The Trouble with Clairvoyance
Never mind the Big Lie. Bob examines the dangerous ubiquity of the Big Guess.
This is not about Glenn Greenwald, although hardly a week goes by that it couldn’t be. For reasons I could only speculate about, the once brave and rigorous journalist has long since come off his moorings. I have no interest in sorting through that, but I do single him out here by way of observing something larger — namely, the ruinous abandonment of rigor in online commentary.
Social media is a swamp of groundless certainty, a world in which the ideologically blinded — and also people who should know better — glibly present what they are feeling, or just supposing, as fact. You’re of course familiar with The Big Lie, and all the destruction it has wrought. But do not dismiss the dangers of The Big Guess.
It is as common as the wind. But recently a tweet from Greenwald achieved a kind of quintessence, the purest expression of the toxic intermingling of supposition and certainty: