Orlov

The Truthers and the Fakers. Sep. 4, 2018.

Can truth be said to exist? Most of us certainly like to think that it does, and, furthermore, that we actually know something about it. We tend to prioritize knowledge over ignorance, and bridle at the idea that some of what we consider to be knowledge may be false rather than true. This seems justified: compared to false knowledge, it is certainly true that ignorance is bliss. But there are few avenues of escape that are open to us when we are confronted with the notion that most of what we know for sure “just ain’t so.” 

The most common avenue of escape, and also the least valid, is to indulge in a bit of ad hominem fallacy by claiming that the challenge to your treasured certainties is the wrong kind of challenge because it comes from the wrong sort of person. For example, these days, it doesn’t take much to run afoul of certain people, and to get them to label you as a “fascist racist misogynist homophobe.” Nor does it take much to cause certain other people to label you a “libtard.” And both of these groups would be only too happy to declare you to be “Putin’s troll” the moment you try to say anything vaguely positive about Russia. 

And the most valid avenue of escape is some sort of public trial. The least assailable of these are held in academic contexts, in the hard sciences, because natural laws are not amenable to political or social pressure. Courts of law, on the other hand, can be good or bad in battling false knowledge, depending on the political environment in which they operate, but all of them are at least forced to maintain appearances of adhering to the truth by following various rules that exclude hearsay, anecdotal evidence or evidence invalidated by a broken chain of custody. The recent trial in California, which concluded that Monsanto’s Roundup is indeed a carcinogen (no doubt causing Capt. Obvious to do a little happy dance) is a hopeful sign that some sort of justice can be served even in the face of relentless political pressure. 

And what’s worse than any court at all, with one exception, is the court of public opinion. How many reputations and careers have been ruined in the course of the recent sexual harassment hysteria, where self-declared victims lobbed accusations unsubstantiated by any evidence? Such “trials” are on par with those held by the Inquisition: if the witch drowns, she wasn’t a witch, sorry, too bad; if she floats, she is obviously a witch and is then burned at the stake.

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there is a larger context to consider, which is that of late in many instances the pursuit of truth has become rather beside the point. Numerous recent developments have made opinion all-important and actual knowledge of provable facts borderline irrelevant. These include: 

• Social and political alienation and polarization, driven by increasing wealth inequality and enforced diversity
• The automatic segregation and voluntary siloing of people in social media, which has made it fashionable for people to avoid being exposed to opinions that differ from theirs, to the point where some have started to take offense whenever this happens
• Plummeting educational standards where independent reasoning abilities are no longer even taught and where the rewards go to those who are able to regurgitate knowledge they have accepted unquestioningly.
• The slow agony of traditional print and broadcast media where rigorous fact-checking was once considered absolutely necessary but no longer is, and where now the overarching concern is to run stories that sell advertising
• The rise of blogging, where a few validated facts are easily drowned in a sea of opinion, where what is accepted as real is determined through a popularity contest, and where a typical response to public disagreement is “go get your own blog.” 

The endpoint of this process is now in sight: as a basis of reality, truth matters not at all. Reality still exists, but as an artificial construct, and is fractured, with different versions of reality tightly targeted to specific audiences that are receptive to one set of opinions and narratives while being easily outraged by all others. In such circumstances, appeals to truth-based knowledge start to seem quixotic—or even a matter of casting pearls before swine. 

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This may be disconcerting to some people, because inquiring minds want to know the truth, even if what drives them is idle curiosity. Besides, walking around after realizing that you’ve been lied to by people you were taught to trust, and that you are surrounded by trusting fools who believe such an obviously fake story to be true, is rather disheartening. 

Great, Britain! Sep. 6, 2018.

The Brits have just provided my previous article, The Truthers and The Fakers, with a tidy little case study: the very next day after I published it Theresa May’s government stepped into its role as one of the world’s premier Fakers and unleashed the next installment of fake news on the Skripal poisoning. We can use this as training material in learning how to spot and discard fakes. 

The fake story that May has been pushing is that it is “highly likely” that the Kremlin ordered a hit on the former British spy Sergei Skripal (and his daughter) using a “Russian-made” chemical weapon called “Novichok.” In turn, from what we already knew, it is highly likely that this story is a complete and utter fake. As I explained in the previous article, it is not our job to establish what really happened. We would be unable to do so with any degree of certainty without gaining access to state secrets. But we don’t need to; all we need to do is establish with a reasonable degree of certainty that the British government’s story is a foolishly, incompetently concocted fabrication. Doing so will then allow us to properly classify the British press, which repeats this nonsense as fact, and the British public, which accepts it unquestioningly at face value. Then we can drop the erroneous appellation “great”—because great nations don’t act so stupidly.

First, applying the usual investigative technique of identifying means, motive and opportunity, we find that the Russian government had none of them while Theresa May’s government had all of them. 

Means: Russia had given up its chemical weapons, submitted to international inspections and no longer has a chemical weapons program, while Britain, along with the US, has been ignoring its treaty obligations. It has not given up its chemical weapons, has not submitted to international inspections and maintains a chemical weapons program at Porton Down, a few miles from where the poisonings took place. Experts at Porton Down claim to have identified the chemical agent that was supposedly used, and this implies that they had some of it on hand. 

Motive: Russia had handed Skripal over to Britain in a spy swap a few years ago and had no reason to pursue him. Gratuitously causing an international scandal right before the World Cup was to be held in Russia would have been considered a career-ending move for any Russian official. On the other hand, Theresa May’s government badly needed a distraction from its disastrous Brexit negotiations, flagging support and other woes and would have been eager to please its masters in Washington by staging a provocation against Russia. 

Opportunity: The poisoning took place on British soil, down the street from a British chemical weapons facility, and the person poisoned was living under the watchful eye of British special services. Clearly, the British had ample opportunity; whether the Russians had any at all remains to be shown. 

Thus, applying the now traditional British legal standard of “highly likely,” it seems highly likely that that the Kremlin had nothing to do with it. But this still leaves open the question of what precisely it was that the Kremlin had nothing to do with because it is highly likely that what the British government claims to have happened didn’t happen.

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Terrorism of the Absurd. Sep. 14, 2018.

In recent months the governments of Syria and Russia have stood accused by the US and the UK governments of carrying out attacks using chemical weapons and have found themselves in a rather challenging situation. The charges against them are nothing short of absurd. It is very difficult, often impossible, to formulate a rational response to an absurd accusation beyond pointing out its obvious absurdity. But that’s usually not at all helpful because the contemporary Western political actors who revel in absurdity eschew the neoclassical principle of verisimilitude and ignore rational, reasoned arguments as uninteresting. This is a calculated choice: most of their audience is too bored, ill-informed and impatient to form opinions based on facts and logic but responds well to various kinds of conditioning.