraft) and blame it on Cuba, so we could start a war with them. This plan successfully made its way all the way up the chain of the command and was one signature away from being executed. The problem is that JFK rejected it, vigorously.

The CIA and the military wanted global escalation and military conflict. Kennedy, by contrast, was working more towards reconciliation and global peace through good faith. Just prior to Operation Northwoods, he had recently removed the head of the CIA (following the Bay of Pigs catastrophe), and following the Joint Chief of Staffs presentation of Operation Northwoods to him, JFK also removed him from power as well. JFK would then go to on to pass a unilateral nuclear test ban as a show of good faith to the USSR, and was reportedly not only looking to withdraw from Vietnam, but also to completely dismantle the CIA. Less than 6 months later, he would be assassinated.

That's hardly a tale of some 'shadowy elite trying to control the world.' In fact the assassination becomes so utterly predictable in this context that one has to consider that if it was a simple lone-wolf then the CIA and military effectively won some sort of one in a quadrillion type lottery (at least from their rather sociopathic worldviews). For that assassin to then to be assassinated, after initially claiming he was a "patsy", and all the other weirdness around it all, I think Occam's Razor starts pointing in a pretty clear direction.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Northwoods