The Rule of Law Works
By: R.B. Lamb
Tags: Journalism, Media Criticism, Politics, Humor, Presidential Election

So what happens when you mix catastrophism with narcissism? Well, you get folks who slay imaginary dragons. Striking at mental apparitions like drunks in alleyways; but in this case, rather than pissing all over themselves, they’re writing headlines and attempting to spread their particular brand of insanity. This kind of thing is quite common, particularly in political writing.

Some of these wankers, like Dean Obeidallah, manage to expose their catastrophism right away. You know you’re dealing with a complete tool when they talk about illegal coups being attempted through legal courts. Institutions have existed to handle legal cases for centuries by now and challenges to election results are a long-standing, American tradition. Refusing to recognize that and opting instead to frame legal challenges as a coup lets you know the writer in question has issues dealing with reality. They are a dead-mind.

Others are more subtle, but by consequence more vague and less specific. They don’t phrase legal challenges as a coup, which is great, since coups are illegal. But they phrase them instead as attempts to erode the legitimacy of democratic institutions. They have more traction here than they do with the idea of an outright coup, to be clear. But only due to referring to something less concrete than tanks and missiles and such. They refer instead to trust in democratic institutions. This is the go-to for anyone who doesn’t have anything specific to say.

Still, there is something to this idea of an erosion of trust. It seems obvious this is in fact going on and one can place a good amount of the blame on catastrophist writers.

Myself, I haven’t trusted writers or news anchors or anyone on television since my late-teens. I saw some things which were then reported inaccurately by people who weren’t there the very same night; perhaps the topic of another story some day.

But those who claim not only was there a coup but they stopped it from occurring? These people are insane and hoping their readers are too. The courts throwing out the various GOP election challenges is part of the legal process, where one presumes the minimum requirements to move those suits forward weren’t met. It seems highly unlikely this was the result of judges reading The Atlantic rather than examining the merit of the cases.

Catastophists in the media don’t deserve credit for preventing a coup they made up. The legal system does, if anything. Of course, a legal coup is a contradiction in terms.

Interestingly, for me anyway, this is just another example of what epistemologists call the problem of induction. I’ve written about this problem in politics before, so if one would like a (hopefully) amusing summary of the thing they can find it linked below. But in brief, it means we have a tendency to assign improper causes to results we see. We fall prey to this problem in political considerations far more often than in others. In scientific inquiry, this problem is understood and we attempt to mitigate it through rigorous testing and observation. In politics, we never even acknowledge it.

Catastrophists of course take this thing to the next level. It is fairly totalitarian, in the sense the totality of the thing is entirely within them. They imagine the problem, they articulate the problem; then they say articulating the problem is itself how the problem is solved. This is also how academic philosophy works, most the time, as well. Some nerd dreams up a problem (like the problem of induction) just so they can solve it in ten chapters or less.

But not all philosophers claim they are the most trusted name in news. That’s just Marx and Engels.