Don't lie. Don't distort. Ever.

Last edited Tue Dec 18, 2012, 02:30 PM - Edit history (4)

A lot of people seem to think that dishonesty, distortion, and emotion-based or faith-based propaganda are acceptable in a good cause—if they advance their political views or views of what is right.

Here's my problem... my central political view is that I am opposed to dishonesty, distortion, and emotion-based or faith-based propaganda.

Intrinsically.

Show me an advanced Earth creature without DNA and I will start rethinking evolution. (Or space aliens visiting us... one or the other.) It would be embarassing for me, given a thousand things I've said, but the truth is not optional.

It is central to my political stance that I think government should be rational. I thus seek to be, try to be on the side of the truth, whatever that may be.

John McCain's policy proposals would have been even more damaging in 2008 than Romney's policy proposals would have been in 2012 but I had even more antipathy for Romney because his entire candidacy was a war on truth... on the very notion of an objective reality upon which different people can agree.

The truth itself is a side.

To paraphrase Lincoln, I do not pray that the truth is on our side, I pray that we are on the side of the truth.



"We should cool the planet or ban guns of have larger class sizes or eliminate the GZ-1 bomber because X is greater than Y."

If someone shows that X is not greater than Y, that doesn't mean global warming is fake or whatever. It mean the argument is false. And false is bad. It means that people concerned with the truth will tend to see the argument as a data point against what it is trying to argue.

None of us can keep on top of everything so we must often assess the credibility of others. And when an entity lies once then they are no longer reliable.

Whenever we see a side distorting the truth it represents a loss of credibility for the side. The side can still be right, of course, but relying on lies is an inferential counter-argument insofar as it suggests a lack of truth to rely on.

I have never examined a glacial core sample or taken the temperature at the north pole. I have no idea whether global climate change is real beyond my assessment of evidence and argument presented.

Climate skeptics lie a lot. The infrastructure of science is pretty reliable, based on past performance. It is easy to see that the climate change side probably has a lot more truth to rely on, because they (we) don't lie as much... and spin, evade, move goal-posts, construct strawmen... all that stuff is ways of lying. (It is easy to deceive without making false literal statements. Even toddlers are hip to that.)

But when "we" make climate change claims that are false it doesn't help that the "side" is right. When "we" (internet activists, not scientists) claimed the Greenland ice sheet had melted to nothing in the space of a few weeks last summer it was obviously not true, and that was quite painful to me because I know there is someone on the fence who viewed that claim the way I view a lot of comparably outlandish RW claims... as excellent shorthand evidence that their side is not worth taking seriously, and likely to be wrong.

There are value judgments that are not matters of true or false, of course. There is no true or false answer to whether a fetus is a human being, for instance, because "human being" is a philosophical category. I cannot mathematically prove to you that pro-choice is right.

But I expect every pro-choice argument that is reducible to truth and falsity to be true. I expect that of my side.

During the campaign Akin said that there are millions of abortions every year. In reality, there are not. It is a lie. (We haven't had as many as 2 million abortions in a year since the early 80s, IIRC) They lie. It is what they do.

Being rigorously truthful is supposed to be what we do, if there is a "we" that I care to be part of.