Lysenko Rises from the Grave. The Mueller Report and the Endgame of Washington Politics
The Mueller report has come out and it’s exactly as we expected it to be, we meaning anyone who bothered to look past partisan rhetoric and consider evidence.
We’re in the endgame where people who admit they don’t read political theory or philosophy are certainly quick to start a harangue about how sure they still are about collusion and the pee-tapes and so forth. On the other hand, when these same assured people are confronted with evidence to the contrary, the are quick to state that there is no such thing as facts and truth. What they mean is not some rarified Baudrillardian perspective about a mediated reality or an advanced epistemological position on justified true belief. Rather, they mean, anything not fitting their current dogma and news source is invalidated, fallacious, and through and through unsound. Why? It just is. This endgame strategy is going to continue for a long time.
Unpacking this a little more, these people do not simply mean to point out a disagreement, nor simply state that alternative conclusions are wrong. They mean that the position that the entirety of any view in opposition to their own is illegitimate both in method and in conclusion. As a result, any data produced that doesn’t fit their narrative is therefore unreliable knowledge. Thus we see the headline today in The Washington Post, “Republicans cheer, Democrats challenge Mueller’s findings.” The implication in this headline is, Republicans, like stupid children, rely on their emotional outburst (they can’t after all have anything grounded in fact or reality) while Democrats find reason to challenge on logical, factual grounds. They are, after all, the adults here. Any nitwit can see through this like they can see a flat tire.
Some crackpot goes around today and spouts, “Oh I don’t know about all this earth circling the sun stuff, in fact I see the sun go up and down, so your science must be illegitimate.” Some nutjob goes around yelling, there’s no pee-tape evidence but I’m sure there it happened. Like a vampire that villagers forgot to stake, Trofim Lysenko rises from his coffin and prowls in triplicate: He haunts the halls of both congress and mainstream media, and he lurks in the brain of partisan inside-dopester dopes. (Personally. I think Trofim Lysenko looks a bit like Bela Lugosi in Dracula, 1931).
Trofim Lysenko rejected Mendel’s genetic studies and working with the Soviet Union attempted to eliminate scientists who would not renounce genetics. It is claimed that as a result of Lysenko’s “scientific theories” of grain growing that millions of people in both the Soviet Union and in China experienced exacerbated famines. Does this model seem familiar when we look at current political coverage on certain media and when we look at social media censorship? The Lysenkoian paradigm of denouncing as unreliable all that deviates from certain dogma is brimming with energy.
“Every nation gets the government it deserves.” Joseph de Maistre
Moving to endgame Washington, which is all about politics and the media (I’m not sure we can separate them anymore), we get to the famous quote by Joseph de Maistre. “Every nation gets the government it deserves.” (2) We got here by our own accord. We assist in propagation through the media we consume.
Every knucklehead knows that in the 2016 election Bernie was on top. He led polls he had momentum, he could have won. Then.
Then the DNC did whatever it did, look it up. Then people who supported Bernie choked out “At the last minute I wouldn’t have been able to vote for Bernie.” They flipped, one big bunch of chicken-shippers. People said, “How are we going to pay for Bernie’s plans?” not understanding the enormity of government spending or that the question itself was rhetoric designed to support the status quo. They suddenly had group-think amnesia. They forgot they wanted their kids to go to college without bankrupting their futures. They forgot they wanted to see doctors without having their claim denied. They attacked Bernie’s ideas as Socialism, which they couldn’t even define. They ignored the fact that most of the younger people, millennials at least, wanted then and still want free college and free health care in the US, (2) in alignment with many other countries where it works just fine.
Then the same people got mad when Trump won. They got the government they deserve. They next believed a number of collusion and pee stories, and they supported media corporations that had an anti-Trump agenda, anything to support their narrative. As a result they got the media they deserve, data collection, censorship, baseless crap and all. An adult would have realized their role in all of this and stopped whining. But no, they’re all like a kid who can’t decide what dessert to order at a restaurant, who then gets mad and refuses to order anything, and who later whines they didn’t get dessert.
What’s the endgame look like? More of the same, of course. So it’s no surprise to see various politicians and media corporations whining that the both the method and findings of the Mueller report must somehow be flawed. Shhh, I hear Lysenko stalking.sume
References:
(1) The Washington Post, March 25, 2019
(2) de Maistre, J. (1860). Correspondance Diplomatique, tome 2. Paris:Michel Lévy frères libraires éditeurs, p.196.
(3) The Harris Pole, Feb. 21–25
