In a post-fact age, painstaking evidence surrounding Khashoggi’s disappearance is slowly winning the day, the only glimmer of good news in an extraordinarily grim few weeks.
This last line of an article on US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s visit to Istanbul in connection with Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s disappearance appears below a video clip of Pompeo answering journalist questions with the caption quoting him ‚I don’t want to talk about any of the facts‘.
Facts are very much what I’d like to talk about. It is strange to me to see international news presented as a collage of debate about the extent to which the US president is lying or is just ignorant, discussion of the depth of his narcissistic crudeness, articles seeming to take seriously the thoughts of his Slovenian model wife, the announcement that a pop music singer has declared herself for the Democratic Party, a bromance involving a black rap singer, an article declaring that a large fraction of the world’s species are dying off. How is it that we continue in this state? Why is it that people exchange videos or „meme“ graphics rather than have conversations involving linear argumentation? How do we work our way out of this place?