The Plague swept the kingdom and the prince's subject were dying like flies.
Blood was its Avator and its seal — the redness and the horror of blood.
In response, prince lavishly provisioned his castle, then gathered all the fancy people
behind the safety of its thick walls.
When his dominions were half depopulated, he summoned to his presence a
thousand hale and light-hearted friends from among the knights and dames of
his court, and with these retired to the deep seclusion of one of his
castellated abbeys.
Finally, they welded the doors shut so no one could enter or leave.
This wall had gates of iron. The courtiers, having entered, brought
furnaces and massy hammers and welded the bolts. They resolved to leave
means neither of ingress or egress to the sudden impulses of despair from
without or of frenzy from within.
Then they partied!
The prince had provided all the appliances of pleasure. There were
buffoons, there were improvisatori, there were ballêt-dancers, there were
musicians, there were cards, there was Beauty, there was wine. All these and
security were within. Without was the “Red Death.”
But uh-oh! Spoiler! The Plague got in!
And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a
thief in the night.
And that was that.
And one by one dropped the revellers in the
blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture
of his fall. And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last
of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay
and the Red Death MAGA Republican Party held
illimitable dominion over all.
If you are unfamiliar with the immortal William Shakespeare's "The Tragedie of
Roger Rabbit and the Framing Thereof" then you might as well move along. But if
you are hip to the tale of the Rabbit, then attend! Attend!
It all begins with a well-known, know-it-all Never Trumper lecturing us po'
dumb Democrats on how Real Grown-Up Politics works.
A consistent mistake (imo) that Democrats have made for *decades* is not
understanding the thermostatic nature of politics: "I don't like this
party being extreme" means "I want moderation," not *the other extreme*
/2x
Now, this is the sort of thing that sounds very wise if you start from the
assumption that both parties are basically interchangeable institutions that
occasionally wander too far from the golden mean.
By the way, this is the same well-known, know-it-all Never Trumper who ignored
all the dire warnings by some of us po' dumb Democrats that his Republican
party was becoming a fascist shithole until it was far too late. Then, when
caught flat-footed by the aforementioned Republican party becoming a fascist
shithole, reacted with the cheap, dishonest, and automatic
bothsiderist reflex which
is every Never Trumpers' last line of defense against self-reflection.
This Tweet has since mysteriously disappeared from X/Twitter but lives on in a
plain-text form on this here blog of mine:
You will get no such contrition, because I think your party had
plenty of matches and lighter fluid and is not free of responsibility
here.
Notice what is missing here: not an admission that the Republican Party
created the conditions for Trump, but a quick escape hatch in which everyone
gets a share of the blame.
Then, as is also endemic among Never Trumpers, Tom went on to present himself
as one of the few Never Trump voices who saw all of this coming, which is why
Trump Republicans resent them so. Which is why, the Bulwark,
MSNOW and The Atlantic all looked at his concatenation of arrogant
certainty that proved catastrophically wrong, followed by reflexive, defensive
false equivalence, followed by sheer puffery about his predictive abilities
and all said, we gotta get this guy on staff!
You wanna bring someone on to opine about the threats and probable future
trajectory of the Soviet Union during the 1980s? Tom is your guy.
But given his record, why anyone would seek this Cold War relic's counsel
about American politics of the recent past and the here and now is, well, to
be honest, bog standards legacy media stuff. He tells the tale they want
told.
So, back to Roger Rabbit and lecturing us po' dumb Dems.
First, let us breeze past ol' Tom's obvious false equivalence which was
immediately and effectively booed off the stage by Blue Sky commenters, one
small sample of which is here:
Second, if you want to read a much longer (Two Parts!) discussion of how
modern politics really works, links are
here
and
here. The shorter version is this...
As all true Roger Rabbit fans know, there is a certain sequence and cadence of
words which all Toons find irresistible. And when the phrase is left
uncompleted they feel an uncontrollable compulsion to finish it, even when
doing so will put them in life-threatening peril.
Psychologists have a name because of course they do. It's called the
Ovsiankina Effect, named after Russian-German-American
psychologist Maria Arsenjevna Rickers-Ovsiankina. In psychology, this
effect describes an innate human urge to finish unfinished tasks. Our
brains like order and clear endings. When things are left open or undone --
"Shave and a Hair Cut..." -- this creates stress. When you finish
whatever-it-is -- "...Two Bits!!!" -- our brains reward us with a quick
dopamine hit, making you want to cross things off a list.
(Bonus Info! Because apparently even psychological concepts need their
own spin-off franchise, Ovsiankina Effect should not be confused with the
closely-related Zeigarnik Effect, named after Lithuanian-Soviet
psychologist Bluma Zeigarnik, and which is more about the tendency of people
remember unfinished or interrupted tasks better than completed tasks.)
Because what is politics, if not a giant collection of unfinished mental
patterns competing for closure?
Which brings us to the particular unfinished phrase our national brain has
been trained to complete. For a long time now -- decades -- our politics has
been overtaken by a very specific form of Ovsiankina Effect. And you
clever dogs already know what it is, because you've read about on this blog
thousands of times already.
What the legacy media has pulled off -- in plain view and with the consent of
way too many of our fellow citizens -- one of the most successful propaganda
campaign in American history. One that dwarfs the Right Wing's Fox
News/Hate Radio "Liberals are Murrica-hating, terrorist-loving, commie baby
killers" propaganda campaign and, in the long run, has been far more
destructive.
“The Politico model of insider coverage and savvy style of analysis is
premised on conditions in politics that became less true over time,
which then undermined the model,” said New York University journalism
professor Jay Rosen. “Conditions like two roughly similar parties
obeying democratic norms, with similar establishments in both parties
and competing for swing voters.”
The coverage of the 2016 campaign in particular was abysmal. The focus
on Hillary Clinton’s emails stemmed from the media’s reflexive both
sides-ism, and an obsession with feuds among Donald Trump's staffers
reflected an insider-focused approach to politics gone too far. More
deeply, the press went out of its way to suggest that the people
supporting a candidate who campaigned on banning Muslims from the
country and building a wall between the United States and Mexico were
expressing “economic anxiety” or a desire for an outsider politician.
The media is still pursuing the appearance of fairness by
treating true and false, normal and outrageous, as equally valid
The first thing to say about the hate and scorn currently directed at
the mainstream US media is that they worked hard to earn it. They’ve
done so by failing, repeatedly, determinedly, spectacularly to do their
job, which is to maintain their independence, inform the electorate, and
speak truth to power. While the left has long had reasons to dismiss
centrist media, and the right has loathed it most when it did do its job
well, the moderates who are furious at it now seem to be something new –
and a host of former editors, media experts and independent journalists
have been going after them hard this summer.
Longtime journalist James Fallows declares that three institutions –
the Republican party, the supreme court, and the mainstream political
press – “have catastrophically failed to ‘meet the moment’ under
pressure of [the] Trump era”. Centrist political reformer and columnist
Norm Ornstein states that these news institutions “have had no
reflection, no willingness to think through how irresponsible and
reckless so much of our mainstream press and so many of our journalists
have been and continue to be”.
Last winter, the New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who has a Nobel
prize in economics, told Greg Sargent on the latter’s Daily Blast
podcast that when he writes positive pieces about the Biden economy, his
editor asks “don’t you want to qualify” it; “aren’t people upset by X, Y
and Z and shouldn’t you be acknowledging that?”
Meanwhile in an accusatory piece about Kamala Harris headlined When
your opponent calls you ‘communist,’ maybe don’t propose price
controls?, a Washington Post columnist declares in
another case of bothsiderism: “Voters want to blame someone for
high grocery bills, and the presidential candidates have apparently
decided the choices are either the Biden administration or corporate
greed. Harris has chosen the latter.” The evidence that corporations
have jacked up prices and are reaping huge profits is easy to find, but
facts don’t matter much in this kind of opining.
In a seminal tweet early this summer, during the battle over a
particularly abhorrent op-ed, journalist Wesley Lowery set down a
marker:
American view-from-nowhere,
“objectivity”-obsessed, both-sides journalism is a failed
experiment.
We need to fundamentally reset the norms of our field. The old way must
go. We need to rebuild our industry as one that operates from a place of
moral clarity
— Wesley (@WesleyLowery) June 4, 2020
Some have depicted this view as radical, demanding some sort of uniform
view on all issues. But what Lowery and others (including myself) are
arguing for is not moral conformity, just clarity.
Margaret Sullivan has some proposals in her book. So do scores of other
organizations and people all scrambling to create a different news
ecosystem to replace what seems unchangeable in our current one. So will
I, upcoming, in this space.
Significantly, nearly all of these ideas involve less of what Margaret
Sullivan has being doing in her columns, and what I have done over the
decades, and what many others have emphasized as well: pointing out what
is not working in the current media models.
-That seems less and less worth it.
-If critiques were going to stop “both-sides-ism,” that would already
have occurred.
And this next bit takes us where we're going next. From
News Literacy Matters,
October 21, 2022
What’s wrong with bothsidesism?
...a knee-jerk response to include both sides in a story can lead to
what is now known as bothsidesism. This misguided pursuit of balance sets up a false equivalence, a form
of specious reasoning in which two sides are treated as the same when
they are not.
Part of the problem is that the public both expects and wants
bothsidesism, according to a
Pew Research Center survey.
Three-quarters of people surveyed say journalists should always
strive to give all sides equal coverage, while more than half of all journalists think the opposite.
And there -- right there -- is why our politics is no longer reliably
thermostatic. Because for decades the general public has been
enveloped in a media bubble where comforting Both Siderist false
equivalences are delivered every hour of every day on the house by Savvy
Media Experts from America's most prominent and influential media
corporations.
And because of this relentless conditioning from trusted sources, the public
has developed a reflexive Ovsiankinan response to every Republican act of
depravity and treason. To get rid of their nearly subliminal
sense of disquiet and anxiety, and to get that nice little bump of Dopamine,
when confronted with any news of Republican perfidy, they will automatically
balance out an equation which their nagging subconscious is
telling them is unbalanced with "...but the Democrats" or ...and the
Democrats" or "Sure, but, y'know, Both Sides".
This legacy media propaganda is so much more insidious and toxic than Fox
News/Hate Radio propaganda because in comes disguised as "fairness" and
"impartiality" which, in different country along a different timeline, would
be admirable traits. But here and now, it's just propaganda which both
prevents the general public from actually fairly adjudicating the vast moral
and policy differences between the two sides, and provides an all-purpose,
every-occasion alibi for Republicans who are sick of Trump and MAGA but
could never in a million years bring themselves to vote for an
Murrica-hating, terrorist-loving, commie baby killers.
Of course, that's just my two-bits worth. You are free to leave your
support, or rebuttal in the comment section.
