If you were truly anti-war, at worst you’d at least try to pretend to be neutral, and not support either side. At best, you would not be on the side of Russia, the aggressor that, unprovoked, invaded a smaller sovereign nation that was peacefully minding its own business, was not in NATO, and wasn’t even applying for NATO membership. NATO was not the cause of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

As always, I remind people that Russia is committing war crimes in Ukraine, including but not limited to: erasing all mentions of Ukraine from schoolbooks, murdering entire civilian populations of Ukrainian cities, and kidnapping thousands and thousands of Ukrainian children (some as young as 4 months old) and placing them into “re-education” centers where they are forced to learn how to become good little Russians. Russia is indiscriminately bombing civilian targets like funerals, churches, schools and hospitals, and the Russian army is using mass rape as a weapon of war.

(Remember, Ukraine has demonstrated that they have the capability to reach Russian held territory, but unlike Russia, the Ukrainian military has only targeted military installations.)

If you can just hand wave all of the Russian war crimes and atrocities away because “America bad,” then please spare everyone your anti-war concern trolling, and your faux worries about Ukrainians dying. Just admit that as long as, lol, “communist” Russia isn’t the one being invaded, you are morally indifferent to human suffering and you actually do not care about ending wars.

Last updated in June 2018, the guidelines are part of a large tranche of internal documents leaked to the Guardian by a former Siri “grader”, one of thousands of contracted workers who were employed to check the voice assistant’s responses for accuracy until Apple ended the programme last month in response to privacy concerns raised by the Guardian.

In explaining why the service should deflect questions about feminism, Apple’s guidelines explain that “Siri should be guarded when dealing with potentially controversial content”. When questions are directed at Siri, “they can be deflected … however, care must be taken here to be neutral”.

While neutrality is sometimes a commendable and beneficial component of an unbiased media outlet, it can easily become a form of bias. In situations where an argument is between a rational individual and an irrational individual—rather than two rational actors—neutrality is heavily biased in favor of the irrational arguer. When the neutral media does not fact-check politicians who attempt to argue using nonsensical or nonfactual arguments, it allows politicians to promote arguments with no real basis in fact.

A non-factual argument, while incorrect, is often far easier to perpetuate than a rational argument; non-factual arguments are based upon fictions which are tailored to support the argument, and reject all opposing evidence. In the absence of fact-checkers, the fictional constructs of non-factual arguments can easily trick the uninformed into supporting policies which cannot work in real life, and have little basis in reality.

A neutral media, like the one in the United States, provides the perfect medium for the propagation of non-factual arguments. By endlessly repeating all sides of an argument, without checking to see if the arguments are based in reality, the neutral media gives credibility to nonsensical arguments. The neutral status of the media creates the public perception that the sides covered by the media are factual and rational. Unfortunately, the credibility given to nonsensical arguments when they are repeated by the mainstream media allows for non-fictional arguments to be mainstreamed in ways which would be impossible with an objective media.

False Equivalence

Why does the mainstream media keep depicting lunatic-right Republicans and normal Democrats as equidistant from the center?

With the final passage of the debt ceiling deal, Democrats got off easier than one might have expected, given that it was a deal between a mainstream Democratic president and a Republican House in thrall to the lunatic far right. In drastic contrast to the scorched-earth budget bill initially passed by the Republican-controlled House, the cuts were about par for the course in a divided government; and they spare the country a repeat of this debt-hostage ordeal for two years.

However, much of the media played the agreement as a compromise between two equal extremes. The New York Times story about the House passage of the deal included this astonishing sentence: "With both far-right and hard-left lawmakers in revolt over the deal, it fell to a bipartisan coalition powered by Democrats to push the bill over the finish line, throwing their support behind the compromise in an effort to break the fiscal stalemate that had gripped Washington for weeks."

Think about that for a moment. There is no doubt that Matt Gaetz, Elise Stefanik, Lauren Boebert, Paul Gosar et al. are far-right by any definition, as white supremacists, Christian nationalists, election deniers, and nihilists on fiscal policy.

But no Democrats in the House can fairly be described as hard left. Those who voted against the deal included moderate liberals such as Joaquin Castro, mainstream progressives like Rosa DeLauro and Jan Schakowsky, as well as self-described democratic socialists including Cori Bush and AOC. But none of them are "hard left," which suggests anti-democratic, any more than Franklin Roosevelt was hard left.

The Times coverage reinforces a narrative of false equivalence that the media keeps repeating, with lazy catchphrases like "partisan bickering." It also plays into the hands of corrupt No Labels and Third Way types, who promote the idea that the best course for the republic is to split the difference between neofascists and a normal mainstream Democratic Party and president.

Big media, obsessed as it is with the appearance of fair and balanced coverage, took years to give itself permission to accurately describe Donald Trump with the impolite word "liar." But its treatment of the two parties as in any sense symmetrical is far more insidious than using euphemisms to characterize Trump’s lies.

Our friend Peter Dreier, whose observations inspired this post, points out that by any reasonable definition, "even the most left-oriented Democrats (AOC, Bush, Bowman, Raskin, Jayapal) are not extremists. They are shades of social democrats. They are pro-union, pro-choice, pro-affirmative action, pro-LGBT equality, pro-Green New Deal, pro-progressive taxation. But the most right-wing Republicans are extremists and reactionaries."

Reporter: So today we’re looking for an undecided voter. Here's one now, coming out of that Make America Great Again rally. And oh look, he’s even wearing a red MAGA hat, and he’s also wearing a “Trump won” lapel pin on his “Trump 2024” t-shirt. And that handsome tattoo of Donald Trump on his forehead is hardly even noticeable, just like that stylish AR-15 he’s brandishing.

Excuse me, sir. If I can just interrupt you passing out these “Release the J6 hostages” fliers for a moment, I’d like to ask you some questions that you can easily spin to heap praise on the Republican presidential candidate. Obviously you haven't made up your mind about who you’ll be voting for in the upcoming 2024 election, but please allow me to give you 15 minutes on national television to share your completely unbiased political narrative, which we will then run on continuous loop for weeks until we can find another impartial independent undecided voter.

If I say that due to systemic and structural racism, black people have it extremely hard in America, that’s not the signal for you to chime in with, “but white people are hurting too”

If I say that because of deeply ingrained heteronormativity, LGBTQ people have it hard, guess what? That is not the signal for someone to announce that straight people also have difficulties in life

I believe that in a genuine desire to be fair, sometimes well meaning people foolishly engage in a, “both sides have it hard” argument

But that’s a misguided approach. Simply taking a “both sides,” counter-position to a statement of fact ≠ fairness

No one is saying that men, white people and cis/het people all have perfect lives. Nobody believes that. But they absolutely have it easier than their counterparts. From employment and housing opportunities, to avoiding deadly encounters with law enforcement, to disproportionately unfair outcomes in the criminal “justice” system

Ignoring facts and being contrary is not the same thing as being fair to both sides: women dO have it harder than men, black people ARE treated less fairly than white people, LGBTQ people dO face more discrimination than their heterosexual counterparts (and woo boy, the people living in the intersection of those identities have it even harder)

Sometimes, one side is in the wrong and the other isn’t. Somebody needs to be brave enough, or have enough common sense to admit it without always worrying about hurting the feelings of the party in the wrong

Look, I’m always going to speak the truth here, as best as I can. If something I’ve said on any of those grounds offends you, or if you feel overcome with the urge to “both sides” one of my posts, then I very strongly advise you to write a post of your very own about why you think otherwise. Don’t ride my coattails to make your false equivalence