[ExI] rational hypocrites

[Adrian Tymes]

On Sun, Aug 5, 2018 at 12:30 PM, William Flynn Wallace
<foozler83 at gmail.com> wrote:
> When you say the NYT has a history of being correct, then you are using
> some external sources of validity to conclude that - external to the Times,
> that is.  And ditto for the external lack of validity for Fox.
>
> So you have a team approach:  if Nature, Science, the NYT all say the same
> thing, then you conclude it's true (true in the scientific sense of
> provisionally true).  And likewise when you have contradictions, Fox and NYT
> agree, you wait to see if it can be sorted out later, I assume.  Or maybe,
> if Fox is consistently bad, then just ignore it
>
> But if no external sources of validity are used, then it's clearly plain
> authoritarianism and no more, right?  Like religion.

Problem with that approach is, how external do you get, before all
possible sources are lumped in as a team?

How do you know that your own eyes, ears, and other senses aren't in
on it, or being manipulated by some conspiracy?

One could (and many do) say that the correctness of Fox's claims as
opposed to the NYT's has been measured repeatedly, and the evidence is
out there to look up so you don't have to spend time repeatedly
re-proving this point every time it comes up (thus countering the
alleged strategy of simply repeating lies - which uses little energy -
until those who would correct the liars run out of energy to do so,
leaving the liars as the only ones still speaking).  One could even
claim that the repeated "ignorance" of said measures is feigned, and
part of the strategy to let lies win by exhaustion.

But more importantly, one could claim these repeated measures
themselves are a fabrication, the historical evidence manipulated
until there is no such thing as reliable evidence, and instead only
what people claim on the spur of the moment, even what their own past
words were being called into question - even, in extreme cases, mere
moments after they uttered or typed them.