Another fun one I ask when someone brings up Snopes: Who snopes the snopes? In other words how do we know they are not being biased or thorough enough?
I am not saying everything there is wrong but I have ran into weird biased articles before.
I am not saying everything there is wrong but I have ran into weird biased articles before.
1) Complete lack of transparency. No versioning or history of how answers have changed. They even opt-out of archive.org history tracking. They usually only disclose one author, when oftentimes there are many.
2) They editorialize many questions, changing them in such a way that they can give the answer they want to. This is done often by inserting modifiers like "always" or "never" or something similar.
A trustworthy organization doing fact checking on one side of the aisle while ignoring inaccuracies from the other side is preferable to no fact-checking at all. Question is: where is Republican Snopes? It's a free information market; why is nobody doing it?
Most people are Liberal (in the American sense) because that's what all the organs of culture promote and reinforce. It's like the "default" position that people adopt. I grew up liberal in a liberal household where we watched Hollywood movies and mainstream news like ABC, NBC, PBS and I listened to NPR and I went to school which was run by generally liberal teachers and administrators and that's pretty much why I was liberal.
This is the Cathedral vs the Bazaar approach to sense-making.
Steve Bannon and his movement are more representative of mainstream conservatism. Even someone Tucker Carlson used to be very much like Chris Wallace. The reason why his program is so popular now is because he's shifted radically away from his establishmentarian position towards Steve Bannon's position.
Personally I don't watch Fox News because of how low to middle brow and Cathedral-like it is.
Cable TV is still a niche.
Now, Fox News and OAN and Sinclair are not, publically, actually the John Birch Society, so sure, you could say "right wingers don't think they lean right either".
Plot out a chart of US political opinion, and I more or less guarantee you that in most things, you'll find your list of media outlights absolutely "centrist", and the 3 I just named distinctly "to the right" of mainstream US political opinion.
> here is no Republican Snopes because conservatives, since the Enlightenment, don't do sense making
Which is both mixing the some undefined set of concepts of the Enlightenment with some undefined characteristics of "All Republicans", in an awkward ad-hominem against "non-republicans"? It's nonsensical.
> At the end of the day unless you were personally there to witness something or can prove something mathematically or do the science yourself,
All truth is subjective, so there is no truth tautology.
Etc etc. There isn't a point being made or a topic to discuss. It's a "too many ideas" post mixed with too many wild tangents that are intentionally designed to incite.
ie Vapid flamebait.
And yes all discussions of this type require some generalization and lumping. "Republican" doesn't even mean one thing since the party consists of libertarians and evangelical Christians and neo-conservatives among many others.
Conservatives have always done sense making via institutional consensus, even moreso than post-enlightenment liberals, though the institutions that they tend to appeal to are those explicitly devoted to their ideological world view (whether it's the organs of a particular Church, or economists of the Austrian School) and not so much those even superficially devoted to objective exploration of facts, even when approaching questions that are, at least on the surface, about objectives facts (what is) rather than ideology (what should be).
> Most people are Liberal (in the American sense)
No, they aren't, unless you are conflating multiple different and incompatible American senses of “Liberal” and thus covering the entire range from the moderate right to the far left.
What is a "fact" or what is "true" is dependent on your values (aka your ideology). This is one of Nietzsche's main contributions to philosophy.
There are things like mathematical and logical truth and really basic physical assertions (e.g. the sky is blue) but those are qualitatively different than what we're talking about.
Both normative and positive statements about the world of human affairs are ultimately dependent on ideology and that might explain to you why you perceive conservatives as focusing on arguments over ideology. That is what people should be arguing over since from that all else flows. When people don't share substantially similar values even language itself becomes useless as a means of communication because the words themselves mean different things.
No, it's not. That's one of the Enlightenment’s many contributions to philosophy and the foundation on which the advances in knowledge of the universe enabling the explosion of post-Enlightenment technical progress is built.
Obviously, one might have ideological, aesthetic, or other preferences for what facts ought to be, and one might have beliefs about questions of fact that ultimately result from those preferences, but—Roadrunner cartoons not withstanding—beliefs about the material universe don't trump material facts.
(However, it's kind of funny that you are making, as a positive argument in favor of conservatism, exactly the argument that conservatives usually not only reject, but also attribute—not entirely inaccurately though certainly overgenerally—to the “postmodern” left and cite as a key reason for rejecting the left.)
Not really:
https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2009/aug/20/bernie-san...
>The OECD's numbers tell a similar story. In 2007, the OECD said that the United States spent $7,290 per capita on health care, ranking it first among the 30 countries studied. Five other nations spent more than $3,645 per capita, the point at which the United States no longer doubles their spending. The highest is the Netherlands at $4,417. The other four were Austria, Canada, Norway and Switzerland.
So he was rated as wrong for saying 'double' because it was actually 1.65 times for one country out of thirty. Oh and they used the dollar exchange rate for their numbers, not the PPP which is what actually matters.
On average, are the facts accurate?
Also, 1.65 isn't double. I'm not quite sure what you're saying here.
Regardless, even if the average WERE 1.65, that's still a damning enough number that the meter shouldn't be all the way to the "False" side.
This is a lie by the fact checkers. One that pushes an agenda that's obvious to see for everyone who cares to look.
(Additionally, PPP is a model someone can use, but it's hardly agreed upon universally as the correct model for equivalent spend value. It's a "basket of goods" model, influenced by the goods chosen. At worst, Politifact is guilty of making a judgement call based on a choice of metric that reasonable people can disagree on, which is hardly "a lie" that "pushes an agenda").
Wouldn't adjusting for PPP bring their healthcare spending up, not down, making Sanders less correct, not more?
I'm curious if the bias is perceived or blatant.
But the more important question is why a random website is being used as the basis for truth. They don't even try to hide the bias in their language, it's just filled with words you would never see in an academic document.
For example, https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/marijuana-electron-microsc... this article would lead a passerby to believe that there is equal parts truth and lie in this picture + caption. In reality I would judge this as 'mostly true' because the caption is more true than it is false.
1. https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/mar/12/bernie-san...
The NEXT 2 PARAGRAPHS say, in simple language, what part is true and which is not.