One of the things that always bugs me is when people say things like "the truth is somewhere in the middle" between two parties.  I hear that kind of moral equivalence argument all the time. But where the heck does it come from because while technically true, in spirit it is not.

In my experience, when two parties disagree about some issue and have different versions of events, odds are that one of the parties accountings of events will be predominantly true and the other party's predominantly false. I talked to a lawyer friend of mine about this the other  day who has concluded the same thing.  In fact, as often as not, disputes arise precisely because one person is lying and the other person is telling the truth.

This got me thinking about falling outs between friends like the one I wrote in my friendship article. The events I described there aren't open to interpretation, those are the facts. Interpretation comes into play when deciding whether one party had a legitimate reason for feeling wronged or not. 

More recently, our company was involved in a lawsuit. I posted the facts as we saw them publicly which were pretty damning to our opponents. I did that because we believe in a very simple philosophy: If you practice your business honorably then you can operate transparently and the facts, when known, will always be to your advantage. But sure enough, a few people still said "Well, that's Stardock's side, I'm sure their opponents have a different take on things." My argument was that no, there wasn' t a different set of facts. There was only one set of facts.  If the case hadn't been settled, I would have been more than hapy to publicly post the complete transcripts (other than the parts our opponents consider confidential) from both sides from discovery along with affidavits from both sides.

This is doubly true when you bring things up onto the macro-scale. There is a tendency in politics to try moral equivalent arguments. It's as if it has become politically incorrect to take a stand on beliefs that are based on cultural roots rather than literal facts.  For instance, if party A believes that it is wrong for party B to kill their children and eat them as food in the service of their sun god, I'm willing to go out on a limb here and say that party B is in the wrong. Yet these days there seem to be many people ready to jump up and say "Well, who are we to say..."

Great evil can be done because good people don't act. Similarly, great harm can be done if we take the easy route and assume that both parties in a given dispute are in the wrong.

Sometimes, there really aren't two sides to any story.