House of Eratosthenes

PolitiFact has been receiving some blowback from progressive bloggers. It’s happening because they named, as the lie of the year, a democrat party lie which is, of course, not something that is supposed to be happening. For writing about this backlash they are now receiving some more.

But FactCheck agrees with them about the lie-of-the-year thing, and so does The Washington Post.

File this one under “It feels like abuse when the ass-kissing stops.”

Ezra Klein, founder of Journolist, the cyber-star-chamber in which lefty journalists could conspire with each other to massage the news for the benefit of the all-important lefty agenda, opined that the fact-checker model is probably unsustainable over the long term. I agree with him, but not for the reasons he offers.

The problem that has been consistently encountered, is with the sensible concern. In 2009, Sarah Palin had a sensible concern about “death panels” and that ended up being the Lie of the Year back then. Turned out, she was right. Ah, but PolitiFact could claim they were in the right as well — and they did: “There is no panel in any version of the health care bills in Congress that judges a person’s ‘level of productivity in society’ to determine whether they are ‘worthy’ of health care.”

See, that’s the problem: A so-called “fact checker” can — as part of his mission statement — turn a blind eye to anything that is a worrisome, even likely, near-future development, which would of course capture the the attention of an interested stakeholder who thinks these things through logically, but in a human-like way. There is a sensible concern that you’ll start a fire if you smoke while pumping gas in your car, even though we can’t find anecdotal evidence of this actually happening. There is a sensible concern that talking on your cell phone will screw up the controls of the passenger jet in which you’re seated, although it could be characterized as a “myth” because, again, it hasn’t happened. Come to think of it, our post-9/11 procedures for boarding that jet in the first place, are based on sensible concerns (although this is debatable) that have yet to stop any mid-air act of terrorism, or any other debacle, one single time.

Washington Post has named it one of the biggest lies of the year, that President Obama has “apologized for America.” It rates four Pinnochios. And yet, does it really make sense to dismiss the claim? Can an observer do just that, and claim the “facts” are on his side, confident that something hasn’t gone sailing over his head? Hasn’t an apologetic stance been an established overtone, intentionally infused with and consistently associated with the Obama brand, since the campaign trail?

And yet on Planet Fact Checker, this is jettisoned as a loathed urban myth. It never happened.

So yes, the fact-checker model cannot survive long, just as you’ll not be very long driving a car that lacks any suspension. The fact checkers skate on by, liberated from any fact-checking by anybody else that actually counts for something, so long as they can claim a competitively tall soapbox…so long as they issue their verdicts in such a way that they’re liked by whoever might have a taller soapbox. But on the rare occasions like this one, when they must go the other way, they get picked apart. And then, whether their “fact checking” stands up to logical scrutiny or not, an ugly truth is bound to come out: That fact checkers are human, possessing all the frailties and weaknesses of humans, including gullibility and prejudice. The motion is a jostling one, and like the jostling car without the suspension, it’s bound to fall apart sooner or later.

It’s a temporary way of getting a taller soapbox. A flash in the pan fad, like Rubik’s cubes and poodle skirts. The desires on the part of the readers to get hold of some solid, unbiased information is much more timeless and permanent. The same cannot be said for today’s way of providing it, since, as the lefty bloggers have so aptly demonstrated, the fact checker only retains his credibility when he tells his readers what they want to hear.

It’s all of a piece with liberal narcissism (which is to say, with liberalism) — their opinions are the baseline from which “bias,” “lies,” etc. are judged.

It’s why leftists can claim that the New York Times is biased in favor of the right without their heads exploding. To them, “fair and objective” news resembles Pravda circa 1974, so when the NYT fails to call for George W. Bush’s execution as a war criminal, they can in all seriousness claim that the paper is “a cheerleader for the Iraq War.” [I remember having this exact conversation with a colleague. After dogging him for the better part of an hour, I finally got him to admit that Keith Olbermann — alone among MSM figures– might have a slight preference for the Democrats].

Without these highly idiosyncratic definitions — basically the “my truth, your truth” crap you dissected a few posts ago — the entire liberal project collapses. That’s the whole point of postmodernism (cf. Stephen Hicks’s excellent book on that topic) — to keep the socialist dream alive in the face of harsh reality.

Making “the truth” solely dependent on the moral — that is to say, the political — virtue of the speaker is the only way to reconcile the 1001 mutually contradictory things leftism requires its adherents to believe. Their heads don’t explode from cognitive dissonance because there IS no cognitive dissonance — in their minds, they’re Good People, and Good People only believe True Things, so therefore whatever I believe is True, regardless of logic, internal consistency, etc. (all tools of western white male phallogocentric domination, natch).

Fortunately, lots of news consumers don’t have degrees in “studies” fields and so are passingly acquainted with Earth logic. To them, facts are facts, “checked” or not, and the media’s increasingly desperate attempts to prove otherwise will only hasten their demise.
- Severian | 12/23/2011 @ 07:24
…in their minds, they’re Good People, and Good People only believe True Things, so therefore…

Perhaps that right there is the unified common ancestor of all ideological disagreements. I’m convinced that perfectly wonderful people good hoodwinked into believing untrue things, all day everyday. About as many times as they inhale.
- mkfreeberg | 12/23/2011 @ 08:18
Perhaps that right there is the unified common ancestor of all ideological disagreements

I think that’s the God’s Honest. It sure beats my “magic words” theory of ideology (that people will behave quite honestly and rationally in their private lives, but go all weak in the knees for utter nonsense when one utters the magic word “government.” A liberal will go miles out of his way to avoid paying taxes, complain as long and as loud about the DMV as the rest of us, refuse to ride public transportation with the riffraff, move entire area codes rather than “celebrating diversity” when the kids hit school age, etc. etc….. but mention “government” and all of a sudden all those things are super-wonderful. The libertarian version is the same thing in reverse).

There are just certain people whose brains’ factory preset is binary. What’s good is good and what’s bad is bad, and everything is either all good or all bad. These are the people who invented, and still employ, the argumentum ad Hitlerum, and who would experience real psychic pain if you were to ask them if 2+2 is still 4 even if Hitler says it. Because their brains are binary, these folks are prone to use the transitive property of equality in bizarre and spectacularly inaccurate ways (e.g. R*n Pa*l is a racist conspiracy nutter who is endorsed by neo-Nazis; R*n Pa*l also claims to be a libertarian; therefore all libertarians are neo-Nazi conspiracy nutters).

We all have a tendency to argue like this, of course, especially when it helps us win, but I find it very interesting that the vast majority of people whose politics are strictly binary cluster on the left-hand side of the aisle… while patting themselves on the back over what nuanced freethinkers they are.
- Severian | 12/23/2011 @ 11:07
To them, facts are facts, “checked” or not, and the media’s increasingly desperate attempts to prove otherwise will only hasten their demise.

I keep hoping this is true. The fact that you think so, too, lifts my spirits. 🙂
- philmon | 12/23/2011 @ 12:18
I keep hoping so, too. 🙂

But between this and the MFM’s blatant electioneering, anyone who doesn’t believe the entirety of the non-Fox media is a wholly owned subsidiary of the DNC is a Torquemada-level religious zealot.

[I mean seriously, my God — must we talk about R*n Pa*l again? In a rational world, the only thing he’d get elected to is the Reich Security Office at some militia compound in backwoods Idaho. Maybe. But in this annus mirabilis of 2012, when even a robotic, blow-dried, liberal-in-all-but-name cultist like Mittens Romney stands a good chance of beating Dear Leader, suddenly the “all government is good government” MFM is out there beating the bushes for a guy who vows to bring the country back to the good old days of the Garfield administration (complete with extra bonus racism!). This is the only time in history you will ever see the dorks at MSNBC and the geeks at Reason aiding and abetting each other… which I think qualifies as signs three through seven of the Apocalypse, if you’re keeping score at home. I just hope the good people of Iowa have better sense than junior high school girls come caucus time].
- Severian | 12/23/2011 @ 17:25
PS I honestly don’t watch Fox New, so if y’all know, please tell me — do they do this kind of thing too? Were they out there cheerleading for, say, Dennis Kucinich back in 2008, in order to maybe get the moonbattiest possible moonbat opponent? Or is this (as I suspect) almost entirely a leftist thing — you know, because lying for the cause isn’t really lying…..
- Severian | 12/23/2011 @ 17:27

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“Lie of the Year” BacklashFriday, December 23rd, 2011

“Lie of the Year” Backlash
Friday, December 23rd, 2011