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Law And Order Takes Over The Speaker’s Chair!

A few days ago I wrote about confirmation bias.

Like I said, I always feel like I need to find ways to check that I’m not the victim of my own confirmation bias. I mean it’s easy to see it in others. Clearly the free kick was there and if the umpires and the opposition supporters didn’t see it, why they just need to watch the replay, but that mightn’t help because the last time I got them to do this, the station broadcasting the football altered the tape and…

Anyway, with the events in the USA, I felt that I should make sure that I didn’t resort to the echo chambers of my own like minds, so I did the unthinkable and I watched Fox News for a while.

I discovered a number of things:

  • Speaking generally, they didn’t think that people should be allowed to storm Congress and stop elected representatives from conducting the business of government. I was pleased that even outside my echo chamber there was some consensus on this.
  • Some of the protestors were treated appallingly because they were pepper-sprayed when all that they were doing was trying to push past police and take over the building. I mean, this was appalling. Didn’t the police realise that these were the same people who support law and order? After all, that’s what the POTUS tweeted so surely if you support law and order you should be allowed to do what you want and go wherever you want.
  • The people who smashed property must have been members of Anti-Fa who’d infiltrated the protest because Trump supporters would never do such a thing.
  • One interviewee managed to point out the tremendous over-reaction from the police when the protestors were peacefully smashing windows.
  • The guy who sat in Nancy Pelosi’s chair and was showing an envelope that he took from her desk hadn’t stolen it because he left a quarter. If I had his address I’d consider breaking in and taking his beer and leaving a quarter. (That’s twenty-five cents, not a quarter of his beers.)
  • There was a woman who was pepper-sprayed and all she was doing according to her own words was “mounting a revolution” when she entered the building. What’s America coming to when you can’t overturn the government by force without someone trying to stop you?
  • It was the tolerance shown to the Black Lives Matter protests that led to this because we’d reached a point where violence was acceptable even though it was a peaceful protest.

I’m sure that I learnt lots more things but I wasn’t taking notes so I may have forgotten what I learnt which is the sort of definition of learning that we expect from our formal education at school…

Anyway, I was waiting for them to do an interview with Trump, but I suspect that the security forces have told him that he needs to go into the bunker and that they won’t let him out for the next two weeks. If you see Trump before then, look very closely and make sure that it isn’t Alec Baldwin doing his Saturday Night Live impersonation.

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13 comments

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  1. Andrew J. Smith

    Will be interesting how all those NewsCorp journalists, LNP/ON grifters, commentators, PR sock puppets and political activists will spin this event?

    They have been equivocating on Trump, his supporters, especially alt right and white nationalists, while promoting the same white supremacist ideology into the mainstream and regions of Australia; now it’s ‘who would have known?’

    It’s the duplicitous and unethical nature of radical right libertarian/white nationalist media and PR techniques to create anxiety, fear, anger and provocations (towards the centre to left, minorities, women, science, education, refugees and immigration), offer ‘solutions’ then when something happens e.g. white natiomalist Tarrant/Christchurch mosque attack, everyone runs for cover…. classic narcissism in not taking responsibility.

    Yet our media merely skates over the surface and ignores the deep seated white nativist ideology that has been coursing through UK, US, Australia and other nations; exemplified by Ferguson’s and the ABC’s platforming of Steve Bannon.

  2. mark delmege

    Look I dont see the problem …. american agencies have been running these sorts of ops all over the world and they are generally supported by our sock puppet media. Though I was more than a little surprised at just how much access they got.

  3. wam

    I think there was some socialism BLM spray at the rally that took over the patriotic mindset bringing on violent thoughts. Then lefties shouted let’s storm das capotal and QED LEFTIES FAULT.

  4. Matters Not

    Americans, generally speaking, forever trumpet the virtues of a particular and peculiar concept of freedom. Unfortunately, it’s rarely accompanied by references to responsibility. The consequences were on clear display this day.

    While the incoming President has a sympathetic Congress, it’s unlikely he will pursue any reformist (let alone radical) agenda.

  5. mark delmege

    Matters I could ask ‘sympathetic’ to what? Many democrats are to the right of Abbott and even if Biden wanted to push a progressive/leftist policy there is every reason to believe many democrats would oppose him. I have libertarian friends who on foreign policy issue I often agree with – not so with many democrats or standard republicans. They don’t do blocks like we do in Australia.

  6. paul walter

    Confirmation bias?

    That’s like calling the Black Plague Acne in this case.

    This posting is a welcome restorative at this of all moments because the mentality (as with Assange?) defies all attempts at understanding even including the inadequate confirmation bias theory, which is however a big part of it.

    If they kept their delusions to themselves it would not matter, but so many people have been hurt by some of the double standards in play already, exemplified by the kid glove stuff handed the Kenosha shooter and so many others of the ilk.

  7. Joe Carli

    In 1773, a group of radical Americans, dressed as Native Indians, raided ships in Boston Hbr’ & threw a cargo of tea overboard to protest THEIR BELIEF at the tyranny of their overlords…yesterday, a group of Americans dressed as “deplorables”, put thier lives on the line and raided congress to protest THEIR BELIEF of a tyranny of a corrupt middle-class.

    Surely then these “deplorables” are less “terrorists” and more “heroes of damocracy” ?

  8. mark delmege

    JC if there was a like button I’d give you one for that

  9. Henry Rodrigues

    Everyone around the world is pouring shit on Trump and rightly so, but the bigger criminals are his enablers, the ones who stood by him the last 4 years, who humoured him, ‘understood’ his’ frustrations and motives’, the ones who who pretended they didn’t hear his incendiary speeches or his words at critical junctures, the ones who were taken up by the fervour and froth of his rallies. the party who refused to find him guilty at his impeachment, the one demure female member who said that he’d learnt his lesson and would behave better, the rank hypocrites, slimy in their subservience to him, like Lindsay Graham Mitch McConnell, Kevin MacCarthy, that stupid punk Jim Jordan, the evil Devin Nunes and of course his criminal offspring who went around threatening members of Congress on his behalf. Forgive me my American friends here on this platform, I no longer have any faith in, or respect for, American democracy.

  10. Joe Carli

    mark delmege………………..dan-ke!

  11. Adam

    Joe, yes, I remember it well, the good old Boston tea party. Oh how we laughed. Splash and crash went the barrels. My memory of the event is vague in some respects though, the passage of time is long. If they had google back then I could check to see if the Brits forced extra taxes on colonial imports before or after the ‘Molasses Act’. That would reveal who revenged who, but who cares?

    The ‘deplorables’ have free time to protest, kicked to the curb by the internal policies of USA Inc that oversaw the decimation of employment in the US for the benefit of a handful of captains of industry now manufacturing in countries like China.

    But how scary are the deplorables really? I watched 2 minutes of the news last night, enough time to see one ‘terrorist’ with a takeaway coffee in his hand stroll past a febrile reporter while in the background a number of boneheads were hamming it up for the cameras or taking selfies.

    The political narrative is a joke, a narrow beam focus on everything but the underlying causatives of discontent.

  12. mark delmege

    Henry I’m more pissed that all those who now claim the moral high ground were missing when the cool dude was arming terrorists and creating millions of refugees as he destroyed whole countries and that his vice is now in charge – and that those high moral grounders don’t see the problem.

  13. New England Cocky

    Now Rossleigh you are being a little unreasonable; remember that the ruling classes can do exactly whatever they like and of course, they must be correct because they are the ruling classes.

    I mean just look at tax policy in either the USA (United States of Apartheid) or Australia. The bosses and corporations get tax exemptions while the workers get tax increases or reduced CPI adjustments.

    So, like the famous English football gag about the one soccer supporter quietly drinking alone in the local pub after his team was thrashed, when the Rugger Buggers arrive, yahooing, smashing up the place and causing a riot, it must be the worker who caused the problem.

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