Map of life expectancy at birth from Global Education Project.

Monday, April 25, 2022

Commenting Policy

I am more than happy to publish comments by people who do not agree with me. Let me explain once more that I do not publish comments that are illogical, irrelevant, or based on false premises. Often I will point out that someone is basing an argument on a false belief, whereupon they will simply shift their premise and construct some sophistry based on the new premise that manages to reach some other conclusion they think I won't like. Or else they'll throw up some completely irrelevant "but what about this other thing," or quote somebody out of context who they think I admire. (Often I don't, actually.) In other words, they are not trying to have a reasoned dialogue. They are just trying to blow smoke. And if you have been banned for doing this repeatedly, it won't do you any good to try to worm your way back in by saying something reasonable for a change. You're banned.


Unfortunately, this is now characteristic of a broad swath of political discourse in our country. Alex Pareene explains it well. The occasion is publication by Washington Post reporter Taylor Lorenz of the identity of the person behind the repulsive "Libs of TikTok" account, which exists to expose random LGBQT people to harassment and retaliation, spreads lies about gender non-conforming people, and is a major driver of the phony right wing moral panic about "grooming." The right wing echo chamber exploded in indignation that a journalist would expose the identity of the person behind this (whose name is Chaya Raichik,)

 

As Pareene says (and he gives permission to share freely):

 

If you are attempting to persuade this creep's defenders, specifically, and not a general audience, that what Lorenz did was ethical, and that the creep's identity is newsworthy, you have made a category error. These people on this ascendant right don't just have different ideas about the role and function of journalism; they don't just believe journalists are biased liberals; they don't just believe the media is too hostile to conservatives; they are hostile to the concept of journalism itself. As in, uncovering things dutifully and carefully and attempting to convey your findings to the public honestly. They don’t want that and don’t like it and are endeavoring to end it as a common practice. You are debating logic and facts with frothing bigots with a bone-deep opposition to your entire project.

This new right fundamentally doesn’t want "newsgathering" to happen. They want a chaotic information stream of unverifiable bullshit and context collapse and propaganda. Their backers, the people behind the whole project, are philosophically and materially opposed to the idea that true things should be uncovered and verified and disseminated publicly about, well, them, and their projects. This may have started as a politically opportunistic war against particular outlets and stories, but it has quickly blossomed into a worldview. It’s an ideologically coherent opposition to the liberal precepts of verifiability and transparency, and the holders of those precepts are too invested in them to understand what their enemy is doing. The creep’s account, everyone in the press should understand, is the model for what they will be replaced with.

It’s not even that the right needs people to lose “trust” in traditional news organizations to win elections or start wars. That already happened and they won. It’s more like they need people to just randomly trust whatever bullshit feels right, to get them to fall for scams and believe propaganda. In the grandest dreams of the pathetic people doing most of the unpaid work, the end game is the eradication of “deviance” from public life. And that is a real threat that the people opposing this should take more seriously. Upstairs from them are the people whose job it is to make sure old people set up recurring payments. Upstairs from them, the goal is that no one finds the boss’s shell companies or offshore accounts. The mission is mainly to prevent, stigmatize, and delegitimize the discovery and confirmation and dissemination of information about how a few people got their money, where they keep it, and what they do with it—like spending it on subsidizing bigotry about trans people and getting gay teachers fired.

 

1 comment:

Don Quixote said...

Powerful and cogent writing. Thanks for sharing. At the end of the day, those of us whose eyes are open wonder, “Why on earth would anyone perpetuate lies?“ As Jung wrote, “A Iie would make no sense unless the truth were felt to be dangerous”.