Post 4: Wherein A Silly Picture Compares Assange To Zuckerburg

Samuel and Simon here.

We came across this little gem on our news feeds this evening, and we have to say it touches on a few topics where both of us are at odds with, we would guess, all of you. Let’s start with Assange.

We have never understood why Julian Assange is so universally lauded by the denizens of the internet. We understand that everyone likes freedom of information, but we thought that it was generally accepted that there is some information that you can’t safely make public; what important ambassadors think about other important ambassadors, for example, is probably past the line of what it’s safe to put in public domain. Let’s start with the premise. Julian Assange gives private information on corporations to the public. For free. Is this why he’s called a villain? We would say no. Julian Assange is not known - for good or for ill - for his releasing corporate information, Assange has made a name for himself releasing classified information on governments. Is everything currently classified deserving of that status? Probably not, and legitimate efforts have been taken by the Obama administration themselves to make public thousands of documents previously kept secret. But there is an appropriate kind of information to release, and a responsible way to do so - a way that must take into account not only the opinions of those who compiled the information, but those for whom its release would most affect. This sort of release can only be done by those who actually manage international relations; you cannot know what information must be secret if you don’t have access to the top levels of military and diplomatic intelligence. And the release of this information doesn’t seem to have done any demonstrable good. Large-scale leaking of diplomatic cables does pose serious threats to national security and the ability of governments to successfully conduct business with each other. We see no positive effects of Assagne’s actions. Only negative ones. Mike Mullen summarized it well when he said "Disagree with the war all you want, take issue with the policy, challenge me or our ground commanders on the decisions we make to accomplish the mission we've been given, but don't put those who willingly go into harm's way even further in harm's way just to satisfy your need to make a point. Mr. Assange can say whatever he likes about the greater good he thinks he and his source are doing, but the truth is, they might already have on their hands the blood of some young soldier or that of an Afghan family."

The belief that information should be free in all cases to all people is a tremendously misguided one. Assange has blood on his hands over the arrogant principle that everyone in the world is entitled to know the intimate details of every government. This is not so. We have politicians for a reason. To get his information to WikiLeads, Private Bradley Manning skipped over the entire chain of command, not to mention the Department of Defense, on a judgment call about what the public needed to know. This is not a way for an organization to be run, least of all one as reliant on hierarchy and structure as the United States military.

Finally, there needs to be a conversation about motives. Time and again, Assange’s supporters will ignore the potential consequences of his actions to tell us his goals are pure - power to the people, ending government monopolies on information, etc. Assuming this goal is noble - a proposition we feel has been at least somewhat thoroughly rebutted, is it true of Assange? We’ve all heard about his arrest last year and subsequent trials for rape charges. The truth of these allegations have been disputed, though, it must be said, not very effectively, but, in an unquestionable act of selfish behavior, Assange threatened to release further information unless the charges were dropped. Prosecute the man, and watch as court and government officials are embarrassed with classified information, one after next. The immorality of blackmail aside, how well does this go with Assange’s purported freedom of information policy? If his top priority is that information should not be withheld from the public, why is he withholding some? To be used as leverage? In case he ever needs to beat the courts? These are not the actions of an altruistic hero, nor of a man worthy of our lionization.

And now for Mark Zuckerburg. The objection to Zuckerburg here seems to be that he should not have been named Time Person of the Year because he takes information that people volunteer on Facebook and he sells it to marketing agencies. These agencies then use this information to cater their advertisements to your interests. First, the premise that this should keep him from being named Person of the Year is a simple misunderstanding of what the honor means; the Person of the Year is not and never has been given to the individual who has done the most good. It is for the person, object, or idea that "for better or for worse...has done the most to influence the events of the year." When he joined this list, Zuckerburg joined such illustrious figures as Hitler (1938), Stalin (1939, 1942), and Khrushchev (1957). So we’re not too worried that he’s tarnishing the good names of past Person of the Year winners.

But we also strongly object to the idea that corporations selling volunteered information is immoral. Let’s remember that Zuckerburg isn’t violating your privacy to extract personal information about you. He’s not following you around your house with a camcorder. If you want to say things on Facebook, that’s your choice, and you absolutely have to expect that the company has access to it. We couldn’t care less whether or not Facebook told its users that it was doing this; obviously they’re taking advantage of the information you tell them to better market to you. It’s such a petty thing to get outraged about, and such an easy thing to work around. If you don’t want people to know things about you, don’t say them on Facebook. It’s really quite simple.

We would like to close with a passionate concession. Private Bradley Manning’s actions were the result of a genuine desire to do good, and he has now been imprisoned in solitary confinement for over a year facing charges that could land him in prison for 52 years. It’s hard to support a system that still locks someone up at 75 because they stole documents at the age of 23. Entire lives are lived in 52 years, but not from behind prison bars. We not saying that we should free Bradley Manning. But we are saying that what we’re doing right now is pretty damn insane.

ASIDE: We realize that a kind of in-depth analysis of an image made mainly to amuse might seem a little pedantic, but this kind of cheap parallelism, a sacrifice of accuracy or truth for the sake of a pithy line (and remember this is Simon and Samuel saying so), is all too prevalent on the internet and is always tremendously frustrating. Just because something sounds good does not mean it is allowed to be wrong. So if we seem to be belaboring the point, or responding to a straw man argument, it’s because that is the quality of argument that was presented to us. If you don’t want to read rebuttals packed with sophistry, don’t construct intentionally misguided arguments.

Anyhow, thanks for reading. Please drop us a comment to tell us why information about tactical strikes against terrorists must be free for everyone to know but information about where you like to eat is a vitally important secret. Stay cool, and keep on trucking.

Post 3: Wherein There's A Schedule

Samuel here.

I would just like to note two administrative details.

1) There's a schedule now!
I will update every Wednesday by midnight. Simon will update every Friday by midnight. We will collaborate on material every Sunday, and it too will be posted by midnight. So stick around, because there will be regular content!

2) We've slightly changed the concept of the blog, thanks to a great suggestion by one Ben Paul, whose tumblr I linked to in the first post. Now instead of just arguing with our friends, we want to argue with your friends too! If your friends post something that you think is wrong, screenshot it, blank out all identifying factors, and post it as a comment on ANY post on this blog. Then we'll compose a response to your misguided friend (or, if your friends is right, explain why we think so).

Keep on trucking.

Post 2: Wherein I Get To Rag On Cracked

Samuel here.

Here is an easy-to-digest audio file narrated by Mr. Suave (yours truly), just because I care! [I will record this file the moment my housemates aren't sleeping or working. So it should be up by May.]

Here is a link to the original Cracked article.

Now, there is nothing I dislike more than when Cracked is wrong about stuff, because they are so loveable. If it were up to them to compose this sentence, it would be a funny and memorable analogy. Unfortunately, they're wrong about stuff really often, and frequently it's because they are prone to spectacular feats of exaggeration. This article is no exception, and I would like to provide a point-by-point response. Note that I'm way more prepared to be wrong about this stuff than I am about political theory, so feel free as usual to leave a comment telling me that I'm not very bright.

1. Coronal Heating Problem.

So Cracked completely and unambiguously misrepresents the status of this problem. This article pretty thoroughly describes a plausible explanation that is decently widely accepted. The idea is that super hot jets of plasma radiate out into space from inside the sun, heating the corona (not the vacuum around space, as Cracked puts it, which is literally nonsensical). We didn't know about this until fairly recently because they are insanely speedy, which makes them very difficult to detect.

2. Gravity on a Microscale

Yeah, that's a real problem. It's also been the central focus of physics for the last 97 years. I agree this belongs here, but it's not exactly news to anyone who, say, watches The Big Bang Theory.

3. Flyby Anomaly

Let's ignore that "there are multiple instances where NASA's Galileo, NEAR, Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 spacecraft have experienced an unexplainable increase in speed over massive distances" is deceptive; it's a tiny increase in speed that occurs at a point close to the Earth, not an increase in speed over massive distances, and let us also ignore that they linked to one article from 2008 as proof that there exists no useful theory. While it remains unexplained (except maybe by some pretty fucking weird conjecture), it is just patently absurd for Cracked to claim that it's a Scientific Discovery That Laughs in the Face of Physics. It really isn't. A measured anomaly that departs a tiny bit from the expected value sounds to me like how discoveries begin, not like the huge Fuck You to physics that they make it out to be. It is awesome for physics when things don't go quite as planned. That's how all the interesting stuff starts. So I find it misleading and strange that Cracked would treat it as some mindbogglingly amazing departure from our models. Probably it's just a small tweak that really doesn't threaten anything at all about modern physics.

4. Law of Conservation of Energy

I really like the contents of this one, and it definitely belongs in here. But to say that "The science behind this gets pretty complicated" is a really huge understatement. A more appropriate description would be something like "the science behind this is one of the two or three most complex pieces of practical mathematics ever tackled by a human being." It's about as well understood as a Catalan in Zimbabwe. It seems hopelessly arrogant to me to claim that it provides a permanent threat to the Law of Conservation of Energy.

5. Quantum Zeno

This one is well-described and absolutely does belong on this list.

6. Relativity Whatever

I was deathly afraid that this would come up. Not only is this an essentially debunked finding, but the conclusion that the Cracked article draws from it is just dumb.
i) Relativity works. If it didn't work, you wouldn't be able to place phone calls or access the internet; satellites are specified to correct for relativity. Relativity works. I heard this guy say that general relativity as a theory, without any tweaking, is essentially bankrupt in terms of the findings it produces, and that given the premise that either relativity or quantum mechanics must go, it will probably be relativity. But in the short term, in the here and now, relativity works.
ii) You can't claim that time travel is a real possibility based on one unexplained experiment, no matter how many times it was conducted. Unless it's an experiment where you sent someone back in time.
iii) Someone pretty reasonably explained why this happened, and it has literally nothing to do with relativity being wrong. This is the generally accepted solution to the CERN anomaly.

5. and 2. are legit. 1., 3., 4., and 6. are great examples of why writers need to actually understand what they're writing about before they compose their works. Cracked consistently puts together absurd and misleading articles with way off-the-mark conclusions, and no one ever calls them on it. They should. Cracked sucks.

Anyhow, please leave me a comment to tell me how you liked this post. Once you've done that, please help me fulfill my interminable craving for human attention; phone your friends, tweet your grandmother, smoke signal your alien overlords, and tell them there's this dude on the internet and he's really really mad.

Until next time, keep on trucking.

Post 1: Wherein It's Supposed To Be About Napolitano But Then It Gets Out Of Hand

Samuel here.

Please forgive the length of the first real post on News Feed Fact Check, but remember that you don't have to slog through this post for the next half hour. Here is an easy-to-digest audio file narrated by Mr. Suave (yours truly), just because I care! [I will record this file the moment my housemates aren't sleeping or working. So it should be up by May.]

Here is a direct link to the youtube video in the status. You'll want to watch it, since the first half of my post is a point-by-point reaction to it.

So, I really do like the first half of this video, but most of what Napolitano says is tautologically true. What I want to point out is my issues with the actually substantive things he says, starting at about 2:15.

The first allegation is that Barack Obama campaigned as an anti-war, pro-civil liberties candidate, and failed on both counts. I assume that here Napolitano is referring to the ending of the Iraq war, Obama's pledge to stop pretending that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could be "won", and the closing of Guantanamo Bay. Here's the score: Obama ended the Iraq war. Obama has ever spoken about Winning. And Obama never did close Guantanamo simply because he never had a supermajority. Between 2008 and 2010, the Democrats were all over the place, since many won in absurdly red states and felt a need to cling to conservative stances to make themselves palatable to independent voters. The Republicans, however, feared absolutely no political retribution from legislative turtling because the only Republicans Obama didn't take down in 2008 were the ones from very red districts or states who never side with the Democrats. The choice became either passing some form of Medicare or something else, and medicare won out, as it damn well should have. Napolitano's position also requires overlooking a few more things about Obama's war record. I just finished reading Obama's Wars by Bob Woodward, and it seems to me (I'll substantiate this if prodded) that he did a superb job of avoiding the escalatory pitfalls of the Johnson and W. Bush administrations. I mean a really superb job; it's the closest thing I have ever read about to scientific policymaking, which naturally appeals to me very much. Furthermore, I would like to point out that the conflict in Libya was exactly what any anti-war person should expect and applaud. No boots on the ground, in and out in a matter of months, precise and rapid victory at the prompting of an eager and vigorous population. Refutation that this was a wise action, I think, requires refutation of the whole Just War Theory. So, as someone who came of political age during the Obama administration and has basically no prior investment in the fate of the Democratic party, I have to say that I am deeply satisfied with how the President has done and I have no clue whatsoever what Napolitano is talking about.

I recognize that there are other civil liberties-related things that he has done that people find unpalatable, so let me try to address a few. He cannot overturn any of the Bush-era domestic surveillance rules for obvious reasons (look at how long he's been trying to tackle the Bush tax cuts), and regarding the ability of the president to kill citizens of the united states, that was a Republican amendment to this bill. Not a shitload he could have done about it.

Regarding George W. Bush, you absolutely cannot blame him for departures from campaign promises in the foreign policy arena, for blindingly obvious reasons. And I'm not sure I agree that the tax cuts for the wealthy were a departure from his campaign promises, but I can't exactly say I remember all that well.

Regarding "the era of big government is over", one line in a state of the union stuck in there against the better judgment of much of his staff does not mean that his presidency was a hypocrisy. It means he said a thing once. People do that sometimes. Calm down.

The stuff about Reagan, Santorum, Romney, and Gingrich is probably all correct.

The notion that people in the establishment are intentionally pigeon-holing the electorate is a claim that I cannot understand. It's the same as the claim that all politicians are corrupt. It's like insulting lawyers. Everyone does it, no one thinks it's funny any more. In this case, Napolitano seems to just be spouting platitudes. "what if the parties were two sides of the same coin? What if they're both corrupt? What if they represent a paradigm designed to box in the electorate?" Well, okay, what if? Why should I think that this is the case? Everything you've said about the presidents is easily explained by other means, everything else you've said are just strange generalized questions. "What if zeppelins were made entirely of lead? What if I were not wearing a tie? What if you were made of cheese?" I don't know. What do you want from me?

What he is describing is simply a basic bi-product of any democratic system. You've heard the boring-ass common knowledge statement that democracy is a slow form of government. That's because, to be electable, you have to hold an essentially status quo opinion. Let's say, for the sake of argument, that I am vehemently in favor of complete legalization of marijuana for all people. Let's say that I believe in fining families who own more than 1 car, and I believe in fining families who throw out more than one bag of trash per week, and I believe in using that money to subsidize bicycles and walking. Let's say that I believe that all guns should be illegal in all cases, except for trained officers of the law. Let's say that I cannot ever fully support a government that thinks that taking people and sticking them in a small room for years is appropriate or humane. If I enter politics, of course I'm never going to utter a single word of that. I'm going to take the main road. Why? Because that's how things get better. You don't make things better by looking nuts. You make things better by playing the game, by impressing the people you need to impress and then slowly, incrementally, winning people inch by inch closer to your point of view. Don't like it? That's democracy. That's the rules of the game. And that is why anyone who tries to tell you that all politicians are corporate shills needs to step back, take a deep breath, and start reading the news.

"Barack Obama's policies, too, are merely extensions of those from George W. Bush" well that is obviously incorrect, and I think I've said enough about that above.

Finally, I am not sure how he draws all of this back to Ron Paul. Here are the substantial differences of opinion between Ron Paul and Barack Obama, in the random order in which I'm remembering them:

1. Ron Paul would end the drug wars; Obama consistently scoffs at the idea of legalizing pot. Mostly what I think it boils down to is that Obama wants to be elected, Paul knows he won't be. But let's look at it from a moral standpoint rather than a pragmatic one. Let's say, for the sake of argument, that I agree that weed should be legalized. In the false dichotomy that two-party democracy *always* presents, I'm still with Obama on this one. Here's why: firstly, I axiomatically believe that it is the duty of a government to protect its populace. I like having rights and stuff, but anyone who tells you that the right to do crack cocaine is an essential element of your liberty is just plain wrong. They like to make a slippery slope argument: "if the government can tell me what I can and cannot put into myself, what's to stop them from telling me that I can't use prescription drugs! How about food! How about water? WHAT ABOUT AIR?" Here's the reason why that's utter bullshit: we can tell when it crosses the line. It's a pretty empirically reliant position: the government should be able to outlaw anything that you are meant to consume that will probably kill you very quickly if you consume it. Cigarettes and tobacco are a borderline, and we can have an interesting argument there. Heroine, not so much. But the popular libertarian extension of that idea is bullshit. No politician would ever say "since possession of heroine and crack cocaine is criminal, I'm going to make tomatoes criminal too." That's not a thing, and it never will be. Furthermore, here is why legalization is morally irresponsible: it's nice to say "people should have the right to do what they want with their bodies." But I would say a vast majority of drug users have no concrete understanding of what these things will do to them, and I'm still undecided as to whether or not people should have the liberty to destroy themselves. Here is a good study breaking down drug use that doesn't directly substantiate this, but it does it according to race and it shows you which communities tend to do the really dangerous drugs (SPOILER ALERT: it's the poorer ones where education is the worst.)

2. Ron Paul wants to "restrain the Federal Government from spending and then turning that over to the Federal Reserve and letting the Federal Reserve print the money" by making gold and silver legal tender. Obviously this is not an accessible argument to most people (especially not to me), but here are a few good rebuttals from Paul Krugman. It seems to me that any proposal with as little political support as this one that seems to have glaring holes as big as this one does warrants a major discussion. That I have not yet been privy to. Here I can concede that Napolitano was probably right; this warrants more coverage.

3. Ron Paul would cease foreign aid. This is something that means a hell of a lot to me, so let me reprint a formal argument I once wrote that goes a bit further than this, but that can easily be extended to counter Paul's position. In it, I cite books and everything. Don't miss the part where I'm a socialist!

Any wealth disparity is morally unacceptable, and our society's inherent rich versus poor dichotomy is the colossal failure of our oppressive economic system. This system institutionalizes our inhuman tendency to ignore suffering, and is our tool for perpetrating mass starvation on defenceless human victims. Any system that creates an economic hierarchy is morally indefensible, contradicted by our most fundamental convictions, and inferior to a system of material equality. The uneven distribution of wealth in our society is a major cause of crime, racism, and our insufficient motivation to produce great works. The vast majority of crime is the direct result of economic disparities in our society. A person will only steal an object when they can't access the capital to purchase it on their own terms; crime rates are much higher in areas with a larger disparity between the rich and the poor, as in the case of the United States in contrast with Sweden. Canadian journalist Pierre Berton (1991) writes that drastic increases in the rates of crime and violence were direct results of the Great Depression in Canada (p. 87). A larger economic disparity means higher crime rates; our system, which demands economic disparity, demands crime. Our economic system also oppresses based on skin colour. Historian Paul Johnson (1992) contends that African Americans have been severely economically disadvantaged in the United States for centuries and remain one of the poorest demographics in that country today (p. 151). However, although they have been poorer than the majority of white Americans since slavery, several generations of African Americans have passed since then. Therefore, either African Americans are inherently less able to make a fortune than white people, or our economic system punishes those who start out poor; through a lack of inheritance, lack of education and no family social stature to maintain, many African American children are economically oppressed on a mass scale, forced into lifelong poverty because of an accident of birth. To make this more relevant to Canada, simply replace "African American" with "Native". So a completely unfettered free market would be one of the purest examples of racism in the history of the world. Completely free markets also beget the mindset that goods, both luxuries and necessities, are to be hoarded, and this mindset prevents humans from doing great deeds. There is less incentive to build new bridges or more magnificent buildings when it is at the cost of money taxpayers need to feed their families, and there are plenty of reasons not to explore the cosmic frontier when it seems expensive. Carl Sagan (1994), the great popularizer of science, writes about “how vulnerable the repository of all our potential” is so long as it is localized to the fragility of Earth, and yet taxpayers remain reluctant to pay even a hundred million dollars for a preliminary rover to Mars (p. 334). It is often said that economies with equitable distributions of wealth produce unmotivated citizens, but it is only in a system with no safety net where action is discouraged on a large scale. It is only the participants in a completely free market who have to choose between saving for their childrens' education and sending humans to the moon, and it is foremost a free economy that promotes violence and hatred and racism and crime.

Western society's most basic political, economic, and religious tenets already discourage any distinction between the rich and the poor, because we find it fundamentally reprehensible. The concept of a social safety net is in place around the world, and it tries to give everyone a basic subsistence and to remove the extreme economic disadvantages inherent in a free market. Bill Clinton (2004) explains the need for a safety net when he states in his autobiography that a strong nation requires “a strong sense of mutual obligations, and a conviction that we cannot pursue our individual interests independent of the needs of our fellow citizens” (p. 362). Welfare, a crucial component of the social safety net, is too often portrayed as a government handout for those too lazy to work; this is a blatant lie, and even in the United States, a country recently subjected to large-scale financial deregulation, there is brazen support of welfare from across the political spectrum and throughout its history. Theodore Sorensen (1996), an aide to President John F. Kennedy, writes that welfare “helped millions of very young children and their mothers weather a dismal period of typically three years or less until they could get back on their feet, helped low-wage earners obtain the health- and child-care and other services that enabled them to work, helped untold numbers of widowed, divorced, and deserted women through a cashless transition to a better life, helped reduce [America's] tragically high rate of infant mortality, and helped countless children of poverty obtain the education and work experience they needed to leave the slums behind” (p. 52). Whig and Republican Abraham Lincoln (2006) spent his entire career promoting Keynesian spending on infrastructural improvements (p. 89), modern Republican President Richard Nixon (2001) said in his 1971 State of the Union address when he needed to gain votes that two major priorities of the country must be “welfare reform” and “improving health care and making it available more fairly to more people” (p. 297), and as governor of California, Republican Ronald Reagan (1982) raised taxes, reformed welfare, and boosted several aspects of social spending in order to turn an economic deficit into a surplus (p. 244). The social safety net which seeks to even out capitalism's inherent wealth disparity is part of our implicit social contract, and is a key component of modern conservative and liberal ideology as well as a core value that politicians tap into when they need to win votes. This safety net exists because we agree that it is wrong to deprive others of the opportunity to contribute equally to society, and humans can only contribute equally to society if they are treated equally in the eyes of the law, medicine, education, and their fellow humans; this is not possible in a system where the social safety net covers only the most basic necessities and only for the very poorest, and therefore an extension of programs like welfare is the only way to meet this fundamental political and economic tenet. The religions most prevalent in our society also object to the presence of a wealth disparity. In the Old Testament, a holy book both for Christians and for Jews, the books Leviticus and Genesis spell out specifically what portions of your harvest to give to the poor, and in most places in the bible it is astronomically larger than we would give today; anywhere from a tenth to a quarter is supposed to be reserved as a gift to the poor, and in Christianity, Islam, and Judaism it is mandatory to regularly give a portion of your income to charity. These religions, which permeate every interaction in our society, hold that it is wrong for some humans to be significantly poorer than other humans. This charity is about feeding the lonely traveller and about ridding yourself of wealth to ensure a better judgement by God, but it is self-evident that the lonely traveller is better fed when he can feed himself. Each of these tenets of our society, when brought to its logical conclusion, advocates a system of approximately equal wealth; each of these tenets struggles against the wealth disparity that is crucial for a free market.

Humans no longer produce great works. We've stopped building great cathedrals and we barely invest in knowledge; we can't even be bothered to explore any longer. While the twin forces of globalization and the free market allow us to oppress exponentially more people exponentially faster, the humans of the capitalist world stand idly by and watch as racism and crime and starvation become crutches for a new global paradigm. In his inaugural address, President Kennedy (1988) declared “to those people in the huts and villages of half the globe struggling to break the bonds of mass misery, we pledge our best efforts to help them help themselves, for whatever period is required --- not because the communists may be doing it, not because we seek their votes, but because it is right” (p. 12). The President was ahead of his time, but he is behind ours. His call to action is too narrow. In our quest for freedoms we have turned against ourselves, and a paradigm that predicates access to food on privileged lineage is a useless and dehumanizing paradigm. The rich versus poor dichotomy is unacceptable and a crime against humanity.

4. Ron Paul would want an option for young people to opt out of social security. Two things: First, I don't believe in the Right To Fail, because I axiomatically believe that the government should care for its citizens, so naturally I find it unpalatable to let people compromise their ability to ever retire. Second, I think that it weakens the social contract to allow withdrawal from government programs. I think that the entire point of a functional social safety net is that it really does provide a universal sense of community. And that's awesome.

5. Obama spearheaded the bailout, Paul voted against it. I think there would have been a wholesale and unrecoverable collapse of the American and world economy had they not bailed out the banks. I think that this is generally accepted. I also happen to think it really, really sucked. But that's the way it goes sometimes.

6. Paul, perhaps more than the former constitutional lawyer Obama, preaches constitution first. I simply disagree with this. Morality first. Constitution second. Pragmatism third. If the separation of church and state isn't strictly in the constitution (as Paul claimed in "Christmas in Secular America" in 2003), it should be a pillar of society nonetheless. I realize that this position means that one particularly self-righteous administration can overhaul the function of the American government, but when you're right, you're right.

7. Ron Paul supports State's Rights, as in the general case he supports decentralized government. Try as I might, I don't know why. I just don't. I think it's another constitution first thing, but in terms of practical moral benefits of letting states make laws that impinge on the liberty of the people (like the death penalty), I simply don't know. Sorry.

8. Ron Paul is a social libertarian. I think in almost every case he is right here, but I think that Obama represents the status quo not by choice but because he has never had command of the entire bicameral legislature. I explained in section one my major objection to social libertarianism, and I've explained that I take it as an axiom that the government is responsible for looking out for its citizens. Ron Paul is on the right side of gay marriage, the PATRIOT Act, and the draft, and more importantly he is on the right side for all the right reasons. I agree with most of his stances here, and so does Barack Obama. I think that I might share his position on affirmative action (against, because it promotes an exclusive group mentality based on superficial characteristics), but I'm honestly not sure.

9. Ron Paul doesn't think that global warming is an immediate threat to human civilization. I think he's wrong. But he doesn't like polluters, so that's good.

Anyhow, to the one person who made it this far, thanks for reading the whole thing. I swear my posts will be shorter in the future. Please leave me a comment to tell me how you liked it, and if you read this far, incorporate the words "social battering ram" into your comment so that we can spot who has a real attention span. Once you've done that, please help me fulfill my interminable craving for human attention; phone your friends, tweet your grandmother, smoke signal your alien overlords, and tell them there's this dude on the internet and he's really really mad.

Until next time, keep on trucking.

SPOILER ALERT: It's a blog

Samuel here.

For the only time ever, I will be brief. Simon and I have spent much of the last decade arguing with smart people on the internet. Sadly, the vast majority of our online arguments have faded into obscurity, clouded in the mists of facebook walls or long deleted from MSN chat histories. Well, no longer! This post is the official inauguration of News Feed Fact Check: where two 18-year old ideologues argue with their friends on subjects as varied as political science, physics, and...well, that's about it. Maybe gaming and movies, if it's a light news feed day.

Here's the perk: we don't just want to argue with our friends. We want to argue with your friends too! Submit your own facebook screenshots (with all identifying factors blanked out) as a comment on ANY post, and we will write responses to your friends!

We would like to keep every post in a consistent format that is easy to scan. First, we will take a screenshot of the offending post on our Facebook News Feeds. We will blank out names/photos, then stick the image in the first line of the post. Then, we will compose the post as a direct response to the person who wrote the offending status or shared the offending link. Posts will say at the top which of the two of us authored them. Some will come from just one of us, some will come from both.

Now on to some incredibly opinionated ramblings. We will be updating according to the schedule here. Always feel free to leave a comment or two giving us any sort of feedback; if you disagree or agree with what we're saying or how we're saying it, we'd love to hear. Enjoy!

P.S. Here are some super cool people that I follow and you guys should too.

• This tumblr is run by a friend of mine who is actually a cyborg composed mostly of internet. Check it out. He shares tons of cool stuff that makes me laugh
• This webcomic is written and drawn by a friend of mine who is super good at writing AND drawing. It's about a goblin who is also a communist. Sorry, ladies, I called him first.