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Quote of the Day: Facts and Feelings
“Facts don’t care about your feelings.” – Ben Shapiro
The reaction to the release of the Muller Report reminded me of this quote. There seem to be a large number of people whose feelings conflict with the facts presented. As a result, many have rejected the facts in favor of their feelings.
So what if Trump did not collude with Russia? He obviously did something wrong. He must have obstructed justice. Or he is a rotten person. Or something. He was guilty of wrongthink. (Admittedly that is only a crime in a fantasy world created by George Orwell, but if you feel a crime was committed, even when the facts contradict you and feelings are more important than facts … well, sheltering in a dystopian fantasy world may be an option.)
You can ignore facts that conflict with your feelings. Often you can ignore them for a long time. But as John Adams once said, “Facts are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.” Eventually, facts prevail. Even if it is because the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew in the wreckage that denying facts in favor of feelings creates. We may be a year or two away from the day when the Gods of the Copybook Headings limp up to explain it once more. That day will come.
Published in General
Reading about “Gods of the Copybook Headings”, I liked what a scholar named Andrew Rutherford had to say about it:
[The poem] contained “age-old, unfashionable wisdom” that [Rudyard] Kipling saw as having been forgotten by society and replaced by “habits of wishful thinking.” More Kipling in the classroom, please :-)
Today’s quote reminded me of a favorite Kipling piece, his poem IF–
Your comments and writing here on Ricochet are always thought provoking, @seawriter. Thanks
I am inclined to agree with @seawriter…
AND…
I worry deeply that objective reality may be denied for generations. I also note Sweet Reason may be a real thing, but in human frames it is likely another other, even self, deceiving pose. I don’t want to start any blasphemous rumors, but there seems to be a great deal of feeling in, with, and under “facts don’t care about your feelings.”
This problem of perception intersects with the faith/reason relationship or argument, appropriate to this season in two faiths.
Oh yeah, facts matter. Here’s what I know. Every Friday night you get your kicks running from the police on your motorcycle. On the Friday night I met you if fence jumping was an Olympic sport you would have won a gold medal. You had to dump your bike on someone’s front lawn. Unfortunately for you your clothing and the helmet you carried matched the description from about six different police officers. When you told me your bike crapped out and you had to walk home you were walking in the wrong direction to get back home. You would have had to circumnavigate the globe on foot to get to your front door.
Oh yeah, that motorcycle ignition key I found in your pocket, well after I chauffeured you back to a bike you’d never seen before laying on a front lawn, yeah that bike, when I put the key in the ignition the bike started right up.
Yep, facts matter.
Facts are what people are told they are and what people want to believe. If Comey, Brennen, and Steele went on TV and told how they made it all up, 40% of people would still think that DJT was employed by Putin. Facts may not care about feelings, but dumb people don’t care about facts.
I think that this is happening on both sides.
The Anti-Trumps are looking at Volume I, Collusion, and see facts of lots of contacts with the Russians, and Russian activities, and conclude that there must be a pony in there.
The Anti-Anti-Trumps (or Pro-Trumps) are looking at the ten examples in Volume II, Obstruction of Justice, and see innocent behavior, while Mitt Romney, Jonah Goldberg, David French and I see sickening behavior.
And most people haven’t taken the time to download the 448 pages of the entire report, or to read the 18 page Introduction and Executive Summaries.
Three of the four have not issued mea culpas for the collusion hoax, while 4:4 assert the obstruction hoax.
It is almost as if the Collusion mea culpa meant nothing at all.
Uh…are you talking to Seawriter or Ben Shapiro?
Sickening? To some. Understandable to me.
Ironically, President Trump would never have happened if the Republican Party had not given its voters a multitude of reasons to be dissatisfied.
Goldberg is very fond of criticizing Trump supporters low bar of, “at least he fights”. Lincoln certainly set a low bar for generals, he defended Grant the same way.
Which, in case you haven’t figured it out, is the whole point. Because “sickening” behavior is about your “feelz.” It is very subjective.
I find David French particularly disgusting. He just doesn’t home in on Trump, his raison d’être these days is to pronounce the veracity of the religious faith of others. Supporting Trump in any way now means hellfire and damnation. It seems for a “devout” Christian that whole Sermon on the Mount thing means very little to him (or his wife, who says she can’t criticize Romney’s faith but has no problem with denigrating that of complete strangers.)
For his part, Romney is being hailed as “courageous,” which is a word politicians love to hear. It sustained John “Maverick” McCain through a career of backstabbing and berating others. The media loves the genteel Republican who can get tag-teamed by Barack Obama and Candy Crowley and lose gracefully like a good little boy.
If you’re talking about from the Mueller inquisition, I’m interested in what you have to say.
Mitt Romney looks like a typical political prostitute right now. He’s gone back and forth on Trump, ridiculously. JMO, I could be talked out of it.
This is what I think.
I’m supposed to be excited by this.
I stopped reading French a while back. He impressed me as a self-righteous prig who occasionally stumbles across the truth, but who manages to pick himself up and carry on as if nothing had happened.
Christopher Buckley wrote a very funny novel called The White House Mess. In an interview one can still find on youtube he said it was intended to be a parody of all of the memoirs that people who work for even 15 minutes in the White House staff are seemingly obliged to write. The subtext of all the memoirs is: It would have been much worse if I hadn’t been there. Those twits referenced in Levin’s article are already outlining their memoirs.
Doug Watt, you are just very lucky that this guy’s uncle wasn’t Robert Mueller!!!
Oh please, not again.
I was using the corporate “you”. Second of all it was a subtle reference to why I could never run for Congress. When my doctor informed me that to lower my evidentiary standards to win a seat in Congress I wouldn’t be able to afford the operation to have half my brain removed.
Bob Vila’s comment is pertinent to this discussion. The comment is in regards to the youtube labelled: The Battle Over Free Speech: Are Trigger Warnings, Safe Spaces & No-Platforming Harming Young Minds?
1:19:51 / 1:25:12
Comment’s author: Bob Vila
2 weeks ago (edited)
Haidt: Here are statistics, research, and syllogistic arguments for why these policies are harmful.
Penny: But feelings matter.
Sacks: Here are personal anecdotes and philosophical arguments for the value of free speech.
Andrews: But white people!
Doug, I think your doctor is giving those on the New Left far too much credit.
“Or something” is doing a lot of work there.
To expand on something Jonah Goldberg said, if someone had been in a coma for the past three years and then read the Mueller Report, they’d likely be shocked and appalled… Partly by the president’s actions during the campaign, partly by the way government resources were used to surveil members of his campaign during the election. (How much focus they would put on each of these would vary from person to person.)
But if they woke-up from just a six-moths coma they’d likely see it mostly as confirmation of what we already knew. It’s amazing how much we’ve all been inured to in the last few years.
What is your point? That French supports Israeli but not American national sovereignty? Quotes please.
Discuss
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLzeK74yuBo
How did we arrive at this point?
I suspect it had something to do with the behavior of the previous administration resetting expectations for the current administration.
French appears to feel very strongly about Trump. He seemingly is very angry and sometimes depressed at having a person who is so widely disliked and regarded as disreputable at the head of his party. Most people initially found Trump to be distasteful, bemusing or concerning, but he did not evoke in them the intensity of emotion we see in some NeverTrumpers. In them is anger that they attempt to justify with tortured rationalization increasingly at odds with reality.
It’s not surprising. This is narcissism, characteristic of our age. It’s the same thing that’s driving the purges of undesirables from campuses and the speaking circuit even to the extent of trashing civil rights and becoming violent.
The over the top condemnation of Trump that goes well beyond the facts, the inability to see good in anything about Trump, in which ordinary and understandable foibles are looked upon with no charity, is the tell.
Yes! Wish I could like this 100 times.
When we moved from SF bay area up to rural No California, I was cleaning out a huge section of the garage. It was 2005; I discovered a People Magazine from 1992. The idea that Bill Clinton’s possible affairs with other women was a major headline seemed so quaint, so innocent. We still had the Twin Towers standing aloof and proud in Manhattan. We didn’t have any on going wars, although George the Elder was possibly facing a big loss in November due to the unpopularity of Iraq War Round One.
There was as yet no Patriot Act – still a distant gleam in the eyes of the PNAC crowd. Surveillance occurred through a wire tap on your phone, with clicks letting you know your phone was tapped. Most likely you were spied on because you were actual Mafiosa, or a real Russian or Chinese spy. In 1992, school shootings occurred once in a while, as happened fifteen years earlier when some young woman student decided she didn’t like Mondays.
It was a different world. The Centre still did hold, and we Americans could celebrate that there was as yet no “rough beast, its hour come round at last,” who “Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born.”
To be fair to French, there’s a difference between repelling invaders who are trying to kill you and keeping people out who are looking for jobs.