Thursday, June 30, 2016

Rule of irrationality


Let me just wrap up this amazing month of June in the year of Our Lord 2016 -- not by an essay or even a legitimate argument -- but by a cry of frustration about the times in which we live.

As usual, given the above, I first turn to Facebook.  Someone today posted a bitter complaint about the government's refusal to call the Orlando shootings a "terrorist act" perpetrated by "Islamic terrorists."  He insisted that the administration was caught up in "political correctness" -- apparently, out of a misplaced desire not to offend Muslims.

My own belief -- which I didn't bother expressing -- is that the perpetrator was a confused and probably mentally unbalanced young man, who may well have been overcome by some sort of homophobic panic.-- but who had also expressed sympathies with ISIS.  If he were still alive, I doubt that anyone, including a psychiatrist, could easily have untangled the various emotional, subconscious, and intellectual bases for his vicious attack. 

But American intelligence has failed to uncover any evidence that ISIS or other terrorist organizations were directing the attack or had any advance notice of his plans.  Therefore, in my humble opinion, his killings may have been influenced by his knowledge of similar terrorist attacks, and/or by sympathy with ISIS, but were not part of an organized terrorist strategy.

But my humble opinion is not the point of this post.  A comment to the gentleman's Facebook post reads as follows:

Here's the other thing, just because they cannot officially link that degenerate Florida terrorist to a SPECIFIC terrorist group DOES NOT MATTER. What, we are recognizing ISIS as ISIL now? Conceding that region of the world is a nation? And they are what, issuing passports and social numbers to people of "their nation" and ONLY CARD CARRYING "ISIL Residents "can be considered terrorists? NO. NO. NO. A terrorist is a terrorist. I don't care who he forwards email humour to, or who he sends a congrats on the birth of your 49th son to your 8th wife to.

That's not how it works. Hello? That's not how ANY of this works.

Semantics are going to be the downfall of the nation.

This writer is not illiterate.  Her words form sentences.  And yet, she makes no sense.  This month's Atlantic fortuitously arrived just after I puzzled over this woman's diatribe.  The cover article is entitled, How American Politics Went Insane: It didn't start with Trump.  It's going to get worse.  Is there a cure? 

The author, Jonathan Rauch, makes a number of excellent points.  The critical one is the total breakdown of trust by a large portion of the electorate in the American political system .  Beyond that, in my opinion, is the total breakdown of their trust in experts in any field, not just politicians.  Why believe national experts who say that vaccinations do not cause autism, when "I read somewhere on the internet that they do?"

I offer no solutions. We may be subject to a new form of mob rule for a few years or decades -- not crowds howling through the streets, but crowds howling on the internet, each demanding obedience to his or her own idiosyncratic view of "reality."

We now blunder our way into July.  And national conventions.

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