Anyone who has tried having a rational, civil discussion with a TeaPublican has had the odd encounter where they are informed the "Fact Check Sites are liberal."
Then they give you the "facts" that they're all owned and/or operated by George Orwell.
The "conversation" quickly devolves into quagmire of myth vs. reality with both sides being treated equally.
The conservatives even established their "own" fact-check site, Conservative Fact Check.
(As an ironic aside, I wanted to give it a good look, just to see if it was credible. It wasn't. It was a lot of opinion stated as facts. But the one article I did find a fact on was reversing their previous ruling that Obama'a birth certificate was fake.
Part of their reasoning was, "We recently had to part ways with a contributor named "Techdude." It began with serious questions over whether his stated credentials are accurate. "
You get the irony: They had to recant their fact check because they didn't fact check their fact checker.
Inevitably it gets to this statement, which drives me insane to the point that I want to metaphorically rip my hair out, eat it, digest it, crap it out and then throw the hair-crap at the person who said it.
"You have your facts, I have mine."
No, I don't, and you don't either. That contradicts the very nature of what a fact is. No one "owns" a fact. Facts are completely independent of us. If every single human being disagreed with a fact, it would STILL be correct.
For example,
*Barack Obama was born.
*His birth was announced in twonewspapers, the Honolulu Advertiser and the Star Bulletin.
*He has releasedhis birth certificate (twice) and Dr. Chiyome Fukino, director of the Hawaii State Department of Health, has verified them.
These are all facts. Whether you chose to combine them to come to the conclusion that Obama was born in Hawaii is entirely your business. You can ignore them entirely. Whatever you do with those facts, they still exist.
And that's the second thing we need to understand. Having facts doesn't mean you have facts that support your conclusion. I truly believe that high school should have a mandatory course in propositional logic.
We spend so much time as a nation worrying over what our kids think, it seems that we gloss over whether they think, at all (and that's my baseless opinion).
There are accepted rules to logic, which dictate what can and can't be done with "facts" to prove an argument. In today's world, little time is wasted on those roles. For example, I read a piece by Dave Boyer of the Washington Times yesterday, where he quotes Obama:
Obviously, the nature of the Senate means that California has the same number of Senate seats as Wyoming. That puts us at a disadvantage. So there are some structural reasons why, despite the fact that Republican ideas are largely rejected by the public, it’s still hard for us to break through.
Boyer took that to mean,
President Obama is taking a swipe at the Founding Fathers, blaming his inability to move his agenda on the “disadvantage” of having each state represented equally in the Senate.
That is a flatly dishonest representation of Obama's statement. Obama was not speaking about the Founding Fathers. He wasn't "blaming" either. Boyer took a couple of words that Obama used, and erected a strawman, a basic fallacy.
He used a "fact" with Obama's actual words, but he didn't honestly represent what they meant in his own synthesis of them.
These two things, what facts you have and what you do with them, are the essence of any sound opinion.
The great lie of this century is that everyone's opinion matters. No they don't. Your opinion and mine should be afforded a level of respect exactly equal to the substance behind them. They deserve no more or less.
In fact, the measure of what kind of people we are is ultimately told by what happens when we are confronted with a fact which contradicts our opinion. We can then do one of two things
1. Dismiss the fact and hold the status quo.
2. Accept the fact, learn from it, and enlarge our opinion to include the fact.
So this brings us back to my original question: Are fact-checks sites (and by extension facts themselves) liberal? I don't think so.
But, there are generally two kinds of people. And is it possible that we choose our politics based on which kind of people we are?
The first group is inclined to give priority to what they value and their own personal experiences. They will readily accept what they agree with and dismiss what they disagree with.
The second group is inclined to give priority to what they know and have learned. Whether they agree or disagree with something, they tend to want to validate it firsthand.
I don't mean to imply that the first kind of person is a judgment either. There are some people who have different value-sets than others. We all have some degree of "Spock" and some degree of "McCoy" in us.
Does this relate to how do we chose our politics? One set of people would say they are secure in their values and aren't ready to flop about every time new shift in the wind comes
They might be seen as feeling threatened by change to those who disagree with them. That sounds like a conservative.
There are also those who question the establishment and are looking ways to fix what they perceive to be problems. They are going to be more open to change than the first group. That sounds like a liberal.
The fist group is innately trusting in what is established, while the second is naturally skeptical.
When I see a debunked Facebook meme, I tend to look at the most-liked comment.
Normally on conservative memes, it's supportive of the argument.
When I look at disproven liberal memes (they do exist) I also look for the top comment. Normally, it's a liberal angry at having been lied to and threatening to unlike the page if such things continue. I personally have a three-strikes-and-your-out policy on that, and it doesn't always get to three.
The second group is skeptical of the "facts" even those which favor their arguments.
Lying conservative memes tend to have longer lives because they get shared by people who accept they are true and pass them along. With liberal memes, that is less likely to happen.
The main reason Polifact says they review more conservative lies than liberal lies is that they get sent more of questions about conservative claims.
Does that mean that conservatives are more likely to lie? No. It does appear that there is, at minimum, a correlation between those who believe lies (and reject true things they disagree with) and those who are conservative, though.
My point is that factcheck sites aren't liberals and neither are facts. People that are curious about the actual facts tend to turn up liberal, though.
And, yes, I appreciate the irony that this whole diary is based solely on my own personal observations. I'm not trying to present this as proven facts. I do wish I had the time to research it, though.