Blogs, Herds and Terrorists
Tony Pierce complains about how Instapundit isn’t paying attention to the Riggs Bank money laundering scandal which I mentioned before.
I don’t read Instapundit on a regular basis, so I checked to see exactly what he’s not talking about today. I discoved that he’s given Tony some much-needed attention by mentioning an article in the New York Times that quoted Tony, but he still didn’t mention Riggs Bank or insert a hyperlink to Tony’s site.
The thing that struck me about about Tony’s post was just how good-looking these two terrorists are. Forget for a moment that they’re two of the guys who pulled off 9/11 and focus on their looks.
How can two men with such angelic faces be so angry and evil? Look at those eyes. They could have had all the sex, love and success that they wanted in life, in a free country.
So why would they sacrifice their lives by flying planes into skyscrapers and killing 3,000 people? What was it about their minds that made them choose death by terrorist act as a higher value than a good life? Until we understand that, we cannot get to the root of the problem.
The problem is mysticism and the inevitable loss of freedom that results from it. Mysticism makes people slaves to irrationality.
The Instapundit and Andrew Sullivan each get tens of thousands of hits per day. They have tapped into some very popular ideas and frustrations. Muslim fundamentalism does the same thing.
Just because ideas are popular doesn’t mean they have any basis in fact. It is the facts, not the popularity of an idea or viewpoint that sets us free from the mystical.
So if follows that bloggers who claim a contempt for terrorism and who are adamant in their support for a war against terrorism, should also be at war with irrationality and mysticism. They should be focused on the facts, all of them, as an antidote to mysticism.
Tony says:
the reason mr. reynolds gets so many hits a day is because he is generally believed to be a reliable news filter. as a law professor he apparently has enough free time in his day to read scores of newspapers and websites and as a free service to the web he links to many of those current event stories and news blurbs and provides insightful and reasonable commentary in short, readable chunks.
however when he refuses to do things like discuss the testimony that donald rumsfeld gave earlier this month, seriously discuss the accusations that pulitzer winning investigative reporter seymour hersh levvied against the defense secretary saying that the cia said that rumsfeld expanded a highly secretive operation originally intended to find Al Qaeda to include the aggressive and sexual interrogation of prisoners in Iraq, or even mention Riggs Bank and its relationship to President Bush’s uncle Jonathan (an executive of Riggs Investment), the illusion of impartiality is diminished.
To reinforce popularly held delusions to get traffic is to promote mysticism. But hey, somebody’s got to do it.
If they weren’t going to Instapundit or Andrew Sullivan they’d go someplace else to get their fix. I don’t think that Glenn Reynolds or Andrew Sullivan are influencing their readers as much as acting as a meeting place for people who already have similar values. And as all businesspeople know, there are some things you can’t say if you want to keep your customers.
I wish I could say that people are out there looking for the truth. Some are, but most don’t care. Most are just looking for agreement. Agreement makes us feel like we know the truth, regardless of independent facts. It’s a lazy man’s “knowledge.” I agree, you agree, it must be true. Right?
Wrong.
Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi, the two terrorists pictured above, thought they knew the truth. And a lot of people agree with them. That doesn’t make their beliefs true.
Comparing our beliefs to existents is the only objective measure of the truth. So readers shouldn’t look to my blog or anybody else’s blog for the truth, they should look to the facts. I can only do my small part to point out the evidence that I see, putting special emphasis on the facts I think they’ve overlooked.
That’s what Tony does when he talks about Instapundit.
And I love the disclaimer at the top of Tony Pierce’s blog: “nothing in here is true.”
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