Even as the Times gets it right...

SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 25, 2021

...Rachel entertains us: In our view, Epstein and Corasaniti did an excellent job with yesterday's Arizona / Cyber Ninjas "election audit" presentation.

Their news report appears in this morning's New York Times. As they start, they note that the ridiculous group with the stupid name reported / acknowledged a basic fact:

Joe Biden really did defeat Donald J. Trump in Maricopa County!

They start their news report with that basic fact. Quickly, though, they move to the deeply troubling place where the rubber is meeting the road. This is the current problem we're all living with:

EPSTEIN AND CORASANITI (9/25/21): Significant parts of the right treated the completion of the Arizona review as a vindication—offering a fresh canard to justify an accelerated push for new voting limits and measures to give Republican state lawmakers greater control over elections. It also provided additional fuel for the older lie that is now central to Mr. Trump’s political identity: that the 2020 election was stolen from him.
“The leaked report conclusively shows there were enough fraudulent votes, mystery votes, and fake votes to change the outcome of the election 4 or 5 times over,” Mr. Trump said in a statement early Friday evening, one of seven he had issued about Arizona since late Thursday. “There is fraud and cheating in Arizona and it must be criminally investigated!”

For Mr. Trump, Republican candidates vying to appeal to voters in primary races, and conservative activists agitating for election reviews in their own states, the 91-page document served as something of a choose-your-own-adventure guide. These leaders encouraged their supporters to avert their eyes from the conclusion that Mr. Biden had indeed won legitimately, and to instead focus on fodder for a new set of conspiracy theories.

Sad but true—and also, extremely important. According to this news report, "significant parts of the right," including the aforementioned Mr. Trump, are now "treat[ing] the completion of the Arizona review as a vindication."

Trump is saying it proves his case—and vast numbers of people are going to believe him!

In such ways, The Other Tribe is engaging in a type of "epistemic secession." It's very, very hard to see how the American experiment, such as it is, will find a way to survive this ongoing mess.

The Other Tribe is deeply involved in an "epistemic secession." This bizarre behavior is largely enabled by the rise of modern technologies and modes of interaction—talk radio; cable news; the Internet; social media—but its ongoing success reflects the deepest realms of pre-rational, highly tribal human mental impulse.

That tribal imperative is now in the saddle among The Other Tribe. That said, Our Own Tribe is bowing to those same human impulses. This was evident as we watched Rachel Maddow mug and clown and reassure / entertain our own failing tribe last night

Maddow is Our Own Rhodes Scholar and Our Eternal Child. For her, the release of the Arizona report was mainly a cause for hilarity last night. 

The Times reporters quickly stressed the disturbing underside of this event. By way of contrast, Maddow opened her program with a very large dose of her standard clowning and tribal reassurance. 

Fourteen minutes into this performance, she summed it up as shown:

MADDOW (9/24/21): But we're back to where this started. Which is that it is hilarious.

[PAUSE FOR LAUGHTER] 

And you can't take that away from me.

Maddow's performance continued from there. But no one will rob Our Eternal Child of her sense that matters like this are mainly hilarious.

No one is going to take that away from her! Jon Stewart told her to stop doing this long ago—that her job was more important than this. She told him that she wouldn't.

We expect to focus on last night's performance in our reports next week. We'll also mention the parts of Maddow's performance in which she mentioned the troubling side of the Cyber Ninjas report.

With that in mind, we'll leave it here for now. But even as The Other Tribe bows to Trump's reign of crazy misstatement, Our Own Tribe has never been able to quit this Eternal Child.

Meanwhile, we have our own sprawling performance of epistemic secession, a performance which largely concerns deeply important matters of gender and race. Again and again, our devotion to this regime leaves us saying the darnedest things. 

This helps harden the epistemic secession underway in The Other Tribe. The Others think our statements are nutty or even dishonest. All too often, it's hard to say that The Others are wrong.

More on these tribal secessions next week. These dueling secessions are very dangerous.

"Hilarious," Our Own Scholar said!


45 comments:

  1. "but its ongoing success reflects the deepest realms of pre-rational, highly tribal human mental impulse."

    Somerby wants us to believe that this lying about the Arizona results reflects human nature. It doesn't. This is motivated lying in the service of political goals. It is wrongdoing, not human foible.

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  2. "That said, Our Own Tribe is bowing to those same human impulses."

    Somerby wishes to present Maddow's work as equivalent to the outright lying on the right. That false equivalence not only tries to excuse what Trump and other are doing, but it pretends that the left is just as bad. It isn't.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. This is Somerby's Big Lie.

      Delete
    2. Three years of Russiagate — Rachel has served

      Delete
    3. Who could possibly believe it would take a foreign power to get the Republican base to vote for an overt bigot, like Trump?

      Delete
    4. Right wing hack Mueller wrote a whole treatise on how Russiagate was real, obviously his version is watered down. Somerby is a clown, just as much as his fanboys are.

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  3. "But no one will rob Our Eternal Child of her sense that matters like this are mainly hilarious."

    The point of laughing at this stuff, and Trump himself, is to undercut its plausibility. The laughter is to demonstrate that the claims of the right are not serious, have no truth, but are more of the right's attempts to fool people using the most ludicrous claims. People have advocated using humor against Trump and the right because outrage and factual contradiction don't seem to work very well.

    Whatever Maddow's sense of humor might be, this is theater, not a joke. That Somerby fails to understand this (or pretends so), speaks to his ignorance not Maddow's feelings about Trump and the right.

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  4. “The Times reporters quickly stressed the disturbing underside of this event.”

    Maddow has covered the Arizona “audit” every night on her show since the audit began. She has massively covered all aspects of the GOP efforts to suppress votes and undermine the election, beginning with all of the Trump lawsuits last year, and she has constantly stressed the “disturbing underside” of all of this.

    The result of the “audit” being a massive dud was the occasion for a moment of mirth, although her mirth underscored the absurdity of the stupid thing and its cynical motive, which she very clearly articulated.

    Perhaps one can judge the relative importance a person places on a topic by the amount of time that person spends covering it. Compare and contrast: how many times has Somerby mentioned this topic compared with Maddow?

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  5. "Our Own Tribe has never been able to quit this Eternal Child."

    Why would anyone on the left want to "quit" one of their most effective counters to the alt-right? Why do you suppose Somerby spends time attacking Maddow? He isn't liberal and he knows who the right's enemies are -- Maddow chief among them.

    Calling Maddow a child because she laughs in the face of Trump claiming vindication from a report that shows he lost bigly in AZ is about as stupid as anything Somerby has said for a long time.

    Or maybe Soemrby is just upset because she has never laughed at any of his jokes?

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  6. "Joe Biden really did defeat Donald J. Trump in Maricopa County!"

    Ha-ha. Thanks for the laughs, dear Bob.

    Surely you're joking? Or can it be that you're really unaware that in America presidential candidates don't compete for counties?

    They compete for states, dear Bob. And falsifying votes in one county can easily switch the state to the losing (despite him winning that particular county) candidate.

    Comprende, dear Bob?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Except that Biden won more votes than originally thought, not fewer, so there is no chance to switch that country, much less the whole state.

      Delete
    2. Yeah, except for all the other stuff that the audit discovered.

      And the fact that all the dembot media (including, sadly, our dear Bob) go with "Joe Biden really did defeat Donald J. Trump in Maricopa County!" bullshit is telling.

      Delete
    3. Bwahahaha

      The audit revealed how gullible the Maobots are to feed the Cyber Ninja grift, but at least the Ninjas arehonest enough to admit that Biden did better than the initial results. Doubtless word salads will convince their brain dead Maobots to put up more cash

      mao mao :)

      Delete
    4. The lady doth protest too much, methinks.

      If everything is as obvious as your liberal-hitlerian cult tells you, why do you dembots get triggered so easily?

      Delete
    5. The old Mao has been replaced by a new bot that thinks aggressiveness wins. Any monkey can throw its own poo.

      Delete
    6. Yes, Mao was funnier when he pretended he didn't awake every morning and run-off to kiss the asses of the Elite Establishment.
      The absurdity of it was the joke.

      Delete
  7. "Joe Biden really did defeat Donald J. Trump in Maricopa County!"

    Of course he did! Why would Somerby, a supposed liberal, think there was any question about that?

    ReplyDelete
  8. Bob, R. Maddow is teaching her youthful audience the proper attitude to have regarding our nations's elections and democracy. Of course, it's a joke to laugh at all the way to the bank for people like her! Her corporate pay-masters own the entire US electoral process and they will continue to make sure the system continues to let them steal the nation's wealth. They pay their top 1% servants like her very well with the trillion$ stolen from the working class.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. The media has always been Right-wing.

      Delete
  9. This animosity toward Maddow, especially when she laughs at something, strikes me as a bit sexist. Women do tend to smile more than men. Marianne LaFrance explored whether that is because they are female or because they are in a subordinate social position, and determined it was the latter, since men who are subordinate socially also tend to smile more.

    Somerby seems to have a knee-jerk dislike for things that women tend to do or like, being pleasant chief among them.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. What makes you, dear dembot, think that Maddow is a womyn?

      Delete
    2. She self-identifies as one. This isn't rocket science.

      Delete
    3. Citation needed, dear dembot.

      Delete
    4. You don't need a "citation" whenever someone tells you their pronouns.

      Delete
    5. So, you have no idea if that dembot is indeed a womyn, dear dembot?

      Delete
    6. She refers to herself as a woman, so she is a woman as far as I am concerned. You can go through this world misgendering people, if you want, and that may be one of your least offensive traits, your continual references to the left as Hitlerian among them. For example, calling people bots is dehumanizing in the same way as insisting that Rachel Maddow is not female (because why?).

      Delete
    7. Let us explain, for the alternatively gifted: the dembot in question can belong to one or more of the infinite number of genders.

      And we won't accept it any other way, dear binary-gender fascist/dembot.

      Delete
    8. She is what she says she is -- not what YOU say she is.

      Obviously, IQ is a hot button for you. Didn't your mommy praise you enough?

      Delete
    9. "And we won't accept it any other way,.."

      The spokesperson for the Establishment has his marching orders, I see.

      Delete
  10. "Maher further criticized the trend of separate accommodations for white and Black students on college campuses, pointing to surveys and news stories of colleges offering segregated accommodations such as gyms and orientations.

    “We need to stop regarding this new woke segregation as if it's some sort of cultural advancement. It's not,” Maher said."

    As long as people such as Maher accept segregation of men as women as acceptable without tearing apart our nation and representing disunity, then they have no basis for considering separate accommodations (by choice not mandate) based on race as acceptable when students prefer it.

    I have never heard Maher argue that men and women should share bathrooms, nor that women should be permitted in every job in the military. He doesn't seem to mind disunity when 50% of our population is excluded from their fair share of jobs in congress. It's just when black students and black athletes want to be recognized in their views that our current anthem does not represent them.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Whoa, how brilliant. You, dear dembot, are definitely a Mensa material. Your IQ is so high, it goes beyond all limits and comes out on the other side.

      Delete
    2. Mensa is an innocent bystander here. I guess we know now who the idiot is who only writes "you're stupid" on comments, as if that were an argument. You can fuck off.

      Delete
    3. Such exceptional intellectual powers, and you aren't in Mensa, dear dembot? How sad.

      Delete
    4. Maher wants to smoke pot legally, and make sure his paramours abortions are legal, otherwise he's a Right-winger who loves the status quo.

      Delete
    5. Agreed, dear dembot. Failing to repeat liberal-hitlerian talking points to the letter makes one an Evil Heretic.

      Delete
    6. I'd call Maher a "Libertarian', except I don't remember him begging Daddy Government to save his business from the clutches of COVID.

      Delete
    7. Maher laughs at things that aren't funny all the time. I wonder why Somerby isn't on his case?

      Delete
  11. Palmer Report says:

    "America has more active Covid cases than the rest of the world. Combined. Put another way, 52% of all Covid cases worldwide are American cases. To a large extent you can thank Donald Trump and his cavalier, slipshod, deceitful, mixed message way of dealing with this horrible, deadly disease."

    And I thank Bill Maher too, for having medical quacks on his show to say that covid originated in a bioweapons lab in China, and saying that only obese people (and himself) catch covid, and believing that he is invulnerable because he eats right, so who needs public health recommendations about masks and social distancing.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. But your Palmer Dembot ain't even a medical quack. Just a dembot, the lowest form of life in this here universe.

      Delete
  12. Typically Bob’s response would actually be closer to a freak show attraction like Mao, the facts here don’t give him anything to work with. So he makes it about Rachel Maddow. It’s hard to see how our system survives when supposed adults do such things.

    ReplyDelete
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