Okay, this has to stop.
No, I am not referring to court decisions. I am referring to “jump the gun” comments made before the commenter has the full story and then looks like a fool for doing so.
There is a current diary on the SCOTUS refusal to hear the Texas vote-by-mail challenge in which several of the comments condemn it. A representative sample:
Roberts hates voting, particularly when done by brown people.
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Time to expand and make the 5 fascists on there meaningless
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Keep up the bad work Texas.
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Apparently the Roberts Court wants to maintain its unbroken record of assaults on the right to vote for people of color.
The worst criticism came from someone who lives in Texas, who self-describes as “angry” and calls the state of affairs there “beyond disgusting”.
Here’s the problem.
Those commenters posted literally within 20 minutes of the article’s release, preceding the reasoned analysis that came about 10 minutes later, from VCLib, which included the key fact:
This ruling by the SCOTUS only states that it will not allow the Democrats to skip over the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals.
In other words, it was a procedural error. SCOTUS rarely (if ever) accepts cases for review unless they have been ruled on my lower federal courts. The Texas Dems shouldn’t have tried, and they got their hand slapped.
Obviously, this makes the early commenters — dare I say it? — “morans” who now loook every bit as clueless as the MAGA hat wearing supporters of Trump and the Republicans who enable him.
As I said, this has to stop.
Many articles have been written here on DK about the difficulty in convincing people who voted for Trump in 2016 to do otherwise this year. It’s not any easier when comments like the above appear for public consumption. It does make it easier for those we are trying to convince to say we’re the ones who get all worked up without knowing all the facts. Because that is exactly what those commenters did.
I think we all need to presume that, when all we know initially is a headline from somewhere, there is more to the story … and reading details into a headline that we don’t know yet significantly raises the possibility that we are going to be wrong in commenting on same.
Anyone who has watched Perry Mason, Law & Order, or any other court-based drama has heard the phrase “facts not in evidence”. That is what you do when you comment based on your perception of a headline with no details. And that is what has to stop.
To their credit, a lot of commenters said pretty much what I am saying, which was “there must be more to this that we haven’t heard yet” or openly speculated that there was some kind of procedural reason. I like those comments, because it hints to everyone else that tossing off an angry comment is at best, premature … and at worst, makes you look like, well, a “moran”.
The late Paul Harvey used to do a daily radio feature in which he told a true story, the outcome of which always seemed to be obvious, until he revealed in the last sentence or two the facts that made the obvious conclusion 180 degrees in error. His closing line was “and now you know … the rest of the story.”
Please, in the name of intelligent discussion, wait to comment until you are certain that you know the rest of the story.