Patterico's Pontifications

12/14/2012

How a Fringe Leftist Thinks: My Flawed Perception Is More Important Than the Facts

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 7:29 am



And if somehow the facts are at odds with my flawed perception? YOU MUST BE DISTORTING THE FACTS!!!!1!! Because I know what I think and I’m not letting some little thing like the evidence get in the way.

This is going to sound like a post about a Twitter battle, but there is a larger point. Stick with me for a second.

Yesterday I told you Marcy Wheeler had accused me of saying Steven Crowder should not have reported his assault to the cops. She had maybe 40-50 tweets to that effect. Here are a couple:

There were dozens of “why do you beat your wife” questions like that. Of course, I had never said that or anything remotely like it. But that didn’t stop Marcy Wheeler from saying I had. Again and again and again.

And, of course, there was the obligatory threat to go to my supervisors, to report this made-up thing that I never said:

I repeatedly denied having said this, and demanded proof. Which I knew did not exist because I never said it. When another Twitter user popped in and asked about this, Wheeler accused me of having DELETED THE TWEETS in which I supposedly made this comment:

I wrote a post about her fabricated accusation, and this morning on Twitter I called her on it again. She issued a sort of half-assed non-apology apology in which she said she can’t find the tweets, so if she was wrong she apologizes . . . but it’s still her memory that I said that, and she can’t change her memory.

Now understand clearly what has happened here. Let’s give Wheeler the benefit of the doubt that she wasn’t just making things up deliberately, and then backpedaling when called on it. Just for the sake of argument. What happened was:

  • Due to her viewing everything through a partisan lens, she had a misperception about the facts of what actually happened.
  • Based on that misperception, she made an accusation about a conservative, and tried to hurt him in his employment based on this accusation.
  • Then she was presented with evidence that the hard evidence did not back up her misperception.
  • Rather than reconsider her misperception, she decided that somebody must have been messing with the evidence.

Do you see how all this applies to Steven Crowder?

Wheeler decided, right off the bat, that Crowder was lying. This is because she just KNEW the place was crawling with cops and that he made no effort to report the crime.

When a video emerged showing Crowder brutally smashing a peaceful union member in the fist with his face, Wheeler immediately declared it heavily edited. Never mind that not one cop is seen on the video. Never mind that Crowder can be heard saying “where the fuck are the cops?” Never mind that Crowder has said in an interview since then that he could not report the incident right away because he was surrounded by more union thugs.

The evidence was at odds with Wheeler’s perceptions — so Crowder must have messed with the evidence.

AH! BUT HE DID! THEY SAY. WELL, NOT SO MUCH: Wheeler has, of course, been emboldened by video footage showing the attacker on the ground just before the assault. The NYT has helped given a partisan spin to this fact by claiming he was “knocked” on the ground — something you certainly can’t see on the video. For all we know, the guy took a swing at Crowder, missed, and ended up on the ground — then got back up and did it again.

Is there any evidence to support this? Sure. Crowder yells that he has just been assaulted before the guy gets back up and punches Crowder.

Now, it could emerge that, contrary to everything I know about the guy, Crowder went and popped this guy in the face first. I doubt it, but if it’s proved I’ll accept it.

But for fringe leftists, the actual facts must always be discounted. What matters is perceptions. This proves the point I have always made, that you can’t convince somebody who doesn’t want to be convinced. And if the facts contradict the fringe leftist’s beliefs, why, you must have distorted the facts. Crowder must have deleted the footage where he punched the guy first. I must have deleted those tweets.

Wheeler owes me an apology — not a B.S. “I’m sorry if I was wrong but I still don’t think I was wrong” non-apology, but a real one.

I think, when all this is said and done, she’ll owe Crowder one as well.

Over/under on whether we’re going to get one?

41 Responses to “How a Fringe Leftist Thinks: My Flawed Perception Is More Important Than the Facts”

  1. Ding.

    Patterico (8b3905)

  2. the apology will be forthcoming on or about the 12th of never.

    redc1c4 (403dff)

  3. How do you put never in an over/under construct?

    JD (9adec8)

  4. ===When a video emerged showing Crowder brutally smashing a peaceful union member in the fist with his face, Wheeler immediately==

    Patterico, your typical sarcasm is obvious to those of us who know you and know the real story. Regardless– using the words “peaceful union member” even in jest on a post related to Crowder and the Michigan incident does not seem like a great idea to me.

    elissa (d0c7e2)

  5. Twitter user @emptywheel admitted she killed Jimmy Hoffa.

    She either deleted the tweet or I misremembered, but I can’t change my memory.

    egd (d580cc)

  6. But for fringe leftists, the actual facts must always be discounted.

    I don’t believe it’s just “fringe” leftists that discount facts… It’s the left at large. And they dont even wait for the facts to be revealed before making judgements. They dont need facts because the narrative is already in place. No matter the situation, just tweak and manipulate the situation to fit the narrative. It is formulaic.

    Case in point re the left not even needing to know the facts before condemnation occurs: President Obama and the Henry Gates incident.

    Dana (292dcf)

  7. She’s already deleted her apology, don’t you remember her doing that?

    htom (412a17)

  8. Emptywheel? More like Emptyhead.

    Ralph Gizzip (5ab3ea)

  9. Is this the same Marcy Wheeler of Grand Rapids, MI who admitted on her Twitter account that she hit another car in a parking lot, yet drove off without leaving a note on the windshield of the car she hit ?

    I can’t remember if this is the same person.
    If it is the same Marcy Wheeler, it is possible she may have deleted that particular tweet.

    Elephant Stone (65d289)

  10. Christmas: the season for nuts.

    JVW (4826a9)

  11. Mis-remember? This very unreliable person made it up in what was her clouded little mind thought was win/win for her.

    Like a manipulative tween, she, asserts in order to draw out, in reaction, some opinion she can “use” – or just keep repeating the falsehood in a very peculiar and not-persuasive support of the false hoax narrative. Otherwise she’d have to start justifying the Union goons right to punch when his tent-tearing is thwarted, and that’s so much harder.

    SarahW (b0e533)

  12. I don’t believe it’s just “fringe” leftists that discount facts… It’s the left at large.

    But they’re the “reality-based community”! Just ask them — they’ll cite an unsourced comment by an unnamed staffer, “reported” by another leftist, as proof!

    Rob Crawford (c55962)

  13. It’s interesting you picked up on the false lenses she wears that cause her to misperceive reality. The new Common Core C3 Social Studies Framework talks about creating new perceiving “lenses” for students to practice wearing in their classroom activities over years. Then proceeds with a whole slew of false facts to distort those lenses.

    http://www.invisibleserfscollar.com/changing-the-filtering-perception-the-way-we-see-the-world-is-key/ is from a quote on using both K-12 and higher ed to change the filtering perception that confronts reality. To gain politicsl, social, and economic change without it being readily apparent what has gone on. Because it is internal and hopefully (to the Statist Schemers) unconscious.

    Gonna be more Empty Wheels if these ed plans go through.

    Robin (801f44)

  14. Something I just noticed about Tony the Union Thug’s attire. The t-shirt he’s wearing appears to have a picture of a fist on it. Not the usual upraised fist of fascist power, like the one they squeezed into a map of Wisconsin over the summer, but one viewed front-on as a punch is thrown.

    I’d love to see a full picture of the shirt, and to be proven wrong on this, but I’ve seen a couple of angles of it, and that’s what it appears to be to me.

    Rob Crawford (c55962)

  15. She will never change her attitude and preconceptions of the world until she, unfortunately, at some point is “Crowder’ed” herself.
    Perhaps she needs to go to Cairo or Damascus and see how others behave during political disputes, up-close and personal.
    What a useless POS!, like all the friends of BK.

    askeptic (b8ab92)

  16. It is a human failing, built into the meat and flesh of our bodies, that we oftentimes color our perceptions and interpretations based on what we expect to see and hear. This gets into our memories and we often mistake our memories for reality.

    A truly “reality-based” person understands that we are imperfect machines and questions to a certain extent what they think they know; and when faced with evidence to the contrary at least entertains the possibility that the new information may be destructive but necessarily true.

    Outright rejection of dis-confirming evidence is the mark of pseudoscience.

    Pious Agnostic (7c3d5b)

  17. She’s backing down, as best she can (without admitting she is a liar)

    Sammy Finkelman (d22d64)

  18. Miss A-Few-Spokes-Short-of-a-Wheel will NEVER give you a real apology, Patterico. And, from her perspective, why should she? After all, NONE of the people whose opinions she cares about give a flying crap about whether or not she is libeling you. If anything, they’re celebrating it.

    Icy (e74af9)

  19. Robin @ 13,

    Great comment. There is always a bigger picture and goal with the left than what is on the surface. Get them trained while they’re young and they’ll neatly fall into line. Common Core is the perfect manual for implementation.

    Dana (292dcf)

  20. Rob Crawford, You see it right. I was making cracks about the I WILL PUNCH YOU shirt the other day.

    I was wrong though, it means ‘Have some of my delicious lunch.”

    SarahW (803813)

  21. 27 reported dead, including 18 children, at shooting in CT school:
    http://www.courant.com/news/breaking/hc-police-responding-to-incident-in-newtown-20121214,0,3969911.story

    MD in Philly (3d3f72)

  22. Perhaps some enterprising soul could send the twitter thread to an Amherst alumni website for their analysis and delectation.

    daleyrocks (bf33e9)

  23. MD in Philly – Has Brian Ross named the teabagger responsible yet?

    daleyrocks (bf33e9)

  24. A classroom of kindergarteners?

    SarahW (803813)

  25. The reason people are leftists is that they desperately want to believe things that aren’t true.

    Foremost among these things is that there is some theoretical abundance of all the things that they want that would exist if only some force (known as government) would create the correct conditions, and the only problem to be solved is the elimination of whatever conspiracy that prevents them having it.

    The key to dictatorial power via the electoral process is to tap into that desperate desire. Like Obama, Hitler and Mussolini were essentially community organizers. They lived Alinsky’s advice before there was ever an Alinsky (sub solis nil novus). They learned what the people wanted and therefore how to sell what to them whatever they were going to give them. Hitler for instance didn’t invent the German zwangwirtschaft, or “compulsory economy,” and he sure didn’t invent German anti-semitism. But, damn, didn’t he use them?

    In Hitler’s case the evil conspiracy that kept the people from having that abundance that exists without working for it were the Jews. For Mussolini it remained capitalists. Or at least uncontrolled capitalists.

    Lenin and Stalin didn’t really fall into this category as they weren’t voted in. But they were able to retain sufficient popular support by blaming the kulaks, the “wreckers,” the “hoarders,” or whatever they called the remaining elements of the reactionary lackeys of the capitalist running dogs.

    Whether they get into power by appealing to the envy, greed, and hatred of desperate people who are looking for someone to blame for their circumstances, or retain power by doing so, it’s always the same.

    And, also important to know, is that the people they are told to blame have brought whatever vitriol and violence upon themselves. The violence and vitriol that grows ever larger as long as they continue to exist and the theoretical abundance just doesn’t magically appear.

    This is how they get their extermination camp or gulag guards. These people can convince themselves they’re good people and can go home and be good husbands or wives or parents (can we stop already with the idea that if someone is raising “two beautiful children they must be good people; children have been raised by loving fathers whom they never knew or suspected were professional torturers while they were away at work) while brutalizing others for a paycheck. Because they “know” the people they’re brutalizing deserve it.

    Or, as Obama put it, “the pitchforks.” As in when he gave the bankers a deal they couldn’t refuse, “I’m the only thing between you and the pitchforks.”

    That’s what a community organizer does. Set one group against another group that he vilifies to force the vilified to deal under duress. Which is entirely his creation.

    This is probably why Obama seized upon the Mohammed video as a cause for the riot in Cairo and the attack in Benghazi. It’s something he would do; appeal to the base instinct of the crowd, the pitchforks, that already exist in order to get it to do his bidding.

    Emptywheel is one of the pitchforks. She already believes certain things. Obama’s ascendance, or rather the environment that makes it possible for him to get elected and reelected, has been shaped by people who are willing to validate her preconceived beliefs.

    What are facts compared to that? Emptywheel obviously isn’t a guard at a gulag. But she does demonstrate the thinking that results from the indoctrination that’s required to create one. And that indoctrination doesn’t involve suppressing human nature but rather reinforcing certain aspects of it.

    Steve57 (25fb74)

  26. CBS: Unconfirmed reports say that principal Dawn Hochsprung and a school psychologist were killed, according to a parent who claimed to witness part of the attack, CNN reported.

    CBS reports that a student’s father was the shooter.

    SarahW (803813)

  27. Steve57 – frankly I think she’s in it for the money and a sense of belonging.

    SarahW (803813)

  28. Comment by Steve57 (25fb74) — 12/14/2012 @ 10:34 am

    Obama seized upon the Mohammed video as a cause for the riot in Cairo and the attack in Benghazi.

    Obama didn’t seize upon it – that came from somewhere. Maybe it did appeal to him a little. If it is the video, it is smaller problem.

    NBut the real source was Sooper sekrit intelligence. That really came from the perpetrators.

    By the way, the video is still on YouTube and is the reason Afghanistan gives for blocking YouTube.

    Sammy Finkelman (d22d64)

  29. “Obama didn’t seize upon it – that came from somewhere. Maybe it did appeal to him a little.”

    Sammy – Obama seized it with a fervor and repeated it in the Rose Garden, when the caskets came home, at the U.N. and countless other times, because it appealed greatly to him as a distraction from his failed policies. Any other thinking is delusional.

    daleyrocks (bf33e9)

  30. The thrust of Obama’s remark was that not liking a vido was no reason to do these things. I think he bought int disinformation.

    The jkey thing by the way is not whetheror not there was a protest. It’s whether or not any of this was planned in advance.

    If everybody’s reacting to a video that became known the day before or so, or reacting to a protest in Cairo, then there’s no ignored warning. It wasn’t in the works before.

    That this isall leaderless or unplanned is exactly what the terrorists want people to think. Making it all seem to arise from something on the Internet is what they want.

    They wanted Obama to believe this, not Obama to try to convince the public about it. Obama and Susan Rice went too public n it for it to continue fooling them. Not hat the terorrists wanted.

    Sammy Finkelman (10c64a)

  31. Comment by Steve57 (25fb74) — 12/14/2012 @ 10:34 am

    It’s not that Liberals (Leftists) do not know anything, it is that so much of what they know is wrong!
    (paraphrase)- Ronald Reagan

    askeptic (b8ab92)

  32. askeptic, I recently saw this quote sited, but with Ronald Reagan himself used as the subject instead of Liberals. It should go without saying, it was on a Liberal source.

    It actually made me wonder if I’d been wrong about it…

    Pious Agnostic (7c3d5b)

  33. PA, I think it is a sound-bite from “The Speech” in 1964.
    http://www.hark.com/clips/dlvxhnstwz-the-trouble-with-our-liberal-friends

    “Well, the trouble with our liberal friends is not that they’re ignorant; it’s just that they know so much that isn’t so.”

    askeptic (b8ab92)

  34. What matters is perceptions.

    Actually, what matters to people like this are preconceptions.

    Craig Mc (f67908)

  35. Marcy Wheeler is just plain being rude to you, Mr. Patterico. She threatened your job because she, giving her the benefit of the doubt, thought she remembered something that she now admits she could have misremembered. Boy, if I were going to do something as aggressive as that, I’d want to have my facts lined up quite a bit more tightly than Ms. Wheeler. I’d look like an idiot. But now she comes out and freely admits that her facts may have been lined up properly at all due to her faulty memory.

    Chants (1bae7e)

  36. SarahW @27, you hit upon an important point about the desperate need of the leftist mind. The sense of belonging. The desire for the collective for its own sake. And the worst thing you can be in a collectivist society is an individual with an independent need for your own facts. The people making political hay telling emptywheel her (flawed) perceptions are superior to facts also tell her there’s something suspicious abouty people who demand facts. After all der Fuhrer has alredy thought it through so no one else needs to. It’s upsetting to people who find relief in giving the collective resonsibility for not only filling their material needs but also filling the role of their conscience. It threatens their notion that everyone is the same. The existence of difference leaves open the possibility of one person being better than another and that can’t be allowed. Hence everyone gets a trophy and there are no gender differences.

    Steve57 (7cc1ba)

  37. “The jkey thing by the way is not whetheror not there was a protest. It’s whether or not any of this was planned in advance.”

    Sammy – The cover up by the Obama Administration of what happened in Benghazi prior to the attack, what Chris Steven was doing in Benghazi, what happened during the attack, and the various conflicting stories told since the attack seem sort of important to me, by the way.

    Remember that Obama began his term with an apology tour of the Middle East and blaming attacks on 20 of our diplomatic facilities on something reprehensible done in America is a good way to maintain that tone.

    daleyrocks (bf33e9)

  38. How about I accuse EmptyWheel of knocking down elderly ladies and stealing their social security checks? To buy heroin? Gosh, these leftist tactics are kind of fun, aren’t they?

    pst314 (ae6bd1)

  39. Please stop referring to people like this as ‘fringe’ leftists.

    They ARE the left.

    jimg (c75ae5)

  40. This is why Dems compete so vulgarly and coarsely; they are conviced that conservatives and Republicans are evil and all their diatribe begins with that pre-conception.

    Over at Neoneocon.com (you should visit) we have been sporadically discussing media perception. It has been my position that conservative billionaires should turn their attention to establishing national conservative media outlets to compete with the liberally biased MSM. We must get the message out. Glenn Reynolds echoes this in his recent NY Post column suggesting that they buy up women’s magazines.

    This is a messaging game and with the MSM on the liberal side there is no way conservatives can penetrate the national dialogue deeply enough with current resources. We must begin changing this pervasive “Marcy Wheeler mindset” and demonstrate on a national scale that the conservative position is valid, acceptable and “un-evil.”

    T (c46473)

  41. Chants (# 35) writes:

    . . . if I were going to do something as aggressive as that, I’d want to have my facts lined up quite a bit more tightly than Ms. Wheeler.

    But that’s precisely the point that conservatives keep on overlooking (myself included). The left doesn’t operate on the basis of facts, so to the left lining up one’s facts is a trivial exercise. It’s all about “feelings.” So Marcy Wheeler feels that this is what Patrick Frey is doing, therefore he is doing it. It’s like living in The Matrix which the left believes is reality.

    T (c46473)


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