Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

[Still no electricity here. Whee.]

I'm wondering whether there's a formal name for a particular type of cognitive glitch -- the one where someone says, "Because the precautions we took were effective and there was no disaster as a result, the precautions were obviously unneeded in the first place and we were wrong to bother tiwth them". There's a closely related one that goes, "Since the worst-case didn't happen after all, it was a waste to have been prepared for it just in case, and next time we shouldn't bother."

One of the first things I read online after the Virginia earthquake was a bit of snark froms someone wondering how long it would take for the RWEC to find a way to blame the quake on Obama. Before the hurricane had quite arrived, my mother remarked that "they'll find some way to blame the hurricane on Obama".

After the hurricane, lacking electricity, Mom's been listening to a wee, battery-powered radio that doesn't work very well. Trying to find stations it'll actually pick up, she's found a Fox Radio Network station, a station apparently somehow connected to the Washington Times, and some Baltimore station with a lot of call-in shows. I've not been listening very much, but occasionally I'm in the same room for a spell and catch bits of it. There was the fellow I mentioned in my previous entry, who was convinced that because no trees were down in his own yard, therefore there couldn't be enough damage elsewhere for BGE to be taking so long to get everything repaired. And there was someone (uh, Sean Hannity, I think, not sure) going on about how all the warnings, and evacuations, and pre-storm advice were all part of some sort of conspiracy (I never did manage to figure out the alleged purpose of the conspiracy that involved trying to get people out of flood-prone areas), and since Irene diminished in intensity just before it reached us and the flooding wasn't as bad as the worst-case predictions, and because so few people had been killed or needed to be rescued, "obviously" all that fuss ahead of time was a completely pointless waste or time and resources except for however it served the left-wing conspiracy. Let's skip over the idea that there might have been more people needing to be rescued if lots of people had not gotten out of the way, eh?

And in the next breath, he went on about how weather predictions are so very unreliable (so, uh, obviously we only need to be prepared for the least severe end of the forecast because it's never ever worse than they expect when they get it wrong?), and how this means Global Warming is completely bogus (gee, sing along everybody, and let's confuse climate and weather Yet Again -- you all know the chorus by now, since we've heard it so many times).

(Hi did concede that the storm took the exact center of the predicted track, and only the intensity was different from what we'd all been warned about.)

In addition to the stuff that just didn't make sense, and the lies that were debunked weeks or months ago about various topics (repeated today as though they were well established, not outright debunked), we've got bits like this where he seemed to be refuting himself. "They can't predict the weather with certainty; therefore we can always predict that it won't be as bad as they predict, and being prepared in case it's ever worse than expected is a Waste of Taxpayer Dollars (and part of some conspiracy to get you out of town for a night)."

(Gosh, when Maddow, Olbermann, or O'Donnel says something later determined to have been false, they have to apologize for it and set the record straight. This afternoon I was hearing things that the speaker had to have known were lies, since they'd been investigated and refuted weeks ago.)

Or maybe the implied claim is that meteorologists can't predict the weather but political opinionators can do so perfectly?

And you know that if the various governors had not taken precautions, ans Obama jad not urged folks to take their own precautions, and Irene had gained intensity instead of diminishing, or had take the absolute worst-case path, and ten times as many people had died, these same haters would be blaming them for not having the foresight to prepare.

Mom thinks these radio people are "funny" because their bias is so laughably transparent and their distortions so extreme. I'd find them a lot funnier if I didn't know people who take such clowns seriously, believe they'ew hearing gospel, and vote accordingly. I might find them funny if I didn't know that some of those distortions were in fact outright lies, not just very insistent spin. I could not manage to be amused, I'm afraid.