The skein of lies

The only thing that is surprising about Representative-elect George Santos's tangled skein of lies is how unsurprising it is.

The list of his falsehoods is extensive, and include:

• He claimed his mother's family is Jewish and fled the Holocaust.  He said her parents' surname was Zabrovsky, and did fundraising for a charity under the name "Anthony Zabrovsky."  In fact, he does not appear to have Jewish ancestry at all, and tried to dodge the lie when confronted about it by a reporter from the New York Post by saying "I didn't say I was Jewish, I said I was Jew-ish."  He'd also said on another occasion that his mother "was born in Belgium and fled socialism in Europe" to come here -- but investigative reporters from CNN found she was actually born in Brazil.
• He stated that "9/11 claimed his mother's life."  She actually died of cancer in 2016.
• He claimed to have gone to a prestigious prep school, but had to leave because his parents had financial problems.  The school has no record of his ever attending.
• He claimed to have graduated from Baruch College.  The school has no record of his ever attending.
• He claimed to have been an associate asset manager at Goldman Sachs.  The company has no record of his ever working there.
• He claimed never to have broken the law anywhere.  There are records of his being charged with fraud in Brazil after writing checks from a stolen checkbook.  Reporters found that he'd been released on his own recognizance and then failed to show up at his court date.
• He claimed to own thirteen properties from which he derived income, and later admitted he didn't own any at all.

And so on and so forth.  Confronted with the list of falsehoods, he called them "embellishments" and "poor choices of words," instead of what they are, which are brazen, bald-faced lies.

All appalling enough.  But what finally pissed me off enough to write about it here was an interview two days ago on Fox News, where Tulsi Gabbard (sitting in for Tucker Carlson) had some sharp words for Santos, calling him out on his lies and saying, "Have you no shame?" and "You don't seem to be taking this seriously."

Okay, whoa now.  Fox News has zero standing to call out Santos for lying.  They stood by and defended Donald Trump for lying pretty much every time he opened his damn mouth, and still largely support him (and attack anyone who opposes him).  They sided with Trump counselor Kellyanne Conway when she defended then-White House spokesperson Sean Spicer's lies about the number of attendees at the Inauguration, calling them "alternative facts."  They've been at the forefront of spreading lies and propaganda about climate change (it's a hoax), COVID-19 (it's no big deal), masks (they don't work), and vaccines (neither do they).

They do not get to stand on the moral high ground now and pretend they care about the truth.

In a very real sense, Fox News created George Santos.  Without the complete disdain they've shown for truth, without their "facts you don't like are lies by the radical left" philosophy, without the constant message of "every media agency in the world is lying to you except us," the network of easily-disproved falsehoods by George Santos wouldn't have lasted five minutes.  Members of his own party would have found out what a fraud he is, and fronted another candidate for the position.

But we're sunk so deep in the attitude that "truth doesn't matter as long as you're in power," he not only ran, but got elected.

It remains to be seen what will happen to him.  A House ethics committee is looking into his background, but whether his past actions crossed the line from "unethical" into "illegal" isn't certain.  It's probable that since in a week the House of Representatives will have a Republican majority, he'll sail into office without a problem.

Honestly, if you think Santos is shocking, you haven't been paying attention.  He's just the end of a long pattern of increasing disdain for inconvenient truths.  We haven't seen the last of his kind, either, especially given the likelihood that he won't face anything worse for his lying than a slap on the wrist.  Until we, as a voting citizenry, demand that our elected officials and the media we consume respect the truth above all, we will continue living out the famous quote by Jean de Maistre, that "A democracy is the form of government in which everyone has a voice, and therefore in which the people get exactly the leadership they deserve."

****************************************

Tell me lies

In Jean-Paul Sartre's short story "The Wall," three men are captured during the Spanish Civil War, and all three are sentenced to die if they won't reveal the whereabouts of the rebellion's ringleader, Ramón Gris.

The main character, Pablo Ibbieta, and the other two men sit in their jail cell, discussing what they should do.  All three are terrified of dying (of course), but is it morally and ethically required for them to give up their lives for the cause they believe in?  When is a cause worth a human life?  Three human lives?  What if it cost hundreds of lives?

Pablo's two companions are each offered one more chance to rat out Ramón, and each refuses.  Pablo hears the noises as they're dragged out into the prison courtyard, stood up against the wall, and shot to death.

Now it's just Pablo, alone in the cell.

Thoughts race through his head.  Now that it's just him, if he sells out Ramón, there won't be any witnesses (or at least any on the side of the rebellion).  Who'll know it was him that betrayed the cause?

After much soul-searching, Pablo decides he can't do it.  He has to remain loyal, even at the cost of his own life.  But he figures there's nothing wrong with making his captors look like idiots in the process.  So he tells them that Ramón Gris is hiding in a cemetery on the other end of town.  He laughs to himself picturing the people holding him, the ones who have just killed his two friends, rushing off and dashing around the cemetery for no good reason, making fools of themselves.

His captors tell him they're going to go check out his story, and if he's lying, he's a dead man (which Pablo knows is what will happen).  But after a couple of hours, they come back... and let him go.

He's wandering around the town, dazed, when he runs into a friend, another secret member of the rebellion.  The friend says, "Did you hear?  They got Ramón."

Pablo asks how it happened.

The guy says, "Yeah... Ramón was in a friend's house, as you know, perfectly safe, but he became convinced he was going to be betrayed.  So he went and hid out at the cemetery.  They found him and shot him."

The last line of the story is, "I sat down on a bench, and laughed until I cried."

It's a sucker punch of an ending, and raises a number of interesting ethical issues.  I used to assign "The Wall" to my Critical Thinking classes, and the discussion afterward revolved around two questions:

Did Pablo Ibbieta lie?  And was he morally responsible for Ramón Gris's death?

There's no doubt that Pablo intended to lie.  It was accidentally the truth, something he only found out after it was too late.  As far as his responsibility... there's no doubt that if he hadn't spoken up, if he had just let the guards execute them as his two friends did, Ramón wouldn't have been killed.  So in the technical sense, it was Pablo who caused Ramón's death.  But again, there's his intent, which was exactly the opposite.

The questions don't admit easy answers -- as Sartre no doubt intended.

All lies are clearly not morally equivalent, even barring complex situations like the one described in "The Wall."  Lies to flatter someone or protect their feelings ("That is a lovely sweater") are thought by most people to be less culpable than ones where the intent was to defraud someone for one's own gain.  And as common as harmful lies seem to be, some recent research came up with the heartening results that we lie far more often for altruistic reasons than for selfish or vindictive ones.

A recent paper in the Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science, by Jennifer McArthur, Rayanda Jarvis, Catherine Bourgeois, and Marguerite Ternes, found that while lying in general is inversely correlated with measures of honesty and conscientiousness -- unsurprising -- the most common motivations for lying were altruistic reasons, such as protecting someone's feelings or reputation, and secrecy (claiming not to know something when you actually do).

So maybe human dishonesty isn't quite as ugly and self-serving as it might appear at first.

Note, however, that I'm not saying even the altruistically-motivated lies McArthur et al. describe are necessarily a good thing.  Telling Aunt Bertha that her tuna noodle olive loaf was delicious will just encourage her to inflict it on someone else, and giving people false feedback to avoid hurting their feelings -- especially when asked for -- can lead someone astray.  But like the far more serious situation in "The Wall," these aren't simple questions with easy answers; ethicists have been wrestling with the morality of truth-telling for centuries, and there's never been a particularly good, hard-and-fast rule.

But it's good to know that, at least when it comes to breaking "Thou shalt not lie," that for the most part we're motivated by good intentions.

****************************************

Shooting the bull

There's a folk truism that goes, "Don't try to bullshit a bullshitter."

The implication is that people who exaggerate and/or lie routinely, either to get away with things or to create an overblown image of themselves, know the technique so well that they can always spot it in others.  This makes bullshitting a doubly attractive game; not only does it make you slick, impressing the gullible and allowing you to avoid responsibility, it makes you savvy and less likely to be suckered yourself.

Well, a study published this week in The British Journal of Social Psychology, conducted by Shane Littrell, Evan Risko, and Jonathan Fugelsang, has shown that like many folk truisms, this isn't true at all.

In fact, the research supports the opposite conclusion.  At least one variety of regular bullshitting leads to more likelihood of falling for bullshit from others.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Inkscape by Anynobody, composing work: Mabdul ., Bullshit, CC BY-SA 3.0]

The researchers identified two main kinds of bullshitting, persuasive and evasive.  Persuasive bullshitters exaggerate or embellish their own accomplishments to impress others or fit in with their social group; evasive ones dance around the truth to avoid damaging their own reputations or the reputations of their friends.

Because of the positive shine bullshitting has with many, the researchers figured most people who engage either type wouldn't be shy about admitting it, so they used self-reporting to assess the bullshit levels and styles of the eight hundred participants.  They then gave each a more formal measure of cognitive ability, metacognitive insight, intellectual overconfidence, and reflective thinking, then a series of pseudo-profound and pseudoscientific statements mixed in with real profound and truthful statements, to see if they could tell them apart.

The surprising result was that the people who were self-reported persuasive bullshitters were significantly worse at detecting pseudo-profundity than the habitually honest; the evasive bullshitters were better than average.

"We found that the more frequently someone engages in persuasive bullshitting, the more likely they are to be duped by various types of misleading information regardless of their cognitive ability, engagement in reflective thinking, or metacognitive skills," said study lead author Shane Littrell, of the University of Waterloo.  "Persuasive BSers seem to mistake superficial profoundness for actual profoundness.  So, if something simply sounds profound, truthful, or accurate to them that means it really is.  But evasive bullshitters were much better at making this distinction."

Which supports a contention that I've had for years; if you lie for long enough, you eventually lose touch with what the truth is.  The interesting fact that persuasive and evasive bullshitting aren't the same in this respect might be because evasive bullshitters engage in this behavior because they're highly sensitive to people's opinions, both of themselves and of others.  This would have the effect of making them more aware of what others are saying and doing, and becoming better at sussing out what people's real motives are -- and whether they're being truthful or not.  But persuasive bullshitters are so self-focused that they aren't paying much attention to what others say, so any subtleties that might clue them in to the fact they they're being bullshitted slip right by.

I don't know whether this is encouraging or not.  I'm not sure if the fact that it's easier to lie successfully to a liar is a point to celebrate by those of us who care about the truth.  But it does illustrate the fact that our common sense about our own behavior sometimes isn't very accurate.  As usual, approaching questions from a skeptical scientific angle is the best.

After all, no form of bullshit can withstand that.

****************************************

Last week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week was about the ethical issues raised by gene modification; this week's is about the person who made CRISPR technology possible -- Nobel laureate Jennifer Doudna.

In The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race, author Walter Isaacson describes the discovery of how the bacterial enzyme complex called CRISPR-Cas9 can be used to edit genes of other species with pinpoint precision.  Doudna herself has been fascinated with scientific inquiry in general, and genetics in particular, since her father gave her a copy of The Double Helix and she was caught up in what Richard Feynman called "the joy of finding things out."  The story of how she and fellow laureate Emmanuelle Charpentier developed the technique that promises to revolutionize our ability to treat genetic disorders is a fascinating exploration of the drive to understand -- and a cautionary note about the responsibility of scientists to do their utmost to make certain their research is used ethically and responsibly.

If you like biographies, are interested in genetics, or both, check out The Code Breaker, and find out how far we've come into the science-fiction world of curing genetic disease, altering DNA, and creating "designer children," and keep in mind that whatever happens, this is only the beginning.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Poisoned by preconceived notions

If you needed something else to make you worry about our capacity to make decisions based on facts, go no further than a study that came out this week from the University of Texas at Austin.

Entitled "Fake News on Social Media: People Believe What They Want to Believe When it Makes No Sense At All," the study was conducted by Patricia L. Moravec, Randall K. Minas, and Alan R. Dennis of the McCombs School of Business.  And its results should be seriously disheartening for just about everyone.

What they did was a pair of experiments using students who were "social media literate" -- i.e., they should know social media's reputation for playing fast and loose with the truth -- first having them evaluate fifty headlines as true or false, and then giving them headlines with "Fake News" flags appended.  In each case, there was an even split -- in the first experiment, between true and false headlines, and in the second, between true and false headlines flagged as "Fake."

In both experiments, the subjects were hooked up to an electroencephalogram (EEG) machine, to monitor their brain activity as they performed the task.

In the first experiment, it was found -- perhaps unsurprisingly -- that people are pretty bad at telling truth from lies when presented only with a headline.  But the second one is the most interesting, and also the most discouraging.  Because what the researchers found is that when a true headline is flagged as false, and a false headline is flagged as true, this causes a huge spike in activity of the prefrontal cortex -- a sign of cognitive dissonance as the subject tries desperately to figure out how this can be so -- but only if the labeling of the headline as such disagrees with what they already believed.

[Image is in the Public Domain]

So we're perfectly ready to believe the truth is a lie, or a lie is the truth, if it fits our preconceived notions.  And worse still, what the researchers saw is that in general, even though subjects had an uncomfortable amount of cognitive processing going on when they were confronted by something that was the opposite of what they thought was true, it didn't have much influence over what they thought was true after the experiment.

In other words, you can label the truth a lie, or a lie the truth, but it won't change people's minds if they already believed the opposite.  Our ability to discern fact from fiction, and use that information to craft our view of the world, is poisoned by our preconceived notions of what we'd like to be true.

Before you start pointing fingers, the researchers also found that there was no good predictor of how well subjects did on this test.  They were all bad -- Democrats and Republicans, higher IQ and lower IQ, male and female.

"When we’re on social media, we’re passively pursuing pleasure and entertainment," said Patricia Moravec, who was lead author of the study, in an interview with UT News.  "We’re avoiding something else...  The fact that social media perpetuates and feeds this bias complicates people’s ability to make evidence-based decisions.  But if the facts that you do have are polluted by fake news that you truly believe, then the decisions you make are going to be much worse."

This is insidious because even if we are just going on social media to be entertained, the people posting political advertisements on social media aren't.  They're trying to change our minds.  And what the Moravec et al. study shows is that we're not only lousy at telling fact from fiction, we're very likely to get suckered by a plausible-sounding lie (or, conversely, to disbelieve an inconvenient truth) if it fits with our preexisting political beliefs.

Which makes it even more incumbent on the people who run social media platforms (yeah, I'm lookin' at you, Mark Zuckerberg) to have on-staff fact checkers who are empowered to reject ads on both sides of the political aisle that are making false claims.  It's not enough to cite free speech rights as an excuse for abrogating your duty to protect people from immoral and ruthless politicians who will say or do anything to gain or retain power.  The people in charge of social media are under no obligation to run any ad someone's willing to pay for.  It's therefore their duty to establish criteria for which ads are going to show up -- and one of those criteria should surely be whether it's the truth.

The alternative is that our government will continue to be run by whoever has the cleverest, most attractive propaganda.  And as we've seen over the past three years, this is surely a recipe for disaster.

**********************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a fun book about math.

Bet that's a phrase you've hardly ever heard uttered.

Jordan Ellenberg's amazing How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking looks at how critical it is for people to have a basic understanding and appreciation for math -- and how misunderstandings can lead to profound errors in decision-making.  Ellenberg takes us on a fantastic trip through dozens of disparate realms -- baseball, crime and punishment, politics, psychology, artificial languages, and social media, to name a few -- and how in each, a comprehension of math leads you to a deeper understanding of the world.

As he puts it: math is "an atomic-powered prosthesis that you attach to your common sense, vastly multiplying its reach and strength."  Which is certainly something that is drastically needed lately.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Truth, lies, and Facebook

There's been a whole lot of buzz lately on the subject of free speech and social media.

The maelstrom has centered around the controversial figure of Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, whose rather lax policies about truth in political advertisements is said by many to have contributed to Donald Trump's nomination and eventual electoral win.  As we enter another presidential election season (lord help us all), the whole issue has come up again -- with Zuckerberg defending his position on allowing ads even if they contain factual inaccuracy.

I.e., "Fake News."  Oh, how I've come to loathe that phrase, which gets lobbed every time someone hears a piece of news unfavorable to their preferred politician.  Call it "Fake News," and you can forthwith stop thinking about it.

It's been a remarkably efficient strategy -- and is largely to blame for the current political mess we're in.

In any case, Zuckerberg isn't backing down.  He said:

While I certainly worry about the erosion of truth, I don’t think most people want to live in a world where you can only post things that tech companies judge to be 100% true...  We’re seeing people across the spectrum try to define more speech as dangerous because it may lead to political outcomes they see as unacceptable.  Some hold the view that since the stakes are now so high, they can no longer trust their fellow citizens with the power to communicate and decide what to believe for themselves.  I personally believe that this is more dangerous for democracy over the long term than almost any speech.

Which, to me, misses the point entirely.

Free speech covers opinions like, "I think Donald Trump has been a great president."  I have no right to censor that, whether or not I agree with it.  However, saying "Donald Trump eats live babies for breakfast" is not covered under free speech, because it's a false statement intended to discredit.

Which the law refers to as "libel."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Ibrahim.ID, Socialmedia-pm, CC BY-SA 4.0]

So allowing political ads is one thing.  You can craft a political ad that steers clear of libel even if it's highly critical of the candidate you're running against.   But when you post factual inaccuracies (better known as "lies") about someone, with the intent to cause harm to their reputation or electability, that's no longer a matter of free speech.

And as such, yes, Mark, you have an obligation to block such advertisements.

Elizabeth Warren responded to Zuckerberg's stance by putting together an ad claiming that Zuckerberg is a Trump supporter (which he claims is untrue).  But the salvo evidently didn't really strike the target.  Zuckerberg is still unapologetic for his position:

Do we ban ads about health care or immigration or women’s empowerment?  And if you’re not going to ban those, does it really make sense to give everyone a voice in the political debates except for the candidates themselves?  I believe when it’s not absolutely clear what to do, we should err on the side of greater expression.

Well, actually, you have banned ads about health care.  Earlier this year, Facebook (rightly) decided to block ads promoting the talking points of the anti-vaxxers.  Why?  Because what they were saying was false and harmful.  That's the acid test, you know?  (1) Is it false? and (2) is it harmful or damaging to the person or persons targeted?

If the answer to those two questions is "yes," then social media has an obligation to say no to the advertisement.

Hard to see how anything about "women's empowerment" would fall under those guidelines.

So what Zuckerberg is engaging in is a false equivalency -- and I believe he's perfectly well aware of it.  Those ads bring in millions of dollars of revenue, so he has a vested interest in turning a blind eye, regardless of the political or societal outcome.  As usual, it's all about the bottom line.

At present, I still have a Facebook.  For one thing, it's my primary way of keeping in touch with people who live far away and whom I rarely see.  For another, it's the main social media platform used by my publishing company, so I'd be cutting myself off from them pretty thoroughly if I deleted my profile.

So I'm sticking -- for the time being.  I'd love to see enough pressure put on Zuckerberg that he changes his stance, and at least pledges to stop advertisements that engage in spreading demonstrably false statements.  That's all we're asking, really -- not to take sides, but to stop all sides from lying for their own gain.

It's not a difficult concept.  And hard to see how you'd craft an argument that increasing the amount of truth in all kinds of media is a bad thing.

*****************************

This week's Skeptophilia book-of-the-week is from an author who has been a polarizing figure for quite some time; the British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins.  Dawkins has long been an unapologetic critic of religion, and in fact some years ago wrote a book called The God Delusion that caused thermonuclear-level rage amongst the Religious Right.

But the fact remains that he is a passionate, lucid, and articulate exponent of the theory of evolution, independent of any of his other views.  This week's book recommendation is his wonderful The Greatest Show on Earth, which lays out the evidence for biological evolution in a methodical fashion, in terminology accessible to a layperson, in such a way that I can't conceive how you'd argue against it.  Wherever you fall on the spectrum of attitudes toward evolution (and whatever else you might think of Dawkins), you should read this book.  It's brilliant -- and there's something eye-opening on every page.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Truth and non-truth

If there's one thing that could be a microcosm of the current administration, it was a short exchange yesterday between Rudy Giuliani and Chuck Todd on NBC's Meet the Press.

Giuliani, who is acting as Donald Trump's lawyer, said, "When you tell me that, you know, [Trump] should testify because he’s going to tell the truth and he shouldn’t worry, well that’s so silly because it’s somebody’s version of the truth.  Not the truth."

Todd replied, "Truth is truth."

You'd think Giuliani at this point would say, "That's not what I meant," or some other deflection, but no.  Amazingly, he replied, "No, no, it isn’t truth.  Truth isn’t truth.  The President of the United States says, 'I didn’t …'"

Todd, obviously shocked, said, "Truth isn't truth?"

Giuliani said, "No, no, no."

Lest you think Giuliani had an unguarded moment, or got cornered into misspeaking, this isn't the first time he's ventured into this territory.  Last week on CNN he took exception to Chris Cuomo's comment that "facts are not in the eye of the beholder."

"Yes, they are," Giuliani replied.  "Nowadays they are."

And in May, when Giuliani was being interviewed by the Washington Post on the topic of the Mueller investigation, he said, "They may have a different version of the truth than we have."

People have made fun of Giuliani over this -- in fact, yesterday Chuck Todd said about the "truth isn't truth" comment, "This is going to become a bad meme" -- but honestly, it encapsulates the Trump administration's entire approach.  Don't believe what anyone is telling you -- except me.  Doubt the facts and the fact-checkers.  

Hell, doubt your own eyes.  Trump himself said, just last month, "Stick with us.  Don't believe the crap you see from these people, the fake news...  What you're seeing and what you're reading is not what's happening."

And the most frightening thing of all is that it's worked.  Last November, a CNN reporter interviewed a Trump supporter and asked about the allegations of collusion with Russia.  The man, Mark Lee, replied, "Let me tell you, if Jesus Christ got down off the cross and told me Trump is with Russia, I would tell him hold on a second, I need to check with the president if it’s true...  I love the guy."

Scared enough yet?  Let's add a quote from George Orwell's 1984 to bring the point home:

The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.  It was their final, most essential command...  And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth.  'Who controls the past' ran the Party slogan, 'controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.'

To me, the buffoonery and sideshow circus over Trump and his alleged dalliances with porn stars and prostitutes is completely irrelevant.  I don't honestly care who he has had sex with, or is having sex with now; it's between Melania and him.  (Although I do notice a crashing silence from a lot of the people who were apoplectic with self-righteous rage over Bill Clinton getting a blowjob from Monica Lewinsky.  Funny thing, that.)

And a lot of what he's accused of -- colluding with the Russians to skew elections, pandering to dictators, doing whatever it takes to use his position to fill his personal bank accounts -- okay, that's some pretty awful stuff.  But we've been through this kind of thing before.  Corruption in government is hardly a new thing; Watergate, Teapot Dome, the Whiskey Ring, JFK's use of his position to avoid consequences for his many affairs, Eisenhower's turning a blind eye to McCarthyism, the acceptance by more than one administration of the atrocities of dictators as long as they were pro-US -- government is not a clean affair at the best of times.

But this is a qualitatively different thing.  This is a president who can stand there and say one thing one day, the opposite the next -- and his spokespeople say he was right both times.

And his followers believe them.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Paterm, Big Brother graffiti in France 2, CC BY-SA 3.0]

The fallout from scandals can take a while to clean up.  I was only twelve when the Watergate coverup was revealed, and I remember how it completely dominated the news, almost to the exclusion of everything else, for what seemed like years afterward.

But how do you fix this?  Orwell was right; once you convince people that everyone else is lying to them -- using state-controlled media (Fox News, anyone?) as the mouthpiece -- you can shortly thereafter have them believing that up is down and left is right.  They're effectively insulated from reality.  Much fun has been made of the whole "fake news" thing, but I'm not laughing; it's the scariest thing of all, and more so because the media themselves are complicit in it.  They played right into Trump's hands during the election, reporting every damnfool thing he said and every outrageous claim he made, because it got them viewers (and Trump, of course, ate it up; he lives for being in the spotlight, even if it's for saying something idiotic).  Skewed stories and biased reporting on both sides?  No problem as long as it kept people from changing the channel.

But the viewers weren't watching because they were laughing.  They were watching because they believed.  And so when Trump got elected, and then said that the media itself was lying, that the only ones who could be trusted were the ones who said Trump was the sole arbiter of truth, his followers turned against the media without a second thought.

Reject the evidence of your eyes and ears.  It is the final, most essential command.

The only possible response sane people can have is to demand the truth.  Not just from our leaders,  but from the media, from political spokespeople... and from each other.  People like Giuliani should be laughed out of the building for saying things like "truth isn't truth," and should thereafter be denied the opportunity for subsequent interviews.  He's destroyed his own credibility; why should we listen further?

Same goes for Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Kellyanne "Alternative Facts" Conway.  They've established their propensity for lying without shame.  Done.  They've lost their spot on the stage.

Of course, I don't really think that's going to happen, any more than the media shut off the microphones once it was established early in the election season that Donald Trump is constitutionally incapable of telling the truth.  But maybe if we stop tolerating lies -- if we start turning off the media that supports these people, and demanding fair, fact-based reporting -- that will get their attention.

To end with another quote from Orwell: "In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act."

********************************

This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a classic, and especially for you pet owners: Konrad Lorenz's Man Meets Dog.  In this short book, the famous Austrian behavioral scientist looks at how domestic dogs interact, both with each other and with their human owners.  Some of his conjectures about dog ancestry have been superseded by recent DNA studies, but his behavioral analyses are spot-on -- and will leaving you thinking more than once, "Wow.  I've seen Rex do that, and always wondered why."

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Authentic lies

A paper that appeared in the American Sociology Review in January, by Oliver Hahl (of Carnegie Mellon Institute) and Minjae Kim and Ezra W. Zuckerman Sivan (of MIT) should be alarming to anyone who values the truth over partisanship -- which, I hope, is the majority of thinking individuals.

The paper is entitled "The Authentic Appeal of the Lying Demagogue: Proclaiming the Deeper Truth about Political Illegitimacy," and begins with a frightening statement:

[H]ow can a constituency of voters find a candidate “authentically appealing” (i.e., view him positively as authentic) even though he is a “lying demagogue” (someone who deliberately tells lies and appeals to non-normative private prejudices)?...  [Our] results demonstrate that mere partisanship is insufficient to explain sharp differences in how lying demagoguery is perceived, and that several oft-discussed factors—information access, culture, language, and gender—are not necessary for explaining such differences.  Rather, for the lying demagogue to have authentic appeal, it is sufficient that one side of a social divide regards the political system as flawed or illegitimate.

Study co-author Zuckerman Sivan elaborated further, in a press release from MIT's School of Management.  "The key to our theory," he said, "is that when a candidate asserts an obvious untruth especially as part of a general attack on establishment norms, his anti-establishment listeners will pick up on his underlying message that the establishment is illegitimate and, therefore, that candidate will have an ‘authentic’ appeal despite the falsehoods and norm-breaking."

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons Madhumathi S V, Business ethics, CC BY-SA 4.0]

I don't know about you, but I find this legitimately terrifying.  One of the most common statements I heard people make in defense of Donald Trump during the lead-up to the 2016 election was that he "tells it like it is."  Even back then it was obvious -- and we've had about a million examples since -- the one thing Trump doesn't do is "tell it like it is."  The phrase "like it is" implies that he's the only one brave enough to tell the truth, when in fact, I have never seen an elected official lie as outrageously and continuously as Trump does.  (And I lived in Louisiana while Edwin Edwards was governor, which sets the bar pretty high.)

So Trump doesn't, in fact, "tell it like it is;" he tells us (1) like he'd like it to be (as in his recent statement that he's more popular than Obama ever was), and (2) like his devoted followers think it is (as in his claim that illegal immigrants are pouring across the border in record numbers, when in fact the number of illegals entering the country has been on a downward trend for over ten years).

"We argue that when voters identify with an ‘aggrieved’ social category — that is, one whose members see themselves as unfairly treated by the political establishment — they will be more motivated to view demagogic falsehoods from a candidate claiming to serve them as gestures of symbolic protest against the dominant group," Hahl et al. write.  "When this happens, such voters will view the candidate making these statements as more authentic than would people in other social categories...  If the key to the authentic appeal of the lying demagogue is that he is signaling a willingness to be regarded as a pariah by the establishment, Trump was certainly a credible pariah.  In this sense, his statements reminded his voters that he is a pariah just like them."

So we've somehow moved from "authentic" as meaning "true" to "authentic" as meaning "whatever flips the finger at the dominant paradigm, whether it's true or not."  Maybe it's always been this way; I've commented before that the hippie movement of the 1960s was just as clearly founded on a lie, that you could burn your draft card and driver's license, jettison all social convention, and live in a world of free food and free sex and no rules -- when, in fact, the vast majority of the hippies lived by sponging off people who had conventional jobs that paid for food, rent, and utilities.  The appeal was that the hippies appeared to be sticking it to the man, shaking a fist at a system that (in the words of the authors) was "flawed and illegitimate" -- a view that, in a lot of ways, wasn't wrong.  Nor are the Trump voters wrong, not in their basic objections -- that the system has largely profited the rich and screwed the lower middle class workers, and that the wealthy elite has many times acted with arrogance and disdain for the people of the "flyover states," when they didn't ignore them completely.  It's no surprise that the poorest states in the United States are the most staunchly red.

But just as the hippie movement wasn't the way out of the tangled morass of unrest during the 1960s, Trumpism isn't the way out of our problems now.  Trump and his cronies haven't helped the working class; damn near everything they've done has been of sole benefit to the fat cats and lobbyists, even if Fox News hasn't had the balls to say so.  And merciful heavens, he has lied.  I know that "politicians lie" is a cliché for good reason, but I have never seen anyone with such a complete and callous disregard for the truth as Donald Trump.  Worse, he gets away with it.  I swear, the man could say "2+2=3" today, and "2+2=5" tomorrow, and not only would his followers believe him both times, he could say "I never said that 2+2=3" while the fucking videotape was running, and they'd believe that, too.

So this takes "lying demagoguery" to unprecedented heights, where it's not so much that truth matters less than "gestures of symbolic protest against the dominant group," but that truth doesn't matter at all.

The basic problem is that addressing this would require remediating the conditions that have led half of America to view the system as "flawed and illegitimate" -- which is even less likely now that we have a government that views funneling money to the Koch Brothers et al. as a greater good than addressing poverty, unemployment, and infrastructure failure.  So the working class gets angrier, the poor get more desperate, and the whole thing snowballs as the democracy unravels -- just as it did in Weimar Germany.

Speaking of lying demagogues.

*******************************

This week's featured book on Skeptophilia is Flim-Flam!, by the grand old man of skepticism and critical thinking, James Randi.  Randi was a stage magician before he devoted his career to unmasking charlatans, so he of all people knows how easy it is to fool the unwary.  His book is a highly entertaining exercise in learning not to believe what you see -- especially when someone is trying to sell you something.

Vitriol in the mailbox

Whenever I write a post that's critical of Donald Trump, I always cringe a little as my finger is poised above the "Publish" button.

Because it never fails to result in hate mail, which runs the gamut from implications that I'm hopelessly stupid to spittle-flecked, obscenity-laden screeds, many of which make suggestions that would not have been anatomically possible even when I was in my twenties and was a great deal more flexible.

I've never seen anything quite like this.  I've written this blog for going on eight years, and during that time I have been critical of a large number of public figures.  Those public figures represent a reasonably good cross-section of political and philosophical ideologies; I try my best to be even-handed and criticize faulty thinking wherever I see it, regardless of whether the person in question belongs to the political party I favor.

So, as you might expect, people often take exception to what I say, and pretty frequently will come back at me with some kind of response, question, or rebuttal.  This is fine.  I have no problem being challenged; if I did, I wouldn't be a blogger, I would stay home and talk to my dog, who no matter what I say looks at me with this adoring expression that says, "Good heavens!  I would never have thought of that!  That's absolutely brilliant!"

But I have never seen anything like the vitriol that gets thrown at me over Donald Trump.  There's something about him that seems to incite either blazing hatred or defend-till-death loyalty.  I find this a little puzzling, but it played out again apropos of my post from two days ago, wherein I described the peculiar evidence-resistance I've seen in Trump and his spokesperson Sarah Huckabee Sanders, wherein they will not admit to being wrong even when the facts are incontrovertible.  Here are just a few of the responses I got within twenty-four hours of the post.  I'm leaving out the ones that were pure vulgarity, because you can only write "go fuck yourself" so many times.

You liberals are doomed.  You know that, right?  We threw away the elephant and the donkey, and elected a lion.  You're [sic] days are numbered.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but the polls aren't really bearing this out.  Support for Trump dwindled into the low 30s by mid-2017 and have pretty much stayed there, and most pundits are predicting that the Democrats are poised to have a good shot at taking back both the House and the Senate.  Now, I'm well aware that a lot can happen between now and November.  Hell, given the last week's headlines, a lot can happen between now and next Thursday.  But even so, the "lion" seems to be in some serious jeopardy of ending up in a very, very small cage.

What part of Trump is in the WH do you not understand?

I understand who the president is all too well, thanks.  My primary concern at the moment is not wishing someone else had won, it's wishing he wouldn't lie every time he opens his damn mouth, not to mention do something idiotic that gets us into yet another war.  And if you don't see him as  increasingly erratic, you're not paying attention.  To take one example (of many), consider his calling out Obama for making public a plan to send the military into Syria, then posting a tweet that... made public a plan to send the military into Syria.  The only difference was that this one came along with a slam against Russia for supporting Assad.  Then -- twenty minutes later -- he backpedaled and said our relationship with Russia is just fine.  And followed it up with saying that he didn't really say he was going to bomb Syria, and if he did, he didn't tell them the actual launch date, so it was all cool.

The man is a petulant, moody, ignorant toddler, whose response to everything is to call people names, lie, and sulk.  And I'd feel this way regardless of which political party he belonged to.  He could agree with me on damn near every political stance there is, and he'd still be completely unfit to run the country.

Finally we have someone whose [sic] doing something about stopping the immigrants from taking over, and people like you can't handle it.  Let's see how you feel when sharea [sic] law is declared in your home town.

Let me quote from my own post: "I'm not here to discuss immigration policy per se.  It's a complex issue and one on which I am hardly qualified to weigh in."  I never once said, either in that post or in any other, whether I'm for tightening or loosening immigration laws, whether I support DACA, whether there should be amnesty for illegals living in the United States, and so on.  (And I'm not going to.  When I don't feel qualified to comment on a topic, I don't comment on it.)  What I did comment upon was that both Trump and Sanders have said that illegal immigration is increasing now, and increased steadily throughout the Obama presidency, both of which are simply false.  I'm not so much concerned with the specific topic of immigration as I am with the fact that the president seems to be incapable of telling truth from fiction.

There has never been a president who has been so abused, so criticized, and had so many roadblocks placed in his way.  People criticize him for not accomplishing his agenda, but he's spending so much of his time defending himself against unfair attacks and criticism that it's no wonder.

First, allow me to point out that if a Republican president with a Republican Senate, Republican House, and Supreme Court dominated by conservatives can't achieve his agenda, it's hardly the fault of the Democrats. But about the abuse -- geez, how short a memory do you have?  Every president gets a dose of criticism (fair and unfair), ridicule, and so on, but have you forgotten what happened when Obama was elected?  The man couldn't wear a tan suit without Fox News having a complete meltdown.  He had a Supreme Court nomination stalled for nine months (an act that Mitch McConnell said was "the proudest moment of [his] political life"), resulting in the nomination never coming to a vote, something that was completely unprecedented.  And as far as how he was treated by the voters, do you remember this photograph?

Oh, wait, maybe you didn't see it, because it was never mentioned by Tucker Carlson, Rush Limbaugh, or Sean Hannity.  And it's only one of many.  If you do a Google image search for "Obama lynched in effigy," you'll see what kind of shit he and his family had to face on a daily basis.

So anyway.  I've probably just opened myself up to another waterfall of vitriol, which is fine.  Like I said, I'm used to it; it's an occupational hazard of what I do.  But the point I made in my original post still stands; if you hold a stance, and you are presented with hard, unassailable facts that the opposite is true, the only honest thing to do is to admit you were wrong, not to claim that you "still feel you're right" or that there are "alternate facts."

And sending the person who pointed it out anatomically impossible suggestions really doesn't help your case much.

Liar-in-chief

I have a basic rule I try to follow, which is: insofar as it is possible, tell the truth.

I'll be up front that I haven't always met this standard.  I'm human, fallible, and swayed by context, emotions, and fear, and those can lead you to commit acts of dubious morality.  But I do my best to follow it, and when I screw up, to admit it and make amends.

That standard should apply even more rigorously to public officials.  They have been elected or appointed to positions of trust, and as such, they should adhere to the truth -- and make their decisions based upon the truth.

Which brings me to Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

Sanders, who is White House Press Secretary, has the unenviable position of making Donald Trump's decisions seem reasonable.  What this means is that she not only has to defend him, she has to persuade the press that Trump himself is being truthful.  And considering that a Washington Post analysis has counted 1,628 times the president has publicly lied since taking office a year ago, it's not an easy task.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

What that means, of course, is that frequently Sanders herself has to lie.  Or to defend lying, as she did two days ago when there was a public outcry about Trump retweeting links from Britain First, an ultraright nationalist fringe group, including one showing what they claimed was "a Muslim boy beating a Dutch boy on crutches in the Netherlands."

Among the many problems with the president retweeting inflammatory rhetoric was the fact that it came to light pretty quickly that the original claim was wrong.  The video clip was not a fight between a Muslim and a non-Muslim Dutch boy; it was a fight between two Dutch teenagers, one of whom had dark hair and the other light hair.  So it was actually something that should only be relevant to the local police; a video of two teenagers having a fight.

But the fringe elements never miss a chance to mischaracterize something if it suits their ends, so Britain First claimed this an Evil Muslim Refugee attacking an innocent Dutch citizen.  And Trump, for whom "tweet first, think later" has become a mantra, passed it along to all of his 43.7 million followers.

This left Sanders in the position of trying to defend what Trump had done, which she did in a curious way; by admitting the video was fake, but saying the president's point was still valid:

I'm not talking about the nature of the video. I think you're focusing on the wrong thing.  The threat is real, and that's what the president is talking about, the need for national security and military spending, those are very real things, there's nothing fake about that.  The threat is real, the threat needs to be addressed, the threat has to be talked about, and that's what president is doing in bringing it up.

No, what the president is doing is passing along a lie that was deliberately designed to stir up ethnic hatred.  And, worse, not admitting it when he got caught.

The "deny-deflect-distract" strategy has worked well for him in the past.  It reminds me of the anti-evolution screeds by the inimitable Duane Gish, originator of the so-called "Gish Gallop."  Gish became famous for "winning" debates by inundating his opponents with questions, irrelevant tangents, and demands for minute details, leaving even the most talented and intelligent debaters foundering.  Here, Trump piles one lie on another so fast that we can't keep up with them, and shrieks "fake news" at anyone who dares to call him on it.  And, with Sarah Huckabee Sanders standing there and telling us that he didn't lie, but if he did lie it doesn't matter, and if it matters, well, too bad -- he's insulated from the impact of his complete disregard for the truth.

At least so far.  One has to wonder how long it'll be before the entire house of cards starts to collapse.  Because the lies are no longer just about evil immigrants and wicked, America-hating liberals; now he's lying about the outcome of his plans for tax and health care reform.  You have to wonder how his followers will look at him him when they realize that they elected a scam artist who has no more regard for the "little guy" or "middle-class workers" than Marie "Let Them Eat Cake" Antoinette did.  He operates out of two motives: (1) gain praise however he can, and (2) feather his own nest and those of his rich donors.  And the "tax reform" bill is a thinly-disguised giveaway to the very, very rich.

The bottom line here is that truth matters.  Lies are "alternative facts" in the same sense that my index finger is an "alternative gun."  People on both sides of the aisle who care about the truth need to be calling the president out on every lie, and demanding that our senators and representatives not give him a pass just because of partisan loyalty.  We cannot afford to have a liar-in-chief -- even if his toadies try to give those lies a coating of whitewash.

Lying to your face

My last post was about how reluctant I am to post about politics.  So, predictably, this post is about: politics.

I've been watching the unfolding humanitarian disaster in Puerto Rico with something akin to horror. Not just for the suffering of the people -- which is considerable -- but for the callous indifference with which Donald Trump is addressing the situation.  First responders have said that the extent of devastation is unknown at this time, but we do know that 95% of the island is still without power, almost 60% without potable water, and 72% without access to telephone service.  San Juan's mayor, Carmen Yulín Cruz, appealed to the federal government for help, and what did Trump do?

Chide the Puerto Ricans for "wanting everything to be done for them."  Point out how far in debt they are.    Pat himself on the back for his "fantastic response" to the disaster.

Others -- most others, in fact -- were not nearly so complimentary.  General Russel Honoré, who headed up President Bush's response to Hurricane Katrina in 2005, was scathing.  "The mayor's living on a cot, and I hope the President has a good day of golf," Honoré said.  "The President has shown again he don't give a damn about poor people.  He doesn't give a damn about people of color.  And that SOB that rides around in Air Force One is denying services needed by the people of Puerto Rico.  I hate to say it that way but there's no other way to say it."

All of which brings up something I've mentioned before; Donald Trump lies every time he opens his mouth.  He has such a tenuous grasp on the truth that columnist Chris Cilizza has said that he's "living in an alternate universe."  Here are a few of the recent lies Trump has told, none of which he's backed down from:

• FEMA and the first responders in Puerto Rico engaged in a "massive food and water delivery."  The fact is -- and this has been confirmed by people there on site -- there's been no widespread distribution of food and water, because most of the roads are still impassable. 
• When Mayor Yulín Cruz said that what he'd said was flat out wrong, he lashed out at her, saying that evidently the "democrats had said you must be nasty to Trump."  Any contradictions between what he said and what's coming out of Puerto Rico are false, because the "press is treating him unfairly."
• His lies don't just center around the hurricane and Puerto Rico.  No, he's been lying for ages.  Another recent one centered around the proposed health care bill.  Trump said, more than once, that the Senate actually did have the votes to pass the repeal of the Affordable Care Act, but there was "one senator who is in the hospital."  They didn't, and there wasn't.
• And, of course, there's been no meddling in anything by the Russians.  At a rally for Luther Strange, who lost his primary bid to take Jeff Sessions's seat in the Senate to the spectacularly right-wing Roy Moore, Trump said it was "... the Russian hoax.  One of the great hoaxes.  Are there any Russians in the audience?  I don't see any Russians."  This, despite the fact that the heads of the FBI, CIA, and NSA, and the former Director of National Intelligence, all agree that there is overwhelming evidence of Russian interference in the election.
• This pathological lying is not just by Trump himself, but by members of his administration.  Apropos of the proposed tax reform bill, Gary Cohn, director of the White House Economic Council, said, "The wealthy are not getting a tax cut under our plan."  Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin concurred, adding that the bill, if passed, would reduce the deficit by a trillion dollars.  Not to be outdone, Trump himself weighed in, saying that he wouldn't benefit at all personally from the bill.  Howard Gleckman, of the Tax Policy Center, says that all three of these are blatant lies.  "There is no plausible way Congress can fully fund all of the tax cuts in this outline while complying with its constraints on revenue-raisers," Gleckman writes.  "Businesses would receive the biggest tax cuts, which would ultimately benefit the highest income households... Tax cuts for corporations and, especially, pass-through businesses, would mostly benefit the highest-income households."  Of the benefit to the economy, Gleckman was unequivocal:  "Despite the president’s promises, it is implausible that this plan would permanently boost the economy.  Trillions of dollars in lost revenue would add to the federal debt, raise interest rates, and make it more costly for businesses to invest.  Those costs would offset the benefits of lower corporate tax rates and expensing."
• He said at a rally in Charlottesville that the U.S. had become a "net energy exporter for the first time ever just recently" -- implying, of course, that it was his policies that had caused this.  The problem is, the claim is flat-out false.  Politifact analyzed this statement from every angle they could think of, and no matter how you interpret it, it's wrong.  

And so on and so forth.  And yet... and yet... there are still people defending him.  Today I saw someone post that the well-deserved backlash Trump is receiving because of his petty, nasty, vindictive response to the Puerto Rico disaster is because "they always want to find a way to criticize the United States of America."  No, "they" (whoever "they" are) aren't criticizing the U.S., they're criticizing the President, who has once again shown himself to be a narcissistic asshole who takes any questioning of his words or actions as a personal assault.

Oh, and Puerto Rico is part of the United States of America.  Awkward, that.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

So this brings us back to a place we've been before; at this point, defending Donald Trump is to side with a man who has zero respect for the truth, and lies continuously, apparently without any twinge of guilt.  He's warped people's attitude toward the media to the point that all he has to do is shriek "fake news" or "lying reporters" and they believe every word that comes out of his mouth (and disbelieve anything contrary that they see, hear, or read).

In short: supporting this man at this point is unconscionable.  I don't care what your political affiliation is, what race, what religion, or anything else.  If you are still in support of Donald Trump, you are putting yourself behind one of the worst people ever elected to public office in the United States.  And I honestly don't know how you can sleep at night.