A Public Sphere Three-Pack

This should probably be three separate posts, for readability and clarity, but I’m a loser. Here are three semi-connected thoughts about the current dysfunction of the public sphere. Let’s do this scatterbrained thing.

One:

I can’t get this attack on Dr. Ryan Cole out of my head:

What’s becoming very clear is that the narrative is going to shift by inches, eventually ending up at the place where mRNA dissenters started, but. Let’s get through the first part, and I’ll get to that but in just a moment. Look at, for example, the recent stealth-edit on the CDC website that quietly removed the assurance about the spike protein from mRNA injection leaving your body in a hurry. So on Monday it’s disinformation to falsely claim that the spike protein lingers in your body, and you’re a dangerous extremist if you say it; on Tuesday, the simple fact of lingering spike protein was always known and never contested. That’s DISINFORMA— hold on, I’ve just been handed a new memo.

This is going to keep happening, in little pieces that move toward reality. There are ZERO mRNA deaths, you lying idiots, and you need to stop spreading disin— uh, hold on, it says here that, uh….

In a year, or in five years, the things that Ryan Cole and Clare Craig and Peter McCullough and Tracy Beth Hoeg and Robert Malone and all the other MONSTERS have been saying will be validated and acknowledged. We’ll know that the mRNA injections caused heart damage and a cancer spike, and we’ll know that mRNA-injected people get sick more often than the dirty unvaccinated. Look at the matter-of-factness with which Deborah Birx says that oh yeah, I always knew these vaccines — vaccines! — weren’t going to prevent infection. A year before she shrugged and said she’d always known that, you would have lost your social media accounts for saying exactly what she just said. Yesterday’s idiotic conspiracy theory disinformation nonsense is today’s “yeah, we always knew that.”

Now, here’s my big but: The narrative is going to turn, in a long series of tiny and unacknowledged shifts, until it matches what the heretics have always been saying — but my bet is that the heretics will not be rehabilitated. Ryan Cole, to stick with the opening example, will be proven correct, but he will not be vindicated. The YOU CAN’T SAY THAT, IT’S DISINFORMATION oh wait it’s totally true maneuver doesn’t rehabilitate the crimethinkers. You can think X when it’s time to think X; if you think X too early, you remain a thought criminal.

The truthtellers in medicine will be proved correct, but they’ll still be resented and excluded.

Two:

Spend one minute watching how much Dr. Suneel Dhand says in just a few words:

“And the truth is that if you seek true wellness and wellbeing, it is a fight to push back against all these forces.” He’s been talking about this fight for a long time, in calm and sober ways and with plain advice; for a longer recent example, watch this, or wander around on his YouTube page and look for things that interest you.

The cycles of destructive madness in our culture and politics seem to be accelerating and intensifying, but they also seem to be creating increasingly severe self-destructive force, insert own Liz Cheney joke here. I haven’t written much, or at all, about several of the recent high-profile stories in the “news,” like Cheney’s defeat or the wobbling foundation of the case for raiding Mar-a-Lago, in large part because I agree with Matt Taibbi’s assessment:

We’ve reached the stage of American history where everything we see on the news must first be understood as political theater. In other words, the messaging layer of news now almost always dominates the factual narrative, with the latter often reported so unreliably as to be meaningless anyway.

Earlier this week, Donald Trump claimed — that idiot! — that the FBI had taken his passports during the Mar-a-Lago raid. The news media rushed to reveal what a disgusting liar he is, explaining that their sources in the DOJ were assuring them that they absolutely didn’t have, and hadn’t taken, Trump’s passports

And then the DOJ returned his passports.

So much emptiness, so much poison, so few consequences. Liz Cheney lost an election, and that’s just like the Great Terror:

TIME @TIME

The GOP just borrowed a Soviet skill and disappeared Liz Cheney writes @Philip_Elliott for The D.C. Brief

ti.meThe GOP Just Disappeared Liz CheneyCheney lost by a stunning 37 points after daring to hold Trump accountable for his role in the Jan. 6 attack.

Republicans are the most dangerous extremist movement in the world, “nothing close”:

Edward Luce @EdwardGLuce

I’ve covered extremism and violent ideologies around the world over my career. Have never come across a political force more nihilistic, dangerous & contemptible than today’s Republicans. Nothing close.

I’m going to say this again: The cycles of destructive madness in our culture and politics seem to be accelerating and intensifying, but they also seem to be creating increasingly severe self-destructive force. People who talk like this have nowhere to go; they’re already doing the storm scene from King Lear, and have no way left to turn up the volume. In practical terms, this means they’re going to create a tsunami of angry and empty noise that will just….exist, that will just be ubiquitous for years every time you turn on the television or fire up the computer. You can drown in it, or you can shrug and climb out of it.

Returning to what I said about people like Ryan Cole in the first part of this post, people in media and politics who will be proven catastrophically wrong over and over again will retire with the respect of their idiot peers. They will have been factually wrong, but correctly positioned in the narrative, which will give them persistent respectability.

Three:

The historian Joanne Freeman works in an unusual field: She’s a historian of congressional violence. In her first book, Affairs of Honor, Freeman examines the political instability of the early American republic, and argues that interpersonal violence was a stabilizing force. Yes, you read that right.

In a period when party politics hadn’t solidified (being divided for several years between fine, decent Federalist gentlemen and dirty stupid trash who for some unaccountable reason wouldn’t be Federalists like normal people), and political rules were still being developed in a new nation, Freeman argues that clear and full institutional norms weren’t available as a source of stability. So the men who participated in politics drew lines by threatening to shoot people, and sometimes by actually shooting them:

It would be hard to overstate the importance of personal honor to an eighteenth-century gentleman, let alone to a besieged leader whose status was under attack. Honor was the core of a man’s identity, his sense of self, his manhood….

On the unstructured national political stage, this code assumed great importance, for politicking was about conflict and competition above all else…. Regional distrust, personal animosity, accusation, suspicion, implication, and denouncement — this was the tenor of national politics from the outset. The Union was fragile, and the Union makers were at odds. It was a recipe for disaster, disunion, and possibly civil war.

In this maelstrom of discontent, at least one thing held true. Disagree as men might on the purpose, structure, or tenor of national governance — argue as they did about the meaning of concepts like federalism and republicanism — clash as they must about the future of the nation — they expected their opponents to behave like gentlemen. The penalty for acting otherwise was too severe. And as gentlemen, there was one expected way to settle disputes. In essence, the code of honor was a remedy for the barely controlled chaos of national public life.

We’re in a similar moment of barely controlled chaos, for different reasons and with a different form of chaos. Influential establishment publications — the New York Times, Time magazine, the Washington Post — have ceased to be central or establishment, turning instead into dumb partisan newsletters. The stability of the two-party system has disappeared into a world in which, for example, Mitt Romney and Liz Cheney think they’re the true Republicans, and the news media howls at the election victories of the wrong Republicans.

We don’t have two parties that compete; we have a court uniparty and a country opposition, two fragmented parties with increasingly irresolvable factional disputes. The stabilizing forces are gone.

In that environment, consequences would be stabilizing. In the early republic, the consequences were that a particularly nasty personal attack on a gentleman who held elected office would result in the gentleman’s designated second showing up to ask your preference of weapons. We have only the weak substitute of defamation lawsuits and primary challenges, though — insert own Liz Cheney joke again — those tools sometimes work.

But I’m pretty confident we need a greater degree of responsive severity for really appalling calumny, and I doubt we’re going to get it in the foreseeable future. And that means that the pathologies of the public sphere are likely to continue unabated: DR. RYAN COLE CHEAPENS IDAHO MEDICAL LICENSES. Appalling, unchecked, mainstream personal attacks on reasoned dissent will remain the norm.

Truthtellers will be proved correct, but they’ll still be resented and excluded. People in media and politics who will be proven catastrophically wrong over and over again will retire with the respect of their idiot peers. The clowns will go on running the circus, even as the rest of us see with increasing clarity what clowns they are.

Until collapse, which becomes inevitable in a broken information system.