Keep Chuckin’ Those Facts!
We have yet more comedy gold from the most useless website in the known universe. You will remember that Politifact’s “lie of the year” was given to Democratic arguments about Republican efforts to end Medicare that were, at a minimum, perfectly defensible. So how does it rate Marcio Rubio’s straightforwardly erroneous assertion that a majority of Americans are conservatives? Why, as “mostly true,” of course. Do they have data nobody else has access to? Nope; their argument is that a plurality is pretty much the same thing as a majority. Right.
So, to review, Democratic arguments that are consistent with the facts are “pants on fire” lies if they’re inconvenient to Republicans, while Republican statements that are straightforwardly factually wrong are actually true. Truly hacktacular.
Let’s put it like this. Suppose you claim that 60% of Americans support policy X. The truth is that only 40% of Americans do.
If you’re a Democrat, you’re a filthy liar. But if you’re a Republican, you were two-thirds correct. Hence, “mostly true.”
See, it’s all perfectly logical.
Republicans are the party of “can we get partial credit for our answers even if they are wrong?”
Soft bigotry of low expectations.
Damned liberal media
The media likes to pat the GOP on the head and say, “Aww, it’s so cute that you’re trying.”
+1
Seems legit.
In other news, “some say” that the Earth is the center of the universe. Politifakes has deemed this statement “mostly true.” (Reminds me of “mostly dead” from The Princess Bride.)
Y’know, I read that on the Internet. So it must be true.
Actually, Einstein says that is completely true.
You shouldn’t use the word “completely”. Any point in the universe appears to be the center of the universe spatially, but only the big bang is at the origin in space-time. The origin would be the “center” in that the universe extends from it in space-time.
Nerd. ;D
You know, if Hubble teaches that there is no center of the universe, isn’t that basically saying that every place being the center of the universe? And if so, isn’t the Earth one of those every places?
The analogy used is that we live on the surface of an expanding balloon. Every point on the surface of the balloon is moving away from us equally, so it seems as if we are at the center of the universe. The truth is that the center of the universe is not just “where”, but also “when”. It is at the center of the balloon, when the surface of the balloon was also at the center – before it began inflating.
What’s infinity divided by two?
Yea, cosmographically, every point in the universe is the center of the universe.
So what you’re saying is, I really *am* the center of the universe. My ex-girlfriends were SO wrong!
So orange is red, so long as you ignore that yellowish tinge. And I am Marie of Romania.
I doff my cap to you for that Dorothy Parker reference — nice one!
Delighted you noticed! “I never seek to take the credit; We all assume that Oscar said it.” (She was a genius.)
How is it even possible for a Republican to tell a lie under the Polifact standard?
“Obama was born in Kenya.”
That statement is “mostly true” because, although Obama was actually born in the United States, his Father was born in Kenya and Obama had Kenyan citizenship until he was 23. That is very similar to being born in Kenya. Therefore, this statement is “mostly true.”
Go ahead, play the Polifact game. Try to find ANY statement that can’t be “mostly true” under their reasoning.
O.M.G!
“All Muslims are terrorists.”
Some Muslims are terrorists, therefore this statement is partly true.
This doesn’t work in every context, of course. For example:
“Some Christians are abortion clinic bombers.”
Most Christians are not abortion clinic bombers, therefore this statement is mostly false.
The difference between Christian abortion clinic bombers and Muslim terrorists is shut up you pinko.
Actually, the assertion is 100% true: some Christians have bombed abortion clinics. It’s more than one, to be sure
We’re using Politifact reasoning, not real reasoning.
Darn. I knew I should have taken the extra blow to the head this morning for breakfast…
Although blow is properly applied to the nose specifically, and not the head generally, I’m going to go to say your statement is mostly true.
Update (via Balloon Juice). Politifact Texas saith, authoritatively, that “44 percent isn’t a majority” and uses this to rate a Ron Paul claim about the gold standard False. Not even mostly false, just plain unvarnished Falso. Politifact Florida, OTOH … So maybe we need a Higher Authority. Webster’s?
I don’t have the figures in front of me but if memory serves me correct the reason why there is a high percentage of Americans who call themselves conservative is because blacks call themselves conservative at a higher rate than whites. Yet, I doubt Rubio, Politifact, or anyone who even remotely follows politics expects even 20% of African American voters to vote Republican
I’m going to assume without checking that Politifact uses polls where respondents self-identify as conservative, and doesn’t mention polls where liberal policy positions have a clear outright majority.
Christ Politifact is dumb.
Even if you were wrong (which you are not) you would be True in Politifact world, because assuming is the name of the game.
Apparently Politifact is borrowing Wikipedia’s standards, or perhaps The Wik is just echoing what they’ve learned from decades of crappy journalistic practice.
Chicken or egg? Who cares, it’s salmonella all the way down.
Wikipedia pretty much has to work that way. If anonymous editors could offer their own interpretations of primary sources, there would be no way to keep crackpot claims out, and no way for an article on any remotely controversial subject to be anywhere near stable. Relying on secondary sources by reliable publishers is not perfect, but it’s better than the alternatives.
That’s a bit of a catch-22 though, isn’t it? Especially as the Wikipedia age grows and people come to believe factoids because they were published on Wikipedia.
It’s not that bad. Messer-Kruse published his book, and it’s now cited in the article. There’s obviously trade-offs, but keeping the cranks at bay is probably worth not being up on the current scholarship.
Messer-Kruse was treated rather shabbily in his interactions there, and it’s certainly become the case that Wikipedia is kind of its own world that it can be hard to penetrate if you’re an outsider.
That being said, Messer-Kruse made no effort to try to understand why the rule he ran afoul of is in place. I’ve been editing Wikipedia for a decade now, and without those rules, the thing would be overrun with crackpottery. There’s a lot more cranks who want to use their own idiosyncratic interpretation of primary sources in articles than there are legitimate academics who want to include findings from their research before those are published in peer-reviewed academic publications.
Oh, another entry in the “Wikipedia deleted my edits, here’s a long screed on why Wikipedia sucks” genre of editorial. How
interestingtedious.It still sucks, so why not?
There are plenty of standards that could be articulated by which competing claims could be judged in a reasonably straightforward fashion. Scholars and publishing houses use them all the time. Wikipedia chooses not to. Whining about how hard it would be to choose, how many arguments there would be, is a cop-out which results in deeply compromised utility.
Knowledge is not a majoritarian enterprise.
“Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’” — Isaac Asimov
Wikipedia has a standard for judging competing claims, and for the most part it works pretty well. It tries to figure out what position has the most support in the existing secondary literature. Normally that works pretty well.
The problem here, so far as I can tell, is that either Messer-Kruse’s points had never been published in the reputable secondary literature, or that literature that had dealt with these issues existed, but he failed to point to it.
I think Wikipedia could probably do a better job balancing these kinds of concerns, but it already does a good job. Problems only really arise on subjects where you have a large body of inaccurate secondary literature and accurate research is being done but hasn’t been published yet.
And in this case, the main problem was a bunch of editors who dismissed Messer-Kruse, rather than trying to engage with him.
It’s simply mathematics. “Most” implies 50% plus 1. Therefore, if Rubio says most people are conservative, and 50% plus 1 of 50% plus one are conservative, it’s “mostly” true. Two “mosts” there. 25% plus 1 of all people being conservative entitles Rubio to say that most people are conservative and have it be “mostly” true!
I like making fun of PolitiFact and all, but isn’t it time that we just start ignoring it?
I’d argue that so long as they’re taken seriously by the mainstream newspapers and other media, we have a duty to twist the knife until either they reform or the mainstream media catches on to their game.
Since they inherited their ethos of “torture the facts until both sides are equally culpable” from the mainstream media, this is sadly not a short-term proposition.
Worse, they’ve taken their Pulitzer Prize, chucked it aside, and rated something said on Glee.
I will be honest that I never really saw the nuances in PolitiFact until realizing how shamefully low the bar is for rating a Republican-esque statement vs. rating a Democrat-esque Statement.
Wait ’til you hear Glenn Kessler equivocate
Give ‘em a break.
If they can’t accept this as true, they’re never gonna make their quota for the month.
That is their own fault for setting the quota for “true Republican statements” as greater than 0.
I think you misspelled “fucking” in the title to this post.
And “rats”
“Politifact” has become an oxymoron.
How the hell can they reconcile this with the their ruliing on Jack Lew’s statement that it takes 60 votes in the senate to pass a budget. They ruled Lew’s statement false.
They explained that while it was the case that no budget could possibly be passed without the approval of 60 senators, that it was factually inaccurate because only a majority of voting senators was necessary.
Republican statement, technically false, practically false, is mostly true.
Democratic statement, technically false, practically true, is false (not even mostly false).
They’re displayed on the same page. Can they not see how bad it looks?
It’s only bad if one side is complaining. If both are, they must be doing something right! Not you know, selling out so no one will yell at them.
I bought 40% of a company. Now I need PolitiFact to explain to the board of the directors why I have the right to fire them at will.
You only mostly have it.
“their argument is that a plurality is pretty much the same thing as a majority.”
President H. Ross Perot feels that this statement is also mostly true, but he can’t figure out why Air Force One hasn’t picked him up lately.
Ross Perot got a plurality of the vote?