Comments on: Time to Face Facts

By: Truth Defeats Truthiness: Election 2012 « Jeffrey C. Goldfarb's Deliberately Considered

Sat, 17 Nov 2012 00:03:57 +0000

[…] pail in comparison to the importance of basing our political life on factual truths, (as I analyzed here) instead of convenient fictions (fictoids), and on careful principled (of the left and the right) […]

By: In Review: Between Left and Right « Jeffrey C. Goldfarb's Deliberately Considered

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 20:31:19 +0000

[…] essay on truth and politics highlights the depth of the problem, as I have already reflected on here and here. Confusing political opinion with political truth and empowering that truth is a primary […]

By: Jeffrey C. Goldfarb

Jeffrey C. Goldfarb — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 14:01:00 +0000

To think that the present economic crisis is Keynes provoked is convenient but belied by the facts. Specifics matter. The terms of the economic union and the common currency of Europe were hopeful but unrealistic. Those chicken have come home to roost. It had little or nothing to do with the fundamental questions concerning the relationship between the state and the economy, i.e. free market v. social market models. And do please note that the German and much of Northern Europe are doing much better than the US in the present economic crisis, with their very substantial welfare states.

But if we deny science, we are doomed, Not only do Europe and Asia pose a challenge; our own past built on the advances in science and technology of the industrial age warn us about this. The best scientific evidence indicates that climate change is very real and caused by humans. To make this a partisan issue is to doom our country and perhaps the species. Evolution is a key theoretical proposition of the biological sciences, to not teach our children this, is to doom them to ignorance.

By: Joe

Joe — Sat, 11 Feb 2012 06:27:00 +0000

“Other nations free of know nothing politics will be working to adapt to the changes that are forthcoming. They will have new energy industries and high speed rail systems, while the United States will decay. But since the United States has the largest economy, by far, our gas guzzling pollution machine could bring the whole world down with us. It’s time to face facts.”

This strikes me as naive. Surely what is unfolding before our very eyes is the very Keynes-inspired welfare state the countries of Western Europe have long-touted as the model for all others emulate. I don’t see any mention in your analysis of how capitalism has played in this “fictoid” on you’ve elaborated. These “nations free of know nothing politics” are adjusting, just not to benefit the broad masses, but squeeze them of every benefit and pension check earned in order to stabilize their economies. Thus is the nature of austerity: it hasn’t led any country to adapt to changes in a positive direction in the slightest. That is why at present Belgian firefighters are hosing down a hostile police force bent on breaking a general strike. Or why in Greece, the police union has symbolically threatened to arrest any member of the Troika (IMF-EU-ECB) if they set foot in the country.

By: Truth and Politics and The Crisis in Washington « Jeffrey C. Goldfarb's Deliberately Considered

Mon, 01 Aug 2011 20:03:49 +0000

[…] Future. I have already reflected on these two sides of the problem in earlier posts. I showed how factual truth, as it provides the ground upon which a sound political life develops, is under attack in the age […]

By: DC Week in Review: Words and Deeds « Jeffrey C. Goldfarb's Deliberately Considered

Mon, 23 May 2011 02:12:29 +0000

[…] close attention to the relationship between words and deeds applies as well to the persistent problem of fictoids in our public life, as we discussed last year. Little tales that confirm preconceived notions of […]

By: Jim Johnson

Jim Johnson — Thu, 23 Dec 2010 15:59:04 +0000

Facts are a pretty minimal threshold here. There are lots of fact checking entities out there doing what they do. But good propaganda rarely involves outright falsehoods. It is too easy to be caught out in a lie. The real threat, I think, is what Harry Frankfurt calls “Bullshit” – interactions in which the speakers are not even playing the game of truth and falsity. They are ignoring those categories pretty much altogether.

So when Obama claims that he is centrist and that he has attained bi-partisan consensus on some issue, he is not lying. He is a centrist. But he has ignored the causal story behind his location – namely that the right has run hard and fast to the right and the ‘liberals’ have shifted rightward apace. Hence the new center is the old conservatism on many matters.

And causes, of course, are not ‘facts’ in any obvious sense – at least not in the sense that the American media use that word. A cause is a theoretical entity. What American politics (and e.g., British, too) lack is theories (interpretations) about what generates the ‘facts’ that people then throw around.

Nothing new in that claim: read the opening paragraph of Dewey’s The Public and Its Problems.