Misalignment vs disagreement
The most important line in the movement, and the easiest one to cross without noticing.
Two different claims
Misalignment — the mechanism was violated. A duty was not met. A check was removed. A vote was not allowed to happen. Money moved without an attributable decision. These are answerable from the public record, and the answer does not depend on your politics.
Disagreement — I would have decided differently. The tax was too high, the spending was wrong, the treaty was a mistake. These are legitimate, they are what politics is for, and they are not findings.
Why blurring them would end the project
The moment a policy preference gets recorded as a violation, three things happen at once:
- The yardstick becomes ours, and it stops being able to tell us anything we did not already believe.
- Half the country correctly stops trusting the record, and they are right to.
- Every genuine structural finding is contaminated by association with the ones that are just opinions in a costume.
The third is the expensive one. The movement's entire asset is that a hostile reader can check a finding and find it holds. One smuggled preference costs that for everything else on the page.
The test
For any candidate finding: can somebody who thinks the underlying policy was a good idea still agree that this happened?
"This bill was never allowed a floor vote" — yes. Somebody who liked the bill's failure can still agree it was never voted on.
"This bill should have passed" — no. That is a position, and it belongs in Decisions where positions live.
Where each one goes
| Claim | Where it belongs |
|---|---|
| a mechanism was violated | Problems, Problem laws |
| a person did a recorded thing | the rosters, voting records |
| a repair was blocked | Good laws |
| I would have voted differently | Decisions |
| here is how I weigh this against that | Values |
Where it gets genuinely hard
Some claims are both. A law can be bad policy and remove a check. The movement records the structural half and leaves the policy half to citizens — which sometimes means publishing a finding much narrower than what the contributor believed and wanted to say.
That is not the movement being timid. It is the only version of the finding that will still be standing in a year.