Lying for a Cause
College professor Tearfree / Deirdre Dashwood proudly admits to engaging sock puppets to boost her ratings on Rate My Professors, which she and fellow professor and Hugo Schwyzer non-justify by pointing out what a generally lame web site it is. Meanwhile, Radley Balko, who appears to be proud of his status as the libertarian right’s answer to Paul Krugman, openly admits he would lie, or at least intentionally mislead a court, to get on a jury so he can exercised his cherished de facto “right” to engage in every good libertarian’s favorite kind of juror misconduct, hiring a hooker and passing a joint around during jury deliberations jury nullification. Then, in a huff, Balko proceeds to falsely accuse Patterico of falsely (?) accusing him of engaging in that very same act on his own blog. To most normal people, lying on your personal web site is lame, but it’s hardly an offense on the order of perjury. To radical libertarians like Balko, there’s nothing wrong with making crap up, allowing no comments, ignoring most incoming email, and never bothering to correct more than a handful of errors that miraculously become aware of despite your own best efforts to remain blissfully ignorant of them, but lying outright is still bad, if done to your fellow citizen. Lying to a judge under oath, by contrast, is not bad; that’s just stickin’ it to The Man.
My question to the Balkos, the Schwyzers and especially the Dashwoods of the world is simple. All of us have our own “good” causes we’ve convinced ourselves will promote the greater good, and all of us have our own strategies for advancing them. But if any part of your strategy involves intentionally deceiving anyone, why should the rest of us believe a word you say about anything? You all might just as well come out and say “OK, I may lie through through my teeth to those others guys to promote my pet issue, but when I talk to you about that same issue I’m telling you the honest to God truth. Honest.”
September 1st, 2006 at 9:29 pm
Okay, for cryin’ out loud, I give. You’re right. I liked the idea, but you’ve appealed to my better nature (and to my selfish desire to be taken seriously), and I repent.
September 1st, 2006 at 10:25 pm
Why should a true believer handicap themselves by having to follow ‘your’ or ‘my’ rules for behavior? If you’re in a fight, are you going to run the risk of losing because you agree to fight according to the way other people want you to fight or are you going to pull out all the stops in order to make sure that you’re walking away at the end of the fight?
The Balkos, etc. of the world obviously feel strongly enough about their beliefs that enaging in behavior that I doubt they would do if the stakes weren’t so high. I don’t agree with them - about their cause, that is, but, if I want to reserve for myself the right to engage in some unorthodox fighting for the things that I believe strongly in, I’ve got to refrain from trying to criticize them too strongly for doing what I would/might do, just for something else.
In fact, there’s something to admire about someone who believes so strongly in something that they’re willing to run the risk of alienating a “dim-witted, quick-tempered, angry douchebag that nobody reads“…
And, yes, X, it’s me, and not someone pretending to be me.
September 1st, 2006 at 11:56 pm
Tearfree aka Deirdre here and, yes, both are pseudonyms.
My comments or, should I say my sock puppets’, comments about myself on RMP are so over the top that anyone who mistook them for real would be a fool.
I would be happy to stop the sock puppetry if RMP would include a suitable disclaimer on every page.
Honestly, RMP is a terrible site. Why should innocent professors have to put up with this stuff? If I said this kind of stuff about my students, I’d be hauled before the disciplinary committee.
Live by the sword, die by the sword!
September 2nd, 2006 at 11:29 am
Steve, I know this is the real you because you missed my point. I’m not arguing that anyone should handicap themselves, but that while limiting oneself to the truth (not necessarily the whole truth, but at least a subset thereof, i.e., nothing but the truth) may be a minor handicap in the short run, lying is the greater handicap in the long run. Like Balko, I lean libertarian, yet whenever I’m exposed to one of his pieces, my reaction is to take whatever he says with a really, really, really large grain of salt - and frankly can’t blame non-libertarians who instead choose to ignore him altogether. Think of the little boy who cried wolf. In the children’s story, that strategy worked very well several times. In real life it works only once. So if lying for a cause is in your rhetorical arsenal, save it for the issue that’s so near and dear to you that it’s worth shooting your entire credibility to hell over. Somehow I don’t think that getting to serve on one measly jury, just to attempt one measly jury nullification (and, in all likelihood, succeed in nothing more than one measly mistrial) is really that important to Radley, or that helping to discredit one measly web site that had no real credibility to begin with is really that important to Deirdre. But perhaps I err.
Deirdre/Tearfree, if I have really have to explain to a college professor why college professors are held to a different standard than college students, our educational system is in much more trouble than I thought.
September 2nd, 2006 at 12:32 pm
XRLQ: I wish you were correct, that telling the truth is rewarded in the long run. Unfortunately, we have seen way too many times where that wasn’t the case. Look at Joe Wilson and his flock… he lied and, notwithstanding a post here and there, he walks away unscathed… and, even worse, having helped persuade a majority of Americans thinking Bush lied in order to justify the invasion. How many times does the MSM (and much of the public) fall for the lies spread by the likes of Hezbollah? How many times has Howard Dean made a baseless claim, and all without ever getting disinvited from the Sunday talk shows?
September 2nd, 2006 at 12:39 pm
XRLQ, I hold myself to a higher standard too. I don’t slag people off online just because my students do. I merely use a bit of creative sock puppetry to balance things out.
I will give the morals of this a good mulling over this weekend, but I am unaware of any ethical principle that says satire must never be used to mock silly institutions. And furthermore, I do not beleive my behaviour fits the definition of a lie.
September 2nd, 2006 at 12:51 pm
Why is it OK for a student who failed an essay or exam due to their own failure to prepare to then go on a website and anonymously slag the teacher as being a terrible prof. I am with Tearfee, whoever she is, on this debate. If the students can slag and defame and libel anonymously, why can’t a prof go on and try to balance things out. That’s not lying, is it? It’s fighting back. And, I might add, I am a university student. And I have seen and heard firsthand students who are pissed off plot and scheme about how they’re going to use ratemyprofessor to bring that prof down.
September 2nd, 2006 at 12:57 pm
I understand that sometimes libertarians feel justified in lying to get on a jury to accomplish their view of “justice” through jury nullification. Would libertarians support a racist in his or her attempts to lie to get on a jury with the sole intent of convicting a black man regardless of the evidence?
It does not take long to see that even if you trust libertarians to exercise their judgment responsibly, do you trust everyone to do the same? Once you justify it for yourself, can you rationally prevent someone else from using the same means to accomplish justice?
September 2nd, 2006 at 6:41 pm
Steve, I don’t dispute that some people want to believe stuff so badly, they will happily accept lies over the truth. However, those people tend to be the true believers, not the people who need to be persuaded to come aboard. Do you know anyone who was a Republican or middle of the road independent until he heard Howard Dean? Joe Wilson may have convinced some people to turn on Bush, but only because he started out with a clean slate. I don’t think he’ll ever convince anyone of anything again. Of course, he was a nobody to begin with, so this was his 15 minutes of fame. IOW, his was the case where this one issue WAS so important as to be worth spending his entire credibility on; the issue was all he’s got.
TF: I have nothing against satire, I’m just not sure it’s feasible to put satire on their site without having it register as “truth.” Even if you managed to write statements that are so comically incoherent as to be distinguishable from the serious stuff some idiots have posted on the site - and I’m not sure it’s possible to do that - whatever “ha ha just kidding” score you give yourself will count toward the real averages, which are probably all most people look at anyway. If your real goal is simply to lampoon the site, why not set up a parody site of your own?
QO: “That’s not lying, is it? It’s fighting back.” Huh? Common sense says it’s both. It’s just not a very effective means of fighting back, which was my point.
September 2nd, 2006 at 10:19 pm
What kills me is that they TELL us about the lying. It’s like the super-secret pot legalisation plan that’s been priority one since about the time big L Libertarians decided to eschew seriousness entirely: “Dude, we’re going to all pretend to think that pot is medicine, you in?”
September 5th, 2006 at 2:46 pm
Carnival of interesting matters…
Jury nullification
Intriguing, low-level blog war on the vexing issue of jury nullification. Radley Balko holding forth here and here. Patterico doing so here and here. Xrlq having his say here.. My own anguished, indecisive position well-stated he…