Truthiness

Like lying—only better

Perhaps you have heard we are now living in a “post-truth” era, but it hasn't disturbed you too much because it's merely a manifestation of the low quality of today's politicians. Sure, Donald Trump spouts random nonsense all the time, but he's as undisciplined as a spoiled toddler, so no one is surprised. Carly Fiorina is, by contrast, a conscious liar, but she's an unimportant fringe candidate without credibility, so who cares? Ben Carson's relationship with truth seems pretty strained, but he's always a little spaced-out and detached from reality; besides, his star is fading.

I could go on in this vein, but I think the problem is worse than a simple matter of our candidates being worse than usual during this unfortunately prolonged election season. (It's not even election year yet, dammit!) The post-truth virus is spreading among us. I've seen this post-truth attitude affecting mere mortals, too. People I used to know as classmates, back when they seemed sane and responsible, are in its grip.

One of them posted an inanely patriotic meme from a website she follows. She was sharing a Facebook post:

It was clearly a specious quotation: “When government takes away citizens' right to bear arms it becomes citzens' duty to take away government's right to govern.” How could anyone take seriously a claim that George Washington ever sounded like a spokesperson for the NRA? I looked it up, verified it was false, and let her know with a simple declarative statement:

These words were never spoken or written by George Washington.

She soon replied with a charming lack of concern:

Ah, but they are so true!

I thought she was missing the point:

I think false attributions should be discouraged. Mainly because they're false.

She remained serenely unfazed:

But truer words were neer spoken, no matter by whom.

See? True or not, it doesn't matter. The fundamental lie at the heart of the statement is irrelevant because she agrees with the statement. We have a problem.

And that's the truth!

Pick a number

The art of data denial

The United States economy has climbed out of the hole created by the Great Recession and the Obama Administration has presided over an unbroken string of increasing job numbers lasting more than five years. I commented on this accomplishment and posted an illustration summarizing the data.

This did not sit well with one of my Facebook “friends,” who promptly took me to task:

Really, you are smarter than this BS!

It's a puzzlement how many people assure me I'm smart while insisting I'm also stupid. I asked my accuser how I had gone astray when my evidence-based conclusion was supported by the published numbers. She didn't hesitate:

Evidence that can be changed or tampered with. Too easy to make things look good for the moment!

Ah, yes. We must question authority and doubt the data. No doubt she took comfort in 2012 from the “poll correcters” who disdained the conclusions of the professional pollsters that President Obama was heading toward reelection. Remember them? (I'm sure folks in the Romney campaign do.)

I shared a story with my data doubter, explaining to her that data tampering in this context is a myth. It doesn't happen. Perhaps that sounds like simple-minded credulity, but I actually know what I'm talking about.

Once upon a time I worked for a state agency that was responsible for the annual computation and publication of the California Necessities Index. The CNI had been adopted by the legislature as the standard for indexing public assistance benefits (mostly because, at the time, it was lower than the Consumer Price Index). I was the person within the agency who was assigned to perform the actual computation, since I was the closest thing to a staff mathematician.

My father was amused by this situation and jokingly suggested it would be nice if I shaved off a fraction of a percentage point, thus denying full benefits to welfare cheats (most of the people on public assistance, in Dad's proto-tea-party view of the world). Contrariwise, I could have been a benefactor to California's destitute and downtrodden by judiciously rounding up the factors of the CNI, giving them an unexpected windfall. We could tamper with the numbers!

No. The very notion was ridiculous, as well as impossible. The components of the CNI were public information, factors selected from the published data for the CPI. Anyone could look up the factors that went into the CPI, apply the weights stipulated for the CNI, and derive the number. My role was simply a formality, providing the number that appeared in our agency's publications to make it official, pursuant to state law. Well before we published the number, the governor's Department of Finance had done its own independent calculation, as had the Legislative Analyst's Office and anyone else who needed the index number or was just curious about it.

The same thing is largely true of the numbers published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The worker bees of the federal government compile the monthly data each month, analyze the figures, and publish the summary information. The monthly unemployment rate, for example, is not vetted, suggested, or even approved by the White House. The faceless bureaucrats who crunch the numbers for the Obama Administration did the same exact thing when Bush was president (and, for some of these civil servants, they did it under both Bushes). They have no more control over the conclusions or final numbers than I did when I was a California civil servant. (It's popular within the right wing these days to decry unemployment data as unrepresentative of the “truth” because the usual unemployment number is deemed to have fallen when people just give up and stop seeking jobs. If they think the U3 measure published by the BLS is insufficiently informative, they are welcome to cite U6, which the BLS also publishes. You want numbers? Go to the BLS. They publish practically everything and the numbers aren't fudged.)

Data denial is a fundamental component of the refusal to recognize global-warming induced climate change. Data denial is also currently hard at work in California, giving aid and comfort to people paranoid about vaccinations, who pick and choose among an Internet stew of “research” and anecdotes to bolster their arguments that vaccines are more dangerous than now-rare childhood diseases (rare because of vaccines!).

If you want your conclusions to be rational and evidence-based, you have to avoid the denial of well-established data. We have seen, however, that even the most robust numbers are rejected when they get in the way of political ideologies.

The Tea Party is not dead!

Just very, very sick

One of the joys of Facebook is stumbling across long-lost friends or relatives and renewing acquaintances. The downside is the discovery that an old friend or cousin has gone completely around the bend. Last year I ran into an nth cousin I hadn't seen since we were both teens. It was nice to swap family photos and do some catching up. But what do I find on her Facebook timeline? Stuff like this:

 Now THAT was a commander in chief

Yeah, one hell of a commander-in-chief, all right. Did he also hug the many widows and widowers he created with his military adventurism?

Of course, my cousin pays tribute to our current president, too:

Hilarious! This implies, of course, that Obama's economic record is nothing to brag about. His job-creation record must be much worse than that of his glorious predecessor, right? Funny thing, though, about reality. George W. Bush took two terms to eke out a job increase of 0.21%. (Actually all the growth was in the second term, because it was 0.0% for Bush's first term.) Obama managed 0.23% in a single term, and it's still increasing during his second term.

This naturally inspires a question: Who from among the GOP's leading lights could be as great a president as the much-missed George W.?

Who would you like to see as a presidential candidate?

Frankly, the gray silhouette strikes me as the most qualified and inspires the most confident. Of course, my cousin wants a Republican president who will finally get to the bottom of the Democratic president's many, many scandals. Like Benghazi:

It would be much too easy for the GOP merely to accept the many answers they've already received. Besides, they didn't like those answers. Obama and Clinton have simply refused to cooperate. They stubbornly won't admit that they deliberately arranged to have Americans killed by Muslim terrorists. If they would just confess and volunteer to go to jail, we could finally put Benghazi behind us. So clearly it's the Democrats' fault that this just keeps grinding on.

It appears that my cousin is concerned that her children are targets for terrorists—probably foreign, but possibly domestic. You can also tell, quite clearly, that the guards in the photo are packing heat. I presume it's merely a detail that these guards (a) are not at the Sidwell Friends school attended by Obama's daughters and (b) Sidwell guards do not carry firearms. My cousin, you see, has a strong aversion to fact-checking, which is likely to destroy an otherwise perfectly good story, just like most of the other posts that my cousin “liked” and “shared” from The Tea Party page on Facebook. (Today's special treat: Nutcase Allen West calls for Obama's impeachment. What? Again?)

My cousin intersperses saccharin pieties among the right-wing memes. Apparently God loves us (at least since 1954) and wants us to be happy, which is in odd conflict with the many miseries he's visited upon us, all “documented” by the right wing. Perhaps we're in the End Times!

One Nation, Under God

The end.