In a previous post, now deleted, I raised a question of OS community etiquette:  what should a good community member do in response to a post which appears to be untruthful?

Some blog posts are retellings of life experiences. Some are fictional, or at least fictionalized. I think all writers do that - I know I do, anyway. Most of my real life stories have at least some elements altered to make them work better as writing, or conceal the identities of people involved.

However. Even when I'm writing fiction, I try to make it TRUE. I once wrote about my father, who used to beat me as a child, changing his personality abruptly after an accident he had when I finally hit him back, and becoming a wiser, gentler man. As it happens, the conversation I describe between my father and myself is fictionalized;  my father is not a talker, and the apology came slowly, a few words at a time, over a great many years, not as I tell it in one go. But nevertheless it is TRUE that my father used to be abusive and now is not, that I believe as a result that people can change, and that if my father still beat me I think it would be horrible to write a piece of fiction-cast-as-a-true-story that gave hope that abusers can change when I had never seen any evidence of it.

That's fiction. Good fiction is truer than truth;  it can tell a story with not just local but universal application.

So what about lies? Where's the difference between lies and fiction?

A lie is something that the teller knows isn't TRUE. And truth isn't just a matter of events, but also the meaning of events. A lie is always deliberate;  if two people honestly differ about the interpretation of events, neither one is lying, though one may be mistaken. The sort of lie I'm talking about here is an instance where the liar knows full well it's a lie.

Many times on OS I've been confronted with posts told as real life stories that I did not believe ever happened to the person telling them. Usually those stories are plays for sympathy or praise. While a part of me screams out in protest when I see others commenting sympathetically on a made-up story of travail, I don't think it's the better part of me. Anyone pretending to suffer for the sake of garnering compliments on the internet deserves pity, not censure;  and it's just possible that some of the people commenting sympathetically are smart enough to see through the story too. In any case, such a story does no harm to anyone.

But what about real, hard lies, stories told that are not just untrue in themselves but false in their meaning?  What about propaganda?

We've seen, recently, how false stories of this kind can take hold in people's minds. Fox news tells the lie that the majority of women have late term abortions frivolously, to get rid of unwanted babies, when in truth almost all late term abortions are a painful choice to terminate a very much wanted baby because of illness of the mother or the baby - and a man steps forward to enact vigilante justice on the doctor. The man's church says that in a way, if you read the  Bible right, the Bible supports his conduct. Many people in America, including some otherwise good-spirited souls on OS, buy into the lie.  

What about that sort of lie?

What about Joe the Plumber, a man who isn't Joe, isn't a plumber, isn't in a position to buy a business at all, whose made-up "true story" was used to attack Obama's position on taxes by claiming that it would hurt real people in a way that wasn't true either?

What do you do when someone tells a story that isn't true, in support of a larger lie?  

Well, it depends, doesn't it?  In the matter of Fox News or Joe the Plumber, I think it's essential to call the liars out and discredit them as publicly as possible.  I think it's good that we have capable journalists who do the sort of research necessary to find out the real facts and broadcast the errors in the stories.

What about OS?  What about posts that aren't true, in support of lies?

Fact checking on OS is limited by anonymity. Except in rare cases, attacking the factual basis of a post made here is limited to calling out failures in internal consistency. And there's an additional matter of politeness. If every time a story seemed far fetched, fifteen people called the author a liar in comments, soon no one would have the nerve to post anything but pablum. Polite discourse on OS is fragile;  it depends on an unstated agreement that we all pretend to be here for the same purpose, to write and read for each other's betterment.

Besides - and this is the insight I gained, from the kind and helpful comments of the community on my now-deleted post - it doesn't matter.

I don't mean that the truth doesn't matter. I will never mean that. The truth does matter. It matters more than anything, because truth is all that allows one person to learn anything about the world we live in from another person.  What I mean is, the factual truth or lack of factual truth of a particular story doesn't matter to the people who hear it. Did you notice how, even after "Joe the Plumber" was decloaked, the people who supported McCain still loved Joe the Plumber?  It didn't matter to them that Joe wasn't a plumber and wasn't going to get his taxes raised for buying his own business because they believed in the truth of the larger story. They believed, whatever circumstances surrounded Joe, that it was true that Obama's tax plan would punish hard-working people for trying to better themselves by giving money to those who didn't work.

Attacking Joe didn't discredit Joe. To discredit Joe successfully, the attack would have to have been against the notion that taxes harm those who work hard.

In the case of the post I was concerned about, it's possible to attack the truth of the larger story, without ever calling the author of the specific story a liar. The made-up nature of the post distracted me, in fact. Because, whether true or false, it doesn't prove what it's supposed to prove. And THAT I can say, perfectly within the bounds of OS etiquette, without stirring up shit or causing a fight or resorting to private messages. (Thanks, by the way, to those who suggested private messages, but they don't really apply in an instance where I'm certain the poster was deliberately telling a lie - you can't have a civilized conversation with someone who isn't obeying the rules of civilization. Besides, as a rule, I try to avoid saying in private things I wouldn't say in public. It keeps me better behaved in private.)

So, that's my conclusion, and many thanks to those who helped me reach it. There was a comment I could have left which would have served the purpose of pointing out the falsehood of the author's conclusion without accusing anyone of lying. And that's a good thing, because the more polite we can be to each other while discussing emotionally-laden subjects, the better. That we all gather here and talk to each other and for the most part everyone remains civil is a small miracle, if you think about it. And that's a truth I can believe in.