…And four more things this week. Maybe five. Or six.
I don’t really know how to frame this stuff, to be honest. I think I had something, but then lost it somewhere along the way. To me, the issues represented here are glaring, but to many they’re not, and I don’t know how to—nor would I want to—try and convince anyone to think anything just because I think it, too.
People think one thing, others think another, and everyone can cite just about anything to prove they’re the ones in the right. And, barring any “evidence”, they can elicit some informal fallacy of reasoning to “prove” their point.
“What so-and-so said must be true because so-and-so’s a doctor. Or leader of business. Or politician. Or president.”
“If we don’t stop this one thing now, other things are bound to arise in greater number and overrun or complicate our way of life.”
“My holy book says so.”
“My holy book says so and it’s right because it’s my holy book.”
“These types of people must be responsible for this act, because the act happened right after these people began to act this way.”
Which all fail to, by the way. But they won’t know that, because all that matters is they establish and reiterate their point to themselves, exclusively, and that there are people out there just like them who will back them up in the process of establishing that same point to themselves, as well.
But what all these stories of this week showcase is someone or some organization trying to convince the world that what someone else did is wrong, and, in the process, winds up showing, usually via some informal fallacy of reasoning, that their motives and actions are just as silly, flawed, harmful and/or wrong, if not more so.
I’ll start with the My Pillow guy, Mike Lindell. Sure, why not? This guy just can’t read the handwriting on the wall. And when he does, he reads it as something to the effect of, “Well, that’s not what the handwriting says!” People as well-to-do as he is shouldn’t be this wall-writing illiterate, but here it is, nonetheless. Lindell was so certain that Trump wasn’t lying about widespread voter fraud back in November 2020 that he put $5 million of his own money where his mouth shouldn’t have been, saying in 2021 at his Cyber Symposium in South Dakota that he’d award the cash to anyone who could pour over data he released publicly and find that it didn’t pertain to the 2020 election. Well, someone did. And then did. If there’s one thing I, personally, the writer of this piece, have learned in my life, it’s never to screw with people who deal in information for a living. This gentleman, a software engineer and cyber detective out of Las Vegas, went over the data and found none of the mumbo-jumbo he was given pertained to the 2020 election. At all. And presented a 15-page paper to prove it. Now, after Mr. Lindell has been told by the arbitrators of an evidentiary hearing that he legally owes $5 million to the engineer, Lindell is literally screaming (holding his ears and jumping up and down with his eyes shut, I’m imagining), “He didn’t prove anything!” Needless to say, he’s going to refuse to pay the $5 million as long as he has lawyers who are willing to be paid to tie whole thing up in court forever.
This, also, may strike a reader as asinine: seeing someone presented with the integer one, and then another integer of one, and watching them calculate the sum and find it equals not 2, but infinity times infinity plus one jillion: The Susan B. Antony Pro-Life America group (SBA), a very powerful anti-abortion organization with potent ties to Washington, put out a response to Donald Trump’s own reply to a question about his (Trump’s) current stance on abortion, which was very Republican in nature, stating that the legality of abortion should be determined by the states. (There’s your first ‘1’, okay?) Now, that’s just what the Supreme Court had in mind when they ruled back in June, 2022, that abortion was not federally protected by the Constitution; interpreters of law everywhere will tell you (including good old, basic old Wikipedia) that whenever something is determined not to be or to no longer be a federal issue, it, by default, becomes an issue to be ruled upon, independently, by each and every state legislature in America. (There’s your second ‘1’.) And, with those integers, what the math that the folks at SBA actually came up with was that Trump ought to be ashamed of himself for not having the sense to declare that the right to an abortion is an issue that now falls under the jurisdiction of the federal government.
(There’s your infinity times infinity, right there. Plus another jillion.)
Tucker Carlson’s been kicked off the FOX News Network, you may have noticed (peripherally, I would imagine and hope). While many are still speculating why the host of the highest-rated cable news show in the America was dropped unceremoniously and without a real farewell of any kind, reports of his backstage shenanigans, stage whispers that apparently we all couldn’t hear and any other theatrical metaphor he engaged in that I can’t come up with right now to describe the texts, emails and first-hand anecdotes that are emerging about him and his show (which are more or less precisely what it all was: theater) are generating all sorts of gossip. Amidst it all, an odd anecdote came out in Vanity Fair, about a speech Carlson gave at the Heritage Foundation wherein he stated George Floyd, COVID and the War in Ukraine have forced Americans to conform out of fear of liberalism (I think); defied anyone to explain what the plus in “LBGTQIA+” [sic] stands for (ever heard of the internet, s—head?); mischaracterized Janet Yellen’s comments about abortion to make a point that if the federal government supports destruction, by which he means child sacrifice, by which he means abortion, it’s “not a political movement, that’s evil”; characterized ‘evil’ as violent, hateful, disordered, divisive, disorganized and filthy, and meant all those, in turn, to describe the federal government, by which he means the Biden administration (with me so far?); that he was “certainly not backing the Republican Party” (still there?); and then wondered out loud at some point, Who would lie on television by not telling the truth?
The anecdote went that Rupert Murdoch apparently got freaked out that Carlson asked everyone in attendance to take ten minutes a day to pray for the s—hole America had become (my words, his innuendo), and that this somehow caused his downfall. Doubtful. Mitch McConnell was caught on a recording saying something similar in 2014 in a private get-together for big-money political donors when he stated, “[Progressives] believe in all the wrong things,” like better wages, social welfare and government oversight that protects people’s health and the overall environment, and no one was really surprised by it.
Carlson’s downfall was caused by Tucker Carlson. Only now, too much of the public has learned too much of who that person really is.
One plus one equals infinity times infinity plus nine jillion. According to that math.
Also, the North Carolina state Supreme Court just reversed a decision the North Carolina State Supreme Court made three months ago, now clearly ruling that gerrymandering to favor one party (Republicans) is totally legal and voter ID laws don’t violate the equal protection clause in the state constitution anymore, and are also crucial to stopping election fraud because election fraud actually sways the outcome of an election in North Carolina, or anywhere else for that matter. And people who have a hard time obtaining a driver’s license have always been the cause. As have convicted felons.
And there couldn’t be any other reason for keeping these people from voting. Or being included in a district where a Republican could win a seat in the statehouse.
And one final thing—a school superintendent is quite possibly going to lose his license for speaking and acting up against the growing DeSantis regime in Florida on issues like abortion and early transgender care and a suppressive “Don’t Say Gay” law (regime = the governor plus the state’s supermajority Republican legislature). His crime? Injecting his “personal political views” into his work and leadership.
Personal political views. Against the guy who’s trying to destroy Disney because it challenged his personal political views. And the regime’s. Which just so happened to have been made into law recently.
I swear there’s a common theme in all of this. It’s down there somewhere, let me take another look…
