This is very bad
I can hardly look at social media right now. I increasingly loathe the instantaneous hyper-emotional reactions, the fact-free assertions, the self-serving conjectures. Look, people are obviously going to have an emotional reaction to an event as momentous as an attempted assassination of a former and potentially future President. I had an emotional reaction myself. I was driving to Milwaukee as this was all going down, pulling over to rest stops to check for information, and listening to whatever live news feeds I could find on my phone. I felt terrible. For whatever journalistic or “contrarian” instincts I may have, I am also a citizen of the United States, which is a country and society that I genuinely like and appreciate on many levels, notwithstanding its many political and governmental faults — which I cover so obsessively precisely because I have reverence for my American citizenship, which I was afforded by accident of birth.
So I felt visceral despair upon news of the assassination attempt on Trump. One of the few oft-repeated cliches I happen to actually agree with is that there legitimately is no conceivable justification for political violence of this sort in 2024 America. It’s an act of lunacy, whomever the target may be. The “stakes” of election cycles are just empirically not anywhere near as high as partisan propagandists constantly tell the public. And even if the stakes were that high, there could still hardly be any conceivable justification. We don’t yet know the precise motive of the shooter — wild claims run rampant despite the pittance of information currently available — but whatever his motive might’ve been, I strongly doubt the act was “rational” even from within his own warped mental framework. I despair that such a person could have caused such tumult. I worry what the ramifications will be — not politically, but civically.
I think the civic health can be damaged by a proliferation of poor public reasoning. Sadly this will inevitably have political reverberations, which I don’t even want to get into right now, as I declared a personal moratorium on any conventionally “political” criticism or commentary until further notice, and I’m still adhering to that for the time being, although I wonder how long it can last since the Republican Convention is nearly upon us.
By “poor public reasoning” I mean making conclusory statements devoid of established fact, based on what you on some level want to be true, rather than what is true. I would like to know the full details of what happened. I don’t yet have those details. I therefore am going to refrain from making any conclusory statements out of some misplaced desire for a particular outcome. Helpfully, I don’t even have that desire for any particular outcome. I don’t “desire” for the motives or background of an attempted assassin to align with my political prerogatives, which are divorced from the current partisan tempest anyway.
Poor public reasoning absolutely dominates social media, which is worrisome not because of the alleged dangers of “misinformation” — a term which has lost all meaning in the past several years — but because it reflects that too many people have extremely flawed cognitive habits. Speculation and hypothesizing can be useful for tentatively processing new information, but making up completely bogus statements of fact, and claiming you conclusively know things you can’t possibly know, are errors of reasoning and unfortunately get replicated on a mass scale during major events like these. There is probably very little that can or should be done to counter it (no censorship, please) but for my part I would advise people to strengthen their critical faculties and conscientiously consume all info they see online.
Anyway, I’ll be in Milwaukee by this afternoon, so we’ll see what happens.
This seems incredibly outdated and irrelevant at the moment, but The Hill did ask me to circulate my appearance Thursday on their new long-form discussion segment with Robby Soave. I was the first guest. It’s mostly about the Biden withdrawal stuff, which I don’t even care to dwell on right now, although at some point we’re all going to be forced to resume “conventional” political thinking.
"One of the few oft-repeated cliches I happen to actually agree with is that there legitimately is no conceivable justification for political violence of this sort in 2024 America. "
Agree but it is especially galling to hear this from a chorus of presstitutes and AIPAC faithful who are the primary source of the division from their Russiagate lies and January 6th distortions to many referring to Trump as another Hitler and unique threat to democracy w sick domination of social media & authoritative sources are clueless or lying talking heads unteathered from reality.
While I agree with your epistemological musings in the abstract, it is rather unlikely that enough information will be available any time soon upon which to make an assertion based upon fact. How long was it before any solid facts were made available about the JFK assassination, and the complete facts, despite continuous promises, are still being kept from the public. And that was a successful assassination. I think it unrealistic that any responses based upon facts will be possible for a while, if ever. What can be made are some fact-based statements about the political and civic conditions that provided the climate which make such an event more than likely. In fact, given the facts we have, the only irrational response I can imagine is one of surprise. What brings me to a place of dismay is that this was so predictable. And this seems to me a more accurate register for the state of our political, civic, and social landscape.
The idea that any of the facts that will be revealed over the coming days will be trustworthy is naive at best. If Donald Trump has done nothing else of value, he has revealed to all who want to see the extent to which our democracy is a myth and to which the Deep State or Security State or Blob or whatever you want to call it, controls the country. This truth has been known to those who sought it out or were in a position in which it made itself known for a long while. However, it was only with Trump that it has become a topic of the general discourse. However, the fact that it has become part of the general discourse does not seem to have lessened the power it has to twist the available limits of known political reality to its bidding. The only thing that this general revelation has accomplished is to make more likely more extreme actions than in the past decades since the advent of this Blob. While this attempt might well prove to be the lunatic action of a lone assassin, it really hardly matters, as the trust in any information provided to prove one truth or another is all but vanished. And I dare say, rightly so. After the mainstream media became a wing of one of the two dominant parties, how can anyone muster trust on any mass level. Those who do trust, with few exceptions, are doing so out of partisanship rather than any rational survey of the given facts. The given facts which, once again, have been revealed to be intentionally circumscribed and skewed in the manner they have been doled out. Only after months or years, or even decades, do we seem to put together the courage and capabllity to challenge to paltry and questionable servings which we have been offered.
I am hopeful that the that part of the web that is still free continues to make a difference and that there will continue to be an acceleration in the correction of official fact or propaganda, that there will continue to be an acceleration in the offering of alternative versions to the official 'truth'. But those who are offering such hope are under assault and are daily battling for their right to exist. Another reality which should tell us how untrustworthy any facts in the near after of an event are likely to be.
A long way just to say that any rational response is unlikely. And the word 'reaction' by definition is not rational. I hope there will be space for the rational before this election. But hope, possibly in a more positive and gentle way, is not very rational itself.