There is an old story of three blind-men who encountered an elephant. One blind-man was touching the elephant's ear, another had his arms wrapped around the elephant's leg and the third was holding the writhing trunk. The three blind-men argued heatedly about the nature of this thing called "an elephant". One insisted an elephant was a kind of fan. The second declared an elephant was a species of tree while the third cursed the others and insisted an elephant was an enormous snake.
Consider an event of this magnitude unfolding in real-time
Even the people tasked with "managing it" become overwhelmed. Data flows in faster than band-width can support. Reports get delayed, side-tracked, routed to the wrong person. NOBODY has a global perspective of what is happening in real-time. NOBODY!
This problem is grossly exacerbated because the people tasked with protecting Trump were grossly under-resourced and had to "borrow" help. What happens when a State Cop starts injecting disturbing (but unverified) observations about a threat? Is he still delayed, side-tracked and routed to the wrong person?
Probably. Absolutely!
After-the-fact, hundreds more witnesses come out of the woodwork with information. Most are well-meaning. Many have useful information. But some are seeking their 15 seconds of fame. Others are dumping "noise" into the hopper.
The 72 hours allows much of the noise to damp-down. It gives people time to "test" the data against various hypothesis.
Time washes away at the story. Insignificant detail is washed away like a freshet washes mud from between gold nuggets. Anomalies start to pop out of the mud and gather attention.
Bending the map
One of the problems of reacting too quickly is called "bending the map".
Picture in your head a naive, young-person who was raised in a middle-class bubble out in outer-suburbia. She comfortably graduated in the top-half of her high-school class, went to college and hangs out with friends who are virtual clones of herself. They are all very, very, nice, well-adjusted people.
The idea that somebody could be inherently evil is incomprehensible to her and to her buddies. The fact that somebody could get a rush of JOY from hurting another human being does-not-compute. They come up with a hundred different ways of explaining "evil" that bends the map back to what they know, what they have experienced personally and what they are comfortable with. That map, unfortunately, is a very small island of what humans are capable of doing.
Most commentary in the first 72 hours is an ink-blot test that tells us far more about the writer than about the event. For want of hard-facts, they fabricate intricate explanations of spun-sugar and wishes to 'splain what happened. They don't report reality. It is not available. They report their "map".
I have absolutely no doubt that in some corner of the internet somebody figured out how "Da Joos" are responsible for the assassination attempt on Trump. Every ink-blot leads to "Da Joos" for them.
Baseless speculation and fearless prediction (anomalies)
We are going to have to come to grips with mental illness and with the place in society for the bottom 10% of our population in reasoning ability. Historically, media used to understand that some of their viewers were not playing with a full deck. The media reported responsibly. Now they seem to jockey for shock and outrage and dopamine rushes, responsibility-be-damned. The downside of jockeying for shock...well, it showed up.
We saved a ton of money "main-streaming" the mentally ill, the emotionally unstable, the intellectually insufficient. It isn't working.
We don't have enough workers to keep mission-critical tasks like road-repair going, not sure where we are going to find staff for institutionalizing the people who used to be called morons and retarded.
Maybe the shooter was not "Special Ed". Maybe he was. For now, he is a total mystery. He is one of the main "anomalies". But if he was "Special Ed", then he was a mindless tool (like a hammer) and the morally culpable parties are the ones who spun-him-up and pointed him toward the Trump Rally.
We don't save money mainstreaming the mentally ill - we just hide the costs elsewhere.
ReplyDeleteIt's the same as with gambling - the benefits are easily quantified, but the costs are hidden so there is an apparent net benefit.
On Sunday I heard someone blaming the Jews... I was not surprised given the person who said it.
Jonathan
Law enforcement officers in charge of areas where mass casualty shooting is taking place should have some accomodations made. People have noticed that officers at the scene have stopped charging in at the earliest opportunity to stop the shooter. Why that happens (I think) is that the officer will now be judged on every single round shot at the perpetrator. The ones that stop the shooting ... and the rounds that miss and hit an innocent bystander / hostage.
ReplyDeleteEnter the lawyers who will now dissect and now prosecute the officer. We see that now, many armed citizens who now are legally put under a microscope for 'justice'. How many officers now hesitate knowing that this WILL occur and mistakes - misses will now be prosecutable.
Maybe we should consider that MASS CASUALTY events are different from residential and traffic stops. When a mass shooter begins randomly killing innocents, it is imperative that stop as fast as possible. And giving the people who engage mass shooters should have accommodations given to them because of that. Fear of that will likely slow the response, waiting for 'others' to do the job.
As we just saw, innocent blood will be spilled. The fastest way to stop that is the imperative.
An interesting perspective about the mainstream media and their inertia and lack of proactive investigation and Twitter/X
ReplyDeletehttps://thebfd.co.nz/2024/07/17/during-the-crisis-free-speech-worked-brilliantly/
Phil B
That is a great essay!
DeleteHickok45 posted yesterday that Youtube is vigorously applying anti-gun rules against him. The policies were enacted June 22 and are being applied retroactively.
He has some videos posted on Rumble. https://rumble.com/search/all?q=hickok45
Business executives forget that they require the support of their customers if they want to be successful. There is nothing unique about youtube or facebook (except content and consumer habits) that cannot be back-engineered in a matter of weeks.
Aesop waited the 72 hours and his essay is on point and accurate
ReplyDeletehttps://raconteurreport.blogspot.com/2024/07/paging-elephant-in-room.html
He references Matt Bracken, also;
https://gab.com/Matt_Bracken/posts/112796109449095484
Kind of difficult for anyone to comment accurately on such an event when it's a virtual certainty that the people tasked with "investigating" it are actually working hard to facilitate a cover up. The FBI is corrupt. Rotten to the core and have been actively complicit with the Dems efforts to destroy Trump ever since he announced his candidacy in 2015. Allowing them anywhere near this crime scene is criminal.
ReplyDelete