Thursday, May 05, 2005

The war on fact

Progressives are coming to understand that American politics has become an exercise in epistemology. The right now refuses to recognise the very concept of objective fact.

Yesterday, I read a Los Angeles Times piece on Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia, which depends on the fact-checking ability of thousands of participants. Error and bias may be inevitable, but they are also quickly corectable, thanks to the cleverly-designed Wikipedia interface.

There are people who want to deface or even destroy Wikipedia. The right-wing blogger Ace of Spades — out of mischief and because he heard Wikipedia's operators were liberals — recently called on its readers to "punk" the site: to put up as much misinformation and nonsense as possible. Other blogs gleefully expose errors, even if those defects persist only for a few minutes.
Exposing errors is, of course, quite legitimate. But deliberately polluting the information stream...?

This is war. A war on reality itself.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

An important point, Joseph. The Bushites have declared war on science, on the
academics, on the news media, on europe--on any challenge to their assertions.

Anonymous said...

Last year I briefly adopted a tagline for my posts: "The reality wars are coming." It didn't catch on then. But I think it will before too long.

Anonymous said...

Your right its virtually become a "war on reality"

they are "soldiers in the war on truth"

Anonymous said...

You are right its now really become the War on Reality" from their side.

they are: "Soldiers in the WAR on Truth"