I don’t normally comment on hot-button “current events”, largely because I find them boring. They are interesting if they are illustrative of some wider trend in culture or philosophy and I want to talk about that, but by themselves they tend to be uninteresting and most of them will be forgotten by the day after tomorrow.
But with some hesitation, per the “illustrative of wider trends”, I thought I’d write a quick comment about this Paul Pelosi / Nancy Pelosi attack. As you’ve probably heard we know… actually very few of the details, which is part of the issue here, but some man got into the home of Paul and Nancy Pelosi, and attacked Paul Pelosi, and seemed to want to go after Nancy Pelosi as well. And that… is about all we know. As I type this the police say they haven’t determined a motive. It seems well established that the place where the guy lived featured such things as a “Black Lives Matter” sign and a rainbow-looking American flag… the home also seems to be some sort of hippie commune, so those things don’t necessarily belong to the assailant, but anyway he is hardly looking like any sort of typical conservative. (There was reportedly a blog of the assailant which read as more right-wing, but there also seems to be good digital records evidence that the blog is a fake created by someone else who wanted to make him look like a right-wing conspiracy theorist which is… well you wonder who might be behind an effort like that, don’t ya.) Californian Michael Shellenberger suggested that the real story here is about the drug-induced psychosis gripping the West Coast.
But none of that matters of course. Every Democrat who could get in front of a camera, and every journalist in legacy media covering the story, immediately set about implying that this attack is the result of right-wing rhetoric, sometimes literally making the case that you shouldn’t criticize the Speaker of the House because it might lead to violence, don’t ya know1. Yes, your plain-vanilla political ad, even that might be hate speech now. PoliticalMath remarked that the incident has all the makings now of another “scissor event”, in which (depending on where you get your news) the “facts” about the incident “known” by people on the Left and Right are so different they may as well be referring to two entirely different events.
Because it might interest readers here in particular, one individual even suggested that the Roman Catholic archbishop of San Francisco subjecting Nancy Pelosi to church discipline might make such incidents more likely!
There is no evidence the attacker even knew about the church discipline imposed upon Pelosi, of course, but such things are no problem in our enlightened, scientific age.
Because when you “identify and name the game” it loses some of its power, I wanted to name and identify two of the games in operation here. Neither of them are particular to this incident… in fact they both happen all the time, but it is helpful to name them.
Pretended causality
Pretended causality is a game played in reporting, when you mention two events that had nothing to do with each other in close proximity so as to mislead your readers into thinking they had something to do with each other. Near as I can tell, the rule in legacy media is that (usually) you shouldn’t literally tell a lie, you shouldn’t just make stuff up, but you can definitely write in such a way as to imply that something untrue is true. That’s fine, that’s not “dishonest” by the low standards of legacy journalism.
Here are two examples of that from the last few days.
So above, this (anonymously sourced, to boot!) claim is that the assailant said “Where is Nancy?”, a question which, we’re told… also filled the halls of the Capitol building during the rioting of January 6th. Uh… so? This is only a tad bit removed from “Trump had a light salad for lunch before announcing his new policy, which is the same meal Hitler had before announcing the invasion of Poland.” This is reporting two events which, so far as we know right now, had absolutely nothing to do with each other, in close proximity so the reader will assume they had something to do with each other. Behold modern journalism.
Here is one more example.
So again, he wants to say “A caused B”, but there is no good evidence that A caused B. So instead you just report that “B follows A”, knowing that most of your readers will assume there is a causal connection (otherwise why would you bother to say this?), without you ever having to make any serious case that such a connection actually exists.
Endless repetition is the “argument”
Perhaps even more importantly… the main tactic is endless repetition. You get a thousand things like this.
And this:
And I do mean you get a thousand of those. People who tell more lies than truths like Clinton and Klobuchar knew what story they planned to tell five seconds after they learned about the incident, and no new facts that would come to light after that point were going to change that story.
The long term goal is clearly to create first a cultural, and then a legal, framework in which you are simply not allowed to criticize the Party or the goals of the Party. That’s the goal. But there’s a problem for them - the US has this legal First Amendment, and this culture of the people that has been formed by this tradition of free speech. So you need to change the people, and that takes time. How do you do that?
You flood the zone, basically. Every single time something happens, put everyone you can find in front of a television camera to say “dangerous speech caused this violence”. Every time. Even if the connection is forced, even if you know approximately zero of the facts when you start running your mouth, it matters very little whether what you are saying is true or not. You are not particularly trying to make an intelligent and persuasive argument. In fact you don’t even want to give people time to think. You’re just trying to beat people over the head with a claim 10,000 times and trust that this repetition, over years, will eventually have the desired effect.
It’s a long game and it’s a dishonest game… but it probably has been a pretty effective strategy. As I’ve said before, this is one reason we can’t say the truth just once and then stop. We can’t let people hear the truth once and a lie 500 times. Human nature is going to be too tempted to believe the lie under those conditions.
But the other interesting thing about our day is… the Left speaks as if they control the narrative and there is no reliable information to be found outside of their own speakers. Of course that isn’t true. You can’t see it above, but that Clinton tweet that has 57,000 likes (many of them surely robot accounts who spend their days trying to make progressives look more popular than they really are) also had 38,000 replies, indicative of a huge amount of criticism. A whole lot of people just don’t believe them anymore. They don’t control the narrative anymore, not with everyone, but they really really want to. As Rick DeVos said:
And this is one problem with what the World Computer has done to us. A hundred million people hold to some quite good belief. Let’s say one person, let’s even say one person actually motivated by that belief, goes and makes a violent threat or does some violence. “You can’t promote that belief anymore, it might lead to violence!” If this principle was applied consistently it would, of course, made it impossible to have a public discussion about any issue whatsoever. Therefore it is in fact applied extremely inconsistently, always in a way to delegitimize criticism of the Party.
Late reading this but wanted to make a point about something that has really bugged me during the reporting of this. DePape’s supposed calling out of “Where’s Nancy” and it being the same words used on Jan 6. If one (ie MSM) actually reads the FBI affidavit for arrest of DePape -- those words were never said. They are not mentioned in the affidavit. It’s stated he was “looking for” her but the agent never entered the phrase “Where’s Nancy” in her affidavit. I would think she would have had it happened and with it having such similarity with the words used on Jan 6. It sounds like the media (once again) has twisted something to suit their own needs, agendas, narratives...whatever you want to call it.
Good analysis. I see no way that this country heals; the divide is too great. Divisiveness and hatred have been deliberately stoked to separate us. Our founders have been vilified in order to dismiss the principles they established as the bedrock of this nation.
How can you reason with and come to common understanding with people who truly believe that men can give birth?
The midterms matter little. Brandon is still president and able to issue executive orders, and that's all that matters. Ron Mittney and Mitch McConnell will see to it that no serious effort be made to investigate the horror we've lived through these last 2+ years.
The Democrats are laying the foundation for calling into question the 2024 election. There is no doubt that secession is in play (some states on the West Coast floated that idea in the summer of 2020) if the Red team wins. The Globalist show for America really gets underway in November of 2024, I think.