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Thread: Snopes Introduces New 'Factually Inaccurate But Morally Right' Fact Check Result

  1. #1

    Snopes Introduces New 'Factually Inaccurate But Morally Right' Fact Check Result



    U.S.—Popular fact-checking site Snopes.com confirmed Wednesday they are debuting a new "Factually inaccurate but morally right" fact check result for claims they don't want to debunk because they coincide with Snopes editors' worldview.

    The fact-checking website will now label inaccurate claims that they deem "morally right" with the new label, giving public figures whose hearts are in the right place a pass.

    "We were often running into situations were a truth claim was absolutely absurd, but it supported progressive causes," said one Snopes editor. "So sometimes we just called it a 'Mixture,' but then people might get the idea that our favorite politicians are being slightly dishonest sometimes."

    The editor then said that upon hearing Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's recent statement that many people are more concerned with being factually accurate than morally right, the Snopes fact-checking team suddenly had an idea: they could label things as being morally laudable even though the facts upon which they were based are totally erroneous.

    continued https://babylonbee.com/news/snopes-i...t-check-result
    "The Patriarch"



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  3. #2
    Snopes Rates Biden's Claim That 2+2=5 As 'Mostly True'



    U.S.—Joe Biden recently made a strange claim: that 2+2=5. He was ridiculed for his gaffe after making the statement while speaking at an elementary school. The kids all said, "Hey, dummy! The answer is 4, not 5!"

    But the crack squad of fact-checkers at Snopes quickly got to work on Biden's incredulous claim. Their findings? Biden's statement was actually "mostly true."

    "Sure, Biden got some key details wrong," said Bob Snopes, founder of Snopes. "But the central concept of what he was saying, that two numbers put together make another number, was completely accurate. Sometimes two and two make four. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. It is not easy to become sane."

    The website's 6,000-word defense/fact-check of Biden's claim further pointed out that 80% of the answer was correct, and it's only the one additional number that was a mixture of truth and falsehood.

    As the event neared its conclusion, Biden claimed there were five spotlights lighting up the stage even though there were clearly four. One bald man in the back shouted, "There are four lights!" but was dragged from the room for reeducation.

    https://babylonbee.com/news/biden-cl...es-mostly-true
    "The Patriarch"

  4. #3
    So, my rating of Snopes now moves from mostly unreliable to completely worthless.

    ETA: wondering if this could be satire. It's become difficult to tell nowadays.
    Last edited by CCTelander; 09-02-2019 at 09:27 PM.
    Chris

    "Government ... does not exist of necessity, but rather by virtue of a tragic, almost comical combination of klutzy, opportunistic terrorism against sitting ducks whom it pretends to shelter, plus our childish phobia of responsibility, praying to be exempted from the hard reality of life on life's terms." Wolf DeVoon

    "...Make America Great Again. I'm interested in making American FREE again. Then the greatness will come automatically."Ron Paul

  5. #4
    Quote Originally Posted by CCTelander View Post
    So, my rating of Snopes now moves from mostly unreliable to completely worthless.

    ETA: wondering if this could be satire. It's become difficult to tell nowadays.
    You don't know the back story behind this?
    "The Patriarch"

  6. #5
    Quote Originally Posted by Origanalist View Post
    You don't know the back story behind this?

    Nope. I'm in the dark.
    Chris

    "Government ... does not exist of necessity, but rather by virtue of a tragic, almost comical combination of klutzy, opportunistic terrorism against sitting ducks whom it pretends to shelter, plus our childish phobia of responsibility, praying to be exempted from the hard reality of life on life's terms." Wolf DeVoon

    "...Make America Great Again. I'm interested in making American FREE again. Then the greatness will come automatically."Ron Paul

  7. #6
    Babylon Bee. The most trusted name in news.
    Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,--
    Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown,
    Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.
    ‫‬‫‬

  8. #7
    Did anyone else totally read “there are four lights!” in Picard’s voice?

  9. #8
    Quote Originally Posted by CCTelander View Post
    Nope. I'm in the dark.
    Some (weeks?) ago Snopes fact-checked a Babylon Bee article and the Bee has pounded them a couple times since.



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  11. #9
    Quote Originally Posted by CCTelander View Post
    So, my rating of Snopes now moves from mostly unreliable to completely worthless.

    ETA: wondering if this could be satire. It's become difficult to tell nowadays.
    Quote Originally Posted by Origanalist View Post
    You don't know the back story behind this?
    That's pretty funny bc not knowing if the Babylon Bee is satire is basically the backstory.
    "It's probably the biggest hoax since Big Foot!" - Mitt Romney 1-16-2012 SC Debate

  12. #10
    Quote Originally Posted by GunnyFreedom View Post
    Some (weeks?) ago Snopes fact-checked a Babylon Bee article and the Bee has pounded them a couple times since.

    Thanks!
    Chris

    "Government ... does not exist of necessity, but rather by virtue of a tragic, almost comical combination of klutzy, opportunistic terrorism against sitting ducks whom it pretends to shelter, plus our childish phobia of responsibility, praying to be exempted from the hard reality of life on life's terms." Wolf DeVoon

    "...Make America Great Again. I'm interested in making American FREE again. Then the greatness will come automatically."Ron Paul

  13. #11
    Quote Originally Posted by CCTelander View Post
    So, my rating of Snopes now moves from mostly unreliable to completely worthless.

    ETA: wondering if this could be satire. It's become difficult to tell nowadays.
    It's satire. Not that you can be blamed for wondering. It's not like there aren't any reasons to do so ...

    Such as this (h/t Bob Murphy: https://consultingbyrpm.com/blog/201...-websites.html):
    Quote Originally Posted by Bob Murphy
    This is absolutely hilarious. On Facebook a screenshot of this AP News article is floating around…

    And then look at how this “fact checker”-type website tries to downplay the obvious critique.
    And then there's this (h/t @Anti Federalist: http://www.ronpaulforums.com/showthr...ithout-consent)
    [...]

    Speaking of magic, one thing you can always rely on is that any time a magician tells the audience, “I’m gonna tell you the truth,” he’s lying; it’s just part of the setup. That rule goes for mainstream-media magicians as well. Take the oh-so-respectable PolitiFact, that unbiased, nonpartisan debunker of all things false and misleading. PolitiFact claims to “expose” lies, but that’s just the patter. In truth, PolitiFact deals in lies. Like last week, when the site’s venerable ephors decided that even though Elizabeth Warren and Kamala Harris were “wrong” to say that Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson “murdered” gentle giant™ Michael Brown back in 2014 (Wilson was completely cleared by Obama’s Justice Department), we should be cool with prominent politicians using a 100% inaccurate (some might say defamatory) word, because “focusing too much on the linguistics in controversial cases” is a “distraction” that can “obscure the discussion of larger issues” (like racism!).

    Other conservative writers have ably covered the PolitiFact Ferguson debacle, but I have my own personal twist. And it fits right in with the theme of this week’s column, because, as magic’s greatest faux-debunker Penn Jillette once said, “with magicians, even things they don’t care about, they actually do care about.” In other words, when a magician tells you that something’s not important, that means it is important, because that’s where the “dirty work” is happening.

    To pull off the Ferguson trick, PolitiFact needs you to think that words don’t matter, because “larger issues” overshadow mere “linguistics.” And it’s a good gag, until you compare it with PolitiFact’s “global warming” routine, which relies on exactly the opposite patter, that “larger issues” require an obsessive, eagle-eyed focus on linguistics.

    Back in May 2014, PolitiFact gave Marco Rubio a “mostly false” rating based solely on one word. Rubio had claimed that global warming had “stabilized,” and Louis Jacobson, the same PolitiFact sumbitch who wrote the “don’t focus on linguistics” piece about Ferguson, attacked Rubio for using the word “stabilized” when, according to Jacobson, the actual word should have been “paused.” Jacobson’s point? One must focus on linguistics when it comes to “larger issues” like global warming!

    Supporting Jacobson, PolitiFact editor Angie Drobnic Holan concurred in a separate piece that “stabilized” was indeed the wrong word, and “plateaued” would have been correct.

    I wrote to Ms. Holan:

    Webster’s defines “plateaued” as “to reach a level, period, or condition of stability or maximum attainment.” So, you say plateaued, which means stabilized, and Rubio says stabilized, which means plateaued. How can his statement be false and yours true?

    It took some time, but Holan finally replied:

    I disagree that they are synonyms. Stabilized implies a permanent stop, while plateaued implies change will resume.

    Angie Holan don’t need no stinkin’ dictionary! But sadly for her, I can be a bit obsessive when it comes to forcing media hacks into a corner. I responded:

    Your job was to rank Rubio’s comment’s accuracy at the time he said it. And at the time he said it, it was true. Temperatures had stabilized. Temperatures had plateaued. If, tomorrow, next month, next year, that changes, fine. But Rubio’s statement that temperatures had “stabilized” was every bit as accurate AT THE TIME as yours that they’d “plateaued.”

    As Oxford Dictionary forum mod Steve Doerr confirmed to me, “stabilized” and “plateaued” are indeed synonymous, with the exception being that something can only plateau after rising, while something can stabilize after rising or falling. I passed this along to Holan and her coworkers, and I sent them pieces from The New York Times, LiveScience, The Journal of Biological Chemistry, and the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology that use the term “stabilized” to describe the global-warming “pause” (in some cases using it interchangeably with “plateaued”).

    At this point, Holan demanded that I stop emailing her colleagues.

    That was funny enough, but it quickly got funnier. While attacking Ted Cruz’s global-warming views several months later, PolitiFact staff writer Lauren Carroll wrote that Cruz shouldn’t have made the claim that warming had “stopped”…he should have said it was “stable.”

    Yes, PolitiFact’s Lauren Carroll declared that “stable” is the proper term for the current state of global warming, even after Louis Jacobson and Angie Holan gave Rubio a “mostly false” rating for using the term “stabilized.”

    Holan refused to address the use of “stable” by Ms. Carroll, so I emailed Carroll directly:

    To “stabilize” is defined by Webster’s as “to make stable.” How can “stabilized” be false, but “stable” accurate?

    After a fun but pointless back-and-forth over the nature of Webster’s definitions, Carroll finally, and somewhat exasperatedly, conceded, “I didn’t write the Rubio piece, and every story goes through multiple editors to come to a ruling. So it’s not my place to say.” She encouraged me to read her Cruz critique “independent of the word ‘stable.’”

    Read it while ignoring the key word in the piece. That was her response; read it “independent” of the disputed word.

    With Ferguson, PolitiFact demands that one must not focus on specific word choices, even words that are objectively inaccurate, because doing so obscures larger issues like racism and makes Democrats look bad. But with global warming, if attacking a word choice can make a Republican look bad, words matter more than anything. Until a drunken Jew with way too much time on his hands presses the issue, in which case words suddenly don’t matter after all, and one should read PolitiFact pieces “independent” of specific word choices.

    Words don’t matter, words do matter, words don’t matter. For the ideological magician, all that actually matters is the illusion. A run-of-the-mill Vegas magician will want the audience to come away thinking a coin has vanished or a mind was read or a lady was cut in half. An ideological magician will want the audience to come away with the idea that, say, an entire island is up in arms over a beer, or a virtuous Democrat used an inaccurate word but don’t focus on that, focus on the “larger issues,” or a villainous Republican “denied science” by using a wrong word and we must focus on that rather than on the fact that the “debunkers” used the same word in the same context.

    It’s all just manipulation and misdirection. “Don’t ask how remote Pacific Islanders came to know of a Dallas microbrew!” “Don’t worry that distortions in the Ferguson case have caused riots!” “Keep your eyes on the GOP’s climate word choices, not ours!”

    I’ll close with one final Penn Jillette quote: “The most immoral thing a magician can do is magic without consent” (magic with intent to deceive rather than entertain).

    “Magic without consent.” It’s what manipulative news organs like the AP and The Washington Post do, and it’s certainly the stock in trade of the phony “debunkers” at PolitiFact. And indeed, it’s immoral, and unquestionably harmful to the public discourse.

    I’d never divulge a legitimate magician’s tricks, but I’ll take any opportunity to expose the inner workings of the professional fibbers for whom “magic without consent” is not a proscription but a motto.
    Last edited by Occam's Banana; 09-02-2019 at 10:12 PM.
    The Bastiat Collection · FREE PDF · FREE EPUB · PAPER
    Frédéric Bastiat (1801-1850)

    • "When law and morality are in contradiction to each other, the citizen finds himself in the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense, or of losing his respect for the law."
      -- The Law (p. 54)
    • "Government is that great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
      -- Government (p. 99)
    • "[W]ar is always begun in the interest of the few, and at the expense of the many."
      -- Economic Sophisms - Second Series (p. 312)
    • "There are two principles that can never be reconciled - Liberty and Constraint."
      -- Harmonies of Political Economy - Book One (p. 447)

    · tu ne cede malis sed contra audentior ito ·

  14. #12
    Quote Originally Posted by CCTelander View Post
    Nope. I'm in the dark.
    The Babylon Bee is a Christian satire site. Snopes decided in their wisdom to fact check them saying some people actually go there for news. The Bee has been pounding them ever since. Great stuff.
    "The Patriarch"

  15. #13
    Quote Originally Posted by Occam's Banana View Post
    It's satire. Not that you can be blamed for wondering. It's not like there aren't any reasons to do so ...

    Such as this (h/t Bob Murphy: https://consultingbyrpm.com/blog/201...-websites.html):
    Quote Originally Posted by Bob Murphy
    This is absolutely hilarious. On Facebook a screenshot of this AP News article is floating around…

    And then look at how this “fact checker”-type website tries to downplay the obvious critique.
    In fact, this one is an excellent example of just the sort of thing the OP item is satirizing (only it's in the "reverse" direction - a "Factually Accurate But Morally Wrong" result, so to speak).

  16. #14
    Quote Originally Posted by Origanalist View Post
    The Babylon Bee is a Christian satire site. Snopes decided in their wisdom to fact check them saying some people actually go there for news. The Bee has been pounding them ever since. Great stuff.

    That's frickin' hilarious! And then, I start thinking about it and...
    Chris

    "Government ... does not exist of necessity, but rather by virtue of a tragic, almost comical combination of klutzy, opportunistic terrorism against sitting ducks whom it pretends to shelter, plus our childish phobia of responsibility, praying to be exempted from the hard reality of life on life's terms." Wolf DeVoon

    "...Make America Great Again. I'm interested in making American FREE again. Then the greatness will come automatically."Ron Paul

  17. #15
    Quote Originally Posted by CCTelander View Post
    That's frickin' hilarious! And then, I start thinking about it and...
    You should check them out, they're better than "the Onion" IMO.
    "The Patriarch"

  18. #16
    Concerning Survey Finds Too Many People Believe Snopes Is A Legitimate Fact-Checking Website

    "The Patriarch"



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  20. #17
    Quote Originally Posted by Origanalist View Post
    Concerning Survey Finds Too Many People Believe Snopes Is A Legitimate Fact-Checking Website

    LOL
    Never attempt to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and annoys the pig.

    Robert Heinlein

    Give a man an inch and right away he thinks he's a ruler

    Groucho Marx

    I love mankind…it’s people I can’t stand.

    Linus, from the Peanuts comic

    You cannot have liberty without morality and morality without faith

    Alexis de Torqueville

    Those who fail to learn from the past are condemned to repeat it.
    Those who learn from the past are condemned to watch everybody else repeat it

    A Zero Hedge comment

  21. #18
    feel free to suggest a better site than snopes.

  22. #19
    Quote Originally Posted by PRB View Post
    feel free to suggest a better site than snopes.
    ronpaulforums.com
    Never attempt to teach a pig to sing; it wastes your time and annoys the pig.

    Robert Heinlein

    Give a man an inch and right away he thinks he's a ruler

    Groucho Marx

    I love mankind…it’s people I can’t stand.

    Linus, from the Peanuts comic

    You cannot have liberty without morality and morality without faith

    Alexis de Torqueville

    Those who fail to learn from the past are condemned to repeat it.
    Those who learn from the past are condemned to watch everybody else repeat it

    A Zero Hedge comment

  23. #20
    Quote Originally Posted by PRB View Post
    feel free to suggest a better site than snopes.
    The Babylon Bee.
    "The Patriarch"

  24. #21
    Quote Originally Posted by PRB View Post
    feel free to suggest a better site than snopes.
    Dirty Dave's Septic Pumping and Cesspool Cleanout Service
    Another mark of a tyrant is that he likes foreigners better than citizens, and lives with them and invites them to his table; for the one are enemies, but the Others enter into no rivalry with him. - Aristotle's Politics Book 5 Part 11

  25. #22
    Quote Originally Posted by PRB View Post
    feel free to suggest a better site than snopes.
    madlibs.org
    The Bastiat Collection · FREE PDF · FREE EPUB · PAPER
    Frédéric Bastiat (1801-1850)

    • "When law and morality are in contradiction to each other, the citizen finds himself in the cruel alternative of either losing his moral sense, or of losing his respect for the law."
      -- The Law (p. 54)
    • "Government is that great fiction, through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else."
      -- Government (p. 99)
    • "[W]ar is always begun in the interest of the few, and at the expense of the many."
      -- Economic Sophisms - Second Series (p. 312)
    • "There are two principles that can never be reconciled - Liberty and Constraint."
      -- Harmonies of Political Economy - Book One (p. 447)

    · tu ne cede malis sed contra audentior ito ·



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