“Debunked” this and “false” that – and “deniers”

The New Neo Posted on by

No doubt all you news junkies have noticed that the MSM has taken to putting modifiers such as “debunked” and “false” in front of any statement they don’t like. It’s so commonplace it’s become a sort of bitter joke on the right, like “Republicans pounce!” when the Democrats mess up and the right criticizes them.

Yesterday we were having a discussion about what to call the “false and debunked” method of characterizing such things. I suggested “the begging-the-question voice” – meaning this:

Begging the question is when you use the point you’re trying to prove as an argument to prove that very same point. Rather than proving the conclusion is true, it assumes it.

But that doesn’t seem quite right to me – not that it matters, because the people who do it couldn’t care less what I call it. It’s also a sort of proof by repetition, the idea that if the left and the press repeat something often enough a great many people will absorb it as truth. Another example, of course, is the assertion that Trump is a corrupt puppet of Russia, although the left’s attempt to introduce evidence to back that up really was faked, and later debunked. The repetition of the original falsehood worked, though, and it’s my impression that there are few Democrats who have given up the idea that it was true and remains true.

Commenter Ray Van Dune suggested “the derogatory voice” to describe these descriptive methods, and added, “For myself, I see it as a convenient signal that I am being coached or bullied into believing something that someone wants to make sure I know is not open to question!” Commenter MollyG thought perhaps the “gaslighting mood” would do.

And today commenter Sarah Rolph writes:

The practice of inserting opinion into a news story is known as “editorializing.”
It used to be considered a huge mistake, so it’s strange for us oldsters to see it becoming so common.

It certainly is a form of editorializing, but it differs in that it masquerades as a hard cold fact. “Debunked” doesn’t mean “I don’t believe it” – and in fact it’s an open question as to whether those making the “election fraud in 2020 has been totally debunked” claim believe what they are saying or just don’t care or actively would support election fraud by Democrats if it had occurred because it was all in the worthy cause of getting rid of Trump. The “debunked” claim about election fraud claims to be relying on absolute empirical knowledge when of course the way the election was designed there is no way to know for sure, and the court cases that dealt with it simply decreed that lack of standing and then later laches barred any real inquiry into the question, or that it simply was unanswerable.

So it’s not editorializing in a supposedly factual piece, it’s more than that and worse than that. And it works, whatever you call it.

In the very same vein but slightly different, the new phrase to describe those who would question the sanctity of the most non-fraudulent election that ever was, that of 2020, is “election denier.” Suddenly, nearly two years later, it’s everywhere.

I guess they’re like Holocaust deniers, only worse.

Here’s a good example. It’s an article purporting to discuss the results of primaries, but there’s a great deal of identification of “election deniers” – which is kind of funny, considering it’s a report on how these people did in an actual election, the GOP primaries for 2022.

If you scroll down at that link, there’s even a chart titled: “How election deniers are doing tonight.” The subtitle is: “Senate, House, gubernatorial, attorney general and secretary of state candidates who have either denied or questioned the legitimacy of the 2020 election, and their results in Republican primaries in Connecticut, Minnesota, Vermont and Wisconsin, as of 11:06 p.m. Eastern.”

It continued with the Wyoming and Alaska primaries, too. At another site (can’t remember where) I saw not only the phrase “election deniers” for the right but also “pro-democracy” for the left. The free, fair, perfect 2020 election has become a Truth that cannot be challenged without heretical apostasy, and in contrast its defenders are holding up the pillars of democracy itself. But of course, if fraud was indeed committed by the Democrats in 2020, then this nomenclature becomes especially Orwellian.

The reason that, from the very start, fraud allegations were invariably labeled by the MSM as “debunked” or “false” is that the canon had to be established firmly. Then it was only necessary to repeat and repeat and repeat till it became reified in many people’s minds. The “deniers” label is icing on the cake, and it will be used right up until Election Day 2022 and probably beyond.

Today…

The New Neo Posted on by

…I’m taking a one-day break from discussing the MAL search and its fallout.

Sometimes you just gotta.

You can discuss it in this thread, though, if you care to.

On the Rhine

The New Neo Posted on by

In a post I wrote earlier today about Germany’s power problems, there was a link with a photo of a low-water Rhine and the caption: “A ferry cruises past the partially dried riverbed of the Rhine river in Bingen, Germany on Aug. 9.”

Here’s the photo:

Because I had to memorize a great deal of poetry in grade school, what immediately sprang to mind for me on reading that caption (“the Rhine river in Bingen, Germany”) was a cryptic stanza forming part of that sentimental old chestnut, Longfellow’s “The Children’s Hour,” about play-time with his own children:

They almost devour me with kisses,
Their arms about me entwine,
Till I think of the Bishop of Bingen
In his Mouse-Tower on the Rhine!

We had to memorize that poem, but I had no idea who or what the bishop or the mouse tower were, although even back then at least I knew something about the Rhine. It occurs to me now that this is the age of the internet, and I can finally find out about the rest quite easily. So here it is, and it turns out to be a surprisingly grisly tale; I’ll leave it to you to follow the link and read the details yourselves.

On looking at “The Children’s Hour” again just now, as adult and parent and even grandparent, I have to say that the deeper point of the poem used to be lost on me but now I get it – especially the last few stanzas. The entire thing is a description of how the three youngest of Longfellow’s children pretend to surprise him towards the end of the day in his study, making believe he is a fortified castle and they are an invasion force. The game is fun, and Longfellow plays along.

But those last three verses reveals how Longfellow really feels:

Do you think, O blue-eyed banditti,
Because you have scaled the wall,
Such an old mustache as I am
Is not a match for you all!

I have you fast in my fortress,
And will not let you depart,
But put you down into the dungeon
In the round-tower of my heart.

And there will I keep you forever,
Yes, forever and a day,
Till the walls shall crumble to ruin,
And moulder in dust away!

The particular fortress that was Longfellow has long since mouldered away, along with all of his children. But the poem and the feeling remain – although I doubt many school-kids are taught to memorize the poem these days.

Fugit inreparabile tempus.

Germany’s nuclear energy whiplash

The New Neo Posted on by

Back and forth, back and forth:

Nuclear exit 1 began in 2000. The government back then consisted of the center-left Social Democrats and the Greens. The latter were in power for the first time, having grown out of the hippie counterculture of the 1970s, and in particular the German mass movement against nuclear energy. So Germany decided to phase out its nuclear power plants.

Exit 2 happened in 2010. The government, by then consisting of the center-right Christian Democrats and the pro-business Free Democrats, decided to exit from the first exit and keep the remaining nuclear plants running. Exit 3 followed within a year, after the nuclear disaster in Fukushima, Japan. It spooked the government into exiting from its own exit of the preceding exit. That is, Germany again began phasing out nuclear power.

The country’s last three fission reactors are due to go offline at the end of this year. Bad timing, obviously.

Now Germany is experiencing a power crunch worse than that of most other European nations, which didn’t go the anti-nuclear route. Why did Germany? This isn’t really an answer, but it’s certainly a description:

Many Germans have spent their entire lives protesting against the splitting of atoms. The Green Party’s base, in particular, teems with zealots who consider all nuclear energy evil, and any attempt to nuance the discussion as tantamount to treason.

Well, now Germany is performing another pivot, at least for the moment – at least maybe:

Germany will postpone the closure of its last three remaining nuclear power plants, planned for 31 December, as it prepares for gas shortages this winter.

Anonymous government officials confirmed the move in the Wall Street Journal on Tuesday (16 August), saying conditions have been met for the government to allow a temporary lifetime extension of three remaining nuclear reactors as the country is facing a likely shortage of gas due to cuts in supply from Russia over the Ukraine war.

Responding to the article, a spokesman for the ministry of economy said the report in the WSJ “lacks any factual basis”.

Not exactly what you’d call clear. What is clear, however, is that it is the Greens who are opposed to the extension.

As if all of that isn’t bad enough, Rhine water levels are low, and that hampers shipping – including the shipping of much-needed coal from Amsterdam.

This is somewhat ironic, as well: “High river water temperatures in France have impeded the operation of some nuclear power plants.”

The political divide

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a new piece on a well-worn topic:

Keyboard conflicts occur every day across the United States. A not-infrequent outcome is that for political reasons, people cast away into outer cyberdarkness friends and even relatives: they are “unfriended.” Unfriending represents an aspect of an ever-developing public policy issue of Americans isolating themselves into hives of like-minded others who have no tolerance for anyone who falls outside their political ideology…

In October 2020, NPR explored the subject of political divides, which included the act of unfriending, in “’Dude, I’m Done’: When Politics Tears Families And Friendships Apart.” It reported: “Jocelyn Kiley, associate director of research at the Pew Research Center, said political polarization is more intense now than at any point in modern history. Nearly 80% of Americans now have ‘just a few’ or no friends at all across the aisle, according to Pew. And the animosity goes both ways.”

It’s my observation that some portion of that 80% of Americans with few or no friends across the aisle are in that situation because they purposely avoid people who disagree with them. But others have had it happen naturally, either because where they live practically everyone is on the same page, or because that’s true of their families or ethnic groups or those who share their interests.

For example, I’ve never shunned people who disagree with me, but because of family, demography, and general interests (the arts, for example), I don’t happen to know many conservatives. That makes me the opposite of the people described in that paragraph I just quoted because almost all my friends are from across the aisle. Even when I became conservative myself, that only increased the number of my conservative friends by a tiny bit. Of course, I know a lot of conservatives online, but we’re talking about regular friends in the non-cyber dimension.

And I never had that shunning impulse in the first place; if I break off with a person, it’s for other reasons than the political, and I’m not a big one for using cutoff even in those cases. In fact, I’ve only used it once that I can recall, and that was more of a mutual thing. Since I’m not on any social media such as Facebook or Twitter, I don’t have to deal with the unfriend phenomenon.

Not online, anyway. I’ve dealt with it in person, though, with some people deciding not to speak to me anymore. Most of my friends and family, however, are able to talk politics with me in a relatively respectful way, or we just agree not to talk politics at all. With that latter group, we’ve tried such discussions and come to the conclusion that there’s just no point, because they just stir up frustration and even anger to no avail. After all, a mind is a difficult thing to change.

I have no doubt that shunning happens on both sides, but it’s my very strong impression that it’s far more common coming from the left. And these days it can even be at the hands of someone who never used to be a leftist but instead was just a regular old Democrat. Now such people are more likely to take a much more radical view than before, and to be more intense about it as well.

From the article:

In 2016, the Hill, a Washington, D.C., political publication, printed “Poll: Dems more likely to unfriend people due to political posts,” an account of a study exploring political leanings and unfriending The article said, “The nonpartisan Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) found 24 percent of Democrats distanced themselves from people on social media because of a political posting. Nine percent of both Republicans and independents reported doing the same to those in social media circles. Additionally, 28 percent of liberals surveyed said they removed someone from their social media circle because of the content that person posted, compared with 8 percent of conservatives.”

That’s very much in line with my own observations, and I think January 6th and the hype around it by the left has exacerbated matters. I’ve had several people say to me the equivalent of, “Surely, though, you see that January 6th was a dangerous un-democratic insurrection…”

Recently I was at a gathering of a group of people, some of whom I’ve known for a long time and some of whom I didn’t know at all. I was talking to a woman I’d never met before, but who for various reasons I was virtually certain was on the left. We were talking about non-political things when suddenly, apropos of nothing, she asked me, “So, isn’t it something, all this latest stuff that’s happening with Trump?” After a pause, I answered that I don’t like to talk about politics. Her response was, “So you don’t follow it.” I couldn’t resist saying, “Actually, I follow it very closely. But I just don’t like to talk about it.” And then I changed the subject rather dramatically. If I hadn’t done that, I think she would have persisted in quizzing me more.

I’ve noticed lately that sort of phenomenon – that some people are determined to talk about politics and have trouble taking no for an answer. What used to be understood – that in most social circles, politics wasn’t something to talk about because it led to such fruitless and bitter arguments – is no longer standard operating procedure. I actually think that, until I refused to answer that woman, it had not even occurred to her that my politics might differ. When I said no, I think it started to occur to her for the first time, and she was having trouble wrapping her mind around the idea that it might be so.

You might ask why I desisted. It’s because I know from bitter experience that most people on the left don’t want an answer that differs from theirs. Instead, they want to be able to bond, to share some political observations – and hopefully some good old Trump-bashing – with a like-minded individual. In that sense, I spoil the party.

Still working on fixing a few glitches

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve been dealing with tech support for quite a while last night and this morning, and I finally ended up signing on for a higher level of support for a month in order to fix some of the problems. I’m curious whether any of you are still experiencing any difficulties getting to the site. For me it’s loading slower, at least sometimes. I’m also getting a cached version on my phone, minus today’s open thread so far, although I’m getting the correct updated version on my regular computer with the open thread showing up. And the redirect from the old URL is working at times but not working perfectly.

My goal while I have the higher level of tech support is to get these things fixed and to also tidy up other loose ends, such as getting the “preview” tab to work. High hopes, right?

We’ll see…

Liz Cheney says: I am big, it’s Wyoming that got small

The New Neo Posted on by

Looks like Liz Cheney will no longer be a member of the House of Representatives from Wyoming.

Pity.

But she’s not sad, not Liz. She’s leaving Wyoming behind in a cloud of dust:

“What’s remarkable is that in the face of almost certain defeat she’s never once wavered,” Republican Accountability Project Executive Director Sarah Longwell told RealClearPolitics. “We’ve been watching a national American figure be forged. It’s funny how small the election feels — the Wyoming election — because she feels bigger than it now.”

Earlier today Cheney said that this is “certainly the beginning of a battle that is going to continue to go on.” I have no doubt it will go on, but it’s certainly not the beginning.

Cheney was speaking just now and compared herself to Lincoln.

In closing:

This is the leading MAL-raid theory, shared by many

The New Neo Posted on by

Commenter “T J Olson” writes:

Federal defense attorney and aggressive Con Law advocate, Robert Barnes, has an unexpected take on the Deep State’s further engagement with ex-Prez Trump.

He believes that it wasn’t egregious overreaching. Instead, he argues that indications support his argument that Trump asked heads of Departments what documents they absolutely would not want to see declassified? (This has been mooted elsewhere.)

And then declassified them and secreted them away as insurance over the Deep State.

Thus, Barnes argues that the MAL raid was an aggressive attempt by the Deep State to regain possession of said documents from Trump and keep their wrongful heinous deeds hidden or simply destroyed outright.

The huge size and strategy of going in — hoping to be secretive and hoping that if discovered, it would redound against Trump, smacks of audacious desperation! In other words, incredibly risky.

Further, he thinks that an overly broad warrant is consistent with his theory.

He adds many details. I have to listen again to his development of his points, from around 20 to 60 minutes mark, in this recent interview hosted by Viva Frei.

I haven’t yet listened, although I plan to do so. Barnes is always interesting although I certainly don’t always agree with him, but I’ve found him to be best on this sort of thing: domestic legal matters of a political nature. What’s more, his explanation is actually one that I’ve seen espoused by quite a few other pundits, although the exact details might differ. In these scenarios, it is usually Russiagate that is the subject of the documents. But the basic idea is that Trump has documents that implicate the intelligence community in wrongdoing and they want to get them back and make sure they stay classified and hidden, as well as to discredit Trump and keep him from being elected again. It makes a lot of sense.

The thing is, just about anyone who’s going to believe that the intelligence community is implicated in wrongdoing towards Trump, based on such documents, almost certainly already knows it. After all, there’s been plenty of other evidence in that vein. And the vast majority of those who don’t realize it by now (or who applaud it) probably will never change their minds, no matter what evidence is presented.

Things have gotten very bad, and although I’ve been cynical about these things for a long time, I’ve only gotten more so. I’m sorry to say that and I hope my increased cynicism is not justified, but I fear it is.

[NOTE: If you want to become even more depressed about the state of the US, please read what Julie Kelly has to say. I believe she is correct.]

About those fourteen FBI whistleblowers

The New Neo Posted on by

Whistleblowers from the FBI have come forward recently:

“Fourteen FBI agents have come to our office as whistleblowers, and they are good people,” Jordan revealed to Fox News. “There are lots of good people in the FBI. It’s the top that is the problem.”…

“It’s becoming a well-worn trail of agents who say this has got to stop, and thank goodness for them and that the American people recognize it, and I believe they’re going to make a big change on November 8,” Jordan quipped Sunday, obviously referring to the 2022 midterm elections behind-the-shed ass-whoopin’ the Dems are expected to incur in 72 days (but who’s counting?).

I wouldn’t count those ass-whoopin’ chickens just yet. I expect a lot more effort from the left to try to make that result less likely. Whether their efforts will bear fruit or not I don’t know, but never never ever count the left out.

Back to the whistleblowers, though. Fourteen doesn’t seem like so many to me out of the many many thousands who work there. On the other hand, whistleblowing on such a corrupt and powerful institution can’t be undertaken lightly. But still, fourteen seems miniscule to me – and, unless they’re willing to come out of the closet, not all that meaningful except as a conduit of information to us on the right. To actually reform the FBI, or dissolve it, will take the right getting a great deal more power and demonstrating more boldness than it has up till now.

Then again, fourteen might be a high figure if the actual number of agents working on the suspect political cases is purposely being kept small, and especially if those agents are selected for their political sympathies with the left. If only the most loyal party members are chosen, you’d hardly expect any whistleblowers at all. But whatever the case, the ones who are coming forward so far had better blow those whistles a whole lot louder.

Fancy that: enough of the Gascon recall signatures have been invalidated to end the effort for now

The New Neo Posted on by

Not a surprise. I repeat: not a surprise.

I am always nervous about signature-gathering on important questions. For example, I learned long ago that in Obama’s very first political race, a Democratic primary, he managed the feat of disqualifying every single one of his opponents through signature challenges. It was one of the first things I noticed about his political modus operandi. It’s certainly legal, and particularly in Chicago I don’t think it’s that unusual, but the scope of what Obama did to his primary opponents (Democrats all) seemed larger and more organized. It also seemed at odds with his carefully cultivated nice-guy image. And of course one of the four people his legal efforts kicked off the ballot was his former mentor Alice Palmer. If you haven’t read the article at that link, please do.

Recently the same thing was done in Michigan to kick many of the Republican governor primary contestants off the ballot. As far as I know, it was not the left that initiated that one; it was some of the candidates on the right. However – and I keep meaning to write a “Part II” about this, but more pressing things have intervened – one of the reasons so many signatures were supposedly invalid is that the company hired to collect them was crooked. In addition, the method the state had of authenticating or de-authenticating the signatures involved taking a very small sample on each petition and then extrapolating the percentage of bad signatures on that sample to the whole. Although that’s an obvious time-and-effort saver, it seems to me it’s ripe for abuse or for error.

There has never been any allegation that the GOP candidates who had the fraudulent signatures knew about it, much less ordered it. But they are considered responsible anyway, even though everyone knows they’re not going to personally verify the signatures. Who in the campaign was in charge of doing that intermediate work and checking the names against the voter rolls? Whoever it was, that person or people slipped up.

But we don’t know how many fraudulent signatures there were, because no one ever went through that process. What actually happened (and the description is a bit murky, but I’m pretty sure this is correct) is that the Board of State Canvassers in Michigan checked some sheets of petitions and discovered a high rate of fraudulent signatures, and then extrapolated that number to the entire batch and to the other candidate who had used the same company and the same workers.

It was on the basis of that (which of course is nothing like the way fraud cases in the 2020 election were handled or every would be handled) that five of the GOP gubernatorial candidates were disqualified. And the process by which that occurred is interesting, as well. The Board of State Canvassers consists of two Republicans and two Democrats, and the vote on this was split along party lines, 2-2. But with a tie, the decision goes towards disqualification (which seems very odd indeed to me) because the rule is that the candidates must prove the signatures to be valid, and neither the Board nor the challengers need prove the requisite number of them to be invalid.

I find that rather stunning. But again, unsurprising.

Which brings us to the leftist Los Angeles Country DA George Gascon. Here’s what just happened with him:

Recall organizers needed to gather nearly 570,000 valid petition signatures to schedule an election. But county officials found only about 520,000 were valid, well below the threshold, after disqualifying nearly 200,000 signatures turned in.

That’s between a fifth and a quarter of the signatures. Interesting, no? And who were the “county officials” doing the checking? Why, look at this [emphasis mine]:

In July, the Los Angeles County registrar notified the Recall DA George Gascón campaign that a random sampling of signatures revealed a 22 percent rejection rate, 60 times more than the rejection rate for mail-in-ballots during the 2020 presidential election. In response, the recall campaign pushed the registrar to explain what they believed was a “shockingly large rejection rate.”

The campaign obtained public records that show the registrar’s office was training staff to review votes using outdated signature standards, which allow the disqualification of any signature for minor variations compared with the one provided on a person’s voter registration form. In a letter to the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, lawyers for the campaign expressed concerns that these outdated standards were leading to an improperly high rejection rate.

Again, not a surprise. That’s the way power is wielded, and that’s the way the powerful stay in power if they’re willing to do whatever it takes.

More:

…Marian Thompson, the attorney who wrote the letter, told the Washington Free Beacon the county clerk has not been forthcoming about the reasons for the rejection rate and refuses to share the precise number of invalid signatures.

“If they didn’t follow the law and apply the same legal standards used for signature verification for vote-by-mail ballots, then we have a legal team assembled to resolve this matter in a court of law,” Thompson said.

No surprise here either. In fact, I’d be surprised were it otherwise:

The Washington Examiner reported the county has denied the Gascón recall campaign observation rights for the election’s signature count, further obfuscating the verification process.

I haven’t read anything that specifically addresses who the people supervising the counting are by party, but I think it’s a pretty safe guess that they are Democrats and not the least bit neutral in this matter.

[NOTE: This is only tangentially related, but it’s about the Lisa Murkowski campaign’s effort to change Alaska’s voting to rank-choice to help keep Murkowski in office.]