We joke that the conservative echo chamber operates on the “Who are you going to believe, me or your lyin’ eyes?” principle. Senses can lie. Listen to us, they say. We’ll tell you what’s true and what isn’t. Except what they’re reading out isn’t true either.
The pilot of Kobe Bryant’s Sikorsky S-76B may have crashed the basketball legend’s helicopter into rising terrain after becoming disoriented in Los Angeles area fog Sunday morning. Paul Cline, assistant professor of aviation at the City University of New York, told Jeff Wise of New York magazine:
“When you get in the soup, your senses don’t work,” Cline, the aviation professor, said. “For me, I always feel like I’m falling to the right. Other people might feel like they’re falling to the left, or climbing.”
“Visual Flight Rules,” or VFR, no longer work in low visibility. Pilots train themselves instead to rely on instrument readouts, hard data, to stay alive. They train to ignore misleading input from their own senses. But switching to “Instrument Flight Rules,” or IFR, is “time-consuming and constrains pilots to following the directions of controllers.”
“A ton of rules come into play, and people don’t always want to fly that way. It takes away their ability to do whatever they want to do,” Cline said. “The trade off is, you get to live.”
This model helicopter has a strong safety record. We don’t know exactly what caused this crash. But Kobe Bryant and his passengers wanted to catch the start of a basketball game in Thousand Oaks. Flying IFR might have meant waiting. Being in a hurry may have cost them their lives.
The impeachment trial of Donald J. Trump resumes this morning in the U.S. Senate. His defense team will use the same tactics that have worked so well for conservative media for decades. Listen to us. Ignore your lyin’ eyes. Ignore the facts. Facts cannot be trusted.
Gathering additional data from witnesses will be time-consuming and get in the way of what Trump’s lawyers and Senate supporters want to do. They are in a hurry to get this over, to declare victory and go home. This isn’t even a low-visibility environment. The facts are in plain sight. More are coming in daily.
The New York Times reported Sunday evening that former Trump national security adviser John Bolton’s upcoming book recounts that Trump said in August he “wanted to continue freezing $391 million in security assistance to Ukraine until officials there helped with investigations into Democrats including the Bidens.” Bolton’s testifying to that under oath is data defenders would rather not hear and will ignore anyway. Loyalty to the president demands it.
The famously untrustworthy president responded in a tweet just after midnight, “I NEVER told John Bolton that the aid to Ukraine was tied to investigations into Democrats, including the Bidens.”
Well. Trump said it. They believe it. That settles it.
Decades of a misinformation diet has dulled Americans’ ability to process hard data. Everything your everyday senses tells you and what you hear from the “liberal” media is suspect. Trust us instead, conservative spinmeisters insist. Master manipulators such as Russia’s Vladimir Putin deliberately create a fog of lies to create public demand for a strong man with a loud voice to lead the way out of the soup they’ve cooked.
They may lead the country into a hillside at 170 mph instead.
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