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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