Unfactual Facts?

[engagedinattempting]

I still find myself thinking from time to time that it should be possible for people in this reality to finally come to their senses and learn to reason together, to find solutions to problems and apply them in a fair and reasonable manner. Don't worry about me, I'm healing, honestly; I used to find myself thinking wishfully like this nearly all the time.

The fact is (and this really seems to be an actual fact), reasoning together is impossible without a certain stable framework upon which we all agree; black is black and white is white and this is this and that is that, therefore...that sort of thing. And as facts seem to be becoming increasingly less factual, hope for sanity fades.

Most politicians look you straight in the eye and lie as part of their daily activities. I say most because I'm healing but not yet healed; hope lingers but is fading. Many of us in this 3D nightmare of our own incomprehensible invention still believe that something can be accomplished with their vote and rely on outfits like PolitiFact to tell them who is or isn't shooting straight and telling it like it is. PolitiFact won a Pulitzer so, can't go wrong there, right? Sorry. The following article from NashuaTelegraph.com by Gary Vincent explains:

"Facts are stubborn things,” John Adams wrote in a letter to Jonathan Sewall in 1759.

But facts are also slippery things, it seems. PolitiFact, the national fact-checking operation run by the Tampa Bay Times, has been finding that out recently.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning effort, which was joined by The Telegraph and other New Hampshire newspapers to fact-check statements made here during the New Hampshire primary, has been showing that fact-checking is not as straightforward as it seems.

The national PolitiFact got into hot water over the State of the Union speech, when it decided to fact-check this statement by President Barack Obama: “In the last 22 months, businesses have created more than 3 million jobs. Last year, they created the most jobs since 2005.”

Given the depth of the recession, 3 million new jobs over the time Obama has been in office is not enough for a robust recovery. But he didn’t say it was. Nor did he, in the sentence above, claim anything other than that “businesses” have created jobs.

PolitiFact rated the statement “half true.” But the statement is, according to the facts, 100 percent true. So why the rating?

PolitiFact said: “In his remarks, Obama described the damage to the economy, including losing millions of jobs ‘before our policies were in full effect.’ Then he describes the subsequent job increases, essentially taking credit for the job growth. But labor economists tell us that no mayor or governor or president deserves all the claims or all the credit for changes in employment.”

That may be an important point – that the president is not responsible for the full output of the economy – but to use it to justify the “half true” ruling here only leaves you scratching your head about “fact-checking.”

What really was done here was political analysis. To try to say that it is just straight fact-checking does violence to, well, the facts. A number of critics made these points but apparently had little impact on PolitiFact.

A similar flap erupted in February when PolitiFact “fact-checked” a speech by Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington.

What Rubio said was: “The majority of Americans are conservatives.” What else would you expect him to say at the year’s premier gathering of conservatives?

PolitiFact rated this statement “mostly true.” What?

The facts are that a 40 percent plurality of Americans identify as conservative, not a majority. And that is not a temporary state; the Gallup polling organization has never found a majority, or more than 50 percent, of Americans identifying as conservative. As in the State of the Union speech, the actual facts are clear.

So how to justify the ruling?

PolitiFact’s response was: “Our goal at PolitiFact is to use the Truth-O-Meter to show the relative accuracy of a political claim. In this case, we rated it Mostly True because we felt that while the number was short of a majority, it was still a plurality. … It wasn’t quite a majority, but was close.”

But we are talking about facts, aren’t we? And facts don’t seem to have any room for close but not quite.

Look at the statement again. It turns out that the vaunted Truth-O-Meter’s goal is to show the “relative accuracy” of a political claim. By that standard, we could have a thermometer that reads freezing cold at 95 degrees Fahrenheit. Relative to the temperature in hell, that is.

Snark aside, the point is that once you swap accuracy for “relative accuracy,” the readers are entitled to ask, in every case, “relative to what?”

Apparently, PolitiFact decides that for itself in each case, and there seems to be no guarantee they are showing accuracy relative to the actual facts.

Even more of a problem for PolitiFact is that it was a different story when Ron Paul claimed that “The majority of the American people believe we should have a gold standard and not a paper standard” for currency.

But a national poll showed 44 percent of Americans support a gold standard, and 44 percent is not a majority, so PolitiFact rated Paul’s statement “false,” even though it was, in fact, 4 percent closer to a majority than Rubio’s.

On this point, PolitiFact’s Bill Adair noted : “We don’t expect our readers to agree with every ruling we make. We have published nearly 5,000 Truth-O-Meter ratings and it’s natural that anyone can find some they disagree with. But even if you don’t agree with every call we make, our research and analysis helps you sort out what’s true in the political discourse.”

Well, sure. But that could be said of any honest political analysis piece. Maybe they need to add a statement to the Truth-O-Meter like that on new cars: “Your mileage may vary.”

It’s all more proof that there is no substitute for critical thinking applied to as many facts as can be gathered. There are no shortcuts in the search for truth.

http://www.nashuatelegraph.com/opinionperspectives/951495-263/politifact-should-stick-to-facts-not-political.html 2/26/12


Paul Krugman in the New York Times:

A commenter on my latest Politifact screed asks a good question: where do you go to check whether a politician’s statement is actually true? The answer, unfortunately, is that it depends on what the statement is about. Most economic numbers can be fact-checked by going to official data sources like the Bureau of Labor Statistics or the Bureau of Economic Analysis, and quite a few of these official numbers are readily available at the excellent FRED database. But the broader answer is that you have to know where to look.

Now, the point of Politifact and other news-org fact-check things is supposed to be to do this work for readers, so that you don’t have to learn your way around labor-force or trade or crime or whatever statistics every time you have doubts about a political claim.

Unfortunately, Politifact has lost sight of what it was supposed to be doing. Instead of simply saying whether a claim is true, it’s trying to act as some kind of referee of what it imagines to be fair play: even if a politician says something completely true, it gets ruled only partly true if Politifact feels that the fact is being used to gain an unfair political advantage.[...]

This is deeply wrong on two levels. First, fact-checking should be about checking facts — not about trying to impose some sort of Marquess of Queensbury rules on how you’re allowed to use facts. Aside from undermining the mission, this makes the whole thing subjective —[...]

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/25/finding-the-truth/ 2/25/12


Rachel Maddow of MSNBC's highly rated The Rachel Maddow Show recently "fired" PolitiFact saying,

You are a mess! You are fired! You are undermining the definition of the word “fact” in the English language by pretending to it in your name. The English language wants its word back. You are an embarrassment. You sully the reputation of anyone who cites you as an authority on “factishness,” let alone fact. You are fired."

video at http://www.mediaite.com/tv/rachel-maddow-to-fact-checking-site-politifact-you-are-fired/

I watch Rachel Maddow and like her. She's a flaming left wing liberal, yes, but what's left of my political identity resides in that realm with her, and I feel that she's as honest and truthful as she knows how to be. And that seems to be what we find ourselves left with at the end of the day if you follow current events and, especially, politics; who do you believe is honest? At least Rachel fact checked PolitiFact.

And I have SOTT, a true blessing.

I live in the southeastern portion of the US in a poor, rural area where the majority's view of the world encompasses far right politics, racial and sexual intolerance and old-time hardshell Baptist churchgoing (fit in well I don't). News is Fox News. Really. I recently ran into a guy I worked with some years back and, as he had managed to achieve the rank of Lieutenant Commander in the US Navy and displayed a variety of knowledge and worldly experience uncommon in these parts, I respected him as an intellectually competent fellow. Now, during our casual conversation, he amazed me by saying, "If it ain't on Fox it ain't happened." And so it goes.

Here is a four minute clip of "Jon Stewart Reads Off Laundry List of False Statements by ‘Lying Dynasty’ Fox News". Watch it, it's funny. And sad.

http://gawker.com/5814309/jon-stewart-reads-off-laundry-list-of-false-statements-by-lying-dynasty-fox-news

 

[lake_george]

Hello Patrick,

You wrote, "I still find myself thinking from time to time that it should be possible for people in this reality to finally come to their senses and learn to reason together, to find solutions to problems and apply them in a fair and reasonable manner. Don't worry about me, I'm healing, honestly; I used to find myself thinking wishfully like this nearly all the time.

The fact is (and this really seems to be an actual fact), reasoning together is impossible without a certain stable framework upon which we all agree; black is black and white is white and this is this and that is that, therefore...that sort of thing. And as facts seem to be becoming increasingly less factual, hope for sanity fades."


Very well put!! And also along with that, I cannot help but have a personal agenda: to protect myself and my household, and along with an estimation of what I am 'owed', and from 'whom'. Am I responsible for what my ancestors did? How much am I willing to give up for the good of the whole, and also, what 'picture' of the whole could possibly be agreed on by all?

 

[Al Today]

Hi Patrick,

You may be interested in searching the forum for "Political Ponerology"

http://cassiopaea.org/forum/index.php/topic,16272.msg139206.html#msg139206

http://cassiopaea.org/forum/index.php/topic,14213.msg109511.html#msg109511

http://www.sott.net/articles/show/204905-Ponerology-101-The-Psychopath-s-Mask-of-Sanity

 

[engagedinattempting]

Thank you Al Today;

There's surely a lot to learn here, and all assistance is greatly appreciated.