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Eclipse
Tag: truth
The ghost of Thomas Paine is suing Instagram and Facebook.
Mr. Paine, the eloquent champion of the American Revolution who penned such zeitgeist-capturing volumes as Common Sense, The American Crisis, and The Rights of Man, is going to court to protest the indignity that these social-media forums recently inflicted upon his spirit by censoring his statement that “He who dares not offend cannot be honest.”
The statement comes from an op-ed Paine published in the April 24, 1776 issue of the Pennsylvania Journal: “Cato’s partizans may call me furious; I regard it not. There are men too, who, have not virtue enough to be angry, and that crime perhaps is Cato’s. He who dares not offend cannot be honest.”
Mr. Paine seems to be saying that persons of craven mettle often eschew the challenge of being standard-bearers of truth, especially when controversial matters are involved. Articulating such views forthrightly tends to offend — somebody.
The particular mentalities of censorious Facebook flunkies and algorithms are new to Mr. Paine, of course. But he is ready to fight.
“Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered,” he declares when asked to assess his prospects, “yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly. . . . [I]t would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as FREEDOM should not be highly rated.”
If that be hate speech, Mr. Paine seems to suggest, make the most of it.
This is Common Sense. Happy New Year! I’m Paul Jacob.
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Reality About Fake News
“Fake news entered the world with the emergence of descriptive language,” writes philosopher Ray Scott Percival on Medium, “perhaps hundreds of thousands of years ago.”
And it is here to stay, because we lack a “fool-proof algorithm” for “disposing of fake news” without cranking out a different variety of fake news.
“But this should not demoralise us,” Percival admonishes. “It is no different from the situation of science. Removing error has to be a piecemeal, tentative enterprise.”
Percival, following a line of argument from philosopher Karl Popper, denies there is such a thing as “manifest truth.” It’s a delusion, says Percival. (The title of his multi-part essay is “Fake News and the Manifest Truth Delusion.”) But you don’t necessarily need to accept wholly his Popperian take on epistemology (or should that be “epistemics”?) to agree with his important conclusion, that a “ministry of fake news is a fantasy, a tool of oppression, suppression and stagnation, and would unavoidably impair our best means of error-correction.”
He recognizes that error isn’t the half of it. People lie. And some lies look pretty convincing, so we spread them. But the bizarre part of the current “fake news” mania is this: too many earnest citizens turn to government to stop “fake news,” though the biggest and most influential liar has always been the government.
What to do? Well, our “biggest gain in the control of error would be through the separation of science and the corrupting influences of politics (e.g. state funding, licensing etc.) and the chilling effect of political correctness on open discussion.”
Percival wants to “keep the enlightenment alive and kicking.” I like to think that’s just common sense.
I’m Paul Jacob.
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“There was truth and there was untruth,” George Orwell wrote in his classic novel, 1984, “and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.”
In the Age of Trump and Fake News, way past 1984, I’m hanging on for dear sanity.
Earlier this week, I commented on the brouhaha between the president and Senator Elizabeth Warren (D‑Mass.). Today, I have a bone to pick with Snopes, the faux-fact-checking site, which found this statement to be TRUE: “President Donald Trump offered to donate $1 million to a charity of Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s choice if she would take a DNA test to demonstrate that she had Native American ancestry.”
Not “Mostly True” with some explanation, but just “True.” Problem is, that statement is false.
Mr. Trump did not make that offer; he promised people at a Montana rally that he would make such an offer in the future, if he found himself “in the middle of the debate, when she proclaims that she is of Indian [sic] heritage.”
Splitting hairs? Where is the split? Here is President Trump’s full statement.
Snopes was hardly alone in misreporting Trump. The Hill titled its story, “Trump denies offering $1 million for Warren DNA test, even though he did.” The Washington Post parroted The Hill’s “fact-checked headline.” Other major outlets from CNN to the Miami Herald declared, falsely, that Trump had made the offer.
Look, I don’t blame Warren for goading Trump to pay up. That’s the political game.
But the media, especially fact-checkers, should be diligent about what precisely the president has said — not playing that game.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
One of my more persistent critics on this site asked, last week, why I might believe anything the current president says — considering all the lies.
For reasons of decorum I won’t repeat his exact wording.
The odd thing about the comment was not the vulgarity, though (unfortunately). It was the idea that I was relying upon belief in Donald Trump’s veracity. The whole point of my commentary regarding Trump’s handling of trade and foreign policy was to read between some lines.
I try never to believe anything … er, everything … any politician says.
In Donald Trump’s case, though, there are lies and there are fictions and there are exaggerations. And corkers … and “negotiating gambits.” Separating the wheat from the chaff from the grindstone is not always easy.
Based not only on some of what he says, but also on results-thus-far from the EU negotiations, Trump’s idea of “fair trade” appears to be multilateral free trade. But he has chosen a bizarre method to get there: the threat of high-tariff protectionism — which in the past has led to multilateral protectionism, not free trade.
Trump sees everything as a contest. Trade isn’t a contest as such. It’s win-win. But trade negotiations are contests. And Trump’s game of chicken is dangerous.
Regarding foreign policy generally, though, he seems to be playing a more familiar game: we can outspend everybody. The recent increase in Pentagon spending is bigger than Russia’s annual military budget!
So, who pays? Americans in
- higher taxes and
- the consequences of massive debt, as well as in
- the higher prices from his tariffs.
That’s awfully daring of him. For us.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
Photo from Max Pixel
The “best debates” are ones in which one side shouts down the other side and threatens violence.
Well, that is what a Washington Post essay implies. In “Why ‘social justice warriors’ are the real defenders of free speech on campus,” Matthew A. Sears, an associate professor of classics and ancient history at the University of New Brunswick, offers a bizarre take on current campus controversies.
After two years of bizarre antics from leftist student bodies in colleges and universities all over the country, academics as diverse as Steven Pinker, Jordan Peterson, and Camille Paglia have denounced the intentionally disruptive and even violent tactics of student mobs. We need to go back to the Socratic method and “the disinterested pursuit of truth,” as Jonathan Haidt, the author of The Righteous Mind, put it.
Sears counters this by defending the “social justice approach” as better than a “disinterested pursuit of truth.” Instead of “constituting an attack on knowledge, the social justice lens reflects new ideas generated by academic disciplines and experts within them, and generally encourages expanding our knowledge and opening up subjects to new perspectives, much like Socrates advocated.”
Conflating Socratic “dialectic” with the screaming matches and overt force used by the social justice students who have shut down lectures, seminars and fora featuring non-leftist figures such as Ben Shapiro, Heather Mac Donald and Charles Murray, is more effrontery than enlightening.*
And about that “social justice lens”? Lenses refract, mirrors reflect — and Sears’ argument, you will notice, defends bad behavior out of his classroom by focusing on how he teaches in class.
We don’t need mirrors or lenses to see the deflection here.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
* It was heartening to read most commenters on the page engaging in a merciless “dialectic” against the author.
