The moderators of last night’s ABC debate demonstrated why it’s a bad idea to fact check live in a debate.
▪️When a moderator fact checks, it gives the implicit notion to the audience that anything not fact checked is truthful. They become the arbiter of truth, which is not their role. Their role is to facilitate a civil and substantive debate.
▪️Fact checking invariably brings bias. What to fact check and how often? Many things politicians say are either false or on a spectrum of misleading, missing context, etc. Tasking a moderator to fairly police this is nearly impossible. In practice they’ll just stick to what stands out as false to them, which will be biased. That’s what happened last night.
▪️Fact checking is often complex. This was briefly shown in the exchange with Trump and the moderators over crime. What sort of crime are you referring to (violent crime, property crime, etc.)? Which cities or states? What time frame are we referring to, over the past year? Since 2020? FBI stats are limited by what local authorities report, so what are they actually telling us? In general, crime has fallen over the past couple years, but is still up since 2020, and in certain locales violent crime and thefts are up dramatically and haven’t declined. Moderators cannot and should not be parsing through this.
▪️Most fact checks cannot be done on the spot, you need to check sources and do research. On the spot fact checks rely on memory and the limited knowledge the moderators have. Which means they are also highly influenced by bias.
▪️So what to do when politicians shamelessly lie during a debate? It’s their opponent’s job to fact check and correct them! That’s why it’s a debate. If they are unable to do this effectively, then they’re bad at debating. But it’s not the moderator’s job. The moderator’s job is to allow each side a chance to get their voices heard and respond to their opponent.
As with the leftist freak out over “banned books” this is not banning books, it’s still easy to get Harry Potter and bookstores should be able to limit whatever books they want for whatever reason. But not only does it show a double standard, the rationale is far less justifiable than removing certain content from school libraries. At least there the justification was the content of certain books are inappropriate for children, clearly not every book should be available in a school library. Here, there’s no argument about the content they just don’t like the author’s politics!
Because news came out about his letter to the FBI, revealing he was a nutcase. The letter was rambling and incoherent, claiming he was trained by the US military off the books, and that Walz had instructed him to kill Amy Klobuchar so he could run for Senate. None of it made any sense (Walz is not running for Senate) and none of the assassinations made any sense, even in a diabolical way.
Nearly all of his hit list was Democrats (including Walz) and abortion clinics, but he was supposedly working for Walz?! Plus, one of the guys he killed wasn’t even on his list, and others were no longer in office or deceased. None of it makes sense from any coherent angle.
Basically, it appears the guy was mentally ill and neither the left or right can use the incident to push their agendas anymore, so the story was dropped.
This is so dumb. First, this means LA began as Spanish land founded to support Spanish missions (i.e. colonialism). Which contradicts their entire premise. But the reality is that Los Angeles is a quintessential American city.
▪️When the US acquired California in the 1840s, LA was a small town of less than 2,000 people. It was basically nothing. It became large only after the gold rush and the railroads completed in the 1870-80s, which brought thousands of new settlers and a booming commercial center.
▪️But LA had a major issue limiting its growth, no water. It wasn’t until Mulholland found a water source and built an aqueduct down from Northern California that LA had the infrastructure to grow into a major city.
▪️Then, a combination of oil, real estate and the film industry caused it to boom in the early 1900s. Post WWII, industries like aerospace continued its spectacular growth. Calling this “Mexican land” is a brain dead take. Neither the Mexicans, Spanish nor ...
