Let's wait and see how strong herd mentality is

Can listening to enough people saying the same thing make you believe it, even if it isn't true?

Here’s where I’m putting the latest Rittenhouse takes that I’m not tweeting, due to taking another Twitter break.

Despite not actually logging in and saying anything, I did look at a few people’s TLs. And I was disheartened.

One of the things I saw was someone who was on the same side as me on this issue RT Pat The Berner when he said that Tulsi sucked and wasn’t an ally. He was referring to a fairly innocuous statement she made about how the killers in the Arbery case were convicted, and that proves America isn’t so full of racism after all.

I think that Tulsi sucks because I’m against drone strikes and she’s on the record saying that we kind of have to do them, which we don’t. But what she said here? Not actually that bad, as far as I’m concerned, although not 100% correct either.

It’s not 100% correct because a just verdict in a single case only proves so much. It proves, I suppose, that the system isn’t broken all the time. That said, it’s still pretty broken, and a lot of people have walked after shooting black people.

Do most Americans believe in what MLK said about the importance of judging people by the content of their character rather than the colour of their skin? I’d say that a majority probably do, but there are still an awful lot who don’t.

Or, if this counts as racist, there are an awful lot of people who might disagree with a political position that enjoys majority support among black Americans. As we know, these days political disagreements fuel hatred. I take no pride in this, but I’m proof of that. My disagreements with people over this case have led me to hate them, to lose respect for them, to go on a blocking spree when I didn’t used to block that many people at all.

If I, or Glenn Greenwald, or anyone else disagrees with the statement “Kyle Rittenhouse is a murderer who belongs in prison”, and a majority of black Americans agree with that statement, are we racist for not thinking the same thing as they do? It would seem lots of people believe so, judging by the tweets I’ve seen about Glenn.

When people say that Twitter isn’t real life, good lord do I ever hope they’re right. If real life sucked as bad as Twitter, then I would would abandon real life and make myself real dead. I swallowed a shitload of sleeping pills back in 2000, due to stress from college and due to conflicts with family. The only reason I’m still here is because I had second thoughts while I was waiting for them to do their work. I thought about how the people in my life would be affected. I didn’t want to do that to them. So I woke up my father and told him what the situation was, and got a drive to the hospital where my stomach was pumped…but not before I had third thoughts in the parking lot and wanted to die again. My dad had to talk me into actually walking in the door instead of sitting there, waiting to die.

Considering how the world would go pear-shaped a year or so later and just keep on getting worse…and worse…and WORSE…would I have really missed out on anything?

Enough self-pity. Whether or not this stream of consciousness shit, me just writing down whatever pops into my head, makes for good reading or not, I really should stay on topic. And the topic here is in the headline.

Herd mentality.

There are all kinds of herds. Your community. Your church or mosque or synagogue or whatever the case may be, if you’re religious. And, of course, your political affiliation. The left is a herd. So is the right, but we’re not talking about them right now since I’m more invested in seeing the side I’m on (still on that side despite being advised that I ought to not think of myself in terms of left or right) not go into the ideological shitter.

A lot of people I’ve gotten my news from, a lot of people I’ve trusted and respected for years, are having the absolute wrong reaction to the Rittenhouse verdict. Did all of the people he shot attack him first? The objective answer to that question is “yes”, because we’ve seen video of them doing so. But a lot of people on the left don’t care. They bring up things like stuff the defendant said in the past, or they’ll ask why he went to that area with a gun in the first place, or they’ll talk about how he got a break because he was white, and absolutely none of it’s relevant when juries and the public are supposed to focus only on the events of the night people were killed instead of distractions.

Are people really so terrified now that they’ve stopped caring about guilt or innocence, and just want bad people locked up regardless of whether or not they did anything illegal? Sure, why not? I guess when so many people want everyone involved with 1/6 behinds bars, I should’ve expected them to want someone who actually took lives to join the 1/6 rioters. I should’ve been emotionally ready for it.

In any case, most of the herd is saying the same thing, and most of the herd is still following the rest of the herd, both in terms of following their lead and following them on social media.

So here’s my question: if you’ve only got a smattering of people the left listens to stressing the fact that it was self-defense in all three cases, and everyone else they listen to talking about how this guy was a Nazi (allegedly, but hey, who needs any more proof than “He liked Trump”, right?) who wanted to kill people and got his wish…then how many leftists are gonna default to believing what the majority says?

As in “Hmm, Glenn seems to make sense…but all of these other people who believe all the same things I do and who have earned my trust are all saying he’s wrong. I’m going to give into my instincts instead of my intellect and follow where most of the herd is heading.”

If I were more detached I could look at this as an interesting social experiment instead of a source of frustration.

I think it’s at least plausible that, just like the mainstream media often does, many left-wing journalists and commentators are repeating one another. Does Ben Norton think it was murder? Maybe that’s good enough for Rania Khalek, who’ll echo the sentiment, and in turn someone will take what she says to heart, and so on.

Watching the trial is a good idea, but how many people have the time? Hell, I didn’t watch the whole thing or even a single day of it, because I have enough trouble sitting through a video longer than an hour. I’m guessing that not that many people pushing the “murderer” narrative watched the trial, which doesn’t reflect very well on them as serious journalists.

If they’re people who report mostly on foreign policy then we might be able to attribute this to them being busy focusing on the Middle East or whether or not war with China is on the horizon instead of a single domestic court case, as opposed to them not doing due diligence because they’re too lazy. But here’s a nice rule to have that I came up with and that they ought to start teaching in journalism school if they don’t already:

“If you aren’t paying close attention to a particular story, then DO NOT COMMENT ON IT. You don’t have the whole picture, and you risk getting things wrong and hurting your credibility. Not to mention misinforming the public, which is dereliction of your duty as a journalist to give them accurate information and nothing but.”

Anybody who has at least two of their five senses working and is capable of articulating their thoughts is capable of weighing in on this. I mean, I’m doing it, aren’t I? But that isn’t enough by itself. I’m sorry to get all self-righteous again, but I feel like you have a duty to make sure you have your facts straight if you do this for a living, if you have a lot of people who trust you and are influenced by you. What you say makes a real difference in the real world, and it can be positive or negative.

The reptilian part of my brain wants people who are getting this wrong, or simply lying, to not have that kind of influence, to be censored. Fortunately, my brain isn’t all lizard, and I do remember that censorship never stops with the people you want shut up. I see that Fiorella Isabel, who (and I am willing to admit I don’t know this for sure, which is apparently an admission many people who do this professionally aren’t willing to make) might have actually gotten this story right, was just kicked off Twitter. If I needed any reminder that censorship is a loose cannon rolling around on the deck of a ship that can go off in any direction and blow anybody away, that reminds me very well.

As with RussiaGate, the credibility of all the people getting this wrong should suffer, either immediately or later on. As with RussiaGate, they’ll retain far too much of it. People will still follow them, because they’ve always followed them. They don’t know anything else. That’s why TYT still has subscribers despite using an AR-15 on their own feet over and over and over.

Banding together was a matter of survival before the beginning of recorded history. It’s a matter of survival today, with people rightly stressing the need for us to stop fighting one another and direct our outrage at the 1% which is causing all of the problems for us. But it’s a double-edged sword, which can cause us all to jump off the same cliff if we don’t have the sense to see when we’re being steered toward that cliff. That was a bit of a mixed metaphor, but eh, I’d rather be guilty of mixing metaphors than writing falsehoods, honest mistake or not.