Getting to stasis: Why so freaking hard?

CONTEXT

Stasis in rhetoric is a systematic method for analyzing arguments and identifying the key point of disagreement in any debate or controversy. The term derives from the Greek word meaning "standstill" or "conflict," referring to the point where an argument must be resolved for discussion to either reach a resolution of disagreement or a point of understanding why disagreement remains. Points of disagreement that cannot be resolved often, probably usually, are grounded in conflicting definitions of concepts. Trying to reach stasis is valuable for political disagreements because it is a way to begin to talk more calmly, more rationally, about any dispute, by uncovering the ways people talk past each another. That helps people actually address the real issues.

This post illuminates the stasis issue using the Abe Lincoln debates with Stephen Douglas. FWIW, Lincoln won the debate but lost the election.

In the 1990s, political rhetoric from the right sounded more and more like nonsense. By November 1998, that prompted my serious dive into politics. It was a quest to understand why I often could not understand what those people were saying. Well now I know. They speak or appeal to things like intuitions, emotions, unconscious cognitive biases, and social loyalties to tribe or ideology. Back then I didn't speak primarily to those things. Still don't.

Speaking different political languages makes getting to stasis hard. So does the often present plague of You can't handle the truth! I call it moral cowardice. 

An example

A few other folks have the same issue. Here's an example from the ProfsBlawg, where lawyers commentate and whatnot. Lindsey Halligan is the utterly inexperienced and grossly unqualified MAGA lawyer that Trump "dubiously appointed" to abuse federal law in pursuit of his alleged enemies such as former FBI Director James Comey, New York Attorney General Letitia James, and Adam Schiff. 

Beyond conclusions

Anna Bowers has an unbelievable Lawfare piece about her text exchanges with dubiously appointed EDVa US Attorney Lindsey Halligan. Halligan initiated contact with Bowers out of the blue to complain about Halligan retweeting a NYT story on the Letitia James indictment and then to retroactively take the exchange off the record.

The exchange captures what I hate about exchanges between reporters and public officials, especially attorneys–it never gets beyond conclusions, whining, and insults. Halligan repeatedly tells Bowers her reporting is inaccurate but never (despite Bower’s repeated requests) explains why. When Halligan requests details–more than conclusions–Halligan insults her and her reporting with more unsupported conclusions (you’re biased, you’ll be completely discredited, you don’t report fairly). Bowers pushed back and demanded more detail rather than letting the conclusions stand; that pushed Halligan to more whining and insults, before making a demand that no reporter would grant and that no competent public official would make.

Halligan’s conclusory responses–conclude, repeat talking points, insult–resemble what we hear from Trump and other government people every day. Bowers’s pushback distinguishes this from every news conference and talk-show interview, exposing the vacuousness of the conversation.

Qs: See why it's hard to get to stasis? See why I call the difficulty of facing reality as a matter of moral cowardice? See why MAGA rhetoric doesn't make sense most of the time?

MAGA's public health insanity: Innocents will be killed

MAGA's reality and reason-detached world is a strange thing to behold. Watching its nuttery and stupidity grow from fringe to mainstream shows the human condition and how the mind can operate when poisoned by demagogic pseudoscience. 

An AP article, Anti-science bills hit statehouses, stripping away public health protections built over a century, makes clear MAGA's anti-science public health insanity. In Minnesota, Republican state legislators introduced a proposed bill to ban mRNA vaccines as bioweapons. Through November 2022, after two years of vaccination, COVID-19 mRNA vaccines prevented ~3.2 million deaths and more than 18.5 million hospitalizations in the US. Vaccinations saved about $1.1 trillion in medical costs. The mRNA vaccines are very safe. The only bioweapons involved here are MAGA Republicans. Democrats are not part of MAGA's anti-science lunacy.

MAGA anti-science freaks in Arkansas want to make harm from vaccines illegal. 

 

Instead of making it illegal to refuse to get vaccinated and causing harm or deaths to others, MAGA gets ass-backwards what makes scientific sense. They want the opposite. These MAGA freaks are both malicious and insane.

In Oklahoma, MAGA freaks want to legalize selling raw Donkey Milk. That is going to kill some people too.

The AP article quotes an expert stating the obvious, MAGA's anti-science stupidity is going to kill people:

“The march of conspiracy thinking from the margins to the mainstream now guiding public policy should be a wake-up call for all Americans,” said Devin Burghart, president and executive director of the Institute for Research and Education on Human Rights, who has tracked the anti-vaccine movement for decades. “People are literally going to die from it as a result.”

The rule of law is dead

This 1:14 video of a CBS News 60 Minutes broadcast shows law professor Ryan Goodman (NYU) discussing how MAGA's Department of Justice lawyers do lawsuits. Sometimes they simply fabricate evidence. The line between the rule of law standing as a pro-democracy principle has fallen to MAGA's morally rotted authoritarianism and kleptocracy. That does not mean the law doesn't apply more or less as usual to most average people. For us as individuals, the law is still basically intact. But for some people, groups and entities or corporations, MAGA elites now decide what the law is and isn't. That is the epitome of a dictatorship or authoritarian regime.

Goodman found 35 lawsuits where MAGA lawyers submitted faked evidence. They flat-out lied to the court. 

So, when it is inconvenient for MAGA to vindicate the rule of law for some criminal, traitor, pervert or killer, federal law gets conveniently ignored. When an opponent or alleged enemy of Trump is targeted, federal law is used or abused to nail them.

It is frightening and discouraging that there appears to be no serious repercussions for sleazy Trump lawyers lying to judges. Apparently the lying is whitewashed by Trump lawyers denying they fabricated evidence, and being the end of it, or by people letting them off the hook as "incompetent". Either way, the rule of law bites the dust. 

Just Security published Goodman's research report at this link.

Pedo meme