"Super Awesome Sylvia Was A Role Model For Girls In Science. Then He Realized That He Is A Boy"
That's title that was originally at the Post...but they seem to have adopted the CNN approach: put a more provocative headline on the front page for people to click on...then tone it down on the story.
It's not so much that the Post prints fiction as fact without batting an eye...it's that it does it resolutely. The story is written as if Todd had actually transformed from a girl to a boy, with no hint of acknowledgement that this is an elaborate kabuki grounded in a certain cultural/political ideology. It's as if the Post were regularly writing, with a straight face, stories about Jesus actually talking to people, saving their souls, performing miracles, and so on. The same thing happens in the NYT and the rest of the left-leaning major media, of course. The options here are (a) write what's really happening, (b) write in a neutral mode, from slightly above or to the side, trying not to take a side (as between fact and fiction...but whatever...), or (c) enthusiastically dive into the politically correct kabuki and write as if it were true. The Post (along with the Times et al.) has chosen the latter option.
This is the creepiest aspect of political correctness--the weird doxastic superposition of states that PCs seem to exist in--what Orwell called doublethink. Or, rather (as with any cultists): it's somewhat difficult to figure out what's really going on in their heads. Do they actually believe the unbelievable? Are they just mouthing the words? Or is it doublethink? Are they, in some sense, both believing and not believing? Or perhaps they're in a kind of unresolved doxastic state that is neither exactly belief nor exactly not?
The care and precision with which such stories tread close to the facts while scrupulously avoiding them seems to me to be a kind of evidence of consciousness of epistemic guilt. Someone who was merely confused couldn't be so precise about skirting the truth while speaking falsehood.
Read more »
It's not so much that the Post prints fiction as fact without batting an eye...it's that it does it resolutely. The story is written as if Todd had actually transformed from a girl to a boy, with no hint of acknowledgement that this is an elaborate kabuki grounded in a certain cultural/political ideology. It's as if the Post were regularly writing, with a straight face, stories about Jesus actually talking to people, saving their souls, performing miracles, and so on. The same thing happens in the NYT and the rest of the left-leaning major media, of course. The options here are (a) write what's really happening, (b) write in a neutral mode, from slightly above or to the side, trying not to take a side (as between fact and fiction...but whatever...), or (c) enthusiastically dive into the politically correct kabuki and write as if it were true. The Post (along with the Times et al.) has chosen the latter option.
This is the creepiest aspect of political correctness--the weird doxastic superposition of states that PCs seem to exist in--what Orwell called doublethink. Or, rather (as with any cultists): it's somewhat difficult to figure out what's really going on in their heads. Do they actually believe the unbelievable? Are they just mouthing the words? Or is it doublethink? Are they, in some sense, both believing and not believing? Or perhaps they're in a kind of unresolved doxastic state that is neither exactly belief nor exactly not?
The care and precision with which such stories tread close to the facts while scrupulously avoiding them seems to me to be a kind of evidence of consciousness of epistemic guilt. Someone who was merely confused couldn't be so precise about skirting the truth while speaking falsehood.
Read more »
posted by Winston Smith at
8:16 AM
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