One of the many joys of knowing me is that, if we go out for drinks and end up talking politics (which is a perpetual risk), I will absolutely jot down points made by everyone involved and then spend the following morning fact-checking them, before sharing my findings in a 2,000-plus-word series of instant messages.

You’ll Do What? ¶

Quoth a old friend, epigramatically, a decade ago: you need to calm down. But, jokes aside, I do want to take a moment to defend my practice.

It’s important to first define what ‘fact-checking’ isn’t. It isn’t an attempt to counter falsehoods with opposing falsehoods. It isn’t a way of showing off how knowledgeable you are. It isn’t even, inherently, an effort to change someone’s mind (but it can, through the instilment of doubt, serve to plant the seed of future reflection). And it should always come with receipts.

It’s also important to define the limits of fact-checking. I don’t believe that anybody holds a perfectly internally-consistent set of beliefs or opinions, and I would be suspicious of anyone who claimed to. Everyone’s worldview is assembled, piece-by-piece, from a lifetime of experiences (both good and bad), their upbringing, their social circles, their access (or lack of access) to resources, and even little things like sensible-seeming but unexamined received wisdom, all accumulated and jumbled together in organic chaos. But the core around which they accrete–the grit in the clam, if you like—is most likely not a rational belief, but a function of one’s personality. Certain fundamental statements, like ‘we should follow laws we don’t agree with’ or ‘I have an obligation to help those in need’, are not factual and cannot be proven or disproven; they are axiomatic, or what US jurisprudence calls ‘political questions’. But they are also only starting points: I think everyone would agree with the statement ‘you should be nice to other people’, but the disagreements arise around questions like ‘what does “should” demand of us?’, ‘what does it mean to “be nice”?’ and (unfortunately) ‘who counts as “a person”?’. That is to say that these core beliefs are scripture; all else is exegesis.¹

So there needs to be something concrete to verify: numbers; dates; specific claims.² At the end, we should be able to agree that something did, or did not happen in a certain way. But who normally does this sort of thing?

Fact-checking is usually associated with well-meaning liberal organisations like Full Fact or BBC Verify,³ who evaluate public statements made by high-profile figures in media, politics and so on. In theory, adding these rebuttals into the discourse allows for discerning truth-seeking audience members to compare and contrast the claims and counter-claims and come to reasoned judgement on their relative merits.

In reality, political support works more like a team sport than a leisurely browse amidst the Marketplace of Ideas™, and once someone has chosen their team, they will start to follow the social media channels and media organisations that support that team; they will never see these rebuttals. Despite these outlets’ best efforts at neutrality, in a political environment in which the right generally plays faster and looser with facts than the left (not to suggest that they hold a monopoly on the truth) any effort to fact-check must necessarily be either so focussed on maintaining a false appearance of balance so as to be rendered useless, or otherwise exhibit a partisan bias. They end up writing, primarily, for an audience of people who already believe those figures to be liars.

Similarly, certain political perspectives are heavily overrepresented due the economic structure of society and the fact that how widely your message can be heard is largely a function of much money you have to guarantee it; that’s a roundabout way of saying that, at least here in the West, most of our media landscape is heavily skewed by the views of the billionaires who own all of the major media outlets, who unsurprisingly tend to lean politically right and well away from anything that might threaten their billions.

But everyday relationships have the potential to bypass those filtering effects. This is the core of why I think (semi)casual, interpersonal fact-checking is very important.

So Long, and Thanks for All the Facts ¶

On a personal level, fact-checking is a sign of respect and act of co-operation, under a superficial veneer of discord: there is no shame in being mistaken, only in persisting to be. By challenging a statement, I affirm that I believe you and I have a shared commitment to truth, and that we’re dealing with a case of inadvertent mis-information rather than intentional dis-information. This is not to say that I expect to change anyone’s entire political outlook with a single zinger of a rebuttal, but over time I hope that these will build (in both directions—I make no claim to infallibility on my own part) and bring us both closer to a shared reality, small mutual course correction by small course correction. If I believed someone to be a fascist, knowingly or recklessly spouting bullshit for their own purposes, I would not bother fact-checking them and would instead consider other appropriate responses.

If the surest sign of friendship is countersignalling, then what better way to do so than to say ‘I disagree with you and think you’re wrong, and here’s why’? But the ‘and here’s why’ is also a gift; a sign of trust in the person’s own critical faculties. Where did they get the false information from? Why would that source have shared something false (and, presumably, trivially disprovable)? Why didn’t they verify it myself before repeating it? If they consistently trace false claims back to a single source or set of sources, shouldn’t they burn that source entirely as untrustworthy? I have too many experiences to list here whereby challenge and counter-evidence have served to pull me away from dead-ends, from participating in online culture war bullshit a decade ago (back before anyone was even using terms like ‘woke’ and ‘culture war’) to the inquisitive globe-trotting socialist of today.

And lastly, I think there is a societal argument to be made here too. Most of my closest friendships—both recent ones and decade-old ones—are with people I encountered by chance: housemates; collegemates; former colleagues. I have never employed a filter of political alignment (beyond the sensible limits referred to above), and indeed some of those decade-old friendships began adversarially. Until very recently in human history (and still today, in many places) this was the near-universal experience: you were born into a village somewhere, with whoever else happens to be around, and you have to learn to put up with them as well as you can for the rest of your lives because you’re probably not going anywhere. You might bond with certain people more over common interests, circumstances or goals, but at the end of each week you’d still have to see everyone else at church.

This has been lost by the unprecentented, technologically-mediated ability to restrict exposure to disagreement so effectively nowadays, and the concomitant loss of third places, but this is beyond the scope of this piece. All I know is that I am further to the left of many of my friends—maybe the furthest-left person they know, or the only leftist they interact with regularly—and so I feel obliged to a) fight the good fight whilst b) representing the team well. I also know that similar experience has benefitted me in the past, and so now I can pass it on.

And, ultimately, I am also a big fucking dork and I love research.

Fact-Checking My Friends ¶

Since I put some not-insubstantial time and effort into this latest lot of research, and I think the end result is rather interesting both an example of my method and for what it says about the topics covered, I hereby present below my series of fact-checks from my latest pub outing. Note that these were originally sent via WhatsApp, and I have tidied them up a little here to better fit the exacting standards of my blog. Also, all of the quotes should be considered potentially paraphrasal; the exact wording is not particularly important.

The Americas ¶

We began talking about Latin America, from insurgencies in Colombia to Trump’s assault on Minnesota.

Political Violence in Latin America ¶

Allende disappeared people and Pinochet disappeared people.

I can’t find any evidence that Allende disappeared or killed people. Even people who are critical of him only accuse him of damaging the economy and going against the Constitution.

On the other hand, the Pinochet regime is estimated to have tortured over 40,000 people and killed over 2,200.

For further reading on Allende, this is an interesting deep dive into his successes and failures (from a socialist perspective) and these are his very moving final words.

The implication of the initial statement, within the context of the argument, was that the left have historically been as bad (in terms of authoritarianism and violence) as the right in Latin America. So let’s expand our scope beyond Chile and look at the records of other (always US-backed) right-wing and military regimes. As I’ve discussed previously, ’left’ and ‘right’ are notoriously woolly terms. For example, many of the dictators mentioned below were more like mob bosses than political idealogues, and many of the avowedly leftist regimes are of a strain of lefist thought with which I have little sympathy. I have here used the rule of thumb that if one side predominantly kills leftists, it is probably right-wing. If it is supported by the US, it is definitely right-wing. And if it calls itself leftist, it is probably left-wing.

These are the gold-standard cases: detailed, post-war examinations into atrocities committed both sides, with estimates for each side’s share of responsibility:

• in Nicaragua, the Somoza dictatorship was responsible for at least 80% of civilian casulties prior to its overthrow, and the vast majority of post-revolution killings were carried out by the Contras;
• in the Salvadoran Civil War, 70,000+ civilians were killed and almost 85% of killings were attributed to the state and its allies, including the El Mozote and El Calabozo massacres by the Army of unarmed civilians;
• in Colombia ~27% of killings are attributed to guerrillas, with the remainder attributed to the state and paramilitaries; and
• the only counter-example I could find is Peru, where the Shining Path have been responsible for ~54% of killings (around 12,5000, including the Lucanamarca Massacre) and 23% of torture cases.⁴

These are less clear-cut, either because there has been little effort to investigate (as in Mexico) or the boundaries between different conflicts and the political alignments of each side are less clear (again, as in Mexico). In these cases, I couldn’t any find sources describing comparable death tolls attributed to left-wing guerillas (when they were involved), from which I conclude that these were very one-sided conflicts and that the number of leftist-attributed deaths were negligible (in part a natural consequence of the state’s vastly greater ability to commit violence at scale, and in part because—as I am arguing—right-wing forces are far more prone to mass atrocity):

• during the Argentinan Dirty War (1974–1983), the military junta’s death squads and state forces killed or disappeared 22–33,000 civilians,⁵ with an estimated ~1,300 civilians killed by leftist guerrillas;
• during Mexico’s Dirty War (1964–1982), the centre-right PRI government is estimated to have committed serious human rights violations against almost 4,500 people (including the disappearance of between 500–1,200 people). The ongoing Mexican drug war (launched in 2006 by that same government), despite the associated widespread killings and disappearances, is not a conflict we can clearly map to left–right sides; however, the more clearly political Chiapas conflict has seen a vast majority of atrocities carried out by state or state-aligned forces, primarily (but not exclusively) under the PRI prior to the left-wing Morena party’s electoral victory in 2018; one specific example is the 1997 Acteal massacre.
• the Guatemalan genocide (1960–1996, most intensely between 1981–1983) resulted in over 200,000 civilians killed by state forces (mostly Maya);
• I struggled to find long-term total figures for Venezuela, but apparently the Attorney General’s Office announced that it would create a designated investigation team in 2009 to look into more than 6,000 reported cases of extrajudicial executions … between 2000 and 2007 (though I’m not sure what the result of the investigation was). Amnesty reported 8,200 extrajudicial killings between 2015 and 2017, coinciding with a sharp upswing in political violence after Maduro took power in 2013.⁶ There have been many forced disappearences, but they have generally been temporary and brief (unlike the permanent disappearences—i.e., murders—seen in many of the other examples above). This is compared to roughly 100–200 extrajudicial killings per year reported under the Pèrez government in the ’90s; I could not find figures for the Jiménez dictatorship.
• For Cuba, I have already written the best part of a Ph.D. thesis on the topic, so suffice it to say here that I don’t think you can trust any of the figures quoted about the current government there one way or the other. That said, even an anti-communist US-based group puts the estimated number of extrajudicial killings since 1959 at 1,324. The body count of the Batista regime that preceded the revolution is, at a high (and disputed) estimate, as many as 20,000 people (though this number is disputed), following which the revolutionaries executed between 800 and 2,500 of those responsible (which were, arguably, both legally and morally justified).

So, in sum, it seems like right-wing forces are responsible for an order of magnitude more violence than left-wing forces in Latin America, consistently over the past half-century and change. Whether in civil wars, guerilla conflicts (with the sole exception of Peru), one-sided massacres or prolonged authoritarian regimes, a clear pattern of evidence emerges: the two side are not even close to comparison.

How Insurgencies End ¶

There is a famous RAND Corporation report about how very few guerilla groups end due to military action; most end because they are incorporated into the political process.

This was a claim from me, stated in the context of discussing Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s Abrazos, no balazos and Colombian President Gustavo Petro’s Total Peace policies.

What I thought was one famous RAND Corporation report is actually three. They mostly support my claim, but the exact figures are less overwhelmingly in favour of political engagement than I had thought.

Firstly, the 2008 report How Terrorist Groups End found that 43% of such groups ended because they joined the political process compared to 40% due to arrest/killing of key members (and only 7% due to military force).

Secondly, the 2010 report How Insurgencies End found that, generally, insurgencies last around 10 years, with the government more likely to win the longer it goes on.

And lastly, the 2010 report’s 2013 sequel Paths to Victory looked into the same questions, but with the benefit of more examples.

ICE Murder of Renée Good ¶

Renée Good was blocking traffic.

Good hit the ICE agent with her car, even if only a little.

Renée Good was waving traffic past, and several vehicles were able to drive around her, including that of her murderer-to-be. The masked agent got out and began walking around her car, filming her license plates. She [is] not mad at [him], whilst her partner heckled him.

Another agent then dismounted and began attacking her door, telling her to get out of the fucking vehicle. Meanwhile, the murderer circled the vehicle, continuing to film. Roughly 10 seconds before the shooting, he swaps his phone to his other hand, leaving his gun hand free. Good begins to drive away from the attacker to her left, with a full steering lock to the right, as the second ICE agent has walked in front of her car (whilst she is almost certainly distracted by the first). This is a known tactic that has been reported on since at least 2014, where agents will intentionally position themselves in front of vehicles in order to justify the use of deadly force. Is is also against current ICE training and guidance, which say to always approach vehicles from the rear (duh).

Video evidence makes a plausible case that the agent was not contacted by the vehicle, and to my eyes he appears to be taking out his gun in the same frame that Good’s wheels start to spin; firearm draw speed for a trained individual is around 1.5 to 1.8 seconds, and a frame of video represents 1/24^th of a second, strongly suggestion that the murderer made the decision to draw before the vehicle finished reversing (and he had put himself in a position to do so at least 10 seconds earlier).

Renée Good was shot three times: once through the windshield and twice through the passenger window (i.e., with the killer safely to the side of the vehicle and not in danger). The vehicle continued to speed away before crashing into a parked car, suggesting that even if she had been trying to run down the agent, shooting her would not have helped. The murderer remained on his feet throughout, continued to walk around afterwards without visible injury and does not appear to have needed medical attention.

The Times video also shows the agents blocking medical access to Good as she bled out, and rendered no aid despite having received CPR training. What it doesn’t include is the agent calling her a fucking bitch as he walks away following the murder.

Agent Jonathan Ross wasn’t afraid for his life. A pathetic, small man—like anyone who joins an agency like ICE—he was trying to intimidate and threaten two unarmed women in the course of his worthless working day. When this failed, and they dared to talk back to him, he and his colleagues orchestrated a scenario (whether through incompetence or intention is immaterial) in which he would be able to compensate for his atrophied, aggrieved manhood by virtue of his badge and his gun.

[On ICE more broadly] There is no problem with the police asking to see people’s papers to verify that they’re allowed to be in the country.

This is, in large part, a political statement rather than a purely factual one that can be proven or disproven. It depends on one’s belief in state legitimacy, rights and duties within a society, and more. But still, one can challenge the consequentialist aspects in part by reference to historical examples. For example, this is an excellent article about why allowing these sorts of paramilitary thugs to act with impunity is so dangerous:

Authoritarian states are constructed incrementally. No dictatorship advertises its plan to extinguish civil liberties. It pays lip service to liberty and justice as it dismantles the institutions and laws that make liberty and justice possible.

…

Manufactured fear engenders self-doubt. It makes a population — often unconsciously — conform outwardly and inwardly. It conditions citizens to relate to those around them with suspicion and distrust. It destroys the solidarity vital to organizing, community and dissent.

…

During the interregnum between the last gasps of a democracy and the emergence of a dictatorship, the nation is gaslighted. It is told the rule of law is respected. It is told democratic rule is inviolate. These lies mollify those being frog-marched into their own enslavement.

The majority sit quietly and dare to hope, Solzhenitsyn writes. Since you aren’t guilty, then how can they arrest you? It’s a mistake!

…

These self-delusions prevent us from resisting while the gallows are being constructed in front of us. Authoritarian states start by targeting the most vulnerable, those most easily demonized — the undocumented, students on college campuses who protest genocide, antifa, the so-called radical left, Muslims, poor people of color, intellectuals and liberals. They strike down one group after the next. They blow out, one by one, the long row of candles until we find ourselves in the dark, powerless and alone.

Alternatively, see here for a communique from activists in Germany about how their own history shows that being “peaceful” and “law-abiding” will not stop authoritarianism.

Spain ¶

From Allende and Petro we segued on to Pedro Sánchez, the incumbent President of Spain. I don’t follow Spanish domestic politics closely, but they are my new neighbours and I’ve been impressed with some of Sánchez’s foreign policy around the Gaza genocide (and, of course, disappointed with other parts of it). My friends, I imagine, are more familiar with Spain given the close cultural ties between their home countries and it, as well as the fact that most media about Spain will be in Spanish; their mother tongue.

Spanish Sexual Assault Law ¶

Pedro Sánchez changed the law in Spain so that a man accused of rape is considered guilty until proven innocent.

In two separate cases in Spain in 2016—one in Pamplona, one in Catalonia—teenage girls were gang-raped (and in the former case, the assault was filmed). The attackers received light charges because under Spanish law at the time, a distinction was made between ‘sexual abuse’ and ‘sexual aggression’, the latter of which required the presence of ‘violence or intimdation’. The girls in both cases were intoxicated and/or unconscious, so obviously did not fight back; the attackers were acquitted of ‘sexual aggression’, and convicted of the lesser charge of ‘sexual abuse’.

In response to massive outcry, Spanish law was changed, by the Sánchez government, to merge the two categories and specify that the critical factor would be the presence or absence of consent, rather than violence. That consent must be affirmative and cannot be assumed by default.⁷

The claim that this change reversed the presumption of innocent was made by right and far-right parties in Spain. The only other place I could find it is various creepy subreddits:

• one in /r/LeftWingMaleAdvocates; and
• not just one but two in /r/JordanPeterson.

These posts are largely nonsense; for example, the first one claims that the law only applies to women which appears to be completely false—unlike in England & Wales, Spanish law does not seem to anachronistically define rape as requiring a penis—and that an accusation results in a a mandatory 4–10 year prison sentence which elides quite the multi-stage process spanning accusation, charging, trial, judgement, appeal and second appeal. Even one of the commenters points out that affirmative consent can be actions as well as words.

I couldn’t find any information about prosecution rates etc. since the law was changed, which I think probably suggests that the right and far-right parties’ concerns were overblown.

There’s been one high-profile case of footballer Dani Alves. He was intially found guilty, then had his conviction overturned on appeal. I’m not going to spend too much time looking into this one case, but a cursory look at the Wikipedia summary certainly looks pretty bad. The first appeal was granted based on technical grounds about the conduct of the original case, more than actually claiming that he was innocent. An appeal to the appeal is currently before the Spanish Supreme Court.

Pedro Sánchez corruption ¶

Pedro Sánchez is corrupt. He was involved in a COVID-19 scheme where he purchased face masks from a company owned by his brother for €20 each.

The mask corruption scandal was about Sánchez’s transport minister and other allies, not his brother (and I don’t think Sánchez is alleged to have been involved).

Sánchez’s brother is involved in a different corruption case about selling influence. Again, I don’t think Sánchez is alleged to have been involved.

This is quite a good article about the various corruption scandals around Pedro Sánchez.

However, it’s worth pointing out that a lot of these cases (like the one against his wife) are launched by a far-right lawfare group called Manos Limpias. Here is a detailed article about that group and the Spanish judiciary (from, admittedly, a very pro-Sánchez perspective):

However, it can be true both that the cases are brought by a sketchy political group, and that they’re also real examples of corruption. But at least for now, whilst they’re still ongoing, there is ample reason to question them.

Hannah Arendt ¶

[Aghast, after I approvingly referenced her] Hannah Arendt defended the Nazis in the Nuremberg trials.

Arendt wrote her famous book Eichmann in Jerusalem about the Israeli trial of Adolf Eichmann in Israel in the ’60s. In it, she coined the term banality of evil to argue that Eichmann was not an evil monster, but a horrifyingly normal, boring man who nonetheless was a major organiser of the Holocaust.

The book was and still is controversial, because she was accused of being critical of bodies like the Jewish Council in Germany, which collaborated with the Nazis in deportations, etc. She also argued that the Israeli trial of Eichmann was more of a propaganda exercise for Israel then a real legal process.

But she definitely didn’t defend the Nazis; here is the conclusion of the book where she’s pretty clear that she wants to see Eichmann hang:

Foremost among the larger issues at stake in the Eichmann trial was the assumption current in all modern legal systems that intent to do wrong is necessary for the commission of a crime. On nothing, perhaps, has civilized jurisprudence prided itself more than on this taking into account of the subjective factor. … And yet I think it is undeniable that it was precisely on the ground of these long-forgotten propositions that Eichmann was brought to justice to begin with, and that they were, in fact, the supreme justification for the death penalty. Because he had been implicated and had played a central role in an enterprise whose open purpose was to eliminate forever certain ‘races’ from the surface of the earth, he had to be eliminated. And if it is true that ‘justice must not only be done but must be seen to be done,’ then the justice of what was done in Jerusalem would have emerged to be seen by all if the judges had dared to address their defendant in something like the following terms:

‘You admitted that the crime committed against the Jewish people during the war was the greatest crime in recorded history, and you admitted your role in it. But you said you had never acted from base motives, that you had never had any inclination to kill anybody, that you had never hated Jews, and still that you could not have acted otherwise and that you did not feel guilty. We find this difficult, though not altogether impossible, to believe. … [G]uilt and innocence before the law are of an objective nature, and even if eighty million Germans had done as you did, this would not have been an excuse for you.

‘Luckily, we don’t have to go that far. … [N]o matter through what accidents of exterior or interior circumstances you were pushed onto the road of becoming a criminal, there is an abyss between the actuality of what you did and the potentiality of what others might have done. … Let us assume, for the sake of argument, that it was nothing more than misfortune that made you a willing instrument in the organization of mass murder; there still remains the fact that you have carried out, and therefore actively supported, a policy of mass murder. For politics is not like the nursery; in politics obedience and support are the same. And just as you supported and carried out a policy of not wanting to share the earth with the Jewish people and the people of a number of other nations—as though you and your superiors had any right to determine who should and who should not inhabit the world—we find that no one, that is, no member of the human race, can be expected to want to share the earth with you. This is the reason, and the only reason, you must hang.’

Her whole career was writing about why people do evil, how to behave under totalitarianism, etc. Here is a quote from her about the danger of choosing ’the lesser evil’ and collaborating, and here’s my favourite passage from another of her essays—Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship—wherein she talks about what divides the kinds of people who do and don’t participate in crimes against humanity:

In this respect, the total moral collapse of respectable society during the Hitler regime may teach us that under such circumstances those who cherish values and hold fast to moral norms and standards are not reliable: we now know that moral norms and standards can be changed overnight, and that all that then will be left is the mere habit of holding fast to something. Much more reliable will be the doubters and skeptics, not because skepticism is good or doubting wholesome, but because they are used to examine things and to make up their own minds. Best of all will be those who know only one thing for certain: that whatever else happens, as long as we live we shall have to live together with ourselves.

Lastly, on Eichmann, her book is very famous and influential and philosophically interesting, but it’s also 60 years old now. A much better modern historical work on Eichmann is this one.