James O’Brien, the radio straw-man delusion

James O’Brien is a leftie that infests weekday mid-mornings on LBC Radio. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m all for LBC having a collection of lefties and righties on the air. Despite the topics being rotated a bit too frequently, there’s a liberal, erm, maybe ‘liberal’ is not the best word, there’s a fair and probably balanced splattering of lefties and righties as the show hosts spouting their views. This then invigorates and inspires the listeners to call in to either argue against the host or suck-up and agree with them, telling them they are a hero.

Middle class all-boys public school educated O’Brien, having never experienced real life, but, instead having had a very sheltered and privileged upbringing, is, as you might expect, infected with typical champagne socialist life views.

It is for this reason that he cannot possibly comprehend nor can he accept that there are valid views other than his own. He cannot accept nor understand why British people voted to leave the European Union. He cannot accept nor understand why people voted for Donald Trump.

The fact that others have views that are not the same as his, leaves him perplexed, and, as with most from the left, forces him to make up excuses for those who don’t agree with him. To him, they must be ignorant, racist, delusional, uneducated, stupid. His mindset can’t handle that they are different, yet completely valid, in holding their views. They are peasants who lack his knowledge and understanding. They are to be looked down on and sneered about.  And that’s what he does. A lot.

O’Brien also uses obscure logical fallacies and straw-man arguments to support his bizarre position. My favourite is the one where he says that if he was on a plane and the passengers voted by a majority to put a drunk in the pilot’s seat to fly the plane, he would still panic and scream that it was wrong until his last dying breath as the plane crashed into a mountain.

He currently applies this argument to try to explain his hatred of Donald Trump. He’s also used it against those who dared to vote in the UK to leave the European Union.

The ‘straw-man’ aspect of his metaphor is his assumption that the pilot is a drunk. As in, Donald Trump is not fit for the Presidency. Period.

What if, to address the metaphor, the only person who believes the pilot is a drunk, is James O’Brien? What if the pilot has proved his sobriety to everybody else on the plane, but because of O’Brien’s delusional state, he can’t accept the results of the breath test the pilot took, or even that he took one. The voices inside O’Brien’s head keep him shouting at and upsetting the rest of the passengers, and screaming about the pending gloom and doom that everybody else knows isn’t going to happen.

In other words, O’Brien is putting the straw-man argument forward that there is an assumption, a given, that something is unacceptably wrong with Donald Trump, or something is wrong with Brexit. He’s saying it’s wrong, taken as read that it’s wrong, not that just in his limited worldview opinion it is wrong. It is, his deranged mind tells him, categorically and unequivocally wrong. The voices in his head also tell O’Brien that only the single view, his view, is true regardless of the logic or any evidence to the contrary. The voices tell him that that his is the only truth, a fact.

All of which makes him very angry when he hears anything that challenges his belief. He is convinced that he is there to save everybody from the drunken pilot. He can’t accept that the pilot isn’t drunk.

It’s all just a delusion inside O’Brien’s head.