Facts, Fact checkers, experts and liars.

First, a few home truths:

In every court case, there are at least two lawyers, and, at least one, of them is wrong.

Alfred North Whitehead reminds us that people usually have honed their arguments, so it is best to attack their assumptions.

In our courts of law, which are ponderous, and expensive, machines to mete out justice, the jury is commonly referred to as the “trier of fact”. The Propaganda Chorus would have you believe that we could dispense with all that time and expense by deploying a fact checker to announce the law and the facts, and pronounce the verdict.


Recently fact checkers have come to prominence in public discourse as a way to silence discussion and win debates with no argument. If you disagree with someone’s opinion, you marshal a pod of fact checkers to pronounce it out of bounds. It is important to repeat the same pronouncement through many sources to add a simulacrum of weight to an empty thought. Fortunately there exists an organization for this purpose called the Propaganda Chorus, or MSM. Some history:

From whence did fact checkers arise? Were they always here? Did they always determine the content of public discourse?

Fact checkers were, only a few years back, poorly paid interns at news papers whose job it was to supply real reporters with tidbits of information to supplement the substance of the article the reporter was composing. If the reporter wanted to know the date of a Supreme Court ruling, the size of last night’s baseball crowed, the population of Albania, he would assign a fact checker to discover it, and return with the fact, and documentation of its source. (Editors could use them to verify such bits of information in a reporters work before publishing it.) In no case was the fact checker the arbitrator of veracity, nor the judge of the substance of the article. The reporter was responsible to develop his own ideas, argue them, justify them, and stand behind them. Nobody, including the reporter, though his work was beyond question.

A few years back, someone came up with the idea that if you disputed your opponent’s ideas, not by engaging them, but by quibbling about bits of data, and did it in the name of “fact checker”, uneducated readers would assume that the fact checker was unquestionably correct, and unquestionably relieved the critic of the need to have any ideas, or knowledge of his own.

The Myth of the Free Press

Written in August 2018

The myth in question is not that the Press is not free, nor that Freedom of the Press is not essential to our democratic republic, or any society that aspires to some meaningful measure of individual liberty. The myth is that the modern conceit of a free press has its roots in our constitution or the founding of our country. This myth is a self-serving misinterpretation that demonstrates just how illiterate our journalists are. it has been nurtured by the New York Times starting, I suspect, in the 1960s, but I cannot be sure.

To explain, we must explore how to read human language. Human language is not mechanical as is computer, machine, language; although human language is immensely powerful, it is at the same time quite fragile. If you study language and literature, you can gain from the experience of others no matter how remote they be, in time or space, even if you can never know them completely. If on the other hand, as is the practice today, you attack the written word to mine it for data, or to gain an advantage over the writer, you make yourself a fool, and contribute to the destruction of the language itself in the process.

The claim of present day journalists seems to be that they are a singularly privileged and powerful group, or class, based on the First Amendment’s guarantee of Freedom of the Press. That claim can be debunked by simply referring to a dictionary, and confirming what is to be found there, but the question can be raised: Why would I go to a dictionary? What alerts me to the probability that the claim is ill founded, not to say absurd? Why should I question an interpretation that benefits me? The answer is in how you should read a document, if you desire to learn from your effort.

First you should know what you are reading: What is the document? Who wrote it? Under what circumstances? For what purpose? A naive person would have an almost endless tree of ever increasing branches to the above questions, but an educated American should be equipped with some general knowledge and understanding that will inform, and shorten, the examination.

The First Amendment is part of the Bill of Rights, which amends the United States Constitution. The Constitution was written and adopted to strengthen the young country founded on the principles of equality, liberty, and popular sovereignty, and to enshrine the principle of the accountability of all power to the people through their elected representatives. The Bill of Rights was added to detail some of the most important individual rights that arose from the revolutionary concept of the sovereignty of the people, rather than their rulers, which had always been the rule. The First Amendment deals with ideas and beliefs; the sine qua non of individual freedom. One side of the debate about the adoption of the Bill of Rights held that enumerating some rights would weaken or void others that were left off the list; the other side implicitly claimed that the very idea of plenary individual rights was so novel, so revolutionary, that some examples were needed, if only to show the seriousness and scope of such rights. In the event, the Bill of Rights was adopted, and the fears of its opponents were proved well founded, even thought the text itself warns against considering the list complete.

It follows, as night the day, that someone who claims that such a document assures them of a special privilege for their unaccountable group, should face almost insurmountable skepticism and doubt.

It is fashionable today to complain about the lack of objectivity of the corporate media, or about the lack of respect that such media is accorded. The theory, the assumption, seems to be that the founding fathers established, in a list of individual rights, an unelected group of men who they trusted to adhere selflessly to an impartial, objective, truth as a check on the rest of us. In other words, that by innuendo, or metaphor, they betrayed every principle they held, and undermined the project for which they had recently risked everything.

The founding of the United States of American stands four square against the proposition that men are angels and can be trusted unsupervised to operate in the national interest. It stands four square against the proposition that one group of people should have privilege over others. It stands four square against the proposition that any power, under the Constitution should be unaccountable to the electorate. The conception of a free press under discussion, incorporates each of those propositions, and consequently, is odious to that founding.

Armed with the assurance that this conception is untenable, someone who does not understand the plain language of the amendment will have recourse to scholarship about what the language meant, at the time is was written, to those who wrote and adopted it. We have incorporated the metaphor that aligns the practitioners of the trade of journalist with the machine or organization that was their medium; thus “the gentlemen of the press” was shortened to “the press”, but it was not always so; most significantly it was not so when the Constitution was being debated and adopted. So it is inconceivable that the founders referred to journalists when they enshrined “the Freedom of the Press” in the amendment. A quick reference to Black’s Law Dictionary, moreover, reveals that in those days, and before, and since, Freedom of the Press was a term of art, referring to the right to use a printing press–and by extension other advanced technology–to disseminate whatever words and ideas you fancied without prior restraint, or censorship. It was, and remains, an individual right, and thus well-suited to the purpose of the Bill of Rights, and while not utterly absolute, covered all sorts of unpopular, and shocking utterances.

The endless carping about how biased, and unfair, and partisan the mewlings of journalists are can be elided by accepting that they should be thus; the error, the cancer on our polity, is to assume that they should be otherwise. The Bill of Rights does not, sub rosa, seek to establish the Ministry of Truth so desired by some, be it for political power or for personal aggrandizement; the Bill of Rights, on the contrary establishes a raucous free for all, a free market of ideas where all can express themselves, and employ, and contract such means as are necessary to amplify their voice in the public sphere. In this we are different from other societies.

If you could return to 1789 to ask Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Samuel Adams, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay, or any of the others if they envisioned a priesthood of unelected “journalists” sitting in judgement over the discourse of the nation (picture Jim Acosta, Joy Reid, Keith Olberman, Don Lemon, Nicole or Chris Wallace, or Joe Scarborough) I am confident that they would discretely, to avoid shaming your relatives, have had you committed to an insane asylum. There is absolutely nothing to indicate that they believed that such a thing was achievable, nor desirable. If after explaining to them our public space, you asked them which embodied the meaning of Freedom of the Press, as they understood it, the New York Times, with all its pretentiousness, or the blogosphere, they would have no hesitation in choosing the latter, marveling on how it empowered the individual where power should reside.

NOTE: It is not uninteresting that most of the heroes of reporting are not members of large corporations, or associations, but lonely voices crying out from isolation and oppression.

If you are not confused, you are not paying attention.

The title was created to caution people about transgender matters, but it applies to human affairs generally. It will probably surprise many people to realize that transgender people are people.

Many people are absolutely sure that every human has either XX, or XY, chromosomes. They are wrong.

Many people assume that the sex assigned at birth is the result of chromosome testing. They are wrong.

Many people know that all people born with XX chromosomes develop into normal female adults. They are wrong.

Many people know that all people born with XY chromosomes develop into normal male adults. They are wrong.

Many people know that a female child will, through puberty, necessarily develop into a female adult. They are wrong.

It is true that most of these assumptions will not be challenged very often, but at the limits of philosophy, law, and sport, they will be challenged, and no honest person will be able to deny the complexity of the ensuing disputes.

Recently a nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court was asked to define a woman. She declined (rightly) and declared (rightly) that the problem was the context; she gave as her reason that she was not a biologist. Her reason was absurd, out of context, and disqualifying. In the context of a hearing to determine her fitness for the Supreme Court, the appropriate answer would have been: “That is a matter that is being litigated, and will in all likelihood be taken up by the court, and consequently, I must decline to state an opinion.” The problem with her answer is that it indicates that when asked a legal question in a legal context, she does not think first of the law, but of her own beliefs.

Many people know that she was dodging (she was), and that the self-evident answer (from the dictionary-a bad place to garner debate points) is: “an adult human female”. As a definition of the word, it is unexceptional, mostly because it adds no new information. The problem is that the terms are not self-explanatory. The mere fact that the question is sure to come before the Supreme Court should caution anyone that it is not resolved. “Adult” is usually opposed to “Child”, but the parameters can be debated: a child may be tired as an adult e.g. “Human” seems pretty simple until you start to discuss abortion. “Female” is really the question that the Senator was asking, and thus, in context, that unimpeachable answer is tautological: a dodge.

The Olympic Committee has been wrestling with the question of “what is a woman” for decades. They have learned from experience that people, organizations, and countries will surely cheat when fame and fortune are at stake, and that a robust way of discriminating between women and not women is essential to any idea of women’s sport; without a robust rule for who can, and who cannot compete, you will have chaos, and the league will disintegrate. They have also learned that there is no easy answer. I do not trust the Olympic Committee, as a general rule, but unlike most of the participants in this absurd free for all, they have experience, and they have engaged seriously in the search for an answer. Therefore they are a good place to start, and if you want to discuss elite athletes, you should include elite athletes in the discussion; they know the subject better than most other people.

Thoughtless Admissions Policies

The (false) assumption behind the attacks on Harvard’s admissions policies is that admission to any school must be strictly according to a single standard. It presupposes a national competition for grades, and test scores, which lead to a national ranking to which all schools must adhere; just as was the case in the Soviet Union. Any deviation from that ranking, any disparate outcome, must be prima face evidence of racism, sexism, or some equally heinous sin.

A century ago, Harvard did admit according to academic ranking (aside from legacies, and racial considerations). Harvard was, and to a great extent still is a local school with a veneer of international dominion. They were able to fill most of their slots with the cream of the academic crop, and they found that they did not like the result. They found that such a policy did not produce a student body that suited their ambitions. So they stopped considering only academic prowess, and determined to create an “interesting” incoming class. (I do not endorse Harvard’s admissions policies, nor its recent behavior, I merely object to the smug, ignorant—by people who assume they know everything, when they have not even asked basic questions, let alone answered them—pronouncements.)

To raise some obvious objections to such a national admissions policy (state schools may very well be constrained to adopt such metrics): should West Point accept students with no potential as future officers, merely because they are academically more qualified than someone else? Should Nortre Dame be prohibited from preferring Catholics, to some degree and become indistinguishable from other schools? Should every school have to apply to the DOE, or a committee of self-appointed pundits for exemptions from the national list?

It is appropriate, it is accepted American practice to object when demographic groups are denied access to (excellent) education, but that is a far cry from a unitary national admissions policy, thoughtlessly imposed even by people who pride themselves on their conservative, or libertarian ideals. Private schools should be free to adopt their own policies and standards, even when they make no sense to the rest of us.

Thinking Darwin

I plan to write my thought here. I will edit this post, from time to time, to include information about how the blog develops, and to explain my interests.

I have been: an audio engineer, a newspaper publisher, a Goer cowboy, a micro computer engineer, a software programmer, a university English instructor, a LBTG activist.

I was fired by the extension school of Indiana University for refusing to adopt a grading scale that would prevent students from failing.

I have been: the Secretary of Seymour IN, PFLAG, a board member of Indiana Black Pride, Chair of the Board of the Indiana Transgender Rights Advocacy Alliance, member of the Planning Committee of Indiana Pride of Color.