The Continuing Failure of the Mainstream Media

CONTEXT

Before the 2016 election, the broadcast media gave the president more far air time than other candidates. An estimate the New York Time published in March 2016 was that the free air time was worth about $1.9 billion to the president's campaign.

NPR's failure

NPR's Morning Edition program broadcast a 4-minute segment on how the Trump campaign is raising money for the 2020 elections. It is a fluff piece. It is very supportive of how the president is harvesting cash from the public for his campaign. The segment sounded like an advertisement paid for by the president's re-election campaign.

There was no mention of Biden or his campaign anywhere in today's Morning Edition program.

I found the segment to be highly offensive. I wrote to NPR complaining about supporting the president's re-election without also supporting Biden's election campaign with equal air time and an equal tone of approval.




Questions: Am I overreacting and this piece isn't anything of importance to the president's re-election? Should Biden be given equal airtime for every second that NPR and other broadcast sources give to the president?

Coronavirus Update 9

Some states are going to start reopening their economies within the next few days and weeks. That is coming despite a persistent inability to do large scale testing in the US. Reopening has already started in some places such as Georgia and Alaska. Some states never issued stay-at-home orders and are under various degrees of business and health care closures. Despite assertions from some governors that it is safe to begin to reopen, there is no way to know that without large scale testing. In essence, each state will be a separate experiment in how the Covid-19 pandemic will play out.

Absent testing data, it will be basically impossible to follow the course of the infection in detail. The number of infections and deaths could increase in coming weeks. The president continues to reject responsibility for spearheading and coordinating testing efforts. The New York Times commented: “A White House document makes clear that the states are still primarily responsible for testing and that Washington is only the ‘supplier of last resort.’” Clearly, the president has rejected a major role for a federal government testing effort, despite being the only source of national authority for coordination efforts. That level of incompetence and stupidity is incomprehensible.

The new set of symptoms

The CDC announced that it now considers nine symptoms to be common to most Covid-19 infections. Previously, three symptomes were considered dominant, i.e., shortness of breath, cough and fever. The list now also includes chills, repeated shaking with chills, muscle pain, headache, sore throat and new loss of taste or smell. These nine symptoms most commonly appear at two to 14 days after exposure to the virus. This nw listing of overt symptoms is an astonishing change in how the disease is perceived by the CDC. Why it took this long to simply see what the dominant symptoms are suggests that there is a profound problem or dysfunction in the CDC. This revelation comes weeks after hundreds of thousands of cases have been observed.

My guess is that the president has neutered the CDC for his personal political reasons. Maybe the president has muzzled the experts. Maybe he put incompetent loyalists in charge. Whatever the reasons, it is very hard to understand why it has taken this long to simply characterize the main symptoms of the disease, except for attributing it to factors such as the president's typical gross incompetence, his blatant dereliction of his duties, concern for his own re-election, and/or just plain corruption.

People still trust Trump

Reuters reports that an astounding 47% of Americans report that they are “very” or “somewhat” likely to follow recommendations the president makes about the virus. Although that is a 15% decrease from a poll at the end of March, it is arguably staggeringly high in view of how poorly the president has performed so far. The poll did indicate that 08% of democrats and republicans will not take the president's advice to inject themselves with bleach or other disinfectants. At least that sliver of reality appears to have sunk in with Americans. Reuters comments that the president’s popularity remains stable: “Overall, Trump’s overall popularity has not changed much over the past week. Forty-three percent of Americans said they approve of his overall job performance, and the same number also approve of his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic.”

Where we are and where we are going

Given America’s feeble, failed federal response to Covid-19, the imminent reopening of states and our continuing inability to do adequate testing, it now appears reasonable to speculate that the virus is going to spread through almost the entire US population. Isolated pockets of people may avoid the disease, but most of the US population seems destined to develop herd immunity on its own whether we want to get immunity that way or not. That will probably happen before a widespread antiviral treatment or vaccine becomes available. It also assumes that once people recover from an infection, they will have protective immunity. That is an open question at the moment, but it is reasonable to think that that protective immunity probably will result in most people who survive the infection.

Some evidence indicates that an antiviral drug now in testing, remdesivir, may be somewhat helpful if given fairly early in the course of the infection. That is good news, but it needs to be confirmed. Also of concern is whether the company can ramp up to large scale production if the drug does prove to be useful. Also, a team in England is optimistic that an effective vaccine they are developing can be available by September of this year. If that comes to pass, it would about as close to a medical miracle as humans can muster in such a short time.

That is something no longer possible from the US government. It is too late for that.

UTILITY AND ALL THAT! Part 1

Arming You to Fight Mainstream Economic Theory by Reconstructing It Into What It’s Properly About

Mainstream economists have adopted the hypothesis that pleasure or satisfaction from consumption is proportional to the benefits of consumption. That sounds reasonable, doesn’t it?

If you said, “No, it doesn’t”, then congratulations. You’ve clearly seen through the veil to what lies hidden beneath it: Namely, how one obtains a benefit, not to mention its size relative to what’s needed or wanted, factors into whether or not one is ‘satisfied’ with the benefit one has.

For instance, the late President George W.H.Bush hated broccoli all his life.

It didn’t matter that his mother saw the vegetable as a good source of nutrients he would benefit from if only he ate it. What mattered to him was that he hated it! To her, the benefits he got mattered more than his being ‘satisfied’.

Now before he left home, he avoided the greater pain his mother might dole out by eating it even though couldn’t stomach it. (Jeremy Bentham would have approved this as the wise utilitarian strategy of avoiding any pain and suffering one could.) After George left home, he never again ate it ... even when dining with his mother. When he casually mentioned this one day, it caused him no end of troubles with broccoli farmers :: You can read up about that. :: yet, troubles or not, he just plainly refused to eat the stuff.

Which is to say "all that benefits does not satisfy". (That seems oddly familiar, doesn’t it?) [See note 1 below]

“Utility” is said to be a benefit or a pleasure or a satisfaction in mainstream economics. Since realizing a benefit and having much,if any, satisfaction from having gotten that benefit are being treated as one and the same thing, ‘utility’ in mainstream theory hinges on the assumption that getting a benefit always brings ‘satisfaction’ which can 'stand in' for the benefit. This confusion between two different things: -- Namely, realized benefits versus realized satisfaction -- makes ‘utility’ not a concept but a percept; and, a wrong one at that.

So, in the Theory of the Consumer, if a consumer gets a benefit, then that consumer has realized some satisfaction with having done so. If so,then the latter can stand in, as it were, as a proxy for the former.

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Then, by employing what I term ‘mathemagics’ :: what mathematicians would call a misuse of mathematics that is just plain wrong, if not ignorant. [I’ll be mentioning a very good article about this misuse in Utility And All That Part 2.] :: then they can dispense with ‘benefits’ completely even while purporting to talk about the ‘well-being’ of the consumer and how that would be ‘maximized’ by a ‘rational consumer’.

Jeremy Bentham first suggested mathematics might be used to measure utility. Yet he would be horrified at how it has become used by economists.

He, a philosopher-lawyer of the 18th and 19th centuries,had many ideas which affected the later development of economics. Among these are two main ones that are outstandingly important for how post-Bentham economic theory developed.

One important idea was that communities were merely agglomerations of individuals. He said that only our imagination that has us think communities are distinct bodies with interests of their own. He argued that community and society don't exist as anything more than as individuals in them. So, if the welfare of communities was neither more nor less than the welfare of its individual members, then the welfare of communities had to be ‘the greatest 'good/happiness' of the greatest number’.

That outcome,he argued, resulted from individual members altogether pursuing their singular interests as individuals. This is an idea which later economists incorporated badly. It accounts for the singular focus on individual consumers found throughout mainstream economics.

Inevitably this means that the economic notion of the welfare of societies is simply the sum total of the welfare of all individuals pursuing their individual interests within it. That’s not a bad idea on its face. If economists actually went about actually measuring well-being objectively, then I’d have only a few problems with this approach

But that would, of course, require actually measuring objective benefits and, among other matters, actually determining if a level of realized 'benefit’ was adequate relative to some objective standard of adequacy.

They don’t do either. They neither measure objective benefits nor have developed any standards for when benefits realized are insufficient.

For instance, if someone manages to get only 200 calories or 8 units of protein daily when, on average, men/women need about 2500/2000 kilocalorie units and about 80 units of protein simply to maintain their health and continued life,then we can hardly say that this person is doing well or has maximized his or her ‘well-being’ any more than we can say that a small business getting $200 per day in sales revenue while needing $2000 daily to remain in business is doing well.

What we should say is that the former, should this deficiency in calories or proteins go on for any significant period of time, is actually starving to death. The business certainly appears to be headed for bankruptcy. When needs go unrealized, welfare ain’t being maximized and businesses fail! {A proper Theory of the Consumer, would see both persons and firms as consumers ... or, as I put it in Economics And All That, see both as producers-who-consume.}

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Instead of measuring the measurable, mainstream economists purport to measure well-being as the amount of subjective pleasures or satisfactions which consumers have with what they buy.

And, how do economists do that? Well, remember when I said they endow consumers with budgets? They do the same with subjective preferences. They give unchanging but made up subjective preferences for ‘goods’ to the consumer just like they give the consumer unchanging budgets. They then ask what’s the rational thing for this a consumer to if these are the consumer’s preferences and if this is the consumer’s budget!

They do this because, after all, they’re not mind readers now, are they? If you read either Austrian School economists or those of the Chicago main school, both make a big point of not knowing what's going on in the mind of the consumer. But, after making that point, they say "Suppose it's this with this budget. Introduce a price change. Now calculate what the rational consumer has to do to maximize his or her well-being."

Did you notice that the pea --well-being-- has vanished in this shell game? It always has.

Now whenever economists tell you a model contains a representative consumer,you should ask whoever is speaking what that consumer’s subjective preference function is and, most importantly, where it comes from. {That’ll shut ‘em up. It should!}

But that’s enough for today. Utility And All That! Part 2 will go more into this fantasyland called maximizing ‘utility’ or maximizing ‘subjective preferences’ without, of course, knowing what these are.

Note 1. That we don’t always manage to obtain or have what we prefer to have is, of course, a reality for most of us most of the time. I will demonstrate that this is especially so when, in monetary economies, the distribution of income and the price system are primary determinants or influences on what one can afford to buy. As noted in Economics And All That earlier, the operations of money price systems are such that changes in prices require budget reformulations. If one hopes to obtain or have the same levels of objective benefit as one had before a price rise for a good, then one must be able to add money into the previous budget one had. Similarly, if one wants only to continue purchasing what one purchased before a price fall, one would take money out of the budget.

When prices of a good rise, if one is unable to add money to the budget,one might forgo buying one of the good the market ‘provides’ but only to those who can afford to buy it. In short, the ability to stay in a market, like the ability to derive benefits in a market is a positive function of incomes.

Note2. It's very important to recognize that Bentham, as a lawyer, operated well within an ethical tradition wherein ethical/moral considerations imposed limits on individuals’ actions. These considerations led to restraints on how one pursued one's singular, individual interests. Later utilitarian economists (still studied intensively today) successfully culled out such considerations out entirely when they took away what they did from his thought. They threw out all normative matters, leaving no ‘shouldas’ when they tried to establish economics as a science. ‘Shouldas’ obviously don’t apply to objects being bounced about by ‘forces’. I’m not presenting here the culturally powerful normative dimension always in the background of Jeremy Bentham's thought. This normative context both shaped and framed his thoughts. It was never absent in the economic thinking of his premier disciple, John Stuart Mill who, though he was philosophically a utilitarian like Bentham, never thought normative issues were beyond economics as he practiced it. J.S. MIll never‘bought into’ the ‘mathemagics’ of post-Bentham ‘utility’ economists. (BTW, Bentham remains well worth reading. Mill,a brilliant economist,is sadly no longer studied for the meaning of his thoughts about the greatest happiness for the greatest number in terms of economic policy.)

Fun With Copyrights

The US Supreme Court just handed down an interesting 5-4 decision on the scope copyright coverage. This case raises an issue that has been a personal pet peeve for the last 35 years or so, namely the copyrighting of scientific publications that are funded by tax dollars. In essence, taxpayers pay for the research and then have to pay again to read the results. That really pisses me off. This case is not spot on my peeve, but it is real close.

In Georgia et al. v. Public.Resource.org Inc., the court held that state law annotations in Georgia are not copyrightable. That holding is a medium deal, not a little deal. State legislatures write and pass bills, and then the governor signs the bills into laws. States then usually publish their state laws in two sets of volumes. The first is the language of the law with not much else. The second publication is annotated laws. The annotations are non-binding law but they help explain it. They appear beneath each statutory provision or law. The annotations usually include summaries of judicial opinions construing each provision, summaries of pertinent opinions of the state attorney general, a list of related law review articles, and other reference materials. As one can imagine, the annotations are valuable for people who want to understand what the often ambiguous and hyper-complex language of the laws is written in actually means. Sometimes (usually?) it is impossible to understand the gobbledygook of the language of a law.

Digression: Another pet peeve

A common reason that lawsuits arise is due to the ambiguity and often sheer incoherence of the language the law is written in. Call it the legislative incompetence factor. The legislative incompetence factor is probably among the top two or three reasons for the filing of all lawsuits in the US. The reasons for legislative slop often is, not surprisingly, self-centered and political. In the video below, Senator Ben Sasse (R-NE), a reasonable looking and sounding, but far right anti-government radical, attacks US Senate legislative incompetence as a tool to avoid accountability at re-election time.





The point: In the video, Sasse makes these comments on legislative incompetence and why the Kavanaugh hearings were so toxic: “. . . . . the people don't have a way to fire the bureaucrats. What we mostly do around this body is not pass laws. What we mostly decide to do is to give permission to the secretary or the administrator of bureaucracy X, Y or Z to make law-like regulations. That’s mostly what we do here. We go home and we pretend we make laws. No we don’t. We write giant pieces of legislation, 1200 pages, 1500 pages long, that people haven’t read, filled with all these terms that are undefined, and say to secretary of such and such that he shall promulgate rules that do the rest of our dang jobs. That’s why there are so many fights about the executive branch and the judiciary, because this body rarely finishes its work. [joking] And, the House is even worse.”

In the big picture, what Sasse is angling for is getting rid of government agencies and forcing congress to not be so sloppy and incoherent in writing laws. Shrinking government until it could be drowned in a bathtub isn't possible as long as congress remains sloppy and incoherent. Big agencies are needed to try to translate the garbage that congress routinely spews out as its work product, if that is what one can call it.

Why the Georgia et al. v. Public.Resource.org Inc. decision is important 

In my opinion, what Georgia was trying to do is to hide the laws from the people of Georgia as much as possible. They cannot copyright the statutes alone, but they tried the next best thing. By copyrighting the annotations, the legislature and governor can try to limit free public accessibility to the annotations. That makes it easier for (1) the legislature and governor to hide behind the ambiguity and slop in laws without annotations, and (2) special interests to deny that laws they bought and paid for benefit them and their interests or their power and freedom from regulation and taxes.

Maybe that is unfounded conspiracy theory, but maybe it isn’t. Consider what Sasse says about why legislation in congress is mostly incoherent slop. Also consider that the annotations in Georgia are assembled by the Georgia Code Revision Commission. That is a state entity composed mostly of legislators, funded through legislative branch appropriations, and staffed by the Office of Legislative Counsel. In other words, it is another example of my pet peeve #2, namely taxpayers pay legislators to write laws, bad as they are, and then they have to pay a second time to try to figure out what the hell the nincompoops in the Georgia legislature were trying to say or hide, as the case may be.

The 5-4 split

The split here was not along pure party lines. Roberts, wrote the majority opinion and Sotomayor, Kagan, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh joined in. Thomas wrote a dissenting opinion, that Alito, joined, and Breyer partly joined. Ginsburg wrote her own dissenting opinion, which Breyer joined. The dissents focused on the fact that the annotations are not binding legal authority and thus they are copyrightable content. On that latter point, Roberts wrote that “annotations published by legislators alongside the statutory text fall within the work legislators perform in their capacity as legislators.” Georgia argued that people wanting access to the annotations could get it. That is true, but it (i) increases the burden on researchers to assemble relevant information, and (ii) could still lead to annotations that are very different from what the legislature may have had in mind.

In essence, trying to make it harder to get annotations looks to me a lot like an effort of the Georgia legislature and/or governor to hide what they are doing as much as they can. That's the essence of authoritarianism and it makes corruption a little easier.

ECONOMICS AND ALL THAT!

Arming You to Fight Mainstream Economic Theory by Reconstructing It Into What It’s Properly About

INTRODUCTION

The world’s a mess. That's partly because economic theory with it's dicta and 'laws' is a fantasyland often used to argue or aver that we live in the best of all possible worlds short of heaven itself, one wherein everyone who is rational has always been able to maximize his or her well-being, and, of course, we should pay no attention to irrational people who complain that this doesn’t seem to be true, for irrational people wouldn’t be in the bad situations they’re in if they’d acted rationally.

The theory is well-disguised as 'scientific'. It isn't. It's jargonistic balderdash. It only serves useful ideological functions. As it is, It is not about the economic activity of people or their economic behavior at all.. And it hides who has control over whether, how and if we provide for ourselves, and why those in control have the power they do. [Clue: This has to do with 'he-who-has-the-gold-makes-all-the-rules-affecting-others' in monetary systems of exchange.)

I'm about to arm you to fight back.

Most people can't fight back. Almost all, well, because economics is intimidating. More precisely, what's taught as economics is. I don't blame most people for thinking this. Even economists can't fight back. Due to their training as economists, they aren't fighting back even when they think they are. Their training blinds them to most of the problems intrinsic within what they were taught. So even when some question theoretical 'laws' as some do, they use what they learned to do so. Sadly, although small parts of what they learned can be used to question or partially refute commonalities like oft-claimed 'laws' of supply or demand, these economists cannot break free from the chains which bind them within the theory that they've learned.

Economists like Steve Keen, for instance, debunk economics as far as their training allows. And that's well and good and entertaining.

But it's not enough. It tinkers about within the margins/limits of what they learned. It is those very margins that they must escape from.

Their being stuck occurs because the assumptions underlying and supporting the structure of mainstream theory hide what economics is really about. These assumptions make all existing theory descriptively inadequate regarding our economic activity and behavior.

That descriptive inadequacy leads to prescriptive inadequacies. Serious ones! For following such prescriptions is akin to letting a drinking buddy perform open-heart surgery because he's a very good juggler.

Mainstream economists are expert at juggling the balls within their theory, but juggling those balls is not what economics is about. Expertise at juggling such balls does not lead to any expert knowledge related to the economic activity of human beings.

For instance, current economic theory, wherein consumers are implied to be people like you or I, simply endows consumers with never changing budgets even as prices change. This absolutely ignores the reality that consumers must, can, and do change their budgets whenever prices change.

Because all 'demand curves' derived within in all mainstream economic theory nowadays rely on consumers’ having ever-fixed, never changing budgets, one must ask if it is possible to derive 'demand curves' since budgets are, in fact, constantly being reformulated when prices change. [Note 1.I will show why budgets must be reformulated when prices change in a later section entitled “DEMAND AND ALL THAT!” Which will follow after the parts A and B of “UTILITY AND ALL THAT!”] For if such demand curves cannot be derived when consumers change their budgets as prices change, then the so-called 'laws' of demand, and the mechanics underlying all equilibria between demand and supply... [Note 2. An equilibrium is said to exist when the amount of a good purchased by a consumer (or consumers) at a given price is equal to the amount supplied by the sellers of the good at that price. Because a ‘market equilibrium’ is obtained at the conjunction of ‘total market demand’:: obtained by theoretically adding up individual demand curves :: with total market supply at a given price, it is necessarily the case that if individual demand curves cannot be derived, then neither can ‘market demand curves’.]... simply do not exist. In addition, if people are not maximizing preferences based on their likes between goods but are more affected in their choices by the kinds of benefits they need or want to have and realize, then we must not derive ‘demand curves’, including aggregate demand curves within markets, given the limitations of the theoretic itself.

So, what is economics about?

It's about how we provide for ourselves through how we use goods to obtain benefits that we need and want to sustain our lives and improve our well being as individuals, families, groups, communities, and societies. In brief,,whether, how, and if we provide for ourselves is the subject matter of economics. Throughout history, human beings have had to manage the use of what they had to provide for themselves. Though, across time and cultures, needs change--Viz, a technological society with its water, energy, and communications infrastructures generates needs for indoor plumbing, wiring, and domestic technologies as essentials one must have to get by with-- as have our 'wants’ the important subject matter economics :: whether, if, and how we provide benefits for ourselves by using goods :: never changes.

You won't find anything like the above definition in economics texts. [You can find that out for yourselves.] But with it we can begin to to deconstruct modern economic theory and, while doing that, reconstruct economics as it should be. That’s my plan here: to reconstruct economics in a manner that disposes with existing theory more or less in its entirety while giving you the ammunition to fight against it and what it prescribes. In the process, I’ll be laying new foundations for you to use.

We live in monetary economies.

In such economies, whether and if we can provide for ourselves as individuals, families, communities, and nations depends largely on how the distribution of income and the accumulation of wealth occurs. That is because monetary economies uniquely impose an architecture of price ratios between goods, one absent in non-monetary economies. That price ratio architecture, in combination with the distribution of incomes/wealth, determines the budgets consumers must have to purchase goods for their use. Every change in prices between goods forces budgets to become reformulated. When such budgets cannot be reformulated, this drives people out of some markets completely. This forcing out of a market regularly happens in monetary economies.

Current economic theory has this forcing out happening rarely and effectively as special cases within the theoretic. That is because the entire body of what is called the Theory of the Consumer has never addressed how budgets are determined when prices change (and thus price ratios between goods). Rather than seriously examining this very important issue and its impacts on human well-being, the current theoretic always endows consumers with fixed, unchanging budgets in the face of price changes between goods. Such endowments with ever-fixed budgets remove from economic analysis all matters related to whether, how, and if people can provide for themselves in monetary economies. In short, it removes the essential subject matter economics itself.

In some ways, I am building this airplane as I am flying it. I apologize in advance if you experience any difficulties understanding what I say. Sometimes I may not be as clear as I want to be, not to mention that what’s clear to me may be mud to you. Let me know when that happens, for I can and will clarify whatever you find difficult. I’ll do that either as quickly as I can, or by discussing the matter thoroughly in a section to come.[It's also true that I can't footnote in this format so, sorree.

Now we can begin with all of the above in mind.

Cooperative vs Competitive vs False Balancing Argumentation

The empty neighborhood in the fog

In a short 2018 Scientific American article and a 2017 research paper published in the journal Cognitive Science, a team of cognitive scientists and psychologists describe their research findings on the effects of modes of engagement on how people perceive political issues and truth itself, including moral truth. Modes of engagement can be thought of as the mindset that a person in disagreement brings to the table when they are in disagreement with others about political issues.

The cooperative mindset

People who engage with a cooperative mindset tend to seek to learn from a person or people they disagree with. In that mode of engagement, people tend to try to learn from people they disagree with. They also tend to be more open to the idea that there is no objective truth about an issue such as abortion. This mode of engagement was found to influence how people view truth, which tends to be seen as mostly subjective and personal. Absolute or objective truth is not what people with this mindset usually see in various issues. The authors comment in their Cognitive Science paper:

“One form of social reasoning consists of a group of people searching together for the solution to a problem. Groups pursuing this strategy reap cognitive gains such as quickly identifying problems (Hill, 1982) and discovering the best solutions (Schwartz, 1995). These characteristics allow the performance of the group to go above and beyond the sum of its individual members (Woolley, Chabris, Pentland, Hashmi, & Malone, 2010). 

However, group reasoning does not always involve finding solutions to problems. Some group reasoning consists instead of argumentation (Walton, 1998). In group reasoning using argumentation, people start out with opposing views on a given question, and each individual proceeds by offering reasons or evidence in favor of his or her own view and against the opposing one.”

The competitive mindset

By contrast, when people are competitive and engage to win arguments, their view of truth tends to be more objective and absolute. It also affects their social behaviors, beliefs about people they disagree with and how truth and the issue at hand is understood. The competitive mindset leads to unfavorable views of, and increased animosity toward, people they disagree with. The researchers associate the rise of political tribalism with increases in competitive engagements relative to past years. This tendency to tribalize and weaponize politics is exacerbated by social media. The researchers comment in the SciAm article:

“At the same time, the rise of social media has revolutionized how information is consumed—news is often personalized to one’s political preferences. Rival perspectives can be completely shut out from one’s self-created media bubble. Making matters worse, outrage-inducing content is more likely to spread on these platforms, creating a breeding ground for clickbait headlines and fake news. This toxic online environment is very likely driving Americans further apart and fostering unproductive exchanges. ..... And although plenty of evidence suggests that contemporary political discourse is becoming more combative and focused on winning, our findings do not elucidate why that change has occurred. Rather they provide an important new piece of information to consider: the mode of argument we engage in actually changes our understanding of the question itself. The more we argue to win, the more we will feel that there is a single objectively correct answer and that all other answers are mistaken. Conversely, the more we argue to learn, the more we will feel that there is no single objective truth and different answers can be equally right. So the next time you are deciding how to enter into an argument on Facebook about the controversial question of the day, remember that you are not just making a choice about how to interact with a person who holds the opposing view. You are also making a decision that will shape the way you—and others—think about whether the question itself has a correct answer.”

As noted here in a recent discussion, political discourse has been weaponized by injecting moral absolutism into politics. Politicians, partisans and special interests have discovered that increasing irrationality and decreasing social trust lies in manipulating the moral framework of politics and fomenting competitive discourse over cooperative discourse. In my opinion, the point of increasing irrationality and decreasing social trust is to deceive and distract members of society, thereby draining both power and wealth from the masses and accumulating it at the top.

False balancing

False balancing is a complicating but important factor in political discourse. This arises when disagreements over a certain topic do not make much sense in view of actual objective knowledge. For example, enough objective knowledge exists to render moot disagreements over whether the Earth is flat, humans are causing climate change or vaccines are safe or effective. The evidence is overwhelming and there is not enough basis for rational debate. Engaging in false balancing debates tends to elevate the status of the contrary evidence and arguments to a level that is not socially or rationally merited. Such debates tend to foment and maintain false beliefs, confusion and distrust. That is much more socially damaging than beneficial.

False balancing and the president

Based on my recent online engagements with various Trump supporters or apologists, I now believe that trying to debate whether the president is a chronic liar, a crook, grossly incompetent, self-centered and maybe also a traitor engages in false balancing. In my opinion, the scant evidence that the president’s supporters sometimes raise does not come close to balancing contrary objective evidence of his character flaws and his bad behavior and failures in office. Of those topics, the allegation that he is a traitor is supported by less direct and circumstantial evidence than the other assertions of truth, which are backed by far more relevant evidence, much of it based on undeniable facts.