I know you said you’re no longer hard left, but you sure sound hard right when you go on about the mainstream media like this.
I can be center-left in my beliefs (having single-payer healthcare, providing a social safety net, enacting sensible gun control, etc.) and also call out liars.
But the right wing in America is opposed to all three of those things.
Did I say I was right wing?
When what is reported in the media directly contradicts, or at the very least, actively omits, observable fact, I have to wonder what the hell is going on. I think the mainstream media has done us a terrible disservice with its 24-hour news cycle consisting of endless panels populated by “experts” and “analysts” who editorialize everything and provide little actual reporting. When the NYT tells me a person is one thing and actually listening to that person tells me they’re something else, I naturally question the rest of the NYT’s reporting and the filter through which it’s being run. I think we’ve passed the point where we can trust the big media companies to give us a fair representation of reality. Nobody wants to be a mere reporter anymore; they want to be an influencer, gain followers, and spread their message.
How is this unique to the left? Fox News, Breitbart, Infowars, the Rebel, and pretty much all of talk radio along with vast segments of YouTube are right-wing examples of exactly this.
Did I say it only applied to the left?
Read what’s there man. Please don’t infer something and then base your arguments upon it as if your inference is fact.
You obviously find the left more objectionable than the right. That seems pretty clear based on what you’ve said.
There’s tons of content out there that never makes it into the popular discourse because it’s not covered by the major media outlets. The danger is separating fact from fiction/conspiracy and not allowing yourself to fall into a very deep, dark place.
This is very vague. You’re generally right on this particular concept but I’m curious, what are you referring to?
I’ve mostly been focusing on trying to get the full story. If I see something in the news that interests me, I’ll dig beyond the 5-second video clip we’re shown and see if I can find the complete video or accounts from people who were there. Doesn’t sound like much, but when we’re being told Israeli soldiers are killing scores of “protestors”, it didn’t take much digging to find out most of the Palestinians at the border were actually Hamas — basically because Hamas admitted it, but I never saw that followup reported in the US. Or you’ll see a clip on the news of a Palestinian woman being dragged from her home in the middle of the night and arrested like it’s some police state type stuff, when a separate video from a day earlier clearly shows her slapping and kicking Israeli soldiers in an attempt to get a reaction out of them. (Please don’t turn this into an Israel vs. Palestine discussion, because I won’t claim any kind of expertise on that mess of problems and won’t engage in a debate. It’s just an example of a tiny part of a story vs. a more complete story.)
Are the eight dead children members of Hamas? That’s almost 15% of the fatalities. Killing 55 and injuring 1200, when at least a sizable percentage are not Hamas, is horrifyingly lopsided given that the targets did not even inflict anywhere near that amount of damage.
Maybe I’m still not necessarily getting the complete story, who knows. My point is that the garbage that passes for news today isn’t cutting it. We get a brief clip or a quote taken out of context, and then an hour of analysis from people who weren’t there talking about what it may or may not mean. Just absurd. If we’re going to reference anything in the news and defend it, we have an obligation to do our research first.
There’s plenty of extensive coverage on that mass killing that happened at the border that day.
The reason I defend people like Peterson, aside from agreeing with some of his views (certainly not all), is that he was the same guy saying the same things before he got famous. If I felt he was modifying his message to suit a particular audience in order to gain followers and make more money, I’d lump him in with the rest of the opportunists and set him aside. And now that he is famous, people have a lot to say about him and his ideas. Some of it is justified, and some of it is patently dishonest.
I can’t speak to who he was before
He has lectures online from way before he achieved any notoriety. Not hard to watch and formulate an opinion.
It is hard when he’s among the most boring men in existence.
As far as me moving more to the right, I’ve tried to be more honest with myself about the hypocrisy I see on the left. I told myself for a long time that the left was “better” than the right, but I no longer believe that. Both sides have their virtuous members and their loons. The Rs still probably have more loons, but the left’s loons are starting to catch up. I’d like to see a strong center that pushes outward and squeezes the loons on both sides.
The great irony here is that there was a centrist in the 2016 election, and her name was Hillary Clinton.
I know. I voted for her. Certainly not my first choice, but I chose from the options I was given.
Okay, so obviously one of the main sides chose a centrist and the other chose a loon. That kind of debunks the notion that both sides have their loons to a similar degree.
Also, if you’re gay then the left certainly is better than the right. That’s just a fact for gay or lesbian people. They have their interests more in mind than the right does. If you’re a poor person with a sickly kid that you can’t afford to take care of, then the left is better than the right. It’s subjective, of course, but the whole notion that all sides are equally bad is not an idea that most people will or even should accept.
I used to see things similarly, but there are more conservative and libertarian gay and trans folks than you think.
I’m aware that they exist, but the right-wing as it works in the Republican Party and the Trump Administration is not in favor of their interests. To put it bluntly, I’d say they’re incredibly unwise and ignorant to think that the Christian right, which is what our mainstream right still is in America, is their ally. We have a gay-conversion Christian as our Vice President, and the cabinet is full of anti-gay types. Trump himself has pandered to them extensively, like the trans ban in the military.
Despite all its problems, one of the good things about social media is interacting with people who have different views and recognizing that identifying people as voting blocks based on gender, race, age, sexual orientation, etc. is counterproductive. I believe it’s one of the primary reasons the Democrats will continue to lose.
The right wing engages in its own identity politics. Trump pandered to evangelicals and the “America-first” anti-immigrant crowd far more than Hillary pandered to gay or black people. Gay people are a negligible voting block anyway. Unfortunately LGBTs have to rely on straight voters to vote in their interests too. The primary reason the Democrats may continue to lose is actually gerrymandering and the electoral college, but soon the identity politics that the right plays won’t work anymore. You can only pander to eighty year-old fundamentalists for so long before that demographic isn’t viable anymore. Texas has a growing hispanic population and some Southern states have growing black and hispanic populations and the Republican party can’t treat them the way they have and expect them to ever support them. By 2032, the Republican strategy that worked in 2016 won’t work again.