Failure to Agree on Reality
Political echo chambers force us to be our own judges of information
Sorry it’s been so long since I’ve posted — I had the idea for this article like 5 days ago, but stuff just KEPT HAPPENING that was relevant and needed to be added. Now it’s WAY TOO LONG (I even included an intermission!) and I apologize for that, too! Enough blab, here it is!
Back in the Long, Long Ago, I spent my weekends judging Magic the Gathering tournaments. Every now and then, we’d have a situation in which the players could not agree on the state of the game. It generally went something like this:
Player 1: Attack you for 5.
Player 2: I take 5, now I’m at 4.
Player 1: Wait, my notes say you’re at 3…
Both: JUDGE!!!!
At that point, it was my job to step in and try to figure out the ‘actual’ state of the game. Both sides had their version of the story, and often the truth lay somewhere between them. Perhaps player 1 ‘missed’ a lifegain trigger for one of player 2’s land, or perhaps player 2 forgot about a Goblin King bonus when determining damage previously in the game.
When the state of the game couldn’t be parsed back together due to lack of information, we judges referred to this as ‘Failure to agree on reality.’ Everybody involved knew that there WAS a proper gamestate (actual truth), but it was impossible to say for certain what that truth was.
Though my judging days are behind me, that phrase has stuck with me, and I find myself thinking of it more and more these days as I observe what passes for ‘political discourse’ in this country. We get a Democratic story and a Republican story, with neither being the truth nor acknowledging anything positive or truthful about the other side’s story. At this point we have a nationwide failure to agree on reality, and it’s getting worse every day.
If you can remember back that far, in 2017 after Trump’s inauguration, Sean Spicer made a dubious claim about the inauguration being ‘the most watched’ in history. In a subsequent press conference, Kellyanne Conway uttered the phrase ‘alternative facts’. The media, of course, jumped all over the phrase and had all sorts of nasty reactions to ‘alternative facts’ — which they called demonstrable falsehoods. (Ironic during the time of breathless Russiagate reporting)
Yet Joe Biden’s entire presidency has been the use of ‘alternative facts’ in an attempt to keep the narrative alive and well. No longer is inflation driven by the type of reckless money printing that we’ve been engaged in for the last couple years (or decades), it’s all Vladimir Putin’s fault! Or maybe the greedy oil companies, who just now got greedy! And since it’s THEIR fault and NOT the reckless money printing, we should just keep recklessly printing money!
Did the Supreme Court just outlaw abortion and force mothers to carry unwanted children to term? It did if you watch the news or read the mainstream media. Only the proverbial political judges can actually explain what the ruling actually did and why. (The 10th Amendment is still a thing)
January 6th is another glaring example. For one side, it was a protest that got out of hand. For the other side, the day was so serious that it warrants impeachment, an obviously illegal congressional ‘committee’, a country-wide dragnet for people who weren’t even there, and endless warnings about how Republicans are ‘dangerous for democracy.’ (Sadly, that side is also withholding the entirety of the video evidence from that day.)
How can we come to any sort of resolution of a problem if (at least) one side refuses to acknowledge the reality of the situation, and if we’re simply yelling past one another and not listening? I’ve often said that as a libertarian, I understand the importance of taking your allies on a position wherever you can find them. If you want to end the war on drugs, let’s work together — your position on other issues is irrelevant as it pertains to the war on drugs. But in today’s political climate, the politicians are too busy demonizing the other side to ask for their support on important matters. Since we don’t actually interact and discuss, we’re basically living in two separate realities.
The most recent example I can think of involves the definition of recession. For as long as I can remember — and certainly during Donald Trump’s presidency — the definition of recession was two consecutive quarters with negative growth. But now the administration is trying to alter the definition of recession so that we’re not in one — because they see the problem as admitting reality, not the fact that the economy is in the toilet. They somehow think as long as we’re not ‘in a recession’, people won’t get upset spending $100+ to gas up their car or going broke trying to keep up with rent increases.
We saw this with the vaccines. During the rollout it was clear that the jab didn’t stop transmission and that any protection provided was purely personal. But that didn’t stop the ‘experts’ from pushing the false reality that ‘you’re protecting others’ with your decision. And when it was pointed out that the new jabs didn’t even fit the definition of vaccine (which STOPS infection in the vast majority of cases), the ‘experts’ simply changed the definition of vaccine — as if the problem was the definition and not the fact that the virus would continue to go through the population no matter how many people were jabbed.
DR. BIRX: I knew these vaccines were not going to protect against infection. And I think we overplayed the vaccines
You THINK that you overplayed the vaccines? People on Twitter were banned BY THE THOUSANDS for saying that the vaccine didn’t protect against infection. The ENTIRE PREMISE of the mandates was that the vaccine protected against infection. We called people selfish and threatened their jobs if they didn’t submit. We fired nurses and threw soldiers out of the military for not getting jabbed. And at no point did you not think to speak up and mention that you knew the vaccine wouldn’t protect against infection?
If that’s true, why are you not on trial right now?
INPURRRRRRMISSION
Speaking of bureaucratic lying shitweasels who should be on trial, Anthony Fauci recently braved the sunlight to conduct yet another powder-puff interview, this time with Robby Soave for The Hill. Though for thoroughness I’ll post the video below, I wouldn’t suggest actually watching it. Fauci simply claims that if he had to do it all over again, we’d still do what we did that didn’t work — but harder.
There’s no actual data from the real world that showed any of these NPIs made a difference. We didn’t NEED to do anything more, because nowhere in the country were the hospitals overwhelmed — the original ‘flatten the curve’ justification. Yet they made it illegal to go to work. They stopped you from visiting dying relatives in the hospital. (Hopefully they didn’t put those relatives onto the ventilator that killed them in the first place) They robbed children of multiple years of life, not to mention education. The government enacted the greatest power grab in American history. Yet this impish motherfucker has the AUDACITY to claim that we simply didn’t NPI hard enough.
If you made the mistake of actually watching the video, you’ll note that Fauci claimed that one of the things he’d do harder is get ‘good’ masks to the people. (because cloth masks are worthless)
"Right now, we are very, very clear that masks do work in prevention of acquisition and transmission," said Fauci. "But you've got to get a well-fitted mask that is of a high quality. And the two we know are high quality are N95 and KN95."
Do you know that tingling sensation you get in the back of your mind when a professional bullshitter is trying to bullshit you? Hopefully you got it when you read the above quote. And hopefully you remember why —
"We were concerned, the public health community and many people were saying this, were concerned that it was at a time when personal protective equipment, including the N95 masks and the surgical masks, were in very short supply," Fauci said in June of last year. "And we wanted to make sure that the people, namely, the healthcare workers, who were brave enough to put themselves in a harm way, to take care of people who, you know, were infected with the coronavirus and the danger of them getting infected."
If today he ‘knows’ that N95 masks work, he would do exactly what he actually did in real life — lie to the public in order to save those masks for medical workers. That’s the problem with lies — they get so hard to keep up with that the lie you tell today contradicts the lie you told yesterday. Sure is a shame we didn’t get an interviewer who would hammer that contradiction. (Related story: The Hill’s ‘regular’ covid reporter Kim Iversen was left out of this interview — likely at Fauci’s request. She has since quit the show.)
And now as we move away from the covid crisis, we jump headlong into the climate crisis. This is such an emergency that we need to stop producing oil in America, and instead we must send Joe Biden to Saudi Arabia to beg them for more oil. (It went as well as you would expect) Here we see a crack in the logic based on a false reality: if the climate emergency is so bad, why on earth would we burn EVEN MORE energy transporting oil halfway across the world instead of making it ourselves?
But as bad as Joe Biden is on the climate, Al Gore is even worse:
Let’s be clear: the ‘democracy crisis’ that Gore is talking about is the fact that ‘idiot voters’ don’t ‘vote the correct way’. (Nothing that a little fortification can’t fix) It’s not the fault of the politicians who can’t get enough votes for their money-burning climate change schemes, the fault is DEMOCRACY ITSELF.
Gore told NBC News’s Chuck Todd that public sentiment on climate issues is changing in favor of supporting urgent action, but a “broken” democracy is preventing progress from happening.
“In order to solve the climate crisis, we’re going to have to pay attention to the democracy crisis,” he said.
Gore said Congress cannot pass climate legislation for the same reason it is unable to pass legislation to ban assault rifles.
He said the Senate’s filibuster, which requires most legislation to receive 60 votes to advance, should be eliminated and that “big money” plays too influential a role in politics.
Once again we see the clash of two fake realities: In one fake reality, Democrats are the brave defenders of freedom, barely containing the GOP’s fascist tendencies. In the other fake reality, we must deal with this problem by breaking all the actual rules of the Republic. It makes MY head hurt to think about, I can’t imagine how the people who actually think that way must feel.
Oh, and how’s that green agenda working out in the rest of the world again?
The actual people who have to deal with the edicts from on high are not reacting well. And the world’s least favorite tyrant sees what’s going on and says “Oh, we need that.”
Covid wasn’t enough to disrupt normal life, so government is determined to do so via the only tool in government’s bag — the giant hammer of force. You WILL reduce your carbon. You WILL forfeit your land to the state when you can’t pay for it. You WILL own nothing. (Happiness no longer an option, sorry!)
Gato says that we also need to fight this via the power of memes, so I humbly submit:
At least Germany is acknowledging reality and considering turning their nuclear power plants back on. Sadly for Americans, it might take some real suffering like we’re seeing in the rest of the world for the politicians to acknowledge reality.
“We know they are lying, they know they are lying, they know we know they are lying, we know they know we know they are lying, but they are still lying.” - Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn
My question has always been: Why do the protected need to be protected from the unprotected by forcing the unprotected to get the protection that doesn't protect the protected?
It's called the Overton Window and it's getting stretched like Pelosi's eyebrows.
Now the entire discourse is a frothy soup of mis-truths, half-truths and pure fabrications.
Even Trump today said he "did the opposite of what Fauci said to do." No sir, no you did not. Is the Brandon Regime and the plague of pronouns worse? Yes, but both sides play the game daily.
Us plebs need to get our heads out over the trees and understand that we're being fed a diet of 99% sawdust, 1% electrolytes and we need to think and act for ourselves.