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.
So many of these right wing accounts are just whiners now, this is a diatribe about automatic sinks and towels, the horror! As I explained in a prior post, most of the newer terminals have great bathrooms, some now have completely private stalls and plenty of them. The worst and most crowded airport bathrooms are invariably found in aging terminals that are decades old. It’s a reminder that airports were usually drab and uncomfortable.
I think the heyday of the air hand-dryers was like 15-20 years ago, where often you couldn’t find real towels. Now you can at least usually get real paper towels in airport bathrooms. Remember those old cloth roller towels that would go in a loop and somehow “clean” themselves? Yuck! Public bathrooms have always been gross, it seems some are deliberately having selective memories.
Airport food and drinks were always expensive, but now practically everyone brings those huge cooler flasks with them and fills them up. So not sure what he means that ...
I first critiqued this terrible take by looking at how food has actually improved substantially. Even though I said the same could be done in every category, people said “you’re only doing food.” So let’s do air travel and see why it’s not gotten better, not worse.
▪️Aircraft have greatly improved. Just 15-20 years ago, many domestic routes (~15%) were flown by turboprops like the Brasilia, Dash 8 or Saab. Now, almost everything is in jets, and most aircraft have WiFi. Some even have Starlink, where you probably have faster WiFi than your home. Most major airlines offer dozens or hundreds of movies and shows to watch.
▪️Newer designs like the 787 have lower cabin altitudes and improved humidity, which make a huge difference in passenger comfort on long haul flights. The first/business class international market has gotten very competitive globally, with many carriers offering excellent service and amenities. Pods, suites, showers, etc. Coach still sucks but is dramatically cheaper ...
This is the complete opposite of an empirical fact. The right has now joined the left in being pessimistic about the modern world and completely unappreciative of the amazing abundance we now have. I’ll just focus on food here, but you could do it for almost every category.
▪️Fresh produce used to be available only in season. In the winter it was canned or frozen. People used to send fruit for Christmas gifts, it was that much of a luxury good. Now, you can get giant, sweet berries year around in every grocery store. Corn on the cob in February. Not to mention once rare items like dragon fruit, heirloom tomatoes or baby bok choy.
▪️If you didn’t live on the coast, seafood was either not available, frozen, or extremely expensive. If you lived in the Midwest and traveled to coastal locales you would quite literally be able to eat food you had never seen. Salmon has become much more abundant and accessible. You can get fresh ahi at Walmart today. Sushi and oyster bars exist everywhere ...
