Americans can probably all agree that it has been raining in Yellowstone, and hot in Texas and the Deep South. It's too much to ask that they should all believe the same people who have staged one such hearing after another, from Mueller to the two impeachments to this. It's a drama, not a reality.
In this drama, the heroes are the Democratic leadership acting in support of intelligence and Federal law enforcement communities in their tireless efforts to stop Donald Trump; the villain, of course, is Donald Trump. Now Trump is a buffoon, as I've always maintained, and regularly says and does careless or stupid things (though he also managed to do some surprisingly solid things as President, chiefly by ignoring the establishment view; when he acceded to it, it inevitably hurt both him and the country). This 'criminal referral' they are promising at the hearing is just another bite at the apple.
Yes, some crimes were committed on January 6th. Almost all of them were misdemeanors. The only procedural outcome that was changed by the riot was that the objection to the certification of the election was dropped and no evidence heard before the vote. The vote was delayed a few hours. The world did not end.
Yes, it probably wouldn't have happened if Trump had been smart enough to hold his protest somewhere besides right by Congress. However, the people who started the riot never went to his protest -- they were already at Congress.
And yes, the FBI's behavior here as in Michigan invites investigation into whether they were here as there engaged in entrapment and/or incitement. Also in the Trump/Russia business, no? Also in the Flynn affair.
Share that reality. Donald Trump is just an old reality TV show and former president, not the chief enemy of the United States of America. He probably won't be president again, but making a martyr out of him turns him from Old News into Headline News. Perversely, his best chance lies with these idiots staging their show.
Shared Reality....a wise executive once remarked to me that 'When you're running a large organization, you're not seeing reality. It's like you're watching a movie where you only get to see maybe one out of every thousand frames, and from that, you have to figure out what's going on'
ReplyDeleteIf this is true of running large organizations, it's a thousand times more true for the average voter in a democracy...and it means that the people who select the frames have enormous power.
A Russian guy who now lives in the US remarked that when he tries to talk to his friends back in Russia about the Ukraine situation, it's like they are living in The Truman Show.
That is also true for a lot of Americans...with much less excuse, because alternative information sources *are* available for those who seek them out...but for those who don't devote a lot of effort & attention to political matters, the selected frames is all that they will see.
Case in point: the Hunter Biden laptop. A more recent case: the back-page treatment of the news about the attempted assassination of Kavanaugh.
We can't agree on reality because we no longer share a language that describes reality.
ReplyDeleteWhat's is a woman? What is an assault rifle? What is a fish? What is a baby? What is a riot? What is an insurrection? Pollution? Disinformation? Racism?
Speech? Whistle-blower? Dog-whistle?
Is nuclear energy a renewable or sustainable energy source? Is a trend over centuries a crisis? Have illiterates emerging from high school "Graduated"? Are "public" schools accountable to parents and taxpayers? Are beer and cider "intoxicating spirits"?
I think the left has wholly bought into the social constructivist view of knowledge, and they have a non- or even outright anti-realist take on that. If all knowledge is socially constructed, we don't have a way to directly experience reality (although another head on this hydra is "lived experience" which provides a limited exception - useful when you want to avoid things like statistics). This means that, while there may be an objective reality, we cannot know it.
ReplyDeleteSo, their academics have been busy constructing a shared "reality" in the form of shared methods and a communally constructed body of knowledge that is as close to reality as they believe possible.
On the other side are people (more or less realists in the philosophical sense, although loosely so rather than meeting the formal definition) who believe in an objective reality, even though they cannot fully know or understand that reality. They build their "reality" by trying to actually understand and build a body of knowledge about this external, objective reality from some combination of sources which may include science, religion, personal experience, etc.
The non/anti-realist left with their socially constructed reality see these realists as naive people who don't really understand the nature of knowledge. They set themselves up as the Great Educators who will save the world through educating the masses in their socially constructed reality.
This also gives them a Hegelian/Marxist dialectical battle: socially constructed reality vs. naive "realism" (again, in their view).
In part, their worldview is supported by philosophies of language that claim that all experience of reality is mediated through language. In that view, whoever controls language controls the social construction of reality.
(OK, before nits are picked, I know they think they're constructing knowledge (not reality), but they act as if their methods + their socially constructed body of knowledge = reality, so, in using the term "socially constructed reality" I'm applying a pragmatic-ish definition which may be wholly out of place in philosophical reasoning -- I don't know; I'm not a philosopher.)
I think counter-examples of this philosophy of language include the experiences of Zen and any kind of peak human performance where in general we agree that language hinders performance. That is, if a pro hockey player is thinking in words about how to score a goal while playing, he won't be able to do it; the words get in the way. It is only in the supra-linguistic "zone" that we have peak human performance. Zen koans, in my opinion, are constructed intentionally to short-circuit this language-mediated experience of reality.
Anyway, such are my thoughts this Wednesday morning. I have no idea if all that makes sense to anyone else.
Brit Hume notes that they should be calling it the "Election Fraud Hearings," considering all the air-time they're giving to the claims of election fraud that otherwise were mostly ignored by the legacy media.
ReplyDelete