If The Right Is Right About Spygate, It's Game, Set, Match,...Uh...Tournament Or Whatever

If the right has been right all along about this, too...well...I don't even know what to say...it'd be game, set, match...uh...what's bigger than a match? Tournament?

   For two years the visible, vocal left has been saying that Trump was basically a Russian asset, and there was just no plausible alternative. They were wrong. The right said they were wrong, and that the real story was Spygate. Progressives and the MSM barely even dignified those accusations with responses. When they did, it was to dismiss them. 

   I initially said: I'm staying out of this one and just waiting or Mueller. But about halfway through, progressive/MSM wackiness made me start thinking about it against my will. The Manchurian Candidate tale just wasn't plausible; about a year ago it started to seem utterly cracked to me. My tentative view became: maybe there was some stupidity-or-ignorance-based incidental contact by the Trump campaign...but the collusion tale seemed unlikely--vastly unlikely.

   I didn't predesignate my view about Spygate. But it doesn't matter, because: I didn't think it was plausible. Like progressives, I dismissed it almost as soon as I started thinking about it.  

   The left should already be engaged in soul-searching. In general--though, of course, this doesn't hold for every progressive--the left is locked into a particularly powerful instance of groupthink. It has accepted a tangled web of falsehoods, and it accepts that tangle with such ardor that, even when individual strands or whole sub-tangles are shown to be false, it barely has any effect on them. They just keep right on groupthinking. 

   The Mueller report should have been (yet another) wake-up call. Not that such tribal organizations normally act this way, but: they should have thought, basically: Damn...we were so passionately anti-Trump that we became certain about something about which we should never have been certain--in fact, about which we should have recognized as unlikely. We are in dire epistemic straights. Some hard-core reflection and soul-searching is long past due.

   Yeah, so that didn't happen.

   It still should. Said soul-searching shouldn't depend on being even more ostentatiously wrong. But should progressives turn out to have been not merely wrong, but super-duper, 180 degrees, abso-f*cking-lutely wrong...that is, should conservatives turn out to have been right even about Spygate...well...that would be huge. Some kind of cognitive-political-attitudinal reset on the left already seems way past obligatory. If they refuse to take Spygate seriously...and especially if they turn out to be wrong...how...what...why...I DON'T EVEN KNOW HOW TO END THIS SENTENCE. You can't go on being ostentatiously wrong forever without either doing something about it or relinquishing any claim to rationality.

   But, more importantly: what about me? 

    I was afflicted by TDS before, during, and for awhile after the '16 election. I got over it. My cognitive/political pendulum has probably swung too far in the other direction; I'm currently probably number to Trump's shenanigans than I ought to be. But at least my TDS is a thing of the past--or so I'd say. However, like progressives, I didn't take Spygate seriously enough. Doesn't what I write above indicate that I'm still at least to some degree in the same boat as progressives? I don' think so. The Russiagate accusations just eclipsed the Spygate accusations. Once the former evaporated, and Spygate took center stage, I became willing to take it seriously. The left has just automatically clicked into dismissal mode. The same blindness and set of commitments that made them (or their opinionmeisters) overly-convinced of Russiagate led them to automatically dismiss Spygate. I don't think I'm like those other guys... But I'll admit: there is a part of me that still almost automatically dismisses this kind of thing from the right. I am inclined, at some level, to think of them as nutty and obsessed with conspiracy theories. Bad on me; I need to think about that.

   Anyway. 

   The outlines of a terrible possibility have begun to sketch a picture in the back of my mind. Specifically: my whole adult life I've been convinced, at some level, that the moderate left is just right and conservatism is just wrong. (I've always recognized that the extremist left was insane and dangerous.) I've always thought of conservatism as hidebound and locked into traditional and conventional--hence irrational--thinking. I've always thought that the moderate left had seen through the irrationality of tradition. And that, consequently, it was rational and right in a fairly deep way, even if wrong about this or that particular. My view of the moderate left depended, I think, on taking the civil rights movement and the sexual revolution as paradigms. The right was an expression of mindless tradition; the moderate left represented seeing past such things--shedding the irrational bonds of tradition. Including: the cognitive/epistemic ones. Conservatism is blinded by theories--traditional and religious ones. The left shed those theories. It saw and sees things more like they really are.

   Now I'm starting to think that maybe...just maybe...for all its errors about particulars, conservatism actually represents and expresses something like level-headed common sense. My old view was approximately the opposite of right. In the main, it's the left that has theories. With some notable and important exceptions, it's conservatives who take things pretty much at face value. Now, at least, it's the left that has theories..."the narrative" as some on the right call it. And they see everything--or lots of things, anyway--through the spectacles of those theories. If they manage to glimpse facts despite the spectacles, and the facts and the spectacles come into conflict, the spectacles win. "White privilege," "toxic masculinity," "rape culture," transgender ideology...and on and on and on. One might add TDS, formulated as a theory rather than a disorder. 

   Just one example: I know people who think that there are fewer men in the math department because of sexism--and that that's the only possible explanation. And to question that explanation--or the belief that it's the only possible explanation--is itself sexism. Now, we have an enormous amount of evidence for he conclusion that men tend to be better at math than women. And an enormous amount of evidence that they tend to like it more. And an enormous amount of evidence that men have a flatter intelligence curve than women--and so for the conclusion that there are more extremely intelligent men than extremely intelligent women. And we know that people in math departments (especially at good and great schools) are a whole lot f*cking smarter and better at math than the average person. There is virtually no chance that these facts play no role in the demographics of math departments. And yet academic diversocrats and their allied faculty refuse to even consider any explanation other than sexism. In fact, it may not even be right to say that they refuse; rather, it's more like: it does not or perhaps cannot enter their minds. We have just about all the evidence you could want. We're certainly more sure that men tend to be better at math than we about a global warming apocalypse. And yet: the president of Harvard basically got shit-canned for even suggesting it was so.

   That's all I've got.