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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   30074 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 12, 2024

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NPR brutally fact-checked Trump, finding "162 lies and distortions". I am not here to inform you that Trump is a particularly honest man, but this bizarre tic that news outlets have developed of referring to statements of opinion that they disagree with as "lies and distortions" is wildly unhelpful. Let's look at a couple:

59 “The judge was a brilliant judge, and all they do is they play the ref with the judges. But this judge was a fair but brilliant judge.”

There has been lots of criticism of the judge in the case, Aileen Cannon, who Trump appointed. She had very little experience as a trial judge, made several decisions that were questioned by legal experts and early in this case, had a ruling, in which she called for a special master to review classified documents first, overturned by the 11th Circuit.

What the fuck? OK, you think she's not fair and brilliant, fine, I probably even agree with that, but it's just obviously a statement of opinion rather than an appropriate target for some nerd to "fact check".

91 “They wanna stop people from pouring into our country, from places unknown and from countries unknown from countries that nobody ever heard of.”

Someone has likely heard of whatever the unnamed country is.

Wow, thank god for that fact check. Very serious journalism.

135 “I've never seen people get elected by saying we're going to give you a tax increase.”

Vice President Harris has echoed President Biden’s pledge not to raise taxes on anyone making less than $400,000. However, Biden has called for raising taxes on wealthy individuals and raising the corporate tax rate from 21% to 28% – halfway back to where it was before the 2017 cut. — Scott Horsley

I don't even know what NPR is trying to argue here. Again, perhaps Trump is incorrect in his assessment of the electoral success of promising tax increases, but there isn't some "lie or distortion" there.

153 “She was early, I mean, she was the first of the prosecutors, really, you know, now you see Philadelphia, you see Los Angeles, you see New York, you see various people that are very bad, but she was the first of the bad prosecutors, she was early.”

Although Harris did refer to herself in her 2019 memoir as a “progressive prosecutor,” her legacy has largely been seen as tougher on crime. She has supported some progressive reforms, such as pretrial diversion, which offers certain criminal defendants things like drug treatment instead of going to trial. — Meg Anderson

And on and on and on. These are disagreements, not "lies and distortions". Maybe you think Kamala's great! That she's actually the perfect balance of tough on crime with smart on crime progressivism, that Trump is just too goddamned stupid to understand that, and so on. That's fine! But there isn't a "lie and distortion", there's an actual disagreement.

I'm amazed at just how banal "factchecking" has become. I wouldn't object to this particular piece framed as an argument that Trump is VeryBadActually, but this smug tone intended to reward their readers with the sense that they're hearing serious truths, and that they have precisely calculated 162 lies is incredibly annoying. That figure then gets repeated by figures like Pete Buttigieg as though it's actually a serious empirical measure of dishonesty, furthering the sense that they're the party of facts. Perhaps things have always been this way and I'm just sick of it, but it sure feels like it's getting worse as party apparatchiks try to create an impression of the official truth.

Depressing and infuriating, but I guess it's inevitable. The position of "official decider of truth" is just too powerful to let it remain non-partisan. It's like how the Supreme Court is theoretically just "calling balls and strikes," interpreting the constitution in a fair and fact-based way, but in reality there's a clear liberal vs conservative voting slant to all of its decisions.

I hope more people start to catch on that "fact-checking" is not an official position, and just start to ignore it.

Several of the members of the Supreme Court try pretty hard to just call balls and strikes.

The position of "official decider of truth" is just too powerful to let it remain non-partisan.

See also, Wikipedia.

I guess it's inevitable.

I disagree. "When good men do nothing", and all. If enough former listeners like myself (and probably others here) made their infuriation known to NPR and similar dishonest media types, we might be able to move the needle back in a fair direction.

I'm amazed at just how banal "factchecking" has become.

Has become? It was always this bad! Hell, it was worse. Remember when Trump got called a liar for stating a correct figure but with implications the fact-checker didn't like?

I'd go looking for more examples but google is completely useless and can't even find my comments complaining about this exact phenomenon on the old subreddit.

countries unknown from countries that nobody ever heard of.

I recently was surprised to learn that South America is not all Spanish/Portuguese. There is a Dutch speaking country, Republiek Suriname, which is almost as large as Uruguay, and which largest ethnicity are Hindu Asian Indians.

It is less populated than Uruguay and mostly jungle though.

Yeah. One fact that I always love is that the largest Japanese population outside of Japan is in Brazil.

There's also a few Hmong in French Guiana. Instead of bringing old allied Hmong to the metropole the French basically looked around, found an equivalent jungle geography, and sent them there. And instead of getting culture-bound diseases they flourished instead!

There's also several large enclaves of Mennonites/Anabaptists. I recall specifically in Bolivia and Argentina but there are probably some elsewhere.

Brazil used to have a sizeable Japanese diaspora in the millions.

Wikipedia's list of sovereign states may be of interest to you.

The rightmost column of the table also includes information on autonomous regions. If 1 percent of people have heard of Suriname and Guyana, then 0.1 percent of people have heard of Gagauzia and Adjara!

I've been to Adjara and I've still never heard of it. I would imagine it's an "autonomous region" in the same way Russia has "autonomous oblasts". From a quick read it seems like it used to have a lot of autonomy under a local strongman until a local crisis in 2004 after Georgia's colour revolution.

Batumi was a pretty popular resort in the Soviet era, so you’re underestimating Adjara, even if only counting Americans.

I was aware of Gagauz people but not the autonomous region.

Used to listen to NPR everyday in college. Sad to see where they are today, stooping to essentially the political punditry equivalent of CinemaSins.

I would watch PoliticalSins if he did funny commentary of all the sins with the ding and the sin counter. Whoever makes this channel first is gonna be rolling in subscribers.

It would work best if it operated in the same spirit as those "American politics with no context" videos on YouTube; mainly aiming for comedy, across both political aisles. Cinemasins was originally a comedic channel before they began using the premise as a way to deliver actual criticism. If a Politicalsins did this it would quickly become subsumed into the mud-slinging contest.

On the topic of YouTube comedy that is politically adjacent but isn't really mudslinging:

There are lots of videos on various topics where the authors commentary is delivered by AI voices of Trump, Obama, and Biden. They're usually called "Presidents ... do X" (e.g. play a videogame, react to a trailer).

These might allude to current events but the focus is usually not the presidents or the politics, it's usually the content (like the game or trailer)

I'm amazed at just how banal "factchecking" has become. I wouldn't object to this particular piece framed as an argument that Trump is VeryBadActually, but this smug tone intended to reward their readers with the sense that they're hearing serious truths, and that they have precisely calculated 162 lies is incredibly annoying. That figure then gets repeated by figures like Pete Buttigieg as though it's actually a serious empirical measure of dishonesty, furthering the sense that they're the party of facts. Perhaps things have always been this way and I'm just sick of it, but it sure feels like it's getting worse as party apparatchiks try to create an impression of the official truth.

Mark Halperin, a high-priced political analyst, just said "The media now has, it's a single mission: [to] stop Donald Trump from winning." I think that's probably right, with "media" defined as "everything to the left of FOX."

It’s really quite the shame from my perspective. It’s actually important to know whether what public figures say is true or not. Except when these “fact checks” became mere political propaganda, it makes it that much harder to get people to believe in actual facts and actually look into whether or not a given statement is true. And it can be dangerous especially in situations where the general public has no ability to actually fact check on its own. If we have a natural disaster and need to get good information out quickly, having people actually trust that their news sources are trustworthy and accurate and do what needs to be done becomes impossible when people are used to understanding “facts” as “those things that we want you to believe whether or not they are actually true.”

The press doing this is creating something like a medieval world in which there was no way to study and learn the truth so you were left with terms like Orthodoxy and Heresy. Figuring out whether or not the earth went around the sun might well be difficult. But you absolutely knew whether or not the concept was Heresy.

The mainstream media is burning its credibility right at the point where it's becoming trivial to create completely believable fake images and videos of literally anything you want to depict.

NPR is playing to its audience. It’s basically a partisan rag at this point.

Anti trump propaganda dressed up as neutral think pieces is just the lay of the land now.

I find this all so fascinating and frustrating.

Back in the 2016 election, I remember being struck by the fact that Trump lies like a used car salesman, and most other politicians lie the way that lawyers lie (which is to say, they know exactly how to shade and color and selectively edit and omit what they say so they can't be held legally accountable for it while still absolutely misleading different audiences rhetorically) And at the time, I remember noting that that distinction mattered a great deal to the existing ruling class, because it accounts for much of their skillset, but I was pretty sure that it was not a distinction that lots of normies were so concerned with - or that they might even find lawyer-style lying much more objectionable than used car salesman lying, which they intuitively understand much better.

I guess this gets kind of philosophical or something about the nature of truth and lying, but I find most of Trump's lying so transparent and bullshitty and unimportant that it's hard to even read them as lies, exactly. I remember all the breathless gasping by the press about Trump inflating his inauguration crowd sizes, and... seriously? Who could possibly care? That kind of thing is baked into the cake when listening to someone like Trump. It's like being shocked that Steve Jobs would say the new iphone was the most amazing phone ever, even though he didn't run double blind studies. Trump exaggerates like crazy and plays very fast and loose with details in way that generally strikes me as pretty lazy and bigmouthed, but it's all so brazen and in your face. Everyone knows people like him. It's not hard to calibrate your reaction as an audience and still know how to get the gist of what he's saying (even if I find that all pretty exhausting).

Meanwhile, if I think about my own experience as a voter, I personally experienced Obama as a VASTLY bigger liar than Trump could ever hope to be. And that's because Obama, and his campaign, and the press, were able to shape a public narrative about himself and his administration, leading into the 2008 election, that ended up being massively at odds with how radical and divisive his administration ended up being behind the scenes. But he lied like a cross between a lawyer and an author (which is what he is, so, you know, this shouldn't have been news). Now, legally, it may well be that if you pored over everything Obama said in public in 2008, none of it would be technically a lie in a court of law. And that would be the point, right? Maybe it was my own fault for treating him like a blank slate and projecting what I wanted to believe onto what he said (which he and his campaign aggressively aided and abetted). And again, that would be the point, right? Those can be useful skills to win an election. But I know how I feel about it all now, for whatever that's worth.

but I find most of Trump's lying so transparent and bullshitty and unimportant that it's hard to even read them as lies, exactly.

Interesting point, and hits on something in the vein of "Trump's supporters take him seriously, but not literally."

Part of his image and legend is being a bragadoccio, and embellishing stories is something the 'average' person probably considers fine as long as you do it with a bit of a wink and a nod.

Vs. the normal Politician method of lying by omission, or using weasel words, or aggressive cherrypicking of data so that no particular statement is blatantly 'false' but ultimately the information is not conveying any 'truth' about the world to the listener.

Trump could claim to have a 15 inch penis, which is a very specific statement of fact, and fact checkers can retort "ACKSHULLY the largest recorded penis is 13 inches, it is extremely unlikely Trump has exceeded that length" and include photos of his (clothed) crotch which would suggest he's not that well endowed. But supporters wouldn't care because they don't expect him to whip his schlong out to prove it, they get the message as its presumably intended.

There's ample lies one can pin to Trump, I don't mind calling those out, but anybody who understands that politics is a game of dishonesty in every single aspect probably can't muster up much outrage for Trump as if NOW the political system is trying to enforce honesty in candidates.

This was a very enlightening comment, thanks.

However, I think there's a very good reason people think of used-car salesman lying as reflecting much more poorly on character than lawyer lying. The used-car salesman style demonstrates sloppiness with and disregard of details---this is a huge red flag if you want your leaders to have any sort of ability to understand technical or scientific questions. Conversely, being able to pull off lawyer-style, technically-true lying is a great demonstration of being good with details.

Lawyer-style lying is never going to lead to travesties like sharpiegate, which actually harmed the ability of the National Hurricane Center to function as a scientific organization. This sort of thing is very dangerous if you want government policy to accurately reflect reality.

The motivations are different. One doesn't really care all that much about details, as long as the point is gotten across. The other is perfectly willing to mislead about the overall point, as long as it's defensible in the details. When a lot of people are judging and making decisions based on the overall thrust of what's going on, not details, one is far more deceptive on a practical, who-aligns-with-me-more (and so I should vote for them) level.

It seems to me like a lot of people care more about overall alignment than details. (This is not at all to say that details aren't important.)

It seems to me like a lot of people care more about overall alignment than details.

I wasn't disagreeing that these (and the various feelings described in the original post) are the true feelings people have. I will however argue that people who care more about overall alignment than details are wrong to do so. We should therefore judge car-salesman lying as worse than lawyer lying.

The world is too complicated---caring about vibes and perceived alignment over details is one of the biggest sources of misguided policy today. Most liberal nonsense, for example, comes from this: restricting housing construction to keep people from being displaced by rising prices, making college admissions more "holistic" and less objective to help disadvantaged students, etc.

Would you then say that what's complaint-worthy is not the deception, but that it evinces a lack of concern for details? That is, there's a problem, but the problem isn't that it's lying?

Yeah, I would say that. When a stranger (like not a friend, family member, mentor, doctor---stranger means someone with no professional or personal reason to care significantly about specifically my welfare) is trying to convince me to do something (vote for someone, buy something from them, sign a contract), its just a default assumption that there's serious amounts of lying and manipulation involved.

Specifically for politicians, you might as well complain about a TV ad lying to you. And sure, I guess part of my gut judgement here is based on a personal bias that I find lawyerly lying way easier to see through, but I hope I presented enough arguments that don't rest on this bias.

This would be more compelling if the lawyerly liars actually demonstrated competence. Unfortunately, they rarely do.

I think there's some epistemic room there to believe that Trump himself believed he saw an earlier forecast that included Alabama and that the media were being unfair to him. During the controversy he apparently tweeted out an undoctered map from some agency that did show impacts to Alabama.

I can think of examples coming from respectable lawyerly types that don't have so much room. For example, Rache Levine getting WPATH to drop age guidelines on "gender affirming care."

I vaguely remember seeing a spaghetti plot that showed a few tracks leading into the Gulf....

Politicians spin. They fib. They misspeak. They make honest mistakes like the rest of us. And, yes, they even sometimes exaggerate their biographies. ...

But what former President Trump did this past Thursday went well beyond the bounds of what most politicians would do.

It's okay when we do it, but it's not okay when Trump does it.

I remember in 2016 when Trump made a comment that Hillary Clinton had illegally deleted her private email server by “acid-washing” it. Snopes gave that statement a rating of “false”. Snopes’ reasoning: Hillary had illegally deleted her files with an app called “bleach-bit” and no physical acid was involved.

NBC has not deleted that particular fact check, either.

Even their top fact check is unadulterated propaganda. “ I think our country right now is in the most dangerous position it’s ever been in” is a statement Trump ties to a plausible future war, as is clear from his speech. A war with China or a Middle Eastern war will affect the economy negatively. NPR ignores this.

Given that there was a recent bipartisan commission that concluded "The US is in the most precarious position since WWII"... that would have been entertaining if they'd properly fact-checked it: "Trump's wrong, it's not quite as bad as right before the most destructive war in history. Yet."

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