Johnny Depp, Amber Heard, the issue of domestic violence, and the motte-and-bailey fallacy at work

It is interesting how even the wokest papers change their tones without acknowledging how they jumped the gun in the past.

It seems like in the Depp-Heard soap opera it was the woman who was abusive, not the man -hardly the stereotype The Guardian likes to discuss, but something unsurprising if you read a little bit about domestic violence in peer reviewed papers.

In the past they were quite happy to condemn Depp as a wife-beater based on hearsay. (There are a lot of articles which take his guilt -or any other men's guilt in domestic violence or rape cases- as a fact; you can search for them for your heart's desire. Start with Mattess Girl if you want to see something really surreal -and people are still defending her.)

#Believeallwomen, right? Oh, wait, now it is a right-wing trap. We never said that. Exept we still do… And yes, I do understand that a couple of people's statements cannot be used to indict a whole group -fourth wave feminists, in this case- except if the group in question does not actually stand up against these individuals. When that does not happen you may start to think that these statements do reflect on the group as a whole. Normally the most vocal fourth wave feminists do not actually disavow outrageous statements made in the name of feminism.

 

It is the perfect example of the motte-and-bailey fallacy: make an outrageous, indefensible claim, and then fall back to an uncontroversial one, claiming you never thought otherwise. (This is when the whole "we did not say that, and we are not responsible for what others have said" routine comes into play.)

The truth remains: somehow lately the Guardian talks about how difficult it is to determine who is telling the truth in these cases (when it is not blaming the victim, of course), while, as mentioned, they were quite ready to declare guilt previously based on hearsay. It is unfortunate for the paper that in this particular case it is really not that hard to determine potential guilt from the evidence presented... it is not merely he-said-she-said: Depp has testimonies, CCTV evidence and doctor's statements at his disposal, and Heard seemed to be quite irrational during her testimonies, going as far as to seemingly fabricating stories of past abuse by Depp.

Now that the evidence is weighted against Heard, now it is suddenly difficult to determine who the guilty party is. Now we do not believe the victim (Depp in this case), possibly because he has a penis and we only believe what women say, since women, as we all know, never lie about these matters. (They do not lie especially when they have something to gain from lying as we know, for example during divorce proceedings… Women are like that. Honest to the fault.) The same thing was going on in the Hungarian News portal, Index.hu. From the absolute certainly of Depp's guilt we arrived to the "well, they both are abusers, it was a toxic relationship" in a couple of weeks. The narrative changes subtly but the overall message does not.

Nice. I guess we can count this as progress.

New York Times: Europe Said It Was Pandemic-Ready. Pride Was Its Downfall

So the New York Times published a deep article about how Europe, as one single entity, has failed in its response to the pandemic.

I mean what the actual fuck. Is this what goes as journalism these days? Simply bunch together a whole range of countries regardless of how successful they were in responding to the pandemic, and make sweeping generalizations based on three?

Europe is apparently Britain, France and Italy. That's it. The rest is inconsequential -after all, they do not support our narrative, so we can safely ignore them. Even Germany only got a cursory mention, even though their response was not good, but it was not the unadulterated shitfest the UK managed to do.

The fact that many European countries (mostly the Eastern members of the EU -figure that) DID respond successfully, is completely forgotten.

Journalism these days are on the level of high school papers. And you wonder why people do not trust these papers any more, turn to 'alternative' sources. At least the Karens railing against wearking masks on Facebook are a bit more entertaining than this elitist crap. Not since 2002 do I trust anything the NYT writes, because they showed their colors publishing the obvious lies about Saddam's WMDs to trump up support for the war, but this article was just insultingly stupid.

The racist fish

So apparently even the statue of a fish with boobs is racist.
This perfectly fits into the present trend of vandalizing statues of people of old for being something they were not - like our friend, poor Cervantes. And even when the ire of the activists turns on a genuine racist -like Churchill- we still are faced with the fact that they absolutely have no clue who this bird really was, and why he was a racist. (Let's just ignore the fact he did not get a statute for being a racist.)

So we have a wave of statute-toppling by activists who are absurdly ignorant on what they are actually doing in the name of fighting colonization and racism. Poor fish-girl is the low point of this activism, I think - you can't get lower than that I think.
Let's ignore the whole complex issue of colonialism, slavery and whatnot - after all, nuances are not something we like. We want black and white, binary answers.

But this leads to a real slippery slope. Us judging everyone by today's standards means we will have to remove statues and the works of every single person until the last decade or so from public spaces and the public domain. Not to mention twenty years from now everything that survived the purge will be destroyed since it is safe to bet that tomorrow's standards will be different from today's.

Orban and his special powers - the lack of journalistic integrity

This is going to be a difficult post for me because I do not wish to defend Orban and his government. I believe they are the very worst of the cleptocratic elite Hungary's political establisment bred over the last thirty years. Their rule is cementing a new, robber baron class in place, making the country even more nepotistic as it was before. A place where I am less and less keen to live in.

Anyhow. During the COVID-19 pandemic they voted some emergency powers for themselves, which were supposed to temporary, but they did not give an automatic expiry date. This sent everyone into panic; the screaming about dictatorships have predictably started. This situation is actually quite similar to the original dictators in the Roman sense -emergency powers granted for a person during times of emergencies, which were returned to the state once the emergency passed - so they might have had a point in this regard, but not in the sense we understand dictators today. (Do not get me wrong: Hungary really is not a well-functioning democracy. Neither is the US, but this is a different conversation.)

And now that the restrictions imposed on the country have been gradually eased, these emergency poweres were willingly surrendered, causing a serious confusion and a need to interpret this from the "Orban Is A Dictator" narrative. By large no mention is made in the usual suspects: Guardian, The Independent, WaPo, and the rest. But some do try to spin it in a new way to keep up their narrative.

Apparently it is a ploy to win by losing, and not actually doing what they said they would.

Now, Orban and his cronies are definitely corrupt assholes with autocratic tendencies. However it is quite clear even to them that grabbing power using the pandemic as an excuse would be a mistake -as it can be seen from their efforts to curtail the spread of the virus. As soon as they voted more powers for themselves, the usual accusations started - clearly it would be a step over the line to make these powers permanent. However, they do not need for such a ham-fisted attempt to grab power. They already have their cake and they can also eat it, too. They are firmly entrenched in power, and they can claim to have a democracy at the same time - the best of both words. Any dictatorial power grab would make them less than desirable company for the people they depend upon: multinationals and Western politicians. No matter how they suck up to Putin they do understand that it is not actually where their future lies. But it seems to be too nuanced for journalists out for some sensational headline I guess.

Racism and identity politics

This video is an interesting take on the whole diversity issue.
Essentially Peterson argues that even though there are measurable, objective differences between different groups, the differences are realtively small. They are not significant next to the differences between individuals.
Therefore any argument for diversity based race or gender is basically a racist one, because it essentially states that the major differences between a white person and, let's say, and Asian person are determined by their race, and not by their persons. So an Asian person is more alike to all other Asians, a black person to all other blacks, and a man is to all the men in the world. This reduces a person essentially to his or her "group" being race, gender, sexual orientation, age or anything else.
This is obviously racist, and I do agree with his conclusion on this particular point -somewhat. Indeed the whole problem and paradox of identity politics is that it is fundamentally racist.

But then he further argues that the real basis of diversity is the individual. I am not certain I can accept this, however.

Those small differences he mentioned added up do amount to visible/detectable differences between individuals. Peterson makes the mistake of taking these differences on their own, and not looking at their cummulative effect. Taken as a whole, these differences do amount to an overall variation between groups, even though certain members of the groups may indeed be more similar to another person from a different group than to members of their own group.

So no. I do think it is still important to have as many types of people in groups as possible, although it is probably true that it does not necessarily mean that you have to focus on the "emphasised" grouping, like gender or race. While it may seem like a no-brainer that including a black guy in a group of lawyers may add an extra point of view, I would argue that if that token black guy is coming from the same Harvard environment as the rest of his pastry white co-workers, he will not  bring as much diversity of point of view into this group as a white kid for Idaho who attended to community college (or, god forbid, someone from an European country) would. If you include a black guy who is coming from a ghetto, you are getting there, however. But this is the point that Jordan is pressing: just by picking a random feature, and making it into the sole basis of "diversity", you are essentially a racist (if this feature is race), or, indeed sexist (if it is gender).

Putting your feet in your mouth -twice

So a small-time politician (he is the mayor of the Third District of Budapest) of the Democratic Coalition (DK) in Hungary had a very interesting insight: he thought Hitler totally deserved to be chosen "Man of the Year" by Time magazine in 1938, as under his leadership the German economy was soaring.
Well, yes. And there was the Crystal Night, the Night of the Long Knives, concentration camps and murder of "invalids". But yeah, the economy was good.

Not surprisingly the right side of the media and establishment jumped onto this with relish, while the left side tried to defend his misstep as a mistake, and used the age old "but you too" as well, saying that the "other side" would not have mentioned this gaffle had their own guys committed it. Which is absolutely true. But it is also undeniably true that if this was a right wing politician, the New York Times and the Guardian would have already justified a NATO strike on Hungary for this.

OK, so far we have a stupid comment, which demonstrates how Mr Imre László has absolutely no clue about history, and how the different sides of the political divide interpret this event. Amusing but not a big deal, really. If you thought this could not be elevated onto an ever greater level of absurdity and amusement - well, you were clearly wrong.

Mr Imre was offering an apology for his unfortunate historical parallel but, as he explained, he was taking part in a debate about naming a public square after Josef Mengele when he made it. You know, Mengele. The Angel of Death, the Nazi doctor who did horrific experiments on the inmates of the Auschwitz death camp, and all that. But before you start writing to the New York Times about that NATO strike, read on.

What actually took place was a debate about naming a public square after none other than Nelson Mandela. (The Right here are very much on the opinion that Mandela was a racist terrorist first and foremost, so he does not deserve any recognition - again: politics before history.)

… 

Let this sink in for a second.

Mengele, Mandela what's the difference? You say tomato I say tomato.

And people wonder how Fidesz is still in power. With allies like this, who needs enemies?