False Balance

There are two types of false balance: one is to present skewed versions of two opposing viewpoints to make it appear as if one side is clearly better while pretending to be unbiased (the steelman/strawman combination that I have mentioned before), and the other is to present two fundamentally incompatible positions as somehow being “two sides to the same story,” and equally worthy of consideration, when one or even both are clearly wrong. It’s similar to a false equivalence in principle, but considerably more convoluted in practise.

False balance is never an honest mistake. What I have noticed is that individuals who are merely biased will present one-sided accounts of whatever it is they are opining on; charlatans, however, will use every dirty trick in the book to make themselves appear unbiased. Andrew Zehner, the Congenial Iconoclast, is guilty of one form of false balance, and a fraud he admires, William Astore, is guilty of another. I will make examples of those two in this article as I show you how what false balance looks like.

As a scientific realist, I am a firm believer in the idea that there are right answers and wrong ones. I am also quite confident that scientific realism is the correct way of looking at the world, and dialectical materialism (or social constructionism, whatever you want to call it) is total nonsense. I do not believe in compromise, because compromise is nothing more than capitulation to the dialectics. Why is that? Simple: compromise is a politician’s trick, and synthesis is a dialectic’s trick. The dialectic creates a movement in one direction with the ultimate goal of inciting a reactionary movement in the opposite direction. If one movement cannot overtake the other, the dialectic will attempt to synthesise the two movements, creating a third position, which they also benefit from. We are seeing it right now, and I will provide examples of that as this gets going.

Did you read both articles linked in the preceding paragraph? Smashing, now let me ask you a question: do you believe that both creationism and evolution should be taught in public schools? If you answered “we shouldn’t have public schools at all,” then based, but you’re missing the point of my question. On the other hand, if you answered “yes,” then you’re either an idiot or a dialectic. One position is objectively correct, the other is objectively incorrect, and we should not give equal consideration to them for that reason. Yes, it is true, some people believe that 2 + 2 = 5, but do we teach that? No, of course not, nor do we teach that 2 + 2 = 4 1/2 (compromise), nor that 2 + 2 = 9 (synthesis)… well, maybe we do now, but that’s only because we live in clown world.

Anyway, why do I bring this up? Simple, I am tired of the “let’s come together” rhetoric, because it has considerably more dire consequences than the politically correct kumbaya that utopians have this bad habit of imagining. Some cultures are fundamentally incompatible, despite everyone agreeing on certain things. Noncery, forever wars, and government corruption are all universally reviled, save by a handful of psychotic elites. I’m not sure if it was George Orwell or Thomas Sowell who originally said it, but there are some ideas so stupid that only an intellectual would ever entertain them. However, that’s where the common ground ends. Just as freedom of religion necessarily includes freedom from religion (which doesn’t mean freedom from exposure, rather it means people should be free to choose any religion or none at all), freedom of association necessarily includes the freedom to disassociate from anyone you want. IIRAW

What brought this on was the latest article (as of this writing, not necessarily as of its publication) on Bracing Views, live version here, archived version here. William Astore doesn’t understand what “right” and “left” mean in terms of politics, because his only source of information is legacy media propaganda (and the Jimmy Dore show, which he has learned nothing from and watches only for confirmation bias). In one article, Astore calls any system he doesn’t like “right-wing,” whether it be the Democratic party or the Israeli government, because left is good, right is bad, yet in the next, he’ll admit that neither “left” nor “right” means anything. Look, we all know he has me effectively blocked, and thus won’t read anything I write in response to him, not since I pointed out that one of his idols was an even bigger fraud than him, but allow me to spell it out anyway: leftists are those who believe that the government should concern itself with the economy, rightists are those who believe that the government should concern itself with culture, authoritarians are those who believe that the government should concern itself with both, libertarians are those who believe that the government should concern itself with neither, and centrists are the idiots who believe that the other four can somehow compromise. To a leftist, authoritarianism, centrism, and libertarianism all appear to be right-wing, whereas to a rightist, those three appear to be left-wing. Centrists and authoritarians correctly identify libertarians as neither leftist nor rightist, but authoritarians and libertarians are bitter enemies (even more so than leftists and rightists, I might add), and everyone sees centrists as useful idiots (only authoritarians love them for that reason). Based on the article I’m responding to, you might think that Astore is centre-left, but based on previous articles, I think he is firmly in the far-left corner, and that’s being unnecessarily charitable, given his authoritarian tendencies. If anyone reading this could please get him to take a goddamn political compass test (preferably this one), I’d love to know what his results are. Granted, political compass tests are meaningful only if the person taking them is honest, and since Astore is all over the place, I don’t think he’s even honest with himself.

I have previously mentioned that Bill Astore is a victim of propaganda… not a recovering victim, as he claims, but a current victim. He knows the establishment is lying, but he still swallows the underlying narratives anyway (and an awful lot of the surface narratives as well), those being the narratives of division, more specifically, class warfare, and of course, demoralisation. He espouses a position which ultimately benefits the very power structure that he endlessly pisses and moans about; in other words, he’s a useful idiot who has set himself up for perpetual disappointment. I’d put him out of his misery myself (in a game of chess or Minecraft, just for the benefit of my personal FBI agent, Interpol officer, and SBU operative), but I lost his address. No, I will not apologise for my fucked-up sense of humour, get used to it. Anyway, I say this in response to a different article, referenced in the first that I linked to, which contains this absolute gem:

| What’s the solution to this “culture war” between the 1619ers and the 1776ers? I’m a historian, and I’ve taught U.S. history. The solution is easy. You teach both. America is a land of contradictions.

WRONG! The solution is that you teach neither, because they are both bunk (and you wonder why I say that Astore is a lousy historian). Granted, the 1776 Report is less bunk, and makes a lot more sense if you view it as a parody of the 1619 Project. The 1619 Project, however, is a complete lie, it is distorical nonsense and belongs in the bin, end of discussion. If you want that drivel taught, then you open the floodgates to equally nonsensical crap from the religious fundamentalists, as if they aren’t already trying to sneak their dogma into school curricula.

| To ignore slavery while singing the praises of the founders would be as flawed and one-sided as focusing entirely on slavery without ever mentioning the proud achievements of those same founders.

Tell me you’ve never read either the 1619 Project or the 1776 Report without actually telling me. FFS, Astore doesn’t even link to either, only to the Wikipedia article about the 1619 Project! I’ve done both, and I can tell you that incorporating both the 1619 Project and the 1776 Report into a history curriculum would be like teaching that the Earth is both flat and egg-shaped, respectively. Let me spell it out for all the braindead midwits in Astore’s audience: both positions are not only wrong, they are fundamentally incompatible with each other. In any case, calling the achievements of the founders “proud” is laughably hypocritical coming from the guy who once wrote this:

| The Founding Fathers–“Women need not apply!”–were, of course, “rugged individualists” and totally for capitalism, for exploitation.

…while hiding behind a sock puppet, no less, because he knows how bad this looks. What a slime-ball. In any case, Astore still shows his true colours here:

| Forget culture war. Let’s make war on those who keep us apart and who refuse to work for those so desperately in need.

Does anyone remember when I said that Bill Astore is the type of person who would wage war on his own people if he ever got into power? Yeah, this is what I was talking about. See, he despises libertarians (he pretends not to, but he’s not fooling anyone), because we tend to prefer the rural life and the ability to disassociate from wider society. He, William Galston, and Andrew Zehner alike view us with the exact same ire that they do the dishonest politicians (but I repeat myself) who make up the nonproductive class. Let me spell it out for you: they see us, those who engage in “rugged individualism,” whatever the fuck that even means, as parasites who enjoy the benefits of society but don’t want to contribute to it, even though this is just as much a misrepresentation of our position as the left and right misrepresent each other. In other words, these feckless cunts are just as guilty of spouting divisive rhetoric as the legacy media propaganda pundits puppets, and they are as much our enemy as the same corrupt government that we all have to deal with. Now then, if I’m misrepresenting their position, they are free to explain how, but I doubt any of them will even try, because they know they can’t fool a former Marxist.

I know both sides of this argument better than the left knows its own alone, and the left is definitely wrong. That is not to say that leftists don’t occasionally have decent takes (even a broken clock is right twice a day), much less that they should not be heard at all. I am a free speech absolutist, and one of the reasons that I am is because bad ideas need to be out there for us to see, analyse, and mock. In a free marketplace of ideas, the best ideas win out. The reason that society is run on bad ideas is overwhelmingly because said free marketplace of ideas doesn’t exist. The Cathedral dictates which ideas are acceptable and which ones aren’t. The Cathedral is the façade of the State, which is why being anti-state is such a taboo. Being pro-welfare is an acceptable position. Being in favour of private charities and mutual aid societies while opposing government welfare is taboo. Pointing out that taxation currently functions as an upward transfer of wealth, rather than an equitable distribution, is acceptable. Pointing out that taxation is theft is taboo… in most countries, anyway. There was actually a scene in a Norwegian comedy called Norsemen that actually illustrated precisely why taxation is theft quite well.

If you enjoy stereotypically blasé Scandinavian humour, you’ll enjoy this show. I certainly did. Anyway, the point of all this is that, when the debate is lost, the ideologues will do anything except change their minds. Rather than accepting that their position is wrong, they will either demand it be put to a vote, or try to downplay it as just a personal preference, saying shit like “we’ll just have to agree to disagree.” Cope and seethe, truth cannot be democratised, neither can the economy, nor can culture. Yes, I am unironically anti-democratic, democracy is the god that failed, and no, that doesn’t make me a monarchist (neither is Hoppe, and anyone who tells you otherwise is either lying or has never read his work). While I have previously made the case that democracy is better than oligarchy and direct democracy is better than representative democracy (up to a point, anyway, the ancom idea of direct democracy is just plain ludicrous), where democracy conflicts with liberty, I will choose liberty every time. Now then, if the socialists and Christian nationalists alike were proposing to establish their own autonomous zones where they were free to practise their systems in peace, and we could associate voluntarily, that would be fine. However, that’s not what they are proposing. What they want is to impose their systems on all of us by force, and as before, if this is a misrepresentation, please tell me now, but based on previous comments, I don’t think it is!

Well, I know that went off the rails, but I can’t just say “one side is wrong,” and then not explain why. Moving on, the other type of false balance I witnessed from the Congenial Iconoclast. While he also addresses the issue of the 1619/1776 debate and also downplays just how dishonest Howard Zinn truly is in one of his blog posts (live version here, archived version here), and may even have been inspired by Astore’s article, I don’t know because none of his blog posts have dates on them, I’m going to address the false balance on another topic: BLM. I hate this subject, but since I’ve already taken care of the false balance in regards to republic/democracy and self-reliance/forced compliance, it’s time to talk about pigs and dindus.

Black Lives Matter is the single most brilliantly-named criminal organisation of all time. The statement “black lives matter” is impossible to disagree with… on its surface. However, contrary to the statement that it is by no means an implication that other lives don’t matter, that is absolutely how it is used, much like how modern feminism claims to be about equality when it is actually a supremist movement. Most decent people agree with what BLM claims to be, but those of us who know better disagree with what it actually is, and many of us saw it for what it really was long before 2020. Andrew Zehner and William Astore both seem to be completely oblivious, even to this day. The unfortunate reality is that BLM doesn’t actually care about black lives, only black deaths. BLM isn’t trying to uplift blacks and inspire them to improve themselves and their communities, rather, keeping blacks impoverished and enslaved to the system guarantees an endless stream of blacks getting killed, and every time another body hits the floor, BLM will use the tragedy as an excuse to Burn, Loot, Murder while their leaders Buy Large Mansions. If you haven’t noticed this pattern by now, then I have a question for you: is there any extra room under the rock where you’ve been living for the past five years?

Well, a last-minute change before publishing this: everything I wrote in the previous paragraph was true when I wrote it, but it would appear that ever since its organisers started getting investigated for financial fraud, BLM is now breaking away from its founders and undergoing major reforms. We’ll see what happens in the next few months.

With that out of the way, let’s check out the false balance in the article (live version here, archived version here). The first big red flag was the section “aren’t most people shot by police guilty of something” followed by the section “isn’t there more to the story,” which is meant to be a counter-argument, but fails miserably. The problem is that the second section mentions only Walter Scott and Breonna Taylor, whereas the first also mentions Michael Brown, Eric Garner, and George Floyd. True balance is not presented here, because it would undermine the narrative that “dey waz gud bois hoo dindu nuffin.” Michael Brown wasn’t shot because he robbed a convenience store, rather, he was shot because he attacked a police officer. George Floyd died of a fentanyl overdose, not from having a knee on his neck. Does this exonerate Derek Chauvin? Absolutely not, Chauvin had a loooooong history of terrible behaviour and he deserves to rot in prison, but that doesn’t change the facts that he didn’t kill George Floyd, and he didn’t receive a fair trial. The only victim mentioned in the article whom I know to have been innocent was Breonna Taylor. Everyone else is either someone whom I know to have been a violent thug, or whose story I simply don’t know enough about, and I don’t trust Wikipedia to honestly inform me.

The second big red flag was this statement:

| It is easy to find “more” in any story. But the truth remains that none of the people on the long and growing list of excessive police violence deserved summary execution.

Almost as if he’s trying to say that hearing both sides is bad. Furthermore, characterising killings carried out by police as “summary execution” is just poisoning the well, and doesn’t help solve the problems with policing. For example, the criticisms:

| Police training and police policies promote excessive use of force. Officers are taught to dominate every situation. This leads to sudden escalation. In an instant, a person who was standing still and speaking calmly can find himself being handcuffed or manhandled, which leads to a “What are you doing to me?” reaction which the police interpret as resisting arrest and justify still more aggressive action. The officers who shoot people aren’t always racist or murderous. Often they are just scared. And that, too is a result of training. Fear is instilled in police officers through deliberate anti-citizen training. They are taught that “blue lives” matter more than others.

…are perfectly legitimate, but the ridiculous levels of bias in the article undermine these points to the point of outright contradicting them. It is for the exact same reason that I want the military reformists expelled from the anti-war movement. Granted, there is no centralised authority for said movement, which is good, so what I seek to do instead is get as many anti-war activists as possible to disassociate from serial liars like William Astore and William S Lind; do not let them write articles for your publications, do not share their work (except for the purposes of criticism), do not invite them to anti-war demonstrations, and do not miss an opportunity to point out that they are part of a pro-war psyop.

Now, I could wrap it up here, but there’s a huge red flag in the article that I cannot simply ignore. It requires some context first:

| Isn’t the destruction of property always wrong? Isn’t it an invalid form of protest? The Boston Tea Party was a criminal act of destruction of property. Americans celebrate it as an heroic act of patriotism. The destruction of the Berlin Wall was also destruction of public property, and Americans see it as a laudable outburst of freedom and human rights. And not just liberals. Conservatives, including Ronald Reagan, were delighted when the Berlin Wall came down and didn’t mind at all when Germans attacked the wall with sledgehammers.

I take no issue with these statements, but what comes next is… well, just read it for yourself:

| Compared to the Boston Tea Party, the vigorous protests of the summer of 2020 were more justified.

No they weren’t. Burning down police stations is one thing, but burning down private property owned by people who had nothing to do with the police officers involved in the deaths of George Floyd and Jacob Blake is COMPLETELY UNjustified. However, statists being collectivist sociopaths, they will make the argument that because these people pay taxes that are used to pay police officers responsible for unjustified killings, therefore the citizens are somehow complicit in those killings. I have brought up this argument before, my good friend Jacob Tothe has seen it as well, and here’s how he rebukes it:

This premise is why it is always essential to point out that taxation is fundamentally extortion, not voluntary payment for desired services. And every subsequent statement is proof of state monopoly as a corrupting influence. But we are raised in the invisible religion of statism and few see it. And this justifies atrocities on a personal and national scale to so many people. (original here)

To argue that because people benefited in some ways from a system to which they never consented, and deliberately overlook the ways they have been harmed by that system, is like arguing slaves benefitted from antebellum chattel slavery. “Look, we fed you, gave you clothes, and provided housing for you as a child. You owe it to the master to contribute back to the plantation.” But it’s different now because the plantation is bigger, has a flag, and lets you vote for a preselected subset of the ruling class. (original here)

Because so many people continue labouring under the delusion that the State has a duty to protect its citizens subjects, they were understandably outraged at the government’s refusal to stop the riots of 2020. They demanded a heavy-handed crackdown against the rioters in order to protect the residents of the affected cities… and that was the point. Unhinged movements such as BLM, Antifa, and Just Stop Oil are psyops whose ultimate purpose is to get the governments of western nations to adopt the Chinese approach when it comes to public demonstrations in general. Are you seeing the pattern of dialectical deception yet? 4th of June 1989, #neverforget

Anyway, perhaps I will return to this particular article on BLM some other time. The remainder of the article shifts to blatant false equivalences and outright lies mixed in with plenty of perfectly valid points, but it’s too much to get into here. Maybe I’ll get JT to take a stab at it. While it may seem productive to have these debates on large social media platforms in order to maximise reach, in order to de-radicalise statists, you really need to navigate through the blogosphere and penetrate the tiniest of echo chambers, because that’s where you find the most radical (and downright dangerous) individuals. As an example, Orthodox Marxists are now suggesting completely disassociating from “the left” and trying to radicalise conservatives into bringing about a communist revolution in the west. Why? Simple: the proletariat is overwhelmingly conservative, and the woketards are overwhelmingly bourgeois, which is something those of us who have been paying attention have always known. Be on the lookout for the rise of a “conservative” movement that is communist in everything but name. It may call itself “Americans elect,” “the people’s party” or “the American workers’ party,” something like that, but don’t be fooled, read their manifesto.

Finally, I want to leave you with this: do me a solid and post this video in the comments section of Bracing Views as many times as you can get away with. Leave whatever comment you like, but just know that I want that twat Bill Astore to hear Jimmy Dore tear his beloved Cornell West apart. Make him realise that he’s a useful idiot, and with any luck, maybe he’ll rid us of his stupidity of his own volition… by deleting his rubbish heap of a website.