CNN Source: Darren Wilson Did Have Swollen Face, but Did Not Have Orbital Fracture

This source conflicts with Fox's (and originally Jim Hoft's).

This source, speaking on background, is no more authoritative than Fox's or Hoft's.

However, it should be noted that there is a conflicting report, and people who claim to have insider information are flatly disagreeing on the point, so as of now it's not a "fact" (either way) that can be relied on.*

I should say that Don Lemon seems to speak variously of a "broken or torn eye socket" and "fractured eye socket" as if these are the same injury, and that by denying one the other is denied.

I never heard anything about a "torn eye socket." I heard fractured eye socket. I'm not sure why he's talking about rebutting a rumor about a "torn eye socket."

Are these different ways to describe the same injury? I don't know. I have to say that to me it sounds like Don Lemon doesn't really know what he's talking about.**

Let me just point something out:

Every time we have one of these stories -- these sort of grabby, dramatic, daily-revelations stories -- there's some pressure from some internet commentators to accept a series of claimed facts, all of which tend to support their conclusion.

And when people resist being pressured into accepting "facts" which are not yet facts, there's a suggestion that they're "not on the team."

For example, someone sockpupptted AllahPundit hear yesterday, calling him something like "AllahPundit, Family Lawyer for the Brown Family," or that kind of thing.

I assume this silly attack was made because AllahPundit was not rushing to embrace, and to declare as proven true, "facts" which are not yet facts at all, but merely claims.

In politics, we can argue about political theory, and we can pressure each other into accepting our preferred theories and doctrines and such, but we cannot take these same approaches and apply them to facts.

If you convince enough people to support your political theory, you will win, politically, on your political theory. It will become governing policy.

On the other hand, if you convince people to accept claims as "facts," this does not actually convert claims into facts. It just convinces people that something is true which is not necessarily true.

Convincing people that false things are facts does not make them facts -- except, perhaps, to the most cynical operator who dismisses any sense that the actual truth should actually sometimes count. (Moral relativism, anyone?)

And if it later should turn out that these claimed "facts" are false, what then?

Do we say, as the left does, "Well the facts don't matter anyway"?

There is no point in trying to pressure people into proclaiming mere claims to be "facts," nor insinuating that people who prefer an empirical to an ideological method of determining the facts are somehow "weak" and perhaps even "subversive."

When things are actually revealed to be facts, it takes relatively little persuasion to convince a fair-minded, non-ideologically-committed person to accept them as facts.

All this nonsense that goes on on the internet, this pressure to accept someone's rumor, claim, or supposition as a "fact," is so thoroughly anti-reasoning I can't even properly express my objections to it.

Opinions are opinions. Guesses at the likelihood of an eventuality are guesses at the likelihood of an eventuality. Gut hunches are gut hunches.

All of these things are properly used in discussing a matter like Ferguson. Gut hunches have their place in every single political discussion (and virtually every other discussion as well).

But what is out-of-bounds is this ridiculous insistence that if we "just get all on board in claiming that non-facts are facts, then we can 'shape the narrative' and get people to believe that non-facts are facts, and then we win!"

Well, you may win, temporarily, unless those non-facts you've insisted to be facts turn out to not be facts.

Then you just look like a bloviating jackass who believes in whatever claim is necessary to support his predetermined, ideologically-divined conclusion.

It is not "ideologically weak" to confess you don't know what you don't know -- except, possibly, to an idiot or a thug.

Again let me be clear: I have no problem with someone saying, for example, "Based on Don Lemon's strange terminology, he doesn't sound like he knows what he's talking about, and for now, I'm going with Fox and Hoft."

That's a perfectly reasonable position to take. (I know it's reasonable, because, at least at the moment, it's my position, and I know that Everything I Think must be Perfectly Reasonable.)

But this sort angry "GET ON OUR SIDE!" lobbying for the facts, this emotional pressure to accept one's emotions as facts (akin to Don Lemon's "I feel, in my heart, that semi-automatics are automatics), as if facts could be lobbied this way or the other, as if facts could be Freeped in an online poll, as if we could elect facts the way we elect politicians in a political campaign, is just stupid.

* Except, of course, that we seem to have further confirmation that Wilson was in fact injured from the encounter, which tends to prove that he was in fact punched in the face, just as he is rumored to have claimed.

** Lemon also says "X-rays" were negative for "a torn or broken eye socket."

But a commenter told me yesterday that my own use of "X-ray" in this context was wrong -- he told me you wouldn't use an X-ray to detect this sort of injury, but instead a CT scanner.

I think maybe because we're actually talking about damage to soft tissue rather than bone?

I don't know if that commenter is right, but a quick search does seem to indicate that we're talking about soft tissue damage and hence an "X-ray" would not be a useful diagnostic tool.

Burying the Lead? Lemon is in such a rush to dispute Fox he sort of forgets that his own source confirms the headline information -- that Wilson was in fact beaten badly before the shooting.

What's Lemon's position? That only a torn eye socket counts as legitmatizing the use of force? That if you just bust someone's head up a bit -- without tearing the eye socket -- you get to run away unmolested by police?

posted by Ace at 04:50 PM

| Access Comments