Lawfare: admitting you were wrong
The Horowitz Report dealt a blow to Lawfare:
…[T]he ‘Lawfare’ blog…[is] a site that’s placed itself at the center of the operation to legitimize and push Trump-Russia conspiracy theories throughout the Trump presidency.
Their specialty has been to claim the Steele dossier is “mostly verified” and asserting it as a credible source of allegations…
To put it lightly, the recent IG report has not been kind to the Lawfare blog. People like Benjamin Wittes, who spent years trashing Devin Nunes’ correct memo, are left flailing about, desperately looking for a way to save face.
You can read one of Wittes’ statements here. It’s a good example of the genre of the very incomplete mea culpa – you might say it’s a mea minima culpa (forgive my unschooled Latin). It contains an admission of error along with fresh attacks on Nunes and tactical twistings of what Horowitz actually said, as the writer at Red State explains.
But this post isn’t really about Wittes himself. It’s about the entire phenomenon of being not just wrong but extremely and publicly wrong, and how a person deals with it. Admitting wrongdoing, even to the small extent that Wittes has done, is actually more than a great many people do. Maybe even more than most people do. But for many (most?) people, this small admission doesn’t usually lead to a lot of introspection and change, because all they do is go on to the next way of being wrong.
Or, as Winston Churchill succinctly put it: “Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.”
Indeed. The profundity, depth, and breadth of their wrongness doesn’t seem to put a dent in their confidence in their judgment and in their politics. And the two generally go together because people often succumb to confirmation bias, if they’re not outright lying (which also can certainly happen).
In summary, a mind is a difficult thing to change.
Errors of this magnitude should spark a great deal of reflection, but they rarely change a person in any fundamental way – particularly pundits, who have gone on public record with their erroneous statements and are frantically trying to salvage their reputations and keep readers’ trust. Change is hard for many reasons, but here are some:
(1) Psychological – this applies to the political but also the personal. A lot of people want to protect their pride and save face, and excuses or rationalizations seem to them to be a better mechanism than admission of error or fault or stupidity or failure.
(2) Political – such errors (whether true errors or outright lies) are usually intertwined with the political goals of the person and what they want to be true. They are embedded in a belief system built of many separate elements going to make a whole and to determine the person’s political goals. The person still believes in all of this and doesn’t want to undermine those goals or to question them. It is too threatening to the sense of self and of life purpose.
(3) Financial – sometimes a person’s job would be threatened by a switch in viewpoint of any significant magnitude.
(4) Social – a real change of heart, a true mea culpa, could easily cause rifts with family, friends, and colleagues. Do not underestimate this factor.
For me, points one and two didn’t really matter; I’m not sure why. I was interested in the truth as best I could ascertain it. The third point was irrelevant; I was not employed in the pundit business at the time of my political change and had no intention of ever being in that line of work (which just goes to show you how wrong a person can be). As for number four, it was big – or would have been if I’d been aware of it, but I was so naive that I had no idea it would happen to me until the change cat was already out of the bag and I was faced with much conflict with friends and loved ones. If I’d seen it coming I don’t think it would have stopped me, but in fact I never saw it coming so I never had to consider it.
They think they’re justified, you know, because, Orange Man Bad. So even if they were absolutely wrong and were implicit in the spreading of lies and the damage done not just to this administration but to this nation, hey – it was all for a good cause.
If you were one of these people why would you ever admit you were wrong? Do like that article about Maddow stated when the story turns you stop talking about it and work on ginning up the next one.
A lot of them have gone on to the next way of being wrong, as you say, Neo. These charges related to Ukraine are vacuous.
It’s a good example of the genre of the very incomplete mea culpa – you might say it’s a mea minima culpa (forgive my unschooled Latin).
Good one, Neo. 🙂
…mea minima culpa (forgive my unschooled Latin).
neo: Works for my high-schooled Latin plus being an altarboy in the Latin era of the Mass.
Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.
–from the Confiteor (Confession)
Minimus is the antonym of maximus.
I used to follow Lawfare because they often had decent articles on various aspect of law that I wanted to learn more about. With the rise and advent of Trump, they went bonkers and the mask fell: they are just adjuncts to the Democratic Party. I no longer read their stuff, even the articles that stick to the law, because of their blatant bias. There is one lady over there, she is on Twitter all the time. She’s the worst sort of partisan because unlike Wittes, she refuses to humble herself or even acknowledge any ounce of epistemological humility.
One suspects that the minds won’t change because they already knew it was BS before they started. Not good people.
The left has really lost it with Trump, just howlingly crazy. For them worrying about whether they got RussiaGate wrong is a triviality. Trump is still president. Aiieee!
The house is burning down and they’re supposed to apologize for trying to put it out?
Here’s an incoherent article from the “Nation” ranting how Trump’s presidency is directly comparable to 9-11.
On that first 9/11, those towers came down. The second time around, the only thing that came down, at least in the literal sense, was, of course, The Donald himself. He famously descended that Trump Tower escalator into the presidential race in June 2015, promoting a “great wall” (still unbuilt years later and now, like everything The Donald touches, a cesspool of corruption) and getting rid of Mexican “rapists.”
From that moment on, Donald Trump essentially hijacked our world. I mean, try to tell me that, in the years since, he hasn’t provided living evidence that the greatest power in human history, the one capable of destroying the planet six different ways, has no brain, no real coordination at all. It’s fogged in by a mushroom cloud of largely senseless media coverage and, though still the leading force on the planet, in some rather literal fashion has lost its mind.
No wonder it’s almost impossible to tell what we’re actually living through. Certainly, in a slo-mo version of 9/11, Donald Trump has been taking down the nation as we’ve known it.
“The Trump Presidency Is Our Second 9/11”
https://www.thenation.com/article/trump-9-11/
QED.
huxley:
I wonder whether the person who wrote that Nation essay realizes that he is describing the MSM’s reaction to Trump, including his own?:
I wonder whether the person who wrote that Nation essay realizes that he is describing the MSM’s reaction to Trump, including his own?:
neo: Probably not. I rather suspect the author is somewhere in the camp of Brian Seltzer retweeting a retweet:
“In an unceasing effort to be seen as neutral, journalists time after time fell into the trap of presenting facts and lies as roughly equivalent and then blaming political tribalism for not seeming to know the difference.”
Yep. There’s your problem. I’ll take Mollie Hemingways’ response tweet:
‘The problem with journalism is that it’s just too fair to the right,’ sounds like a totally not insane thing to say. My goodness these people have lost all touch with reality.
https://www.dailywire.com/news/cnbcs-john-harwood-is-getting-trolled-for-saying-journalists-are-too-fair-to-the-fundamentally-broken-gop
Reading Wittes, I couldn’t help being struck with how dogmatically he claimed what Horowitz explicitly denied, namely that he was disproving the claims of FBI bias against the President. Next, he was vague about what he was claiming and how the evidence supported his claims. Finally, he bases his arguments on someone else’s conclusions about Horowitz, after all the talk about his own analysis.
This is a guy who might under a great deal of psychological distress, but instead we have shamelessness and lack of conscience. Apology? Hardly. Merely a prelude to distraction.
Is the real story of our time about the number of credentialed sociopaths who have gone undetected? This is terrifying.
Leon Festinger, a psychologist wrote a book on this subject titled “When Prophecy Fails.” Festinger wrote, “We’ve all experienced the futility of trying to change a strong conviction, especially if the convinced person has some investment in his belief. We’re familiar with the variety of ingenious defenses with which people protect their convictions, managing to keep them unscathed thru the most devastating attacks. But human resourcefulness goes beyond simply protecting a belief. Suppose an individual believes something with a whole heart; suppose further a commitment to this belief, suppose irrevocable actions have been taken because of it; finally, suppose evidence, unequivocal and undeniable evidence, that the belief is wrong: what will happen? The individual will frequently emerge, not only unshaken, but even more convinced of the truth of such beliefs than ever before. Indeed, s/he may even show a new fervor about convincing and converting others to this view. How and why does such a response to contradictory evidence come about?”
Welcome Oblio:
“Is the real story of our time about the number of credentialed sociopaths who have gone undetected? This is terrifying.”
They are not sociopaths – they are PC true believers, fundamentalist fanatics in god-less neo-religion with all the ferver of new converts. They are also elites, or perhaps worse, elite wannabees. And the wannabees’ ways of becoming elite are 1) go to college, and 2) virtue signal your own true beliefs. PC-parrots.
Colleges have become non-truth, untruth, and anti-truth indoctrination centers. Most of the college indoctrinated, not educated, are certain that the conclusion of all the Orange Man Bad lies is that: Trump is bad.
They WANT to believe this conclusion, and have been educated so that they can rationalize “reasons” to justify their beliefs.
The really terrifying thing is (3) Financial — many people’s jobs depend on the college indoctrinated managers’ opinions of them. So if they are not PC, they stay in the closet.
The USA, and Western Civilization, needs to stop supporting with tax breaks the college indoctrination crap. The colleges have been secretly discriminating against hiring Republicans — such colleges don’t deserve tax-exempt status, nor Federal Loans.
Is the real story of our time about the number of credentialed sociopaths who have gone undetected?
Oblio: That’s a tough one, a variety of the “fool vs knave” question. Though it is clear we have a large number of credentialed elites who are unprinicipled yes-persons, I don’t know I would put them in the sociopath category.
Sociopaths by definition are extreme individuals intent on dominating others with charm and/or threats and without remorse. They are impulsive risk-takers which tends to be self-limiting in the long-run — not a good strategy for climbing the greasy poles of government or academia. Here’s the DSM-5 run-down on sociopathy:
* Being very charming or witty in order to manipulate someone or get what they want.
* Exudes a sense of superiority or arrogance.
* Impulsive and prone to taking risks or engaging in dangerous behavior with little regard to how it may affect others.
* Lack of empathy or feelings towards others or a situation.
* May display hostile, aggressive behavior, or become violent.
* Being dishonest or lying to people.
* No regard or care for what is right or wrong.
* Being irresponsible.
* Inability to maintain healthy relationships.
* Lack of regard for rules or societal norms.
Obama and Trump check a number of these bullet-points. However, they have both raised decent families, as far as I can tell, so I take them off the sociopath list.
The only credentialed sociopath who comes to my mind is Timothy Leary. I have a sentimental hippie fondness for him and grant that he was not violent; however, he hits most of that list plus his family suffered terribly. His first wife and daughter committed suicide, while his son did marginally better. He showed little remorse until he was near death.
https://babylonbee.com/news/resistance-movement-vows-to-do-anything-to-stop-trump-short-of-treating-other-half-of-country-with-respect
Thanks, huxley, for the DSM-5 definitions, and let me be clear that I am not suggesting a clinical diagnosis, nor am I qualified to offer one.
The list is indicative of behaviors that are extremely common. You might have added at least one if not two Clintons to your list.
But consider how much you are relying on the self-destructive nature of extreme behavior for the diagnosis. It may be that such behavior is generally self destructive or limiting, but not always. Could it be that there are institutions and communities in which the average behavior is already so extreme that sociopaths don’t really stand out as all that different? Especially if the lack of impulse control and lying exhibits itself in behavior of which the community approves? For example, sexual promiscuity or bullying conservatives. Movie producers and law school professors come to mind. Lack of conscience might prove in those cases to be a career asset.