Case in point, from Unitarian pastor John Pavlovitz:
His is a dumbarse moronic thing to say of course. Yet oozing with falsehoods and arrogance seems like the prolegomena to all liberal discourse. Not to say there aren't conservatives or other non-leftists who aren't guilty of the same. It just seems as though finding leftwing discourse that doesn't rely on false accusation, bullshite, denial or arrogance is like finding Bigfoot.
Oh, speaking of the above qualities of leftwing discourse, as a bonus from the Tweet thread I saw above, there's this:
Heh. Oh yeah. Perhaps the least credible journalist in modern history. The man who was booted from CBS because he acted like an old blithering stereotype. It wasn't because he got caught colluding with the Democrats in order to unseat the president. It wasn't that he dug in on evidence after it was debunked. It wasn't even that he invoked the increasingly popular idea that evidence, proof and facts are not needed when we know someone is guilty.
Despite the official story, we all knew it was because he railed against the ascension of them 'New' Blogs like some tired old geezer railing against them young whippersnappers and their Rock and Roll music. Almost all conservatives I knew then, and not a few liberals, had to hang their heads with that one. There was no way he could keep being the face of network news sounding that out of touch with what was already old hat to more and more Americans.
But at least he gets his homophones.
The left has acquired a gift of saying things that are so outlandish as to shock their opponents into silence. Unless we show them documented proof that they are wrong the argument continues, however, they do not need to provide proof as if their words are proof enough for anyone with a half a brain. It's a lose lose situation. Exchange of ideas destroys the left, hence their need to force us to silence.
ReplyDeleteAs my son says, with each passing day, you sympathize with those in Germany or Russia who saw the problems but felt powerless to do anything since the problems were fully sanctioned by everything in Germany and Russia.
DeleteWhy does almost every leftwing argument seem to begin with either a lie or a false accusation?
ReplyDeleteBecause Nat Hentoff is dead, George McGovern is dead, Mark Kleiman is dead, and Alan Dershowitz, Jerilyn Merritt, Harold Pollack, Glenn Greenwald, and others on Substack can produce only so much content. Outside of this modest circle, liberal discourse consists of lies and accusations, full stop. Its essence is socially sanctioned aggression. 'Conservatives' are a miscellany of people baffled by and repelled by the aggression.
Yep. I find as I pay attention that more and more leftwing discourse is nothing but attack and accuse. Ha-Satan defines it well - the accusing one.
DeleteI disagree with you in re Rather. Mary Mapes was fired for making use of evidence she had to have known was fabricated. Rather was also discharged for cause, (1) for not undertaking due diligence on Mapes' work and (2) for offering a flurry of evasions and lies when her documents were exposed as fake. C-BS went through the rubrics of an audit by an external agent (former Attorney=General Richard Thornburgh) and Thornburgh was obliging and did not call a spade a spade in his final report. The investigation was to flesh out details and provide a face=saving interval for Mapes, Rather, and the corporation.
ReplyDeleteAgain, Mapes has six questionable documents. She gives two to one examiner, two to another, and two to a third. If all six documents had been given to each of them, you'd run the risk of dissenting opinions on each of the six and you could not use them. Then she ignored two of her examiners when they told her that it would not be prudent to rely on the documents. Again, at least one of the documents was produced in the default settings of Microsoft Word and anyone familiar with typescripts produced in 1973 would have spotted how anomalous it looked at first glance. Neither Mapes nor Rather had any excuses. When they tried to throw chaff in their viewers faces by bringing on Col. Killian's 86 year old long-retired secretary (who implausibly claimed to remember the Colonel was irritated with Bush at the time), she looks at the papers and says, no, that's not my work and the formatting is characteristic of Army memoranda, not Air Guard memoranda. They also knew that Gen. Staudt had complained publicly that Mapes had scammed him over the phone, reading the fake Killian memo over the phone to him and peddling his response ("well, if that's what he said...") as 'confirming' the complaints delineated in the memo. The network knew from the time Thornburgh was engaged that Mapes had perpetrated a fraud and that Rather was scrambling around trying to cover her bony ass. Network news was less sociopathic in 2004 than it is today and couldn't very well keep this pair of grifters on the payroll. They conned Robert Redford, or were able to enlist him as an accessory after the fact, which tells you something about the value of Robert Redford as a civic actor.
I was always sure the official reasons were more complex than that. But I know several I ran with back when this happened felt the big reason was that he came off as a laughing stock for railing against those bloggers like this was some new thing. By then, blog were well on their way to being common knowledge. There were many things that were bad looks of course. To me, not the least of which was his statement that the falsehood of the evidence was irrelevant, we know Bush was guilty anyway. That puts me in mind of the Kavanaugh hearings.
DeletePavlovitz also reminds you that divinity schools and seminaries recruit and retain a great many low calibre people.
ReplyDeleteI think when your society encourages low caliber people, almost any outlet is going to be recruiting low caliber people since they are the ones who are at hand.
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