Glenn Greenwald has it about right. If I post something un-tribe-like on FB, it's crickets, scolding or ad hominem attacks. These are all well educated people who have become convinced that we cannot be friends unless we agree on politics.
Andrew Sullivan, summarizing some of the core concepts of the new book by Jonathan Rauch, The Constitution of Knowledge.:
[J]onathan Rauch lays out some core principles that liberal societies rely upon. These are not optional if liberal society is to survive. And they are not easy, which is why we have created many institutions and practices to keep them alive. Rauch lists some of them: fallibilism, the belief that anyone, especially you, can always be wrong; objectivity, a rejection of any theory that cannot be proven or disproven by reality; accountability, the openness to conceding and correcting error; and pluralism, the maintenance of intellectual diversity so we maximize our chances of finding the truth.
The only human civilization that has ever depended on these principles is the modern West since the Enlightenment. That’s a few hundred years as opposed to 200,000 or so of Homo sapiens’ history, when tribalism, creedalism, warfare, theocracy or totalitarianism reigned.
The genius of liberalism in unleashing human freedom and the human mind changed us more in centuries than we had changed in hundreds of millennia. And at its core, there is the model of the single, interchangeable, equal citizen, using reason to deliberate the common good with fellow citizens. No ultimate authority; just inquiry and provisional truth. No final answer: an endless conversation. No single power, but many in competition.
In this open-ended conversation, all can participate, conservatives and liberals, and will have successes and failures in their turn. What matters, both conservatives and liberals agree, is not the end result, but the liberal democratic, open-ended means. That shift — from specifying a single end to insisting only on playing by the rules — is the key origin of modern freedom.
My central problem with critical theory is that it takes precise aim at these very core principles and rejects them. By rejecting them, in the otherwise noble cause of helping the marginalized, it is a very seductive and potent threat to liberal civilization.
A friend is quite perturbed at me for (as I view it) not adopting the top-to-bottom progressive platform. The friend found it disturbing that I would get some of my information from sources that the friend considered to be the other team. I told this friend: "You are the 1,000th person to get frustrated with me for wanting to get my facts straight without reference to the prevailing narratives of political tribes. I am prepared to die on this hill."
I am wired to make sense of things as best I can, letting the chips fall, regardless of whether I offend people in the process (with rare exceptions). I was prepared for this way of learning during a childhood where my father force-fed me buckets of religious dogma, resulting in this five-part essay.
I am willing to get useful information from anyone who has information that seems useful. I'm working hard to not divide the world into "good" people and "bad" people. Good people often say untrue things and bad people often say things that make sense. Everyone has a batting average. Everyone is flawed. It is my act of faith that we need to listen to all of it and then pretend that we are emotionally detached Martian anthropologists in order to decide what is accurate. In other words, we need to pay close attention to John Stuart Mill, who is as relevant as ever.
Hence, I reject any Manichean outlook. I fear that our two main political tribes and their respective news silos (amplified by social media) are poisoning our national dialogue. In fact, ruining our national dialogue to the point where, truly, our de facto national motto is getting to be "Fuck e pluribus unum!" It's gotten to the point where people are hating other people for ideas, whereas I think we can hate the idea but must always love the person. I am not religious, but I think that Jesus' "Love your enemy" is one of the most radical, brave and brilliant things ever said.
We need to listen to people that others call the "enemy" because sometimes they are right--sometimes it takes years for it to become apparent that they are correct. I have long been ridiculed for listening "to the enemy." That is, and will forever be, my plight, because the world is complex, not a cartoon, and no tribe has it completely right. We need to actively listen to each other and test each others' claims without feeling like this is a threatening thing to do, in order to make good sense of our world. Without each other, we are all prone to become ideologues who "win" all of our arguments because we refuse to consider competing views (and in fact many of us actively work to muzzle competing views). Hard earned, carefully distilled facts first to prepare the way for meaningful opinions, is the only way to make sense. Whenever we do the opposite, indulging in thinking and opinion-vomiting as a team sport, we are poisoning all dialogue and shutting down human flourishing.
I believe that real conversation (not the pundits barking at each other on CNN, or regular folks on the street, imitating the pundits) will dissolve many of the differences we see in each other. That brings me to an inspiring dialogue I recently heard: a discussion involving Joe Rogan and Glenn Greenwald. This is an odd couple in many ways. At the beginning of the show they both admitted that, in prior years, they weren't each others' favorite people. But they reached out, sat down for three hours and had a riveting conversation that covered many issues, including whistle-blowers, corruption in Brazil, Hunter Biden. My favorite part is where Joe and Glenn discussed the importance of reaching out to people who think differently in order to understand them and to better understand yourself.
Rogan and Greenwald both tout the long-form podcast as one of the best ways to dissolve the pundit-coating that people construct around themselves and to then get down to some interesting conversation--the kind of conversation where people learn interesting things about each other and about themselves. You can be a politician for a short session on FOX or NPR, maybe even 30 or 40 minutes, but you can't hide it for several hours. Rogan mentions that he stumbled upon this powerful revelation because he was too lazy to edit his long podcasts, but then he started to appreciates incredible power of the long-form podcast to reveal who people really are. This conversation between two wide-open complex minds is pure gold, and I invite you to listen to the entire podcast, but especially from 118 min mark to the 140 min mark. You can also read along here (beginning at 2:01:38).
Chelsea Mitchell runs track at the college level. On May 22, USA Today published her Op-Ed in which she complained that runners who had "male bodies" are repeatedly and unfairly winning championships in women's college track meets. Three days after the publication of the Op-Ed, USA Today retroactively edited Chelsea Mitchell's Op-Ed, offering the following reasons as an editor's note:
Editor's note: This column has been updated to reflect USA TODAY’s standards and style guidelines. We regret that hurtful language was used.
I took the liberty of running a "compare" of the edited part of the original article (published in its original form by Alliance Defending Freedom) to the new version of the USA Today article, the one from which the "hurtful language" has been removed. The red corrections were the changes made by USA Today.
I don't understand what is factually inappropriate about saying that the MTF (male to female) transgender runners to some degree, retained "male bodies" if that is what Chelsea Mitchell (an accomplished athlete) observed. These are facts that are also strongly borne out by the stunning success of these runners when they are competing against the runners who are biologically female. That is, in fact, the entire point of Chelsea Mitchell's Op-Ed. Apparently, she will not be allowed to make her argument in her own words.
Mitchell's article did not even once mention the vague-to-the-point-of-meaningless word, "gender." Her article was about the two sexes, male and female. Perhaps USA Today also finds basic biology principles hurtful, including this finding, which goes back for thousands of years: Mammals, including human animals, come in two and only two sexes, male (small gametes) and female (larger gametes) (and see this peer reviewed article. There is not a third type of gamete. Mitchell should be allowed to freely discuss and compare the competitive advantages of those with biologically male bodies versus those with biologically female bodies. That said, this is 2021, and we are in the deep throes of Wokeness.
I repeatedly encounter people who identify on the political left who insist that the Laptop found at a computer shop in October, 2020 was not Hunter Biden's laptop and that it was a Russian ploy to interfere with the U.S. Presidential election. The fact that these beliefs persist tells a sad story about the power the news media has to defraud its trusting audience.
This CBS Report from April 3, 2021 is recent confirmation of my belief that the laptop really was Hunter Biden's laptop. April 2021, long after the election was decided, was a politically convenient time and place for Hunter to deny that the laptop was his, but he didn't deny it. October, 2020, when the NY Post initially reported on the laptop, prior to the election, was also the perfect time for Hunter Biden to deny that it was his laptop, but he didn't deny it then either. He has never denied that it was his laptop. In fact, in the above CBS interview Hunter Biden stated that it is possible that it might have been his laptop. Watch the CBS video excerpt and observe Hunter Biden's demeanor. Is this the sort of person who would use his father's name to cut lucrative self-serving deals with foreign powers? Is that the sort of person who would write the emails found on the laptop. Seems apparent to me.
If this laptop and payoff had been about any of Trump's degenerate children, the media would have been all over it. The failure to cover this story is stunning jour - - - I almost wrote "journalistic malpractice," but it was far worse. It was an intentional and deliberate ongoing muti--news-outlet conspiracy to keep citizens from knowing something important that might affect their views on an upcoming election. Full disclosure: I voted for Biden and I was horrified by the thought that Trump might win a second term. There are more important principles at play, however, than the result of any one election. See Russell Brand's interview with Glenn Greenwald on this topic:
Glenn Greenwald has focused laserlike on this topic from the beginning. His felt need to tell the truth cost him his job at The Intercept, a news organization he founded. See "Article on Joe and Hunter Biden Censored By The Intercept: An attempt to assess the importance of the known evidence, and a critique of media lies to protect their favored candidate, could not be published at The Intercept." See also, Greenwald's article on the alleged Russian disinformation: "With News of Hunter Biden's Criminal Probe, Recall the Media Outlets That Peddled the "Russian Disinformation" Lie."
Were the materials on Hunter Biden's laptop the sorts of things the media should report on? The NY Post described some of the materials here:
In the final months of the heated 2020 presidential race, The Post revealed a trove of emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop that raised questions about his then-candidate father’s ties to his son’s foreign business ventures, including Burisma, a Ukrainian natural gas company linked to corruption.
The emails revealed that the younger Biden introduced a top Burisma executive to his father, then vice president, less than a year before the elder Biden admittedly pressured Ukrainian officials into firing a prosecutor who was investigating the company.
The never-before-revealed meeting is mentioned in a message of appreciation that Vadym Pozharskyi, a Burisma board adviser, sent Hunter on April 17, 2015.
An image of Hunter Biden found on the laptop at the center of The Post exposé The water-damaged MacBook Pro — which bore a sticker from the Beau Biden Foundation — was dropped off for repair at a Delaware computer shop in April 2019, but the individual who dropped it off never returned to pick it up.
. . .
In addition to his Ukrainian connections, other emails on the computer showed Hunter discussing potential business deals with China’s largest private energy company. One deal seemed to spark considerable interest with the younger Biden, who called it “interesting for me and my family.”
. ..
Hunter Biden’s position with the reportedly corrupt energy company — which paid him “as much as $50,000 per month” — “created an immediate potential conflict of interest” because his father was involved in US policy toward Ukraine, the report stated.
This is a complex story with fails in many directions, including Twitter's stunning decision to shut down the Twitter account of the NY Post so that it could not promote its blockbuster story.