#mostly false

[joematar]

America sucks!

Snopes has reviewed this claim and found it to be:

It is unfair to judge a fledgling democracy, one that has yet to conquer the outlying, fertile heathen lands.

Sources: The memoirs of my late great-uncle Silas Q. Migillicuddy, oil baron and plantation owner, and the CIA.

[fake-diary]

Day 3

Today has been an eventful day! But in a good way! The flowers today were beautiful, even the grass! I also cut the grass yesterday! But it growing has reminded me that, no matter what may happen, I will be like grass and grow back! It may take some time, but I might even be stronger than before!!!!

[linguistifacts]

“Media has a Lower Approval Rate than Congress” - Just Mostly False?

Ok, let’s start off with one of my favourite examples of weird ratings yet. The case in point is this evaluation of a Trump utterance: http://www.politifact.com/truth-o-meter/statements/2017/feb/16/donald-trump/news-media-less-trusted-congress/

Politifact’s ruling goes as follows:

“Trump said he thought that the media had lower favorability ratings than Congress. But Congress actually ranks below the news media, according to surveys from three different research groups spanning several years. In two polls, mistrust in the media broke 40 percent, which is hardly anything to brag about. But in those studies, mistrust in Congress was over 50 percent.

Trump had a point that the media has a trust issue, but he got the ranking wrong in terms of Congress.

We rate this claim Mostly False”

So the interesting thing is that the actual claim is false - media by no means has lower approval rate than congress, it actually has about 10 percentage points higher, so it’s not even that close - yet it’s not judged as completely false. Politifact’s criteria for “mostly false” is “The statement contains an element of truth but ignores critical facts that would give a different impression”. Yet there is no element of truth here. The proposition made in this particular utterance is a comparison, which doesn't hold. 

So why is it just mostly false? One explanation is that politifact might have seen this as some kind of hyperbole, so that in some way, the point of the utterance would be that media has very low approval ratings. In this case the comparison wouldn’t be the central part or even the point, so then the point of the sentence would be true - 40% mistrust is not too good. This would hold even though the literal interpretation is false.

In my view, this might be too kind if an analysis. I don’t see why we shouldn’t interpret this literally - it doesn’t obviously flout any maxims, since the literal statement is a reasonable enough statement to make, and as such shouldn’t give rise to any implicatures. If this was meant to be a hyperbole it’s nowhere near outrageous enough, if you ask me. Even if the utterance is meant literally, but a “side-point” of it being that media has low favorability, that’s actually not what is proposed by this particular utterance. It might be said in other utterances in the same context, and they might be true, but this utterance is not.

[triviaproofing]

#1776: “Before 1850, golf balls were made of leather and were stuffed with feathers.”

Mostly false.

Early on in the game’s history, two types of balls were likely used: one made out of wood, and the other made out of leather and stuffed with cow hair. Later, the feathery was developed—it was a golf ball made out of leather, stuffed with feathers and usually painted white. Since the process to make them was so tedious, the featheries were expensive, roughly $10 to $20 each in today’s money. In 1848, the golf ball made out of sap was invented, a predecessor to today’s rubber golf balls.

[benchmarkfr]

Wash FR and NON-FR separately? MOSTLY FALSE

Many laundries and flame resistant manufacturers claim you must wash your FR separately from your non-FR to avoid contaminating your FR clothing with non-FR lint. This is mostly false and is used to sell uniform washing services. In ASTM F2757 it is ‘recommended’ to wash FR and non-flame resistant garments separately but this is primarily for appearance degradation. This code also recognizes that while lint could transfer it is unlikely to result in reduced flame resistance. See ASTM F2757-09 section 6.3.1. 

[unofficialpolitifact-blog]

Yes for banks, no for AIG and GM

[unofficialpolitifact-blog]

Editorials don't count

[somanywastedwords]

On Labyrinths, Minotaurs, Crystals and Spores

The pickup truck behind me is following far too close and has far too many lights on its front. They’re arrayed in staggered ranks like the eyes of a spider. None of them are on—it’s 4:45 in the afternoon—but they unnerve me anyway. I duck into the right lane.

RIGHT LANE MUST TURN RIGHT, it says.

So I turn right, onto one of those remote roads that has a name but is too wary or too shy to share it. It leads into network of streets that shift in condition from one to the next. The main artery is uneven blacktop, splitting away here and there into worn and cracked asphalt. Asphalt splits off into gravel. Gravel splits off into dirt. From the sky it must look like the scribbling of a bored giant.

I pass mobile homes with stained vinyl siding and lawns covered with random debris. Toys, tires, rusted appliances, all scattered as if dropped from space. The burned husk of a Trans Am leans out of a patch of shrubbery.  Its blackened hood is propped up and the engine compartment is as empty as a toothless mouth. I give it a wide berth. This is out of my element, but only a few miles from the city—only a few miles from the gears of the great grey machine.

The homes here are clustered like mushrooms. Outside one of them rides a man on a small residential tractor, swooping over everything green in long, straight paths. The tractor man glances up at me as I pass then continues on into his neighbors’ yards. The cuttings spray out onto the road and blend the edges of the gravel with the grass.  Gone is the meticulous geography of modern suburbia, where all roads lead into one another, all roads look the same, and there are no surprises. The roads here curve and slope without any hint of planning. Not only does every street look different from the last, but each one also looks different from itself when approached from the opposite way. This is a labyrinth and I think that there may be a minotaur at its heart.

I am officially lost.

My car shudders down a slope of crumbled macadam and semi-voluntarily rounds a corner. The road ahead of me is blocked by an enormous orange pickup truck. I can’t overstate the size of the thing; it defies reason. It is the carriage of a titan. The tires come up to my windows. A boy in a baseball cap sits inside the thing’s cabin and talks to a blond girl. He sees me and maneuvers his behemoth a few precious inches to the right so that I can slip by. The sound of its idling engine is like an erupting volcano; it rattles my windows. Glancing at the machine in my rear-view mirror I try to glean some sense of its purpose. It must have been built for uprooting antediluvian trees, smashing apart Cyclopean structures, diverting rivers. In the end I decide that its purpose is simply to be large—mind-bogglingly, senselessly large. I find another length of rotting asphalt, this one patched into rough shape by black veins of tar. It curves around a copse of trees behind which sits a small house either made to look like a barn or retrofitted from one. I pass it onto another dirt road lined left and right with mobile homes. One of them has been demolished into a pile of naked and pale splinters. A plaid couch and matching love seat sit next to the road, lone survivors of the demolition. Trash bags rest on their cushion-less seats. Up ahead, a dozen yards or so, a gorgeous young woman with long brown hair walks towards me through the dirt and the dust. She could be seventeen, twenty-two, or anywhere in between. She wears denim jeans held at an ideal tension. We make eye contact as I drive past and I can see beads of sweat rolling down her neck, over the hump of her collarbones, and down into the softer curves beneath her cotton top. I smile at her, but I don’t belong here and I fear the minotaur. I rotate around the mysterious core of this place, my internal compass compromised by its unique magnetism, and again—wholly by chance—I come parallel to the orbit of that brunette particle. She might think I’m following her. In a moment of snobbery I imagine her hoping that I would stop and take her away to the great city. The great, gray city. The city of gears. The city that digests us alive and rebirths us into carapaces of plastic and steel.

I realize then why this place unnerves me. I pinpoint its fundamentally alien quality. This place grew organically, from spores, out of some forgotten civic latticework. It’s like a coral reef. These are the anti-suburbs. Everything here is in flux, in rolling growth and decay. The suburbs I know don’t grow; they replicate. They don’t have veins; they have circuits. I prefer that comforting symmetry—a labyrinth where every path is an exit, and where at various points throughout the day a man is both Theseus and minotaur. I have become suburbanized, I realize, and the realization makes me feel cold like steel. I buzz in my seat between two states. I am an imbalanced equation, and I set the variables in this place ill at ease. The girl recedes behind me. I feel the pull—the electron’s lust for the proton, but I am shed from an isotope. Her atom is balanced. Her molecule is this place. From her germinate the spores that grow in the fields but will never touch the stars—will never burn.

I want to grab her and wring the juice out of her, to make her into a solid piece of carbon. I want our hard angles to scrape together, spark, and make fire.

The roads change and with them I shift through time. Cars metamorph from glossy silver to blackened trash and back again. Houses at one stretch sag and peel, then seem renewed again behind intervening trees. The roads here have names: Charles, Martin, Laura—real names. They grow out of and into one another like the gnarled branches of an aristocratic family tree. I can almost hear their heartbeats and the heaving of their lungs. I can feel the urge to pave the mutation, to lay down immense sheets of concrete and bury it. I return to the nameless road and push my way back to the pulsing conduit that leads back to the city. The city is surrounded on all sides by places like this. From its center the urban crystal hums and grows. It hums and grows all the time, and its geometry is so precise that you can imagine it encompassing the entire world, given enough time. You can imagine it paving over everything until mutation is replaced by machine. I turn onto that conduit and immediately feel the inexorable forces drawing me back into the steel and concrete hive. The other way terminates—after several miles—into muddy water. The only crossing is an honest-to-God river ferry. One day the city will find it necessary to erect a bridge, but not yet. 

As I leave the throbbing fungal colonies behind I glance to my right and see the emerging structure of a mini-mall. I see a sign announcing the imminence of a national grocery chain, a national gas station chain, a national fast food chain, et cetera. I see the machina mundi blooming into full, amaranthine glory.