House of Eratosthenes

Brian Williams is taking a temporary leave because of the “misremembering” thing. His Wikipedia page has probably the fairest and most complete recap of what happened here, but there’s a note above it that says the page includes too much. So it might do to pull that in here before the revision hits…

In February 2015 Williams recanted a story he had told about being aboard a helicopter hit by RPG (rocket-propelled grenade) fire and forced to land on March 24, 2003, during the U.S. invasion of Iraq. His initial and subsequent reportings of the incident indicated that a helicopter in front of his was hit by the RPG. However, in a 2013 interview and during the NBC Nightly News broadcast on January 30, 2015 Williams inaccurately recounted the incident, stating that it was the helicopter he was on that was “hit and crippled by enemy fire”. His story was soon criticized by Lance Reynolds, a flight engineer who was on board one of the three helicopters that had been attacked. Reynolds and other crew members said they were forced to make an emergency landing, and that it was a half hour to an hour later that Williams’ Chinook helicopter arrived on the scene. Williams investigated the damage and interviewed crew members about the attack.

On the February 4 broadcast of Nightly News, Williams apologized, stating that he “made a mistake in recalling the events of 12 years ago,” and extended his respect and apology to the “brave men and women in the air crews who were also in the desert.”

NBC News President Deborah Turness announced on February 6 that there would be an internal investigation into Williams’ Iraq reporting. On February 7 Williams announced that he would step away from the Nightly News broadcast for “the next several days.”

On the same day, a 2007 videotaped interview surfaced in which Williams described the helicopter incident in another way that contradicts the recollections of its crewmen. Williams said in the interview, “…I looked down the tube of an RPG that had been fired at us, and it hit the chopper in front of us.” Williams had already agreed in his February 4 apology that no RPG rounds had been fired at his aircraft, but the statement also collides with the recollection of military personnel that the helicopter that did sustain RPG damage was at least a half hour in front of Williams’ craft, making it impossible for Williams to “look down the tube” of the RPG that damaged the other helicopter.

I’m struggling to reconcile this with what I know about the lefty-leaning types, the left-wing cloth from which Williams is cut. I’m taking it as a given that this misremembering event is an effect, of which the leftiness is a cause. My reasoning should become clear after what follows. I haven’t got much new information about this because by now, most of the ones I know have unfriended me on the Hello Kitty of Blogging, either that or we’ve reached some accord in which we “agree to disagree” and all that rot. Most of the lefties I can see are on the news, like for example, President Platitude babbling His gibberish about “high horse” and the Crusades/Inquisition thing…

In [President Obama’s] speech on Thursday, he said:

Humanity has been grappling with these questions throughout human history. And lest we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.

Pharaoh Three-Putt then went on to explain exactly what “terrible deeds” He had in mind. Oh no wait — no He didn’t! We’re left to figure this out for ourselves.

Once again, it could be fair to accuse me of making the problem with such ambiguity, since a lot of people won’t see it. And that would at first appear reasonable, too. Obama is speaking in the context of a man being burned to death while a crowd watches, well, the Inquisition sometimes involved burning at the stake, so the point is made. Right?

And the answer is no. Ambiguity involves a plurality of interpretations; a disagreement about whether ambiguity is present, cannot be settled by people who believe it’s not there just because they lack the ability to see what causes the confusion. Obama mentioned the Crusades. The evidence, and common sense, compel us to regard all those as one big defensive war. They were a response to the Muslim hordes’ centuries-long attempt to take over the entire civilized world, and of course anytime you’re trying to control people, the very first thing you must do is to stigmatize as a “terrible deed” any act of resistance. We’ve seen Obama’s people do that repeatedly. ObamaCare alone is an adequate example, although there are others. So, sorry, I’m really not sure if He’s comparing immolation to immolation or not. He could very well be talking about something else. Why didn’t He take the time to clarify? He says “let Me be clear” an awful lot, why doesn’t He take the few extra words to, you know, actually do it?

But back to the main subject. How does the idiotic “high horse” remark connect to the Brian Williams debacle? What they have in common is this: Narratives coming undone. People of all ideological stripes love to talk about how they “wait for the evidence to come in before reaching any conclusions,” but in human existence, that is mostly mythical. We like to compose narratives first, then watch truth unfold to validate them. We all do this. It’s impossible not to. Against any example offered to thwart that generalization, the ultimate test would be to monitor human behavior in the presence of some event that is known to repeat, like a drumbeat, a sunrise, or a shrewish soon-to-be-ex-wife yelling about something. People start to form expectations around what has not happened yet, but that they expect to see happen.

People in positions of authority are especially likely to do this, because when unfolding reality fits into a stated expectation like a cog’s tooth into the gap of another cog, it looks like the right people are in charge of things. It’s a cheap and easy trick. Of course, it works the other way too; you have new questions emerging about whether the right people are in charge when reality doesn’t unfold that way. But that’s why we have spin. That’s why speechwriters make money.

Here we come to a key difference in the way lefties do their “thinking,” that distinguishes them from normal people, ultimately separating them from normal people: They are extraordinarily outspoken in their narratives, and yet when the unfolding reality confounds those narratives, the experience doesn’t even faze them. They are Medicators, and as such, they exercise a “process of adjusting one’s emotional response to reality as a first priority, with recognizing that reality as a distinctly second-place priority.”

Misremembering Are you starting to see the picture now? Brian Williams didn’t lie. He honestly vocalized what was in his head, the problem is that what was in his head was whatever made Brian Williams happy, because Brian Williams leans left and that’s what people do when they lean left. President Obama thinks His patently juvenile rebuttal of “Christianity was doing it too” is somehow relevant, for the same reason Brian Williams thinks his chopper was hit by a rocket, for the same reason Obama’s fans think He is a gifted speaker or that the high-horse comment was some sort of brilliant point to be made. And this is why they unfriend you on social media, or at the Thanksgiving dinner table. This is why they do not revise anticipations of things after previous anticipations were thwarted.

It makes them happy to think this stuff. As Medicators, it is all about that; it is all about regulating the emotional state.

For the same reason I spread fertilizer around on my lawn, that is why they spread it around in their minds: There is a “lawn” of sorts in there, and they want it lush and green. You can prove that your rebuttals are meritorious and correct, all day long and until you’re blue in the face, it doesn’t matter.

Being Medicators, leftists don’t give two hoots about whether a perceived fact is correct, or if a stated opinion is worthy, or whether a recollection is accurate. They care about whether these things are pleasing to them — therefore, whether such things “belong” in their heads — nothing else. That is the real cause of the conflict. It’s whether reality is something you assess, measure, perceive and recall, or whether reality is something you choose.

Fact is, if they kept right on “thinking” that way but didn’t seek to control other people, there wouldn’t be any conflict at all.

Update: Thought it would be good to bookmark this as an example of those who think President Obama was somehow right in what He said. Yeah that’s right: The President said “lest we get on our high horse,” and in the subsequent words immediately climbed up onto a rhetorical high horse — and, there are some hardcore adherents who think that’s just fine, in fact that the message was overdue.

If the article itself underwhelms as an example, get a load of the comments.

There are few things in our modern world sadder than the spectacle of those among us who are secularly inclined, indulging in their legendary bromides about the evils of one thinking oneself better than others simply because of the thoughts in his head — and then, from there, proceeding to provide their own illustrious examples of exactly that. Seemingly without realizing they’re doing this.

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Brian Williams Didn’t LieSunday, February 8th, 2015

Brian Williams Didn’t Lie
Sunday, February 8th, 2015