Fact-Checking Is Killing Us
Fact-Checking Is Killing Us
Moderators fact-check the debate and we’re worse off for it
This made me laugh...
When Kamala Harris says “there is not one member of the United States military who is in active duty in a combat zone in any war zone around the world, the first time this century,” she believes it. She believes it because she has battalions of lawyers carefully defining what a combat zone is, what a war zone is, even what active duty means, what “boots on the ground” means — even what “ground” means.
Its perfect. People know they're being lied to when they hear stuff like that. It doesn't matter if its "factually" correct in a way a lawyer could claim. Its stil a lie
Kamala Harris — and the Washington-oriented tribe of A students she represents — love the facts. They love adhering to the law, following the rules, being judicious. They love meetings. To discuss. For the A students the process becomes as important as the outcome, which is to say that accountability is to the numbers and not to the people.
This is accurate, but dividing up the population into "A students" vs "everyone else" seems an unhealthy way to frame it, I guess the writer is using this because he can't just say NERDS
and that's what they really mean but yeah. The anti-intellectualism is a bad play, particularly when so many of the very best communists I know are such ultra nerds that they make the "A students" look like children.Yeah, I feel like Chapo's derisive use of 'Lanyards' is a much better way to describe this group of people. It's not so much that they are smarter or particularly interested in learning as they are in appeasing power to acquire credentials
I didn't read it so much as anti-intellectualism but rather a group of people who think they're smarter than everyone else. It's basically the rule lawyer crowd who only care about being correct within their own definition of correctness.
I kinda' agree. Although I think it's because I'm skeptical these people are all actually A students in the first place.
To be fair, being an A student in the US is way more about complying with power structures than it is about knowing things.
Source: "BodyBySisyphus consistently fails to follow directions" x 1,000,000
The funny thing is She of the Real Time Fact Checkers lied her ass off the entire time. She lied about the Chinese Covid response, she repeated the Hamas sexual assault allegations that the NYT chose not to print, she either lied about her love of fracking (less likely) or her belief that climate change is an existential threat (more likely)*.
The thing is those lies are all within the Pale of Discourse so they go unchallenged. Trump is such a gift to the democrats because they get to go as far to the right as they want while still keeping their cherished veneer of intelligence and maturity.
*I suppose she could think both and either be a bona-fide threat to humanity or a complete idiot who doesn't know what's causing climate change
I suppose she could think both and either be a bona-fide threat to humanity or a complete idiot who doesn't know what's causing climate change
Given her unlimited support for genocide I think she just loves death
Yeah I think this article really missed that callout. Yes there's the legal pedantry that they do to lie without really lying, but then there's the bigger lie that is the consensus of reality that exists in the political class of the global north. Things that bolster the consensus are facts, things that don't are lies.
Well put!
Wordle Times,
Got 'em
i think the mass extinction event is killing us but your mileage may vary
Interesting perspective. Pretty accurate ngl. Facts don't win elections, never have.
Ugh why does every article have to circle back the Trump/Harris I don't care
For me, the interesting part of the article was how the point that everybody is sick of libs doing constant gaslighting. When people point out obvious problems that everyone is experiencing, libs dismiss that by playing word games and acting as if others are just too dumb to understand what's really going on. That's precisely what's driving so many people out of the liberal mainstream.
What do you kids mean when you say you're tired of hearing about the Adults In The Room that Make The Hard Decisions and Get Shit Done? Who hurt you? Do you need a safe space from the cold hard facts, sweetie?
They talk about the infectiveness of fact checking, and sure, the effect they described is depressingly common. More importantly tho, what’s the alternative? If the left stops trying to keep discussions grounded in verifiable facts, I strongly doubt the right will quit their bullshit and take up the job. Letting politics get even more divorced from reality would only make the right more powerful - we’ll never be able to beat them at appeals to emotion when the only emotions they need to appeal to are the low hanging fruit of anger and fear.
Idk, the article raises a good point but it just feels incomplete to me without raising an alternative or at least acknowledging the need for one.divorced from reality would only make the right more powerful
Liberalism is in of itself divorced from reality.
Letting politics get even more divorced from reality would only make the right more powerful
The democrats are as much if not more divorced from reality. That's the point of the of the whole article. The libs are so into facts that they don't care about truth - and people know it. People know they're being lied to by Republicans, but they also know they're being lied to by democrats.
I think its also important to point out that the dems and they're supporters aren't the left. We arent a part of that here. Also don't be weird about "appeals to emotion" logic bro crap. We're humans and we have emotions and that's good. The fact that the fact obsessed liars want you to feel that's a bad thing should tell you something.
Democrats are definitely also guilty of living in their own reality, but ime theirs is more created by misrepresenting facts versus the republican dismissal of them. Their lies are more often misleading truths with a massive fucking asterisk - that’s shit behaviour and I’m not defending it or them, but they’re absolutely not “as much if not more divorced from reality” than republicans. They’re not married to reality either, but theirs is a divorce where they’re at least still on speaking terms lol.
You’re right that they’re not part of the left, and I shouldn’t conflate them with the actual left, but thinking about the far right’s misinformation campaigns gets me thinking in very “us vs them” terms and I do still (reluctantly) consider them part of the “us” in that specific area. A very problematic part, sure, but I consider it like how I’d probably be a lot more accepting of police for a minute if I was locked in a room with only an armed cop and a rabid bear.
Also, I wanna be clear that I’m not discounting the value of appeals to emotion - on top of what you said, they’re also probably one of the best ways to really get stuff done on a community scale. My point is just that we’re not nearly as good at them as the (far) right, so throwing away the boring factual components of our messages would be like jumping into the water to wrestle an alligator. We have to accept that we’re just built different for fights on those terms, and focus on other ways to win.
You are wildly over-estimating the role that things like 'appeals to emotion' have on the right. Most people I know who are on the left are on the left because of their emotional investment into concepts such as 'justice'. The reason the right is in control is because the controllers of the means of production monetarily rewards right-wing (including right-wing liberal obviously) behaviors and ideology. The problem is fundamentally more complex than 'fact-checking', 'ceding ground' and 'appeals to emotion'. Thinking that these ideological methods and arguments are the base or basis for revolution is part of the liberal ideology that we swim in on a regular basis. Not that I have a better solution at this point, mind, just that I know that these things very much do not matter in the long run.
The reason the right is in control is because the controllers of the means of production monetarily rewards right-wing (including right-wing liberal obviously) behaviors and ideology.
Absolutely, on the government scale this is def more of a factor, but at the individual level I really think the appeals to emotion are how they keep their voters in line. To me that’s one of the scariest things about the right, is how incredibly good they are at making people continue uncritically accepting their reality in the face of literally any contradictory evidence.
It’s anecdotal, but nearly every person I talk to who agrees with the right on some issue (eg trans rights, abortion, racial justice, whatever the flavour of the month is) maintains their stance on the issue through anger, fear, and/or hate. If you’re able to get into an honest dialogue with them about it, they’ll eventually reach a point where their talking points/strawmen are exhausted and they can logically see the conclusion that eg. trans people existing is okay, actually - and this is where I find that root emotion comes out. Every time I’ve had any success trying to deprogram someone who’s been brainwashed into these reactions (not often cuz I don’t have infinite patience, but at least five or six times by now), it’s been by following this chain of events and then directly addressing the emotion it brings out in them. I find until they notice it in themselves, they won’t consider any amount of proof or logic unless it’s stuffed down their throat, and even then the next time they’re reminded of it, the memory of the emotion is stronger than the memory of the proof. I’ve literally sat down with someone and gone through every aspect of fucking drag queen story hour to see why it made them so irrationally angry, and after disproving all the misinfo and enough leading questions (“what do you think the kids are learning from this?”, “is there anything to disapprove of in the lesson that different ≠ scary?”, etc) they realized and agreed that it wasn’t problematic after all. The entire thing was based on facts (systematically disproving every bullshit claim they’d heard) and their own reasoning (in response to pointed questions) and they fully accepted the result - but without addressing the root emotion (fear, in this case) they didn’t internalize it and the next bit of right wing lies that came out put them right back into irrational anger about the subject. It took less than a week.Anyway, I definitely agree that the one-sided class war is the fundamental cause of this problem, and I’m not suggesting we ignore it to address the symptoms. I’m just saying that even if stewardship of the objective facts isn’t a particularly good weapon in that war, we shouldn’t throw it away thinking it’s no good to us - that shit is a shield that we would be so unbelievably fucked without. I just cannot imagine a circumstance where the left can win on a battlefront of purely emotional investment - like lets’s treat a random person as a blank slate and have the two sides both talk about their new neighbour with no need to stick to facts. Like you said, we’ve got some inspiring shit: justice, equality - “your neighbour’s a living thinking being too, maybe feeling isolated in a new place. let’s go see if they need any help getting settled in”. Probably gives some good emotions, but requires a little thinking and then conscious action. Meanwhile the right goes “that new person’s fucking awful, I just saw them eat somebody’s cat”. Absolutely zero barrier for entry - it takes conscious effort NOT to buy into their fearmongering. We have a powerful message, and I have no doubt that a lot of people will make the conscious efforts required to try to live up to the ideals; I just also have no doubt that more people will take the path of least resistance and I know I wouldn’t wanna be the new neighbour in this thought experiment.
Ugh, this has turned into a rambling fuckin essay of a reply and I’m sorry about that, I just don’t have the energy to go back and try to wrangle it on topic right now
No it's not. Facts are facts. That's all there is. If you don't fact check, you let lies run rampant.
It appears that you lack reading comprehension to understand the content of the article. What it says is that many of these "facts" are just definitions that liberals come up with to spin a narrative.
When Kamala Harris says “there is not one member of the United States military who is in active duty in a combat zone in any war zone around the world, the first time this century,” she believes it. She believes it because she has battalions of lawyers carefully defining what a combat zone is, what a war zone is, even what active duty means, what “boots on the ground” means — even what “ground” means.
The fact-checking is actually just plain old gaslighting, and everybody can see that.
Wow, you just assume I didn't read an article. Nothing in the opinion piece says anything of substance. It's saying don't bother because it's a nuisance. If we don't fact check, than lies are put out as fact. If Harris lied, call her out, if Trump lied, call him out. They are pesididential candidates, they should be held to higher standards than some random Youtuber.
If I say Australia landed on the moon last night, and no one checks the story out, are people to assume I told the truth? If No one checks out stories and opinions, than anything becomes a reality that just simply doesn't exist.
headline: "Fact-Checking Is Killing Us"
liberal: "No it's not. Facts are facts. That's all there is. If you don't fact check, you let lies run rampant."
article: "the battle in today’s America is about the headlines. No one outside of a tiny demographic reads the actual articles..."
Sure hasn't stopped Democrats from enthusiastically supporting Israel despite the latter being constantly caught lying.
It's almost like letting lies run rampant is perfectly fine for Democrats if it helps them and their allies.
Deffies strike again.
