October 14, 2024

Fact checking is inappropriate for terminology or procedure. Truth cannot be arbitrated; it can only evolve through rationality. No one allowed a "truth commission" to be produced by Congress several years ago for that reason.

It might seem extremely obvious that false claims by Trump and conservatives need to be corrected. If so, corrections don't need to be called fact checking. The use of the label is an attempt to systematize a process for correcting; and even if it is justifiable in some instances, it will be an abusive process in other instances, which particularly means science.

No fact checkers are going to get science right, because no scientists can get fact checking right. Science is an evolution of truth and knowledge; not an arbitrated result. It takes measured evidence to determine truth and knowledge in science, not opinions. Science is measurement of evidence, not opinion. Scientists talk about evidence, not facts.

Of course, incompetent and fake scientists do the opposite, which gives the unwary the impression that science is equivalent to social disputes and causes some total idiots to assume they can produce better opinions than the scientists.

Politics is always an unusual process that requires balancing subjective forces in society that do not have complete solutions. Proper politics in a representative democracy does not give politicians the ability to resolve social contradictions and disputes, let alone solve social problems. That means politicians have to represent some sort of social averages which are not their own views. Representing is not imposing or changing, though you wouldn't know it from conservatives, who assume getting elected is acquiring the power to change the shape of society in line with their values and purposes.

Therefore, politicians rightly shun journalists. What politicians do and say cannot be reduced to truth and problem solving. Ideally, journalists could restrict their purposes to the traditional time, date and place. But those days are long gone. Journalists now days want answers and accountability aligned upon the solutions to overwhelming problems.

To put politicians in that position is to change what politicians are. They are not the solutions to problems and never have been. After forty years of increasing fascism, the problems are totally unsolvable. To demand solutions from politicians is to destroy their functionality and put someone less capable in their place.

So-called fact checking flushes all of those problems down the drain and demands one sentence solutions to all problems. It's a systematization of irrationality.

That doesn't mean the obnoxiousness of liars such as Trump needs to be ignored; it means a rational approach is to add corrections to the extent that they are self-evident as additions to the subject for whatever they are worth.

Fact checking does not allow such measured purposes. It's not an addition to a subject but an erasure of a subject. If not, it wouldn't be called fact checking and instituted as the new form of truth policing. Being reasonable has always been justifiable, where erasing undesirable realities has never been possible.

Adding corrective information to extreme lies is justifiable and necessary; but using the label and procedure of fact checking guarantees that corrupters will misuse the process elsewhere.

The label and process also result in corrupters demanding corrections on every disagreement over minutia. Take away the label, fact checking, and replace it with rationality applied to correcting, and the fraud arguments become self-evident absurdities.

Therefore, instead of arguing with conservatives over who is going to fact check what process, the journalists need to simply state that they will add whatever rationality requires, take it or leave it.