Facts

What ever happened to fact based discussion? Or the idea that one individual can have multiple opinions, and not just right or left wing biases? There seems to be a lot of “If you are not with us, you are against us.” mentality that poisons the discussions from the start. I believe still (although not as strongly as I used to), that there is a silent majority that isn’t all in on right or left, on conservative or progressive, etc. The political media seems to me to be hijacked by the people who shout the loudest. For example, if a person wants to talk about immigration in a 1) positive tone: you’re a communist, or 2) negative tone, you’re a nazi.

The root reason could be that the people in charge like this situation, because then people / voters can be easily divided into boxes of categories. And thus are more easily controlled or at least are more predictable. There are swing voters and the undecided, but they are always portrayed as people / voters that need to be persuaded into box one or two, into right or left. For me, this is a bit of undermining the intellectuality of those voters. Like, somehow changing your mind is automatically a bad thing. Science is a good example where results (“opinions”) change when more research is gathered – this should be the same with voting and voters.

The latest of this “divide and conquer” politics is the fake news kind of jargon, that undermines the whole media that brings unwanted news, but are celebrated when the news fits the narrative. The people who are the first to criticize the media don’t seem to have anything to put in its place – other than news sources from blogs, corporate funded think tanks, etc. A good idea when criticizing is to give something to replace the object. To be a part of the solution, not just shouting how everyone else is wrong.

The question that I don’t know the answer is: how to make people understand facts over feelings? And stop this attitude that just because someone\’s feelings are hurt by the truth, the truth somehow stops being the truth.