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The current obsession seems to be Nazis and statutes. Not long ago, it was wedding cakes and pizza for homosexual couples, or Cecil the lion or dumping water on your head and donating to ALS.
Has anyone thought about Cecil or ALS, or wedding cakes this year? While we were all following the directives to obsess over Cecil the lion, or wedding cakes, did anyone give one thought to statues or Nazi rallies (which were both in existence then and for decades before)? Nazi rallies have been going on for nearly a hundred years. Why is it suddenly our most pressing issue?
While we obsess over statutes of people who may have been slave owners, or promoted slavery 150 or more years ago, do we give one thought to the fact that slavery continues today? Anyone bothered by the fact that someone will be sold on this very day?
If we put 1/10 of the energy into current slavery issues as is going into statues of confederate war heros, or the fact that Washington and Jefferson were slave owners, would we find a way to stop it? Why are we more worried about slavery 150 years ago, than we are about slavery today?
It seems that our society is in a constant state of obsession over comparatively irrelevant issues while the bigger problems continue unnoticed and undiscussed. Why is that?
Maybe this belongs under psychology.
I call this stuff the Outrage du jour. I blame the 24/7 "news" mentality. The media needs to feed the beast, so they drum up one faux controversy after another.
I don't know, or haven't talked to, a single person who gives a flying flip about any of these things.
I believe it is largely due to people being too lazy to think for themselves. Instead, they let the media and celebrities form opinions for them. What is really important- our relationship with God and how we treat others is not given much thought compared to statues and transgenders.
Clicks and likes generate add revenue, follow the money - they would not be doing it if it was not effective in generating them money. Propaganda, clickbait, and bias are so common because they are and always have been very effective on people with certain... mental flaws.
The only way to fight that type of exploitation is:
A) Obtaining an understanding of these flaws and how they are exploited (things like logic, discrete math, psychology, and philosophy)
B) Vigilant policing of ones own mind to squash these thought patterns when you feel yourself giving in to them. That requires a level of education, discipline, intelligence, and introspection that is simply not present in many(probably most) people.
Last edited by zzzSnorlax; 08-30-2017 at 10:17 AM..
This is a very good post, Dusty. The "game or spectacle" proposition is valid online. Very much so. It's not "how do you feel about X topic?" It's "which party do you belong to?" And, once a person knows which one, they begin to fit people into neat, tidy boxes. Just like the Home and Away sections at a sporting event.
I'm not a Republican. I'm not a Democrat. I agree and disagree with both party platforms on various topics.
This either annoys most people or makes them think I'm lying. Or both.
People have this deep longing to categorize folks. Friend. Enemy. There's no middle ground.
The internet has certainly intensified the problem.
Otherwise reputable new sources have to pump out meaningless content in order to keep up with the Twitter age. And often, a bulk of the valuable content is oversimplified. An article titled "Ted Cruz SLAMS John Kasich" might give you the gist of what Cruz's criticism is of Kasich's policy on whatever given topic, but it's presented in a way that's mostly superficial and unhelpful.
I've heard the apology that this makes politics more accessible, and I guess I can see that. But the thing is, by making it more accessible, the parts that were sufficiently political were pretty much shaved away.
C-SPAN makes it's content more accessible too. Before C-SPAN, you might have to read official congressional record, where as C-SPAN lets you be a spectator, but without gutting the content. It's why Fox News get more views than C-SPAN. It's way more accessible as it requires less work to understand.
And I don't mean for this to come off as pretentious, but I know it most likely does anyway. I firmly believe that politics needs to be about policy debate before anything else. So little of the conversation on this forum even scrapes the surface of policy.
I know it sounds like I'm saying you need to be exceptionally smart to follow politics, but I don't think it's that simple. I think more than anything, you need respect and patience.
Intelligence helps, obviously, but you don't need to be a political theorist to grasp policy debate; you just have to want to grasp policy. Most would rather stick with semantics.
I don't exactly disagree with you, Todd. You're making some valid points here.
But, you need to also acknowledge that there are liberals who do care about facts and there are conservatives/Republicans who are just as hysterical as liberals/Democrats on one topic or another.
It's not unique to a party or ideology. Some people are more wound up than others most of the time.
In fact, some are so wound up that they see others as just as wound up as them. It's self-fulfilling prophecy, really.
The media, all branches of it, gets some people more riled up than others. My solution has been to avoid taking most of it too seriously. If I'm genuinely concerned, I'll flip to media from another country, believe it or not, and compare it to what's coming out of the US.
In fact, the less provocative the news story, the more I'm inclined to believe it.
I see friends on social media (from both sides of the political aisle) post the most RIDICULOUS links to stuff that is absolutely not true. And, they are worked up. And, they believe this stuff.
Human nature says that the ones I generally agree with the most surprise me and the ones I tend to mostly disagree with are the ones I look at and think it's just like them to post such a thing, but then I check myself and think "they're not any different, not really."
Stepping back to look at the big picture usually sets me right.
The right is no dream but the left is no doubt worse than the right. Republicans don't like democrats because they're democrats. Then obama was elected and it's about race?
The inability to hold ones own party accountable is another big problem. We didn't see that much from the left during the last administration. Trump is being held accountable much more although it is hard to get to the meat of the issues since the media and the left continue to falsely play the race card and avoid policy. The right, mainly conservatives, aren't afraid or biased enough to stay quiet. We screamed at the right for their unethical bailout, that didn't work and which was many times worse than the horrible bailout that didn't work from the left.
I don't see the left hold their own party accountable like the right does and the right isn't that good at it either. The right has 2 factions, conservatives and progressives while the left is mainly progressive. That plays into it too.
It is the media. They have been leading people around for years. It is the media that gets people riled up with their hyped up reporting. They give a pass to some stories while pounding on others to push an agenda. Look at the Trump Russian collusion nonsense. We had top Dems say that there is nothing there yet the likes of CNN kept reporting on it. They believe that it something is said long enough and loud enough that people will believe it and they do.
I think it is ridiculous that the do gooders are so riled up about anything having to do with the Civil War that they are wiling to tear it all down while there are still slaves being sold today in this country.
People have become so dimwitted that they will believe anything they hear so it is easy to get a mob going with trigger words like Trump and Racism. The thing is with most Liberals they don't care about the facts but they are motivated by feelings.
I find the first and last statements to be the most interesting in your post. I bolded them so we know exactly what I'm talking about.
From where I'm standing, the biggest lie from the media is not one that can be attributed to a partisan motive or a political ideology, but rather that there is some great left/right divide that exists among us. They successfully turned politics into a spectator sport and have managed to get most of us to pick a side.
But there are no sides. Not in reality. I'm a liberal. Happily so. If I feel like making things simple for people, I say I'm a moderate Democrat to give them a general idea on what policy I support. But even that's way too simple. For example, I oppose gun control in most situations. I'm actually not much of a hardliner on things like abortion. I despise the idea that we need a popular vote.
But when I announce that I'm a liberal, your response is most likely not going to be asking me questions on the nuance of policy or why I'm a liberal; it will immediately go to asking about specific policy issues and why I'm wrong. Because you think that my being a liberal means I support X, Y, Z... correct?
Maybe I'm wrong, but your last sentence sort of indicates that I'm not.
So I agree, the media has been leading people around. But from where I'm sitting, you've only convinced yourself that you're no longer sucked into their narrative. But you're still following their spectator sport political narrative just as much as most others are.
The right is no dream but the left is no doubt worse than the right. Republicans don't like democrats because they're democrats. Then obama was elected and it's about race?
The inability to hold ones own party accountable is another big problem. We didn't see that much from the left during the last administration. Trump is being held accountable much more although it is hard to get to the meat of the issues since the media and the left continue to falsely play the race card and avoid policy. The right, mainly conservatives, aren't afraid or biased enough to stay quiet. We screamed at the right for their unethical bailout, that didn't work and which was many times worse than the horrible bailout that didn't work from the left.
I don't see the left hold their own party accountable like the right does and the right isn't that good at it either. The right has 2 factions, conservatives and progressives while the left is mainly progressive. That plays into it too.
Ok, you say the left is worse than the right. Rather than tell you that's wrong, I want to take a different approach. For what you said to be true, we have to accept one thing: there is a left and a right.
What is your response if I say they don't exist? And I'm genuinely curious. I want to know where that thought leads you.
For what it's worth, I agree, parties need to do a better job of holding themselves accountable. But, I do think you're exploration of that was a little biased. The GOP is fracturing itself at the moment, and I think that's the main reason it's holding itself accountable. Paul Ryan and Donald Trump are basically members of two different parties, so it makes sense that they'd butt heads.
As for the Democrats, I think their issue is that they're a minority party. Because we have a two party system (which is very bad, I think) the minority party cannot afford to hold itself accountable. With that said, there were a lot of Democrats who had things to say about how the DNC favored Clinton over Sanders.
Can you tell us what you have done to stop modern slavery so that we could emulate it?
Never suggested anyone emulate anything. What can you do?
1. Care about it. That is a good starting point.
2. Discuss this problem rather than Trump's hair or the latest statue controversy. Increase awareness.
3. Contribute money or your time to organizations set up to fight it, or to smuggle slaves out of the slave countries and help them set up a new life.
4. Run for office and insist our military go shoot the slavers.
5. Pray for these people instead of for Cecil the Lion or the poor people who had to make a wedding cake for a gay wedding, or the poor gay people who had to go to a different store to get a cake, or abut the 600 Nazis who had their 60th annual rally in who cares USA.
6. Redirect conversations online and elsewhere from Trump's bizarre hair, or Bernie Sanders picked his nose, or some symbol of slavery from 150 years ago, to real issues like slavery that is going on now, child abuse, malnutrition, water issues, the heroine epidemic, human sex trafficking. . . .
7. Think rather than reacting as directed. "Do I really care about this issue? Did I care about it last year? Is this really an important enough issue to warrant my attention or obsession? Why am I supposed to obsess over this issue right now? " Try to get others to think rather than following the directives.
Some good places to start.
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