On the Couch

The FBI has been scouring the land to find and arrest the insurrectionists who invaded the United States Capitol building on January 6. As news media report the apprehending of each miscreant, I find reading the brief backgrounds of each one instructive. The most salient feature I have noticed is that many of the would-be shtarkers live with their mothers. (And many of whom brought their mothers along to the riot.) 

Calling Dr. Freud!

*

In interviews, several of the idiots claimed to be acting like the citizens in Ukraine or Belarus who flocked to the streets to protest fraudulent elections. But their heads were so screwed on backwards that they couldn’t even get the analogy correct.

Consider: Those Eastern European protesters were opponents of the government, who saw the ins using their political power—control of the right to be on the ballot, control over the handling of the voting, control of the counting of the votes cast, etc.—to steal the election.* The opposition had no way to subvert the election—they had no power to do so, even if they wanted to.

Now consider the situation in the US: The party in power was claiming that the election was stolen by those who had no power to do so. But the outs don’t control how ballots may be cast (in person, by mail, etc.), or where drop boxes will be placed for the collection of ballots not cast on election day or mailed,** or how and when ballots are counted, or what forms of ID are necessary to cast one’s ballot, or the reporting of the results, etc. That is all under the control of the ruling party. In other words, only the ins have the means and power to steal an election. 

Thankfully, election officials—both Republican and Democratic—did not bow to pressure to undermine the legitimacy of the election. Indeed, some of the state officials who came under the most pressure to act fraudulently—those in Arizona and Georgia—were Republicans. When Trump called the Republican Georgia election official and asked him to find 11,780 votes, that was a prime example of how an in party attempts to steal an election. He wanted an in-power official to commit fraud. No out-of-power person could even attempt such an act.

The ins steal elections, because, unfortunately, they can.

So “Stop the Steal” as a slogan was a correct one. Except it was aimed at the wrong party.

***

 

* As proof of what an in party can do, here is what happened in Tanzania this past October:

https://apnews.com/article/tanzania-elections-kenya-voting-fraud-and-irregularities-presidential-elections-e4df247054dd2ce39412ec660357f80e

**  In Texas, the Republican governor decreed that only one drop box would be placed in each county. Harris County, which contains the city of Houston, has 4.7 million people!

See Who Salutes

I logged into Amazon last night. I was looking to purchase some false flags. It turned out, however, that when I typed in “false flags” what popped up was about a score of books with that term (singular or plural) in the title. Nothing to run up a flagpole to see if anyone saluted.

I was motivated in my search by the claims of numerous Republican/conservative/rightwing/batshit crazies that the storming of the United States Capitol building was not perpetrated by their swamp creatures but was a “false flag” operation. As Rolling Stone noted:

One of the most prominent figures to publicly promote this claim has been Rep. Matt Gaetz, a far-right politician and conspiracy theorist, who claimed on the House floor on Wednesday night that some of the rioters had been antifa plants. “Some of the people who breached the Capitol today were not Trump supporters. They were masquerading as Trump supporters and in fact, were members of the violent terrorist group antifa,” he alleged, without any basis in reality. (1)

That is just one of many reports on the false “false flag” accusations.

The best response (as the riot was happening) was by Mark Leibovich, Chief National Correspondent of the New York Times:

When the president’s defenders keep saying “we don’t know who these people are” and “this is not who we are,” it might be more convincing if they weren’t all wearing MAGA gear.

* 

Thinking over the nature of “false flag” accusations, I have concluded that they are a sub-category of the “No-True-Scotsman” fallacy. I wrote about “No-True-Scotsman” back in 2011, (2) but here, briefly, is what it is:

Hamish MacTavish of Aberdeen is reading his newspaper at breakfast. He reads a story about a brutal murder in Manchester, and proclaims, “Och, no Scotsman would do that!”

 

Two days later, reading his paper at breakfast, he reads about another brutal murder, this one in Glasgow. “Och,” he announces, “no true Scotsman would do that!”

The fallacy is an attempt to immunize one’s cohort from blame—slicing away the negative elements from the group by narrowing the definition of the group. “That is not who we are” is a paler version of the fallacy.

At heart these attempts to cast the blame elsewhere and to display one’s own clean hands are cowardice in action. It is a refusal to accept responsibility and to examine the dirty secrets of one’s own identity—and of the flag that one has chosen to march behind.

*

In the case of the Capitol rioters, the false-flaggers were repudiated by another set of crazies who glorified what they did. Here’s one example:

[A]s the protesters swarmed the Capitol, “Stop the Steal” national organizer Ali Alexander posted a video of himself overlooking a sea descending onto the nation's capital saying, "I don't disavow this. I do not denounce this.” (3)

*

And it’s nice to see that Trump got ahead of the postal crush by sending his Valentine’s Day message to the rioters 39 days early:

 “We love you, you're very special.”

*

P.S.: I sense a business opportunity. Anyone else want to go into the manufacture and sale of false flags?

***

(1)  https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/antifa-false-flag-maga-riot-1110941/

(2)  https://drnormalvision.blogspot.com/2011/06/drop-puck.html

 (3) https://www.yahoo.com/gma/trump-allies-helped-plan-promote-234801490.html