What is the essence of someone pretending not to notice the essential aspect of the central allegation with respect to an eminently essential matter to which he is an interested party, aspect that he easily and obviously possesses the intelligence to notice, of someone implicitly saying A while explicitly stating B? A refusal to engage in rational dialogue, which latter is in turn the single way to avert violence between holders of opposing viewpoints: an implicit declaration of (civil) war.
I am obviously talking about the Georgia SecOfState and his assistant(s), in the above video between minute 8 and 10, claiming that in the nightly vote counting at State Farm Arena everything had been done correctly, while not addressing with a single word as problematic that the partisan poll watchers had been sent away for the night so that the counting was without any doubt illegal. Sterling implicitly narrates the fact as such, while at the end of those two minutes claiming that all counting had been done correctly “with observers”.
This is a blatant case of willful distortion of logic in the pursuit of one’s own advantage (the GA SecOfState and his assistants like Sterling know they are at fault and refuse at all cost to admit it, apparently in order to protect their reputation which in this way they taint only that much further). It was in the occasion of such a case that in Dante’s Commedia an assistant devil uttered the phrase heading this website (“Perhaps you did not think I was a logician!”) to the soul of Guido I. da Montefeltro, taking it from the hands of St. Francis, and then down with him to hell. St. Francis in turn was powerless as the devil had logic on his side.
So what Raffensberger & Co. committed is what is known to Christians as “blasphemy against the Holy Spirit” to which Dante refers in the mentioned passage of the Commedia, which “blasphemy”, as we shall deduce on this site, is essentially nothing but a conscious negation of logic, the only sin that cannot “be forgiven, either in this age or in the age to come.” And just as Guido I. da Montefeltro, to whom loico’s signature phrase is being uttered in the Commedia, Raffensberger & Co. will roast in hell eternally, logically speaking. And unfortunately for them, logic has the uncomfortable aspect of unavoidably realizing itself, later or sooner.