House of Eratosthenes

Naomi Schaefer Riley, writing at the New York Post, notices there are an awful lot of loud people running around “raising awareness” about things that don’t have much to do with what actually happened…

The verdict’s in on Rolling Stone. According to no less an authority than the Columbia Journalism Review, the magazine’s last year story of a University of Virginia gang rape was a “journalistic failure [that] encompassed reporting, editing, editorial supervision and fact-checking.”

But as with many other stories that don’t fit into the right narrative, the media will continue to draw the wrong lessons.

As an AP article noted, “Despite its flaws, the article heightened scrutiny of campus sexual assaults amid a campaign by President Barack Obama.”

Despite its flaws? You mean despite the fact that as far as anyone can tell, the story was made up out of whole cloth?
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Take the case of Ellen Pao, who filed suit against her former employer, venture-capital group Kleiner Perkins, for gender discrimination.

She was seeking millions of dollars in damages to make up for what she claimed was a pattern of women being excluded from important meetings. They weren’t invited on a ski trip with other partners. Women were forced to sit in the back of the room during a meeting.

Two weeks ago, a jury decided her claims were completely without merit. And yet from the media coverage, you’d think Ellen Pao successfully exposed a Silicon Valley ripe with discrimination.

Here’s Farjad Manjoo in The New York Times: “The trial has nevertheless accomplished something improbable…The case has also come to stand for something bigger than itself. It has blown open a conversation about the status of women in an industry that, for all its talk of transparency and progress, has always been buttoned up about its shortcomings.”

In a Bloomberg article called “Ellen Pao Lost, Women Didn’t,” Katie Benner declared: “The case broke wide open the issue of sexism in a powerful, influential industry.”

Or take the Atlantic, which declared, “Ellen Pao’s claim against top venture-capital firm Kleiner Perkins seems to have come up short, but it’s brought heightened attention to gender discrimination in tech.”

Come up short? She lost.
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This is not unlike what happened after the Justice Department released its report on the shooting of Michael Brown last summer.

The only “lesson” that could really be drawn from the DOJ report and the grand jury’s non-indictment was that you shouldn’t knock over convenience stores, but if you do and a police officer catches you, it’s probably not a good idea to resist arrest.

But that was not the lesson that others wanted to emphasize. Which is why the Ferguson police now has to try to change the composition of its staff and ticketing policies — though they have no bearing on the case at hand.

Even The Washington Post’s Jonathan Capeheart, whose article “‘Hands Up, Don’t Shoot’ Was Built on a Lie” offered a kind of mea culpa for rushing to judgment in the case, concluded: “Yet this does not diminish the importance of the real issues unearthed in Ferguson by Brown’s death. Nor does it discredit what has become the larger ‘Black Lives Matter.'”

Actually, yes, it does diminish the importance because it calls into question whether those were real issues at all.

They certainly do love their narratives. From my experience in business, I’ve come to learn of a certain type of executive that is fond of saying “perception is reality.” I’ve also noticed that there doesn’t seem to be any such thing as an exec who casually mutters that now and then; people who say this, make it into a catch-phrase. It’s a bit disturbing because you can’t help wondering how they plan to benefit from the difference between the two. And there has to be such a difference, because if perception really was reality there’d be no need to point it out to anyone. You’d just talk about the reality.

The ambiguity has always bugged me too. Does “perception is reality” mean, if senior management is under the impression that a department is over-staffed and doesn’t need any open reqs for this year or the next one, and should be a plum target ripe for layoffs, that everyone should sit down and wonder what might have taken place to make the bosses think that? Alright. Say that, then. Because it comes off sounding like something very much different: Don’t argue, accept your fate. Maybe someone has worked something behind the scenes, slandered you, but it’s too late to do anything about that now. Both interpretations are plausible, so shouldn’t the speaker put a little bit of work into defining which one he means?

I recall reading another recap of narratives that outlived not only their usefulness, but their believability, at the end of last year. There is overlap between that list and the one up above, but only some.

Everyone knows Obamacare is a giant lie. We saw Jonathan Gruber on tape giggling about how the Democrats knew it. But the New York Times didn’t tell you that. The Washington Post didn’t tell you that. It was the citizen journalists who Andrew Breitbart inspired who told you that. If it weren’t for Andrew and his progeny, most American would still not know it. But now they do.

How about the “rape culture” lie of radical liberal feminists desperate for relevance in a world that has passed beyond their bitter whining and fussy psychodramas? Liberal media darling Lena Dunham claimed to be raped — conveniently, for the narrative — by a Republican. That was a lie, a lie revealed by the conservative new media. And it was also the conservative new media that publicized her book’s bizarre passages about her sexually inappropriate conduct with her sister — passages the gushing reviews in liberal stalwarts like the New York Times somehow neglected to mention.

So there are two takeaways here. One, if what you’re accomplishing has something to do with the truth, it’s better to talk about it while just sticking to what’s known to be true. If the movement is an honest one, and the people advancing it are honest people, they’re going to want to do that anyway. Truth is easier; you don’t have to remember what you said, or to whom you said it.

Two, reports of 2014 being the Year Of The Liberal Lie are evidently quite premature. Our friends the liberals, never having had much reason to worry about accountability for their lies, seem to have figured out the accountability thing is just never gonna happen and are now engaged in an effort to see just how profitable serial deception can be. Twenty Fourteen was just a matter of slipping through the first two or three gears, before really red-lining it.

They can say whatever they like, and they know it.

Ah, no. They have been able to say whatever they like for a long, long time. See all the lies about Wilson, for example. Or FDR. See how they made McCarthy the Bad Guy. See how they turned JFK into the Hero over the Bay of Pigs. They are supposed to be in control of the “Narrative”, and thanks to the Internet, they don’t have it like they used to. They see everything breaking up, and are rolling to the Left, because that’s how you get a job after a crashing failure in Media world (See http://accordingtohoyt.com/ she wrote about that at length).
- Robert Mitchell Jr. | 04/08/2015 @ 09:35
But, all now is not the same as it was back then. For instance, the chestnut that Walter Cronkite was infinitely believable because he was infinitely likable, therefore must have been telling the truth about what was going on with the Tet Offensive, was based on reasonable premises and value systems: I want the United States to win wherever she’s engaged, she shouldn’t be squandering blood and treasure where there isn’t a path to victory, I don’t want communism to spread across the globe (the point of disagreement had a lot to do with whether or not Viet Nam had something to do with that)…

Contrast that with now. You don’t see anyone arguing “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot!” is a truthy version of what happened, just like you don’t see anyone arguing that Bill Clinton was telling the truth. Look at the Ellen Pao story, the arguing has shifted away from which version of the truth is the correct one, entirely toward matters of relevance.

Perhaps I should have clarified my point about what’s changed, lately, with a metaphor. Back then, arguing was more about which version: Captain Kirk says “Shoot him Spock! I’m the real Captain Kirk!” And the other one says “No he’s lying! I’m the real Kirk! Shoot him!” Now this has been entirely replaced with Hillary Clinton balling up her angry-fists and shouting “What difference, at this point, does it make??” — about everything. The enemy has stopped selling its own version of the truth, and is now selling its own version of reality. Which is a change that is a bit easy to miss, and a bit difficult to define, but the change is there and it’s a meaningful one. They used to come up with different answers to questions, now they challenge the question.

It changes things because it avails them the opportunity to admit that they’re lying and had always been lying about this subject or that one, and then without missing so much as a smidgen of momentum, keep on keeping-on. Their lie about McCarthy was that he was ruining innocent lives, it wasn’t what it would be today: “Well so what if so-and-so is a communist bent on destroying the U.S., our country has a shameful past and certainly has it coming.”
- mkfreeberg | 04/09/2015 @ 04:42
Cronkite was a hard core Proggie, one who turned the Tet victory into a political loss because he wanted the Communists to spread across the globe. You make my point. Cronkite was able to lie, because they controlled the Narrative so much that they could make it look like their lies were based on “reasonable premises and value systems”. Just like Charles Kuralt was beloved, because they were able to keep control of the Narrative. You wouldn’t be able to hide that level of sleaze today, everyone’s got cameras……….
- Robert Mitchell Jr. | 04/09/2015 @ 09:15
“Cronkite was able to lie, because they controlled the Narrative so much that they could make it look like their lies were based on ‘reasonable premises and value systems.’”

I don’t think this is quite on the mark, Robert. The question is not whether those ‘reasonable premises’ were ginned up from the beginning. Likely they were – but why drop the con? Why NOW, when they no longer control the Narrative and need the ‘reasonable premises’ more than ever, are those premises abandoned?

A normal person, when trying to sell a bill of goods, will come up with the most likely sales pitch to entice an audience – as Morgan has observed elsewhere, it’s precisely when the product is worse (or less necessary) that the sales pitch has to be better. If you’re selling the world’s greatest Whatsit, you just point out that it’s the world’s greatest; if you’re stuck at Brand X selling inferior Whatsits, you trump their lower purchase cost, their variety of colors (that have nothing to do with how good they work), Brand X’s “strong commitment to sustainable Whatsit creation and fair trade,” etc etc… you avoid topics like “how soon will it wear out” and “will it work with all my stuff” and “does it scuff the floors?”

Leftism, it turns out, gets old quickly, wrecks everything, and in fact only works at all when it’s at the margins of an otherwise-healthy society. The more it takes over, the faster things go to pot. The sales job has to be brilliant, impeccable… and yet, precisely now where we’re seeing all things left go off the rails (and us with it), they have dropped the pretense of winning us over and are now shouting us down for daring to even have questions about their product and services. Why?
- nightfly | 04/09/2015 @ 12:46
I don’t think they are dropping the con, Nightfly. It’s just, thanks to the Internet, we can compare notes. The John Birch Society was right, but couldn’t get their message out, save by mimeograph. Many, many people knew we won at Tet, but couldn’t get their message out. The sales job doesn’t have to be brilliant or impeccable, if there doesn’t seem to be anybody else selling a product.

And they haven’t “Dropped the pretense”, as both you and Morgan seem to think. Remember, Hillary! didn’t start with “At this point, what difference does it make?”, she started with “The Movie Did It!”. Would have worked, years ago, but this time she, and the Democrats, and the Press, got laughed out of the room. “Now all our lies are proven untrue, and we must face the men we slew.” Things are getting better. We have the Internet, and universal pictures and streaming video. For the moment, it’s very, very hard for the Democrats/Left/Press to push their sad old lies. Which, oddly, makes things look worse then ever, because all the facades to their pretty little Potemkin villages have fallen down, and we can finally see the rubble……..
- Robert Mitchell Jr. | 04/09/2015 @ 19:40
I think Robert Mitchell Jr. is on the money here. The left is, collectively, doing a spot-on Louis XVI impersonation right now. Or, better yet… you know all those “Hitler Finds Out About ____” internet parodies? Have you seen the movie they’re from? (It’s great, btw). Immediately before that scene, we see Hitler pointing at the map and moving fantasy divisions around. He snaps (the “finds out about” part) when one of the generals is forced to tell him that the attack he’s ordered is impossible — that “division” exists mostly on paper, has no ammo or fuel, and is completely surrounded by the Russians.

They could get away with that kind of thing pre-internet. They could even get away with it in the earlier parts of the internet era, though a few of their most egregious lies would be exposed (e.g. the Rather Memos). But not even a MSM-wide full court press can hide widespread unemployment, escalating terrorism, canceled health plans, and soaring taxes. This is forcing people to finally wake up and smell the bullshit, and they’ve got at least a few right-wing sites to clue them into the truth.

Of course, we’ve got “net neutrality” now, so most of those sites will soon be gone… but hopefully the cat is far enough out of the bag.
- Severian | 04/10/2015 @ 06:39

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