Modern witchery

October 19, 8:04 PMAnchorage Libertarian ExaminerKevin Wilmeth

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  Comic from xkcd. 

Perhaps my memory is starting to fade.  I could swear that at some point, I heard Leonard Pitts say at least some things that made sense.

That sense is hardly to be seen at all any more.  Increasingly, we get articles like this one, sounding more and more like the garden-variety Team Blue v. Team Red rantings that use more and more words to make less and less sense.

The problem with both Team Blue and Team Red (or whatever other pointless labels you may choose to substitute for the different tentacles of the same Establishment, that need to spend such a conspicuous amount of effort convincing us that they are in fact different) is that they refuse to acknowledge their own internal hypocrisies, while inflating their own self-importance even as they become ever less relevant.   "You're so vain / You probably think this song is about you" indeed!

Consider this passage:

But here's the thing: When no authority can be regarded as unimpeachable by both right and left, when no fact can be universally accepted as such, when anything you prefer not to believe is automatically dismissed as a product of ``bias,'' you impoverish intellect and render informed debate impossible.

You may think Dwyane Wade is the best there is, and I may prefer Kobe Bryant, but if we can't agree they both play a game called basketball, if you say it's basketball but my conservative dictionary tells me it's actually checkers, then we can't even have the debate; our assumptions are too fundamentally incompatible. We live in different realities.

Now this would be a useful thought indeed, if applied equally to all aspects of the Establishment, but that does not appear to be Pitts' point at all.  No, he has taken time out of his busy day to get in a few trendy digs at Team Red while warning us of the dangers of a possible competitor to Wikipedia (which will be perfectly free to fail on its own), and above that of the inherent dangers of covering one's ears to the sounds of dissent and screaming "LALALA" at the top of one's lungs.  Well--as long as the ostriches are "conservative", that is.

Funny, when I read the above passage, the very first words that popped into my mind were climate change. 

Other "out-of-the-question" conversations these days might include questioning the "need" for socialized health care, for continued fiscal suicide, for ever more law enforcement upon everyone except the enforcers, or generally any sort of principled, meaningful disagreement with the Current Occupant...but climate change really captures the essence of Pitts' own words.

Funny indeed...not a word about any of that.  He seems lately to be specializing in simplisticly rebranding anyone who cuts through the noise with dissent, into a kook or lunatic--regardless of how principled or lucid such dissent may be.  (You know, a witch.)

Perhaps dissent all looks the same to him.