I’ve been beginning to notice the lack of foreign policy that any of the news sources I read talk about. The only news source that I have read that has a whole lot of news about foreign affairs is the economist, who seem to have pretty good articles.

I think news in general is more about drama than hard hitting journalism. That’s especially true of the american media who payed so much attention to scandals and controversies and payed 0 attention to issues like climate change or gay rights, and covered hillary’s emails something like 5 times more than all of her other policies combined.

I know that there’s a lot of factors that go into why hillary clinton lost the election, and a person like donald trump could even win the whitehouse, but I think that one of these factors is the apathy towards real hard hitting journalism in our culture and more focus on drama.

___________________________________________

That could also be what drives us all so far apart, because intellectuals should be able to find common ground on positions in spite of disagreements. That’s how it should work, people should be able to come to agreements on issues and good ideas should prevail from honest discourse. I’d like to know more about what it is intrinsically about our culture that drives people apart based on our political and religious affiliations.

It’s so easy to say that someone you disagree with is a piece of shit, and without a doubt I find great comfort in calling people I disagree with pieces of shit in politics all the time. However, today when I was calling someone who was questioning whether trump really lacks the experience to hold public office a moron, someone else pointed out to me that calling people morons doesn’t actually help and we’re already a deeply divided country and I realize I probably am just being counter productive and driving a wedge deeper between the divide.

I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that people have an identity that they stick to, and a lot of what has to do with people becoming entrenched in their own political echo chamber has to do with confirmation bias.  I’ve heard about studies that show that the brain will even become more entrenched in what it believes when presented with facts that contradict it’s beliefs.

Perhaps on some fundamental level, we’re all afflicted with this political binary mentality, I know that I certainly have bias against republican news sources. That may be a good thing, because I tend to have a red flag go off in my head if something sounds right wing to me, but inversely the people who have a bias against liberal ideas essential have the same system of confirmation bias inside of their head. So in a way I think that we actually share a lot of similarities with others in that way, I think it’s very hard to be innocent, or perhaps even claim that someone else is guilty, if this is the way that our brains work.

The problem remains though, that it’s incredibly hard to find a common ground when people on either side don’t want to hear each other’s arguments. I will say though, that it seems that republicans seem more biased towards lies and lack skepticism than liberals who seem to have more of a bias against lies, for some reason. I see this all the time with people accepting any news about blacks or lgbt people being inferior, or denying evidence for climate change and evolution

I, unfortunately, can’t seem to come up with any solution at the moment to how people in general could see eye to eye on more things. In my mind - and a lot of people will disagree - liberals are more open minded than republicans on pretty much everything. I don’t think it’s hard to tell a liberal some facts and change their mind about a subject if new facts about it come to light. It is, however, hard to get a person entrenched in conservative politics to accept view points that contradict their own. This is apparent to me when I see the level of pseudo science and lies and acceptance of liars like donald trump coming from conservatives.

Unfortunately, I don’t think that the problem is going to go away as long as there’s media outlets propagating fake news like fox and breitbart.