What’s fascinating to me as somebody without TV

Last updated on: December 5, 2014 at 11:20 am by Mark Shea

What’s fascinating to me as somebody without TV 2014-12-05T11:20:50-07:00 Mark Shea

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…is how, over the past couple of days, I’ve watched people in St. Blog’s comboxes come to consensus that Uniformed Power Figures killed a weak guy in a dark skin because he had it coming and the cop who killed him is blameless/he resisted arrest/he had it coming and the cop who killed him is blameless/he had priors/he had it coming and the cop who killed him is blameless/this is society’s fault/he had it coming and the cop who killed him is blameless/he was obese/he had it coming and the cop who killed him is blameless/he was bigger than the cop who killed him/he had it coming and the cop who killed him is blameless/this is really about taxing cigarettes/he had it coming and the cop who killed him is blameless/the real culprits are the people protesting this as an injustice/he had it coming and the cop who killed him is blameless/questioning this grand jury is attacking our civilization back to Magna Carta/he had it coming and the cop who killed him is blameless/the real villain is the person who filmed this killing. It was really baffling to me that people could overmaster the evidence of their eyes to repeat this rubbish.

Then, I see the summary of the Right Wing Noise Machine ridiculous memes propagated by FOX and some of the CNN pundits…

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…and I realize that the organizing principle here is pseudoknowledge and tribal loyalty to these Manufacturers of Thought. For a brief window of time, there were notes of sanity coming from Krauthammer, Napolitano, and even O’Reilly expressed some discomfort (though he buried it under soft-pedaling). But very quickly the narrative retrenched into the sing-song above and then got dutifully parroted through the conservative blogosphere and is now filling up comboxes across St. Blog’s. It’s remarkable to watch this nonsense get parroted and so many comboxers around St. Blog’s circle the wagons in defense of this grotesque miscarriage of justice. It’s even weirder to see the bizarre disconnect in the mind of a subculture that a few short months ago was cheering loudly as racist weirdo and thief Cliven Bundy was ginning up a shooting war with the state (aided and abetted by his dear good friend Sean Hannity). Now that same subculture is leaping to the defense of Uniformed Power Figures inflicting Sacred Violence on the weak and twisting itself into a pretzel to defend the indefensible.

There’s a reason the Right Wing Noise Machine does not encourage it’s fanboi to listen to level-headed people like Ross Douthat:

At the very least, though, we know that the overall number of homicides has dropped over the last decade, and the (again, problematic) statistics we do have show an increase in policemen killing civilians over the same period.

The purpose of the Noise Machine is not to educate or to teach thinking skills, but to manipulate, to gin up, to silence, to herd. Don’t get played.

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