Chris Cuomo's Demostrable, Inarguable Case of Progressive Bias

Chris Cuomo has a textbook case of bias.

Previously, he's dismissed speculating about possible terrorist involvement in murders claiming "no evidence" had yet been adduced to suggest that.

So he claimed, categorically, that it was improper to speculate about terrorist motive.

However, in the Amtrak case, without any evidence for it (and indeed mounting evidence against it) he gladly floats the speculation that allegedly low infrastructure spending was responsible for the derailment.

This is, as I say, a textbook form of bias, or, I should say, a textbook case of partisan behavior.

One important rule in any competition is this: What happens in ambiguous situations? I mean things like tie scores, but I also mean things like "What happens when replay review cannot conclusively establish what happened?"

Do you go with the original ruling, even if the replay suggests that's wrong (while not conclusively demonstrating that)?

This "Rule of the Gray Areas" can determine the course of games, seasons, championships.

And political contests and political debates.

After all, if a party, a movement, a political philosophy is granted the "rule" that any and all ambiguous cases should be resolved in our favor -- well. That's a pretty huge concession.

Because most such questions are never truly "resolved," ever.

It is a frequent source of contention in political fights as to what the posture of the American voters should be towards an issue in the light of a lack of conclusive evidence.

In the climate change debate, climate zealots sometimes deign to note that they are not absolutely certain in their predictions -- and confess they maybe, sometimes, made an error here or there, or overstated a finding.

Nevertheless, they urge that the threat is simply too grave to do anything but begin spending tens of trillions of American dollars per year to forestall the alleged problem.

What they're contesting is that, in the ambiguous case of arguable evidence, all doubts should nevertheless be resolved in their favor.

That is -- they want to win on a win -- obviously; everyone wants that -- but they also demand they be credited with a win on a Tie.

Once you are aware of this, you see this everywhere.

Chris Cuomo is, pretty obviously, an active and unapologetic partisan. Like any partisan in any contest, he is a Special Pleader for special considerations and special rules to favor his team. He's an angle-shooter -- and he also wants the rules written to explicitly grant his team the edge.

(An angle shooter is one who games the rules of a game to just go up to the line of cheating, and/or over that line, but usually in a "safe" sort of way where he could claim "he just didn't understand the rules." For example, string raises -- "I see your 200 and then raise you another 200" -- are illegal, because the person so raising can look to see if his opponent's face has given anything away with the "see your" part of his bet, and then, based on that, make the decision whether or not to go on with the raise. Experienced poker players know this and don't do it. Experienced Angle Shooters know it's illegal but do it anyway; they have the plan to say "Oh I'm sorry, we permit this in my Home Game, it's just fun," when challenged on it.)

In all cases, he argues that the Left's ideological preference should win out, as an epistemological rule, in ambiguous cases. In situations where we just don't know enough to know anything, he presses for the heuristic that the Leftist take should be the default, acceptable take, and all deviations from this ruled out-of-bounds and inappropriate.

He's a partisan, and a nasty, grubby, rules-lawyering sort of one, the sort of progressive partisan always arguing that in any dispute that can't be resolved to everyone's satisfaction, He Wins, because, obviously, he's on the side of the angels.

The most insidious thing about these leftist heuristics is that they are designed to be invisible to dumb people. Maybe I shouldn't say dumb people -- I should say people who do not think deeply or sharply about philosophy and society.

Leftism is crafted specifically to appeal to such persons, who are not only a majority but a dominant majority in society.

Leftism is not thinking -- It is a permission to not think, granted to those who dislike thinking.

It is pret-a-penser, "ready to think," "off the rack thinking" in the French expression.

If Chris Cuomo was willing to hurt his brain a little, he might question why he "knows" it (without knowing why or how he knows it) that it's racist and out of bounds to speculate about a terrorist motive after an apparent terrorist attack, and yet just plain old common sense to speculate that Republican Budget Cuts are responsible for a train derailment.

If thinking were pleasurable to him, rather than slightly unpleasant, he might realize that his "objective rules" are not objective and certainly not rules -- they are, rather, politically-constructed Edge Plays for partisan gamesters.

But he doesn't like thinking, and those who have developed Leftism understand this about him (and most people). They know that people will just uncritically accept a claim if you get enough people to parrot it.

So Chris Cuomo thinks he knows why some speculations (those which Trigger the left) are out of bounds, and why some speculations (those which give the left Jazz Fingers) are acceptable.

He does not know how or why he knows this, or from whom he learned it, and will become visibly agitated, even angry, if you press him on that point.

But he knows the rule that his leftist Thought Designers have fashioned for him, and that rule permits him to think less, and he is content.

Corrected: I think I meant "Angle Shooter" rather than "Edge Player." I think may sharps would be Edge Players (everyone wants to play with an edge).

But it's the Angle Shooters who are the Edge Players who cross the line into cheating.

I think the term "Angle Shooter" derives from sitting in such a way to be able to glimpse a down card as its laid on the table, but I'm not sure.

I'm not a professional gambler; I just know one. My terminology is second-hand.

posted by Ace at 02:35 PM

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