Sunday, April 11, 2021

R.I.P. Snopes

For more than two decades, I have relied on Snopes to provide accurate and truthful fact checking.

Lambert Strether makes a compelling case that Snopes just bullshits their readers when they claim that the charge that Biden broke his $2,000 stimulus check promise is "Mostly False". 

It's not. Biden made the promise, and he broke it. I dunno, maybe he had good reasons to break it. Maybe he's just an asshole. I don't really care; politicians break promises all the time, and I didn't vote for him anyway.

In On Bullshit, Harry G. Frankfurt defines bullshit as an indifference to the truth, in contrast to a lie, where the liar cares enough about the truth to falsify it. Frankfurt goes on to argue that bullshit is more destructive to truth than lies.

In one article, Snopes has completely destroyed its reputation for caring about the truth. I simply cannot trust anything Snopes says or has ever said. They're dead to me.

R.I.P. Snopes.

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