The Burden Of Proof

When assessing claims of guilt, or even brutality and monsterousness (which the Western media often throws at the Taliban, while not looking in the mirror), assessment of the truth is the most important thing.

Having seen their lies over the years, I would personally not trust anything about a enemy of the USA published in the US Media.  They're proven liars over and over and over, for example:

Bombing of the USS Maine

Gulf of Tonkin

Weapons of Mass Destruction

Assad's Chemical Attacks

Russiagate

And this is only the short list.  All of my friends are with me on the first 3 of these, but not the last two.  Because of those, and my tendency not to portray Putin or China as the Greatest Evil in the World Today, and things like that which don't look at US evils first, I am an outlier of all the people I know personally--friends and family.  I'm labeled a Putinist or Assadist or Stalinist.  I'm constantly quizzed on the latest headlines from the US War Wurlitzer before the antiwar media has had the time to debunk them, and criticized for Not Keeping Up, or being a Conspiracy Theorist (in particular for disbelieving in a conspiracy between Trump and Putin).

And these friends and family consider themselves opposed to war or harmful military actions or financial sanctions.*  They just believe a set of the Imperial lies in which I don't believe.  But they don't consider them lies, so we are back to the question of Truth.

As I see it, the central problem with Truth is that it's an impossible ideal.  Truth famously requires three parts:

The Plain Truth.

The Whole Truth.

Nothing But the Truth.

The central problem is in The Whole Truth.  That is anything which could have involved in the matters at hand.  Effectively, that means the entire universe leading up to that point.  No one can have an understanding that vast.

Secondly, the Plain Truth depends upon The Whole Truth, because without The Whole Truth, one cannot decide which of the issues involved rises to top to become the Plain Truth.

Similar issues apply to Nothing But The Truth, though it would seem easy in principle not to say anything not true...but then that itself has the same three parts.

The bottom line is that the Truth is an impossible Platonic Ideal which we will never know completely, if even partly.

Because of that fact, we routinely apply simplifications in our search for the truth.  Some trust their religious leaders, others may trust leading scientists or atheists.  At a deeper level, we apply burden of proof principles that deliberately bias the discovery of truth toward one extreme or the other.  For example, in a scientific test, we reject findings that don't reject the null hypothesis one out of twenty times, written in frequentist statistics as p < 0.05.  But that means, as I am at odds to explain to my friends who accept every "scientific" pronouncement in the their media as known fact that in a large number of cases we may fail to find relationships that actually ARE there, the problem being that the test involved failed to reach sufficient power to detect those relationships at p < 0.05.  And then there is also the possibility that when supposedly p < 0.05 is satisfied, in 1 out of 20 tests just meeting that threshold, the relationship will itself be false.  And then there are endless possibilities of bias.  The best situation is when you have more and more tests, conducted by many different people, and over and over they show p values far less than 0.05.  Which is precisely where we are with vaccines...they are widely proven to be effective and safe beyond the shadow of a doubt (very high imputable p values) with only a couple of small historical exceptions in the past 80 years.  If only everything were that simple, sadly most things aren't.  In many if not most cases it is impossible to do good blind and randomized testing, for example, and then you can't even get started on your search for truth very well and easily.

So it may matter, and usually does crucially, to decide in which direction the burden of truth should go.

For drugs, for example, it usually makes sense to put the burden of proof against the drug, because we don't want to intervene in ways that we aren't sure are helpful.  First Do No Harm.

The same First Do No Harm principle applies to foreign countries as well.  We don't want to intervene unless it is useful and helpful.

So the burden of proof should be on those alleging brutality on the part of foreign governments or their agents.  Such claims need be evaluated critically and held to high standards of veracity such as Beyond a Reasonable Doubt.  The burden of proof is on those criticizing Putin, Assad, PRC, Madero, Cuba, Iran, and yes Taliban rather than on those defending them.

(*They say that something can or should be done.  Perhaps by a global authority which has some global legitimacy in their eyes, such as the UN.  Or an NGO such as Amnesty International.)