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A word from Prime Minister Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Camacho:

Disclose.tv @disclosetv

NEW - Tony Blair says "if you're not vaccinated... you're an idiot."

In 1858, the Lincoln-Douglas debates went on for twenty-one hours over a long series of days, as the two candidates took turns speaking without a script for an hour to 90 minutes (to a final 30 minute rebuttal) at a time, without a moderator, each man examining the premises advanced by the other and challenging him to reconcile apparent flaws and contradictions. Today, a distinguished former head of state says that, like, you better do what I just said, or, like, yer a idiot. ‘Cause I told ya to, ya stupid moron! It’s been two days since I wrote this:

We have “leaders,” people in positions of significant authority and responsibility, who cannot argue. They can’t make an argument around a set of evidence, meet critics openly, defend their argument with an ordered deployment of fact, and logically sustain their views in transparent debate. They presumptively label critics and dissenters “fringe,” and deploy sneak attacks to undermine their reputations. They answer arguments built on facts and logic with character attacks and diversionary tactics.

And here’s still more evidence for the implosion of persuasive rhetoric — the emergence of a global class of technocratic managerial elites who have no capacity for discussion beyond 1.) make assertion and 2.) insult, threaten, and demean people who don’t fall into line behind it. I’ve always loathed Tony Blair, but the man had an extraordinary gift for verbal agility, displayed often at PMQ. He’s devolved. They’ve all devolved. The status group has imploded into an incoherent ball of blunt contempt. (See also Biden, Joseph R.)

So Hillary Clinton is concerned that people are speaking, writing, and reading freely, which exposes people to misinformation and bad arguments that lead them to embrace authoritarianism, so we need government and corporations to work together to put “guardrails” on our discourse to limit what people can read and write and speak and think, to prevent authoritarianism. And a trio of retired U.S. Army general officers call for government to ramp up domestic political surveillance and the arrest of opposition party leaders to protect our democracy. And Tony Blair knows that people who don’t obey are just stupid, ‘cause, like, just obey already. This is the whole formula of Western governance emerging in the 21st century: threaten, demean, harangue, surveil, prosecute, exclude.

Throughout the performance, grotesque elites strike the same posture about dissenters and critics, a performance I thought was particularly clear in that recent op-ed from the three retired generals, and that has been the subtext of everything Hillary Clinton has said in public for at least twenty years: These people are victimizing us. The presumption underlying the attack is that the attackers are being attacked: These people are disagreeing with us, and that’s bullying. They don’t build the case for it; they just show up already knowing it.

There’s something happening under the surface, some tectonic action eroding the ability of nominal leaders to think and to argue, and I suspect it’s a form of the same thing that’s happening to all of us: the rewiring of our brains by new media.

John Robb @johnrobb

What's going on? We are being mentally rewired by the technologies of social networking. It's an involuntary process. That mental rewiring is forcing a reorganization of society. Those changes are dangerous during the early phases (think: printing press/30-years war)

We’ve all, even presidents and prime ministers, become accustomed to the world of ten-second bites of information, taken here and there from a daily stream of noise. The people who make policy seem increasingly unable to think — just to think, in basic ways, with a set of facts that line up in some kind of order.

I have no idea where that leads, and I doubt very much that anyone else does either.