Justice for Jussie

The New Neo Posted on by

When it finally came it was a move that should surprise no one who’s been following the news at all:

“Empire” actor Jussie Smollett faces a felony charge of disorderly conduct for allegedly filing a false report claiming two men attacked him last month, a Chicago Police Department spokesman tweeted Wednesday night.

Smollett has turned himself in:

Yesterday I speculated on Smollet’s motive:

Attention and fame—fifteen minutes or longer—are potent [motives]. And of course, there’s also the desire to stir up political conflict over race to the detriment of the right.

I then went on to speculate at length in that post on a third possible motive, both for Smollett and for others engaged in similar hoaxes: the desire to be part of a noble group cause, such as the causes of the past in the fight against overt and violent bigotry against black people. I added:

I am not offering this post as any sort of excuse whatsoever. It is merely a description of a phenomenon. In the case of at least some race hoaxers, I really think this is part of the driving force to commit a dangerous and truly heinous crime that could have grave consequences, including riots and more hatred. I utterly condemn all race hoaxers and believe they should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, but that doesn’t keep me from being interested in what might make them tick.

The police say that Smollett faked the attack because he was “dissatisfied” with his salary. That is no surprise either; probably he thought that he would become more famous, more sympathetic, more virtuous, and more heroic all at the same time as a result of his hoax. These things—the desire for money and the desire for appearing virtuous despite being exactly the opposite, as well as the desire to be part of a noble cause even if your actions are ignoble—can all co-exist.

Or perhaps I’m wrong and Smollet was merely motivated by money. That is certainly possible; I’ve been wrong about things before.

But whatever his motives, it certainly was a funny way to go about it, and I don’t mean funny ha-ha. As I said, I hope he’s prosecuted to the full extent of the law. This could have ended up much much worse if he and the brothers hadn’t been so incompetent as hoaxers. What if they had succeeded? It could have done immense harm to blacks and whites and everyone in-between.

And if the MSM and many politicians and celebrities on the left hadn’t immediately jumped to believe Smollett, the hoax wouldn’t have done them any harm, either. As it is, it should be doing their reputations harm. As it is, though, they’ll probably ignore their own shame and hope it will go away.

And it probably will go away, too, at least in the eyes of their supporters. Memories are short, and human beings can rationalize away quite a lot. But perhaps next time a few more people, just a few, won’t be so quick in the rush to judgment.

Race hoaxes, virtue-signaling, and the desire for the heroic

The New Neo Posted on by

In all the verbiage about Justin Smollet and other race hoaxers, there’s been talk of motive. Attention and fame—fifteen minutes or longer—are potent ones. And of course, there’s also the desire to stir up political conflict over race to the detriment of the right.

But I think for most people another very strong motivator is a more complex one. People usually want their lives to have meaning, and one way to gain meaning is to engage in a great and heroic struggle against enormous and evil forces. Sometimes that struggle is against hatred, and in that fight a person often suffers at the hands of the haters.

There is no question that a battle of this type is part of the history of black people in America. And there are quite a few heroes in that struggle who are much celebrated today.

What can a young person do if he or she wants some of the same intensity of purpose? The person doesn’t even have to be all that young, either; he or she can be someone old and nostalgic for more heroic days (although I don’t think that’s anywhere near as common as the phenomenon in the young, especially if the older person is old enough to remember how bad it really was then compared to now).

So how does one become a hero? Of course, there are plenty of bona fide ways that have nothing to do with race. But not everyone sees him or herself in those roles. Some people want the glory without the work, and they don’t mind lying in order to get it. They tell themselves that the lie is justified because of their heroic and virtuous cause.

It’s not just race hoaxers, either who exhibit this phenomenon. It’s also The Resistance, whose members fancy themselves fashioned after the Resistance in WWII. This current Resistance is ridiculous in that conceit, but I think their attempt involves a yearning for the heroic. It also involves much else, of course, including a hefty dose of virtue-signaling narcissism as well as a shallow knowledge of history. But a desire to be involved in a group that’s dedicated to a great cause is part of it.

Let us not forget that “group” aspect. People are lonelier today than when I was young, despite (or maybe in part because of) the internet and social media and all that connectedness we supposedly have. Connected to whom? Connected for what? Connected how? Virtue-signaling—saying we are connected to a group with “good intentions”—is one possible answer to that lacuna.

You may think I’m being much too kind to race hoaxers in giving them any hint of good intentions. Perhaps I am. But I don’t think so. And I am not offering this post as any sort of excuse whatsoever. It is merely a description of a phenomenon. In the case of at least some race hoaxers, I really think this is part of the driving force to commit a dangerous and truly heinous crime that could have grave consequences, including riots and more hatred. I utterly condemn all race hoaxers and believe they should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law, but that doesn’t keep me from being interested in what might make them tick.

Sandmann sues the WaPo

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s the text of the complaint.

Paul Mirengoff has a pretty good analysis of this particular suit’s prospects:

It’s worth noting, however, that much of the alleged defamation by the Post consists of quotations from Nathan Phillips, the jerk who confronted the Covington students. Some of it consists of the Post reporting what the students’ own arch-diocese said about them when it rushed to judgment.

The Post will argue, I assume, that it isn’t defamation to quote an eyewitness who got facts wrong. The complaint tries to head off this argument by alleging that the Post “recklessly relied on Phillips.”…

…I wonder what the implications are of allowing lawsuits against newspapers based on their choice of sources. If the Washington Post can’t rely on biased sources, its national news pages would be quite thin…

The Post reported, without quoting anyone, that the Covington students chanted “Build That Wall,” something the complaint says didn’t happen. But is it defamation to wrongly accuse someone of chanting this? Certainly it will make some people think worse of the students (and some think better of them). But the Post reported accurately that Sandmann and others wore MAGA hats. Would chanting “Build That Wall” add any loss of reputation to that already induced by the hats?

Even if the suit against the WaPo ultimately won’t fly, it’s still well worth it to file it in order to serve notice on the WaPo and other media outlets that they might actually face some financial consequences some day. But I think some of the defamation lawsuits by Sandmann against individuals have a decent chance of succeeding.

I don’t know if Andrew McCabe has stopped beating his wife

The New Neo Posted on by

And there are things that McCabe says he doesn’t know, either. Such as:

Some of the comments to that Ace post I linked to:

You’ll have to buy my book to find out!

Do we know if McCabe has the bodies of several dead children in his basement?

We do not know.

Do we really know if Trump is an agent of Saaaaatan? Well, of course we just don’t know. Definitively.

Trump is an interdimensional vampire from the right dimension. Prove me wrong.

“We don’t know?”

Good enough for me! IMPEACH!!!!

Despite the jokes that practically write themselves, the thought that McCabe was ever head of the FBI is a very sobering one.

[ADDENDUM: An article about another of McCabe’s lies. I think the author misses the point in one respect, however, when he characterizes it as “unbelievable.” McCabe has a still-large potential market for his book among the most fervent Trump-haters, whose appetite is still huge for this sort of thing.]

Al Sharpton on Jussie Smollett

The New Neo Posted on by

No, this is not the Onion. Al Sharpton, race hoaxer extraordinaire, who was successfully sued for defamation by the lawyer Sharpton coaxed Tawana Brawley to defame and name as a perp, has said the following regarding the Jussie Smollett case:

When initial reports broke, Sharpton claimed “we should come with all that we can come within law enforcement to find out what happened and the guilty should suffer the maximum.” Now that the story appears to be very different, Sharpton “still maintain(s) that.” And if it is found that Smollett and these gentlemen did in some way perpetrate something that is not true, they ought to “face accountability to the maximum.”

Sharpton went on to talk about the confusion surrounding this very strange news report, before finishing with the very awkward double negative claim of “We cannot not get to the truth here.”

I wrote an article for PJ some years ago about the Brawley case and Sharpton’s role in it:

Tawana Brawley, much like UVA’s Jackie, was a young woman (Brawley was only 15 at the time) who concocted an elaborate lie to get out of a sticky situation. As with Jackie, it’s not at all clear that Brawley originally intended her accusations to go national, and she did not initially name any names. But pretty soon, egged on by police questioning and then by “advisors” including Sharpton, her story became enormously well-known, and alleged perpetrators were identified.

It later came out that Brawley previously had been physically abused by her parents, particularly a stepfather who was a violent man with a criminal past. She was afraid her parents would punish her for skipping school to visit a boyfriend; they had beaten her before under similar circumstances. Thus the ruse was born…

After Al Sharpton and several lawyers started to take charge of the publicity on the case, that’s when her charges got a great deal more specific and became a national scandal:

“Sharpton, Maddox, and Mason generated a national media sensation. The three claimed officials all the way up to the state government were trying to cover up defendants in the case because they were white. Specifically, they named Steven Pagones, an Assistant District Attorney in Dutchess County, as one of the rapists, and called him a racist, among other accusations.”

A grand jury ended up finding that no crime had occurred. But many members of the black community, whipped up by Sharpton and company, believed that Brawley had gotten a raw deal and that guilty and abusive white men had been let off scot-free…

…The falsely-accused Pagones won a $345,000 defamation judgment against Sharpton, Maddox and Mason, and a $185,000 default judgment against Brawley. But Sharpton himself has never paid a penny; his debt was paid off for him in 2001 by “supporters, including attorney Johnnie Cochran.”

Brawley was only 15 years old at the time, but Sharpton was an adult. What’s his excuse? He is still in the public eye 30 years later, making sanctimonious statements about an accountability he’s never faced himself except symbolically and temporarily. How many people today know a thing about what Sharpton did back then? Only us old folks.

A hand of one’s own

The New Neo Posted on by

Here’s a story about hand transplants and their variable results, benefits and risks, and the stories of some of the patients who’ve had them.

Reading the article, I was struck by a number of things. The first is how far medicine has come; I seem to remember reading about the first hand transplant not all that many years ago (actually, about twenty years ago—how time does fly). The second is how problematic these procedures often are. The third is how variable the results can be. Some patients have great success and some end up having the transplanted hand or hands removed, after all that work and hope.

I also was struck by how many of these patients had initially lost their extremities to sepsis, an illness I wrote about here.

When I read about these things, it takes me back to the decade in which I had nerve injuries in both my arms and suffered constant and often substantial neuropathic pain (I’ve described it here and elsewhere). I’m not comparing myself to these patients (thank goodness). Nevertheless, I have had a fairly lengthy experience of nerve injury, and then a lengthy convalescence (a couple of years, actually) and rehab from nerve surgery, and am well aware of the dangers and difficulties inherent in rehabbing any nerve problem. Hand transplants involve a great deal more, of course. But they also involve the reconnection and growth of many nerves, and that takes a long long time.

In particular, the article recalled a dream I had a night or two after surgery on my right arm. I dreamed that my arm had been amputated and I’d been given another arm that was attached at the shoulder with clumsy, Frankensteinsih stitches. At the time, my right arm was essentially unusable, and in tremendous pain. The rehab ended up being fraught with problems—I changed physical therapists about four times before I found one who knew how to help me—and my recovery took two to three years. It’s been about twenty years and I’m now about 85% to 90% better than I was before the surgery, which is practically miraculous and for which I’m very grateful. But a person doesn’t forget an experience like that.

During all the time I was recovering, I didn’t know the outcome. I didn’t even know whether I was recovering. In fact, for many months I was worse than before the surgery. The doctors had told me that my case was highly unusual and that my recovery wouldn’t be typical and might be more difficult than is usual, so I didn’t have any good comparison or even a time frame to guide me. So I remember what it was like to just not know whether what I’d done would help me or hurt me.

I’m not a person who tends to have no regrets. But in the case of my arm surgery I had no regrets, even during the dark times, because I felt I’d exhausted every other possible remedy during the near-decade I’d spent in terrible pain. I really felt I had nothing left but surgery, and I needed to try it even if the prognosis was uncertain. It had taken me a while to find a good surgeon willing to take me on as a patient (as I said, my case was unusually complicated). But one of the greatest arm surgeons in the world said “yes,” and that was it.

Hand transplant patients are rolling the dice and taking far larger risks than I ever did, and mine felt large enough. Some hand transplant patients have been doing okay with prostheses and just want something better. Some are struggling more with prostheses prior to the surgery. Some recover quickly, some slowly, some temporarily, some permanently (so far, anyway). Some go into kidney failure. One of the patients reported on in the article has died, although of a rare problem seemingly unrelated to her hand transplant.

I wish them all well. They’ve already had to deal with enormous hardship, and they’re dealing with it as best they can.

Lara Logan leaves the present-day journalism fold

The New Neo Posted on by

I’m not sure that Lara Logan (she of the Superman-ish name) was ever in the fold in the first place. But if she ever was, she’s certainly left it now:

Logan herself got into trouble with CBS several years ago when she used an unreliable source for a Benghazi story that reflected poorly on the Obama administration. Aside from that, she has a history of intermittently voicing concerns that are not the party line. She also was the correspondent who was sexually assaulted and nearly killed by a large crowd while reporting from Tahrir Square in Egypt in 2011.

Regarding Logan’s Benghazi report and the aftermath, here’s an unconsciously humorous memo from a CBS executive:

On 26 November 2013, Logan was forced to take a leave of absence due to the errors in the Benghazi report. Al Ortiz, Executive Director of Standards and Practices for CBS News, wrote in a memo, “Logan made a speech in which she took a strong public position arguing that the U.S. Government was misrepresenting the threat from Al Qaeda, and urging actions that the U.S. should take in response to the Benghazi attack. From a CBS News Standards perspective, there is a conflict in taking a public position on the government’s handling of Benghazi and Al Qaeda, while continuing to report on the story.”

If taking a public position on a government action disqualified a reporter from reporting on that action, these days half (or more) of the journalists in America would be out of a job. I can get behind that—I actually think that reporters shouldn’t be speaking or writing about their personal politics. But that wouldn’t fix the larger problem, which is that they report from the skewed perspective of their personal politics.

[NOTE: More here about Logan’s previous journalistic life and times, including the Ortiz investigation of her CBS story about Benghazi.]

Mark Penn writes an excellent summary of Russiagate and the FBI and DOJ’s role

The New Neo Posted on by

Worth reading.

But perhaps the most surprising thing of all is Penn’s resume: “Mark Penn…was chief strategist on Bill Clinton’s 1996 presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton’s 2000 Senate campaign, and Mrs. Clinton’s 2008 presidential campaign.”

Did they do something terrible to him? Because he’s certainly left the reservation.

I also recommend this by Victor Davis Hanson, although I don’t think I agree with him that the coup is dead.

Jussie Smollett and confirmation bias

The New Neo Posted on by

The story of the attack on Jussie Smollett was a suspicious one from the start. I say that for two reasons. The first is that so many of these recent reports of racially motivated attacks, physical or symbolic, have turned out to be self-perpetrated hoaxes. The second is the many inconsistencies, glitches, and lapses of logic in Smollett’s own story (listed by Kyle Smith here).

But this was a story MSM and the left deeply wanted to be true. And as with so many other stories the press deeply wants to be true—the racist MAGA-hatted Covington kids, Christine Blasey Ford’s tale of the would-be teen rapist Brett Kavanaugh, the marauding frat boys of Virginia, the feces-covered Tawana Brawley—when people want a story to be true they tend to suspend disbelief and even logic in the effort to keep believing it.

It’s called confirmation bias:

Confirmation bias, also called confirmatory bias or myside bias, is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms one’s preexisting beliefs or hypotheses. It is a type of cognitive bias and a systematic error of inductive reasoning. People display this bias when they gather or remember information selectively, or when they interpret it in a biased way. The effect is stronger for emotionally charged issues and for deeply entrenched beliefs. Confirmation bias is a variation of the more general tendency of apophenia.

People also tend to interpret ambiguous evidence as supporting their existing position. Biased search, interpretation and memory have been invoked to explain attitude polarization (when a disagreement becomes more extreme even though the different parties are exposed to the same evidence), belief perseverance (when beliefs persist after the evidence for them is shown to be false), the irrational primacy effect (a greater reliance on information encountered early in a series) and illusory correlation (when people falsely perceive an association between two events or situations).

Don’t think this is limited to the left. It’s not. But it’s rampant there, perhaps because the left is very “emotionally charged” right now, to say the least.

But reporters are supposed to be especially aware of confirmation bias and to be on constant guard against it. When reporters see themselves as crusaders for a cause, rather than dedicated to truth no matter where it leads them, we have a state of affairs where they can be easily fooled because of their confirmation bias.

Today, though, it’s worse than that. Some may be fooled, but some know that they should be more skeptical and more thorough in investigating something, but purposely suppress that knowledge because of sheer and utter partisanship. That’s not confirmation bias—or, if it is, it’s willful conscious confirmation bias.

Which could also be called purposely writing outright propaganda.

With all of this in mind, I find this WaPo op-ed by Nana Efua Mumford fascinating. Mumford—the executive assistant to The Post’s editorial board—is black, and she seems to have grown up in Chicago. Mumford describes her back-and-forth struggles with the Smollett story this way:

…[W]hen I first heard of the attack on Smollett, I had to pause. On “Empire,” Jamal Lyon came out as gay in front of his homophobic, abusive father; took a bullet for that same father and overcame an addiction to pain pills. Was I reading last week’s episode recap, or did this actually happen in my hometown of Chicago? Almost immediately, I had a terrible feeling that I was victim blaming, or worse, that I am so brainwashed that I no longer can hear cries of hurt and outrage from my own black community. It was a horrifying feeling that I am still trying to work through almost three weeks later.

So for Mumford—who I think is being honest than self-serving here, although I can’t be sure—her initial skepticism was followed almost immediately by self-blame at her own thoughtcrime for doubting Smollett’s story. She seems to still be troubled by her initial failure to follow the dictates of groupthink, rather than being proud of her independent thinking and devotion to logic instead.

I use those Orwellian terms purposely and not as a gimmick, because Orwell was describing the left and the ways in which it controls independent thinking and trains a person to stop all such meanderings from the Truth as the Party sees it and wills it. That’s what Mumford appears to be struggling against.

She writes:

I wanted to believe Smollett. I really did. I know that there is a deep, dark racist history in Chicago and, if proved true, this would be just one more point on the list. I wanted to believe him with every fiber of my being, most of all because the consequences if he were lying were almost too awful to contemplate.

And yet I struggled with Smollett’s story.

So for Mumford this was an enormous struggle, a very real one and certainly not a trivial one. It’s one that is faced by anyone reluctant to change his/her mind (and that’s just about everyone, believe me) about something basic. Perhaps the saddest thing in Mumford’s story is the fact that she would rather the attack on Smollett have been bona fide than that he be found to have been lying and a complicit hoaxer in his own supposed victimization.

Unfortunately (at least by yesterday, which was when Mumford’s op-ed was published) Mumford is still fighting the truth and taking sides against it. That is the strength of groupthink. And in doing so, she commits another error and exposes previous confirmation bias on her part [emphasis mine]:

If Smollett’s story is found to be untrue, it will cause irreparable damage to the communities most affected. Smollett would be the first example skeptics cite when they say we should be dubious of victims who step forward to share their experiences of racist hate crimes or sexual violence. The incident would be touted as proof that there is a leftist conspiracy to cast Trump supporters as violent, murderous racists. It would be the very embodiment of “fake news.”

And that reason, more than any other, is why I need this story to be true, despite its ugliness and despite what it would say about the danger of the world I live in. The damage done would be too deep and long-lasting.

Mumford says that the Smollett story would be the first example skeptics would cite. Where has she been all her life? In this post, I’ve already cited a few that easily take priority—high-profile cases, too—and I did it just off the top of my head. There are plenty more, and you can find many lists of them: race hoaxes in 2016, some more recent ones here, and that’s just the tip of a huge iceberg, and not a really hidden one at that. If Mumford is unaware of this history, both old and new, it’s due to more confirmation bias, either unconscious or willful.

Right now the status of the Smollett story is that most media outlets are reporting that “Chicago Police believe Smollett paid two men to orchestrate the alleged assault.” That seems most likely, because Smollett’s behavior around the crime was not the behavior of an actual victim (see Kyle Smith’s summary of Smollett’s suspicious behaviors).

So at this point, logic seems to indicate that Smollett was in on it. But I’m open to new information that would tell me that Smollett’s new defense is correct, and that (as he says) these two black guys from Nigeria who are acquaintances of his really did attack him and yell racist epithets, and then framed him by saying he paid them to do it. It’s a bit far-fetched, but stranger things have happened. How two Nigerian guys could masquerade as white guys is a little hard to picture, even if they wore ski masks and gloves and were totally covered up. But it’s possible. Hard to believe, but possible. Phone records, emails, and/or records of any payments by Smollett to the brothers would be part of the evidence that could shed light on this aspect of the whole sordid mess.

But whether it was Smollett himself or whether he was being framed by the brothers, the indictment of the MSM and the left stands: they believed a hoax, and a fairly transparent hoax at that. Or they pretended to believe it for propaganda purposes. Either way, it’s bad.

And for many and varied politicians, the same.

[NOTE: Another thing that’s indisputable is how much Smollett hates Donald Trump, which would serve as a possible motive if he is in fact the hoax’s perpetrator:

Pretty nasty stuff.]

[ADDENDUM: This is satire, right? Right?]

RIP Pat Caddell

The New Neo Posted on by

This is sad news:

Pollster and political analyst Pat Caddell died from a stroke on Saturday at the age of 68.

I don’t watch cable news very often, but I’ve certainly watched it enough to be familiar with Pat Cadell. He was whip-smart, iconoclastic, and an independent and bold thinker.

He was somewhat of a political changer, or at least a semi-changer (or a stay-the-samer-while-everyone-else-moves-er). But at any rate, he distrusted both parties:

As for the future, Caddell may have been estranged from the Democratic party but he had contempt for the Republican party’s leadership. He accurately predicted that the GOP would lose the House in the 2018 midterms, caustically explaining the loss to Breitbart News as follows:

“The Republican party is essentially wusses. They will not fight. They don’t believe in fighting. They just lay down and roll over, and usually for their donor class, who are basically antithetical to 90 percent of Republicans and what they want.”

Caddell correctly predicted the rise of someone like Trump who would appeal to those disaffected from government as usual, and once Trump was in the running he predicted that he had a good chance of winning. So at least he got to say “I told you so.”

RIP, Pat Caddell.

[NOTE: See also this (hat tip: commenter “Snow on Pine”) as well as this.]

The genius of Peter Sellers

The New Neo Posted on by

Every now and then this blog has visitors of the anti-vaxx or anti-fluoride variety. Reading one of the latter the other day, I thought of the movie “Dr. Strangelove,” and recalled that the Jack D. Ripper character had a thing against fluoride.

YouTube easily provided the scene. When I watched it, I was struck anew by the fact that Peter Sellers was a comic genius. Watch what he does here. It’s somehow both subtle and close to the edge of too much at the same time. He plays it right smack on that border, and it’s screamingly funny.