AOC's Chief-Of-Staff Wears T-Shirt Featuring Nazi Collaborator

[Igel]

21. Why bother?

Everybody knows one fact about Bose, the only important fact about a man's life, and has committed to their judgment without any further hearing or elaboration.

It's 21st century critical thinking. You think just until you can adopt a sufficient line of criticism and condemnation of somebody you have doubts with, in order to solidify those doubts.

(Older varieties would have said, "Gee, he's wearing this shirt. I know this one fact. Surely there must be things I don't know. Perhaps I should try to learn something before I get pissed off in my self-righteousness and call for his head on character grounds. I know that this is a PR problem, but PR and truth aren't necessarily the same--there's a reason that rhetoric and logic aren't synonyms, and we don't house advertising departments in the Science Division at Tier 1 universities." Sadly, the very idea of "there must be things I don't know" and "perhaps I should try to learn something" are now rhetorical tropes and not responses to gaps in knowledge.)

AOC's guy probably didn't know that somebody would search for "Bose" and opt for the worst thing the guy did, in a completely decontextualized way, taking a peripheral detail about the interaction as the central core of the man's life. (In fact, what Bose did wasn't widely known for a long time, and may not be known. But since we can't ask "what don't we know?" obviously it's impossible to ask, "What didn't he know?&quot