I Blocked a Medium User the Other Day
By: Charles Bastille
Tags: Republicans, Conspiracy Theories, Fake News, Fact Checking, Blocking

The Spread of Disinformation

I Blocked a Medium User the Other Day

We keep asking ourselves why Trump supporters “think” the way they do. The very simple explanation is that the tunnel they are in is more like a bottomless pit than something that can get them somewhere.

The more crazy stuff they hear or see, the more they seem to get sucked into the zany world view created by Trump Twitter feeds, Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson illusions, and QAnon conspiracies that once were the domain of supermarket tabloids.

Original Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash; Photoshopped for this story

The Medium user I had to block the other day is a frequent “contributor” to the comments area of various Medium stories. Many of you would recognize his name/face. I’ll skip that part. I’m not here to publicly humiliate the man.

But it does point to a deeper problem that has afflicted various Internet “mediums”, from Facebook to Medium, for some time.

Who is the arbiter of truth? Where is this line drawn?

It’s a difficult question to answer.

I don’t block true conservatives. I listen to them.

The world view of conservatives is and always has been very different than mine. I’m old enough to remember long arguments with my conservative friends that would sometimes drag into the early hours of the morning if the beer or coffee was flowing.

These were friends. People I admired. People with intelligence who almost always provided a challenge to any debate effort on my part.

We held opposing political views, but we both liked beer. The second was more important to our friendship than the first.

The first rule of debate is a valid premise

My conservative friends of long ago never forgot this rule in our debates.

For example, they might begin an argument by pointing to inefficiencies in bureaucratic governance. This is an unassailable fact and is often used as an argument against big government.

Forget the counter-argument that corporations can be even more inefficient and that their greed overcomes all the various sound bites about being good corporate citizens. I’m not here to argue those kinds of points.

What I’m saying is that without a valid premise, you can’t put forward an argument. A valid premise doesn’t even have to be factually correct. It’s sufficient if it is plausible.

Modern Republicans have abandoned the requirement of a valid premise

Let’s see this in action. I’m going to post the comment that forced me to block this user. We’re going to parse it. If you love inane thinking, you’re going to eat this up like a lion in a fenced antelope farm.

The background is a comment I made about General Flynn and his dangerous remarks about how martial law might be necessary in order for Trump’s election fantasies to come true. The response to my comment began like this:

I think you’re misunderstanding Flynn and the epistemological basis of our Constitution and Bill of Rights.

Okay, first, let’s just parse that one word. It’s commonly used by right-wing nationalists, and it makes no sense in this context.

According to Webster's Dictionary epistemological is…

relating to the theory of knowledge, especially with regard to its methods, validity, and scope, and the distinction between justified belief and opinion.

What does the commenter even mean when he uses the word in this context? In order for something to be considered as knowledge, it must be true in nature. Well, hold on. He continues:

Flynn believes the election was stolen by people who would take away our basic freedoms granted to us, not by the govt, but by God.

Uh-oh. Now, don’t misunderstand me. I’m a believer in a Christian God. But there is no absolute proof that he exists. If that is what the commenter is getting at, he’s using a false premise, probably because he saw the word epistemological used in a Breitbart article somewhere.

But that’s not a blockable offense, right? Nah. No biggy. Just a silly man using a lofty word improperly. Happens all the time. Hell, half my own writing is probably chock full of the stuff. After all, I am a hyperbole enthusiast.

He goes on…

He is calling on patriots to protect that freedom, by protecting our elections in calling for a re-vote.

Ah, and there you have it. The word patriot. If you don’t call for a re-vote, you’re not a patriot. I guess. That’s a head-scratcher, and it is the first sign that an individual needs to be blocked for spreading disinformation. But he hasn’t gone there yet. So far, he’s just expressing an opinion. Like a child, he’s yelling, “RE-VOTE!! MY GUY DIDN’T WIN!”

He didn’t mention what would happen to the votes in local races where Republicans gained seats. Does this mean that he is happy to abandon those victories in the various state legislatures that Democrats were hoping to win? These were important elections.

Redistricting is about to begin, and continued Republican control of state legislatures in places like Texas and Georgia is bound to result in even more gerrymandering. Does he want to throw away the baby with the bathwater?

And I wonder what he would say about the 126 Republicans who signed an amicus brief asking SCOTUS to throw out the results in the 2020 Presidential election. Wouldn’t such a thing also mean that their own elections were a farce?

But so far, no real false premise. Just mindless insanity.

Let’s pass him a diaper and move on, shall we? Next, he says:

Most republicans will accept the outcome of a free and fair election. 74 million Americans have very good reason to believe it was stolen. This cannot stand.

Here is where he begins to wander into the land of the false premise. He says 74 million Americans have very good reason to believe it was stolen. Except. They don’t. Have. Any reason. At all.

Republican judges, Republican county clerks, Republican Secretaries of State, have consistently stated that they are satisfied with their electoral processes. Fifty different times (and still counting).

There have been multiple recounts. Just how many more shall we have? While we’re at it, can we recount North Carolina? Biden may just win there if we do. Thanks.

Georgia has had two recounts (including a hand count) and numerous local audits. Georgia is famous for being, well, a Republican-run state. Not generally a very well run state, but in this case, if there was a problem with the way the elections were run, its Republican leaders have a huge incentive to bring it out into the open. The Republican governor, Kemp, has been a Trump boot licker for years.

And, “this cannot stand” sounds like a threat.

Our commenter isn’t done with his false premise fellatio quite yet:

If it was a fair election then why are Dem strongholds resisting any real oversight?

Are they? I wasn’t aware of this. I thought it was mostly Republican counties and states that were the problem areas. Georgia. Arizona. Goodness, not even Pennsylvania’s Republican legislature was willing to step into this muck of bizarre conspiracy silliness.

The martial law Flynn is advocating will not be necessary if the states in dispute will cooperate with a fair audit. That’s all anybody is asking.

Read that again. This is an American citizen who is actually saying that martial law is a legitimate way to retain The Predator in Chief if some nebulous entity (God? Moses? Jerry Fallwell Jr.?) decides that the states in dispute are not cooperating.

Georgia, are you listening?

We are all in tunnels of our own making

It is now well known that leftists read and watch their stuff, and right-wingers read and watch different stuff. If you’re a progressive, ask yourself about the last time you read an article in National Review. Do you watch The Young Turks? Or Alex Jones? Okay, that’s not apples and oranges, that’s apples and turds. But you get the point.

Most of us watch or read things that accommodate our opinion.

This is a known problem, and it’s a problem that seems likely to remain for a while.

One nice thing about Medium is that you can get different opinions a little more easily, but I have found that its newsfeed algorithm isn’t much better than Facebook’s. It still gives me opinion pieces that are invariably leftward. If I want conservative thinking (the old fashioned kind, not the crazy stuff), I need to log out and peruse Medium without it knowing who I am, and what my viewing habits have been.

So when I block someone who thinks differently, I find myself conflicted. It’s not the way I want to interact with the political world.

But this recent descent into madness by Republicans has forced my hand. I can’t engage in discourse with people who treat facts like fiction, and fiction like facts.

Doing so enables the anomie that has overtaken the Republican voting public.

Luckily, this is the only person I can think of so far that I have had to block on Medium. I won’t block libertarians, even though I loathe that economic philosophy, because they typically are consistent with their views. And I won’t block old-fashioned conservatives who genuinely dispute the affirmation of big government, as long as they don’t talk about pizza parlor conspiracies.

But when someone is unreachable because they have subscribed to tabloid conspiracy theories, often broadcast by the president, I need to remove their thought processes from my space.

And I think you should, too.

Engaging with them in any way helps feed the growing hysteria and, fun new word I saw recently, anomie:

Screenshot of Merriam-Webster website

We are living in a stricken society. Let’s try to heal it by ignoring those who make a living by feeding false narratives into our discourse.