Fairness

One of the things that I find troubling often is when people try to be fair.

I don't have a problem with that except it often results in them being unfair.

For example, in many sporting events, the officials don't want to seem like they are favoring one side over the other and so, even when one of the teams is being clearly more aggressive or outside the rules the official try to find offenses to sort of even things up on the non-offending team.

The assumption that both sides are more or less playing the game the same way leads to this and a lopsided number of calls will be challenged by the team that has them.

The result of this is that the team being more "guilty" will get away with things while the more "innocent" team will get penalized.

This is because it just seems fair that by the end the number of infractions is roughly the same.

We see the same thing in Politics where there is the same assumption that both sides use the same tactics.  They do to some extent, but recently at least we see one party clearly leading in falsehoods and dirty tricks and then accusing the press of bias when it points it out.

The press bends over backwards to try to appear balanced.

The dontard clearly leads all contenders in outright lies and history revisions and the press has pointed it out.  However it then finds things which are much less significant to accuse the other side of for balance.

This attempt to be balanced results in bad behavior being equated with behavior that is not close to equal in seriousness.  For example I read a recent fact checking article concerning a private citizens op-ed which stated that the dontard has shown no inclination to stop election hacking.

The article spelled out examples, many of which were done b congress trying to show this was incorrect and concluded the words "no inclination" went too far.  Really?  This was an op-ed by a private citizen that drew a conclusion that is essentially accurate, even if a few things could be found that might indicate the opposite.

It was clearly a lot of effort to be "balanced".

It wasn't.