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Comment by drzaiusapelord | Hacker News Reader

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drzaiusapelord

>I very very rarely hear a fact touted by the left OR right that is just outright incorrect.

The right absolutely makes up stories:

https://www.snopes.com/tag/breitbart/

https://www.snopes.com/tag/fox-news/

Lots and lots of false statements here.

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You don't even have to look past the current President, who is the most prominent member of the Republican party and to a degree the political rightwing in the US. He tells outright lies on a regular basis.

He lies about trivially verifiable things like the weather and number of people at his inauguration, past statements he has made, about whether any presidents between Reagan and himself have cut taxes, about peoples faces openly bleeding from a facelift, about CNN/WaPo/NYT "failing", about the murder rate, etc, etc, etc.

Here's a decent list to get started, for anyone interested. http://www.politifact.com/personalities/donald-trump/stateme...

Note that not everything on that list is an outright lie. Many of them are, but not all of them.

Snopes isn't made up of experts and isn't an unbiased source. It mystifies me that so many people treat it as reliable, let alone infallible.

(sorry for pointing this out, but downvoting me doesn't change that it's true)

That's about as useful as saying that Wikipedia may contain nonsense and therefore you shouldn't believe anything in Wikipedia. If you have examples of things on Snopes that are wrong then please supply them.

The beauty of Snopes is that it provides citations for its particular claims. People saying "Snopes is biased" in response to a Snopes article being posted don't tend to provide citations for why they think that particular Snopes article is inaccurate.

You're welcome to challenge their items on a line by line basis. Type it out, I'll wait.

There are also lots of other sources. I think playing up a 'no true scotsman' just empowers the liars because at a certain point you're just arguing that truth cannot be verified by anyone.

They have no valid credentials other than having been on the Internet a long time and having an interest in researching urban legends as laymen. One of the founders, David Mikkelson, couldn't answer questions about fact-checking due to legal issues[1].

If you really want to play the "HN says the names of logical fallacies" game, then I'll do you one better and say that challenging me to refute every single line item is an appeal to authority and we should just trust them because everyone says we should. There's no reason to believe them any more than there's a reason to believe much of anything published on somebody's personal website.

[1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/kalevleetaru/2016/12/22/the-dai...

This is a reversed appeal to authority, and the fact that you keep attacking “credentials” rather than anything solid is telling. As Vkou said, they cite their sources. I’ll take that over vague hand-waving around credentials any day. Like people who dismiss Wikipedia, the issue is that you need a case-by-case basis to dismiss cited works.

Again, you're doing everything but addressing the claims.

Again, if I was to link to WashPo or NYTimes, you'd dismiss them as well.

Again, you're just covering for the liars of the world.

You are defending the expert status of indisputable laymen by demanding a line by line refutation of everything they have ever written? And this seems not merely reasonable to you but you perceive it as upholding good reasoning and logic itself?

Every single one of Snopes' items could be correct and it wouldn't save your argument, because you're relying on the idea that what Snopes chooses to debunk is an unbiased representation of who actually tells more lies.

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