Facts?

by Rich Beckman on August 10, 2009

It is inter­est­ing to me how often peo­ple I talk to do not believe in “facts”. Maybe it is true, maybe it isn’t. Who’s to say? That there is no short­age of talk­ing heads out there with no more agenda than rat­ings and a will­ing­ness to just make stuff up (or repeat what some­one else made up) cer­tainly con­tributes to this phenomenon.

But there are facts. Jonathan Chait has a nice post up over at The New Repub­lic talk­ing about some facts.

One exam­ple is it is a fact that in Eng­land, the gov­ern­ment owns the hos­pi­tals and the doc­tors are gov­ern­ment employ­ees. It is also a fact that this kind of arrang­ment is not even being con­sid­ered by Obama and the con­gress. More at the link.

Increas­ingly the right side of the polit­i­cal spec­trum seems to be spend­ing its time with hands over the ears chant­ing “no, no, no, no”.

No, we do not accept evolution.

No, we do not accept man caused cli­mate change.

No, we do not accept that the cur­rant health care sys­tem is in crisis.

It would be nice if there could be a dis­cus­sion of facts instead of rants.

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