Sojourner553

The evidence you are speaking of was probably the Iraqi planes.{?}

My husband is a pilot and laughed when the Bush admin brought this up on Blix because he had read a month earlier in his aviation magazines all about this plane and what a piece of technological garbage this was...

Those protests by Bush and Powell were the latest in their staged lies.

m00ner

Can anything really be proven? It's possible to fake just about everything, is it not?

Zar

Even under ideal "scientific" conditions, the answer is no (except perhaps some very trivial things.) Matters of synthetic knowledge cannot be proven. If you want to avoid being a radical skeptic, you can at least accept a parsimonious assumption that there is a real external world that we can stumble our way through (that we are not solipsists), but even so, perhaps the best you can do is know that something isn't true.

But in the even less ideal world of politics, where nearly all of us are NOT eyewitnesses, we are left floating in a sea of reports and must accept (at best) corroborated second-hand perceptions as our "evidence." This not only makes politics in some ways more difficult than science, but this layer of separation from "facts on the ground" and the fundamental limitations of the human being "in his place" make for a vulnerability that can easily be exploited by those who wish to influence our opinion. Couple this theoretical limitation with more common limitations on time, interest and access to information and you have a virtually impenetrable thicket of "information" to sort through. In fact, the "thicket" itself is a primary weapon. You can not only give out disinformation, but bury people in information, it being truthful or not. This is why, for example, retractions can be so nefarious. They reside tucked away in the midst of other data some time after the event and as long as only a small minority bothers to read it, the original story stands as if it were true. Also, facts by themselves are rarely useful. Context is needed because your average citizen simply has no means to deal with all the data otherwise. Only experienced analysts might have the ability to sort through a raw set of facts to reach some conclusion, but these people are few and in any case the problems arise again the moment they try to tell any non-expert anything at all. This is yet another layer of separation between fact and interpretation. You get second-hand facts coupled with second-hand interpretations.

What a mess.

P.S.: You might complicate the picture even further by acknowledging that many things about politics involve a lot of guesses about the distant future, wishful thinking and a priori rulemaking. Some things would be "truer" if only people cooperated with the idea. They may fail because people didn't see the light soon enough or because they truly are wrong about some aspect of humanity or nature. Since we don't have a lock on human nature itself even in our everyday relations, it seems like our problems are compounded. We also cannot read minds, so even when we have built a careful model of another political actor or element, we might still be surprised. There are only relatively good or poor risks, no absolute guarantees.

I read somewhere that almost no one knows what he or she wants or needs but that nearly everyone "knows" what everyone else should get.