The Logic Problem

This has been making the rounds on Facebook and elsewhere:

Alice, Bob, and Chris are taken to the police station for questioning. Detectives know that one of them is the thief and that only one of them tells the truth.

Alice says, "I am not the thief."

Bob says, "Alice is the thief."

Chris says, "I am not the thief."

Who is the thief?

And there's all kinds of good reasoning going on as people weigh in and suss it all out; and I'm OK at such things, but I'm really not very adept at the Game Theory thing (or whatever I'd have to be good at to get through this kinda stuff), so I just have to take an awful lot of people's word for things, y'know?

And that's OK as long as you've learned a thing or two, and are at least marginally skilled at figuring out whose word you can probably take on a given subject, and who you should doubt - which is kinda the point, but that's more about the politics than logic, and now I'm heading off into the weeds again which should give you an idea what a cluttered jumble my brain can make of this shit, but that's not really the point, but it might be, but anyway...

So here's one logic string:

If Alice is the thief - 

1. What she says is a lie... we have one liar

2. What Bob says is truth... we have the one saying truth.

3. I am not the thief... as we need a second liar, Chris saying he's not the thief is a lie, hence he's the thief... but we started assuming Alice was the thief. So, since we don't have two thieves, we discard it.

If Bob is the thief -

1. What Alicia says is truth... we have our one saying truth

2. What Bob says is truth as we started assuming Bob is the thief... this would be the second saying the truth. We know we can't have two persons saying the truth. Then Bob is NOT the thief.

If Chris is the thief -

1. What Alice says is truth... we have our one saying truth.

2. What Bob says is a lie... as Alice is NOT the thief. We have our first liar.

3. What Chris says is a lie... as he is indeed the thief..... We have our second liar.

So, if Chris were the thief, we have exactly two liars and one person saying the truth, as the problem states.

Therefore, Chris is the thief.

I had to read through it 3 or 4 times before I started to get it, and that brought me to what I think is a bit better understanding of the anti-intellectual shit that essentially gives us a political atmosphere where this is what makes sense to too many people:

*Way too complicated - let's do this instead:
1) Elect Donald Trump
2) Waterboard all three
3) Put them in prison camps where they become slave labor
4) Seize their wealth and redistribute it to political appointees
5) Declare lots of a national holidays to extol the virtues of freedom and enterprise and the entrepreneurial spirit

6) AMERICA!

No muss, no fuss, no need for all that tiresome thinking.

*this was not actually posted - this is just what too many Pro-Trump comments sound like to me