Affirmations

I Rage, Therefore I Am

The thing about having about a million news and commentary sites on the Internet is that they can become fairly niche. And once they've connected with their chosen audiences, there can be a habit of directly catering to that audience, and thus they can become fairly one-note. In light of this, every so often, I try to branch out my reading habits to sites and people that I don't normally look at and/or have lost track of. This is in part because the same messages over and over become old after a while and in part because I understand that there are more voices in the world than the ones I normally read.

Generally speaking, I tend to read Center-Left, even though they tends to be to my left, politically. I do this mainly because I tend to find the tone of such sources to be agreeable, even if I find the actual messages to be annoying. Being unfamiliar with the general landscape of Center-Right media, I tend to have difficulty with finding sources in that area that I can read for any length of time.

Mainly because I don't really care about What Makes People Angry or What People Do Not Like in general. (I routinely find myself removing "Everything Wrong With..." videos on YouTube for this same reason.) And if there's one thing that I've noticed about the Conservative media that I've come across it's that is seems to be primarily concerned with what it doesn't like. (Of course, there is a lot of Liberal media that does the same. I don't read them, either.) Which is fine, for what it is. After all, a lot of these people are attempting to connect with an audience that fears that some of what their ancestors have done unto others is soon to be done unto them, and they're somewhere between unhappy and enraged about that fact. And reflecting a person's worldview and emotional outlook back to them is a good way to connect with them. As evidenced by its continued success in getting people into the White House.

I'm sure that there are Right-leaning news and commentary sites out there that don't traffic in anger over capitalism becoming "woke," fears of élite conspiracies to enact "socialism" or simple bitterness over social change. I'm just terrible at finding them, mainly because I don't have enough conservatives in my social circles to point me at them and I'm not invested enough to do the work of separating the wheat from the chaff. Which means that anything I find will come down to luck. Not impossible, but it will take a little longer.

End Of Summer

And then, the rains came...

On Three

The Vermont senator told a TV debate that women "in poor countries" should have access to birth control.

Conservatives said the remark meant the self-described democratic socialist's climate change policy was for fewer "brown babies".

Because of course they did. It's the nature of politics in the United States. Republican politicians have to take any opportunity that they may be afforded to trash a Democrat. Taking words out of context to create an attack vector simply provides for a bonus.

And it is, basically, all pointless. The Democratic primaries are far enough away that no-one will remember what Senator Sanders said by the time they roll around, and the Republicans will have moved on to other things. But more importantly, anyone who was going to take Senator Cruz, Representative Scalise, Liz Wheeler or Ben Shapiro seriously enough to be "outraged" at Senator Sanders' comment has pretty much zero chance of being a Democratic voter in the first place. And while it's possible that Republican voters may attempt to swing the Democratic primaries towards a candidate that they may feel would be weak against President Trump (more than) a year from now, it's unlikely that anyone who managed to make the President look good in the eyes of Democrats and independent voters would have any chance of winning in any event.

I suppose that the common description of something like this would be "style over substance," but that presumes that there's even any style to any of this. Instead, it's simply reflexive partisanship, divorced perhaps even from ideology. Presumably, politicians behave this way because they honestly feel that their policy ideas would be genuinely good for the country, and since they need to be in office to enact those policies, they are often willing to go out on a limb to preserve their (and their party's) electoral chances. That reasoning, however, feels more and more like a stretch every passing day.

And this, perhaps, is the worst thing about the current state of American politics. The constant drive to increase cynicism and the disengagement that goes with it; the attempt to narrow down the subset of the public who actually vote to the smallest possible number of people, and then hope that of the people who are left, the people who would come out to vote come Godzilla or high water, the largest slice votes for the person who puts the most effort into badmouthing their opposition.

I, like many supposedly non-partisan voters, have a decidedly partisan bent to my actual voting behavior. In my case, it's because every time I hear of the Republicans doing something or other, it strikes me as something stupidly partisan, to the point of blind thoughtlessness. Not that there aren't any Republican officeholders that I vote for, but that's such a small group that they seem non-existent most of the time.

It's possible that this is a screening mechanism, like the laughably bad scams that pervade the Internet these days. Since attracting people bright enough to eventually suspect that something's amiss is a waste of time in the end, the pitch is designed to drive away everyone who won't swallow it whole from the get-go. I don't know. I suspect I'm better off that way.

Choice of Interests

I was listening to a podcast about the situation at the United States-Mexico border and, I have to admit, I found it long and tedious. Mainly because the format was an interview with someone who was effectively an immigration activist, and her constant repetition of her favored talking points was tiresome. It touched on all of the things that one would expect a conversation with an advocate to touch on: how wretched the people were, how deplorable their treatment had been, how shabby the behavior of Immigration and Customs Enforcement was et cetera.

But, to be sure, this wasn't really intended as news. The podcast was the work of an opinion magazine and the whole episode was really one long human-interest piece; it was about holding up persons that the interviewee was advocating for as objects of pity and sympathy, and no-one said any differently at any point. And what struck me about it was how similar it seemed to other stories about the border that I'd heard and read. And some of those were from outlets that considered themselves news.

And I wonder if this is the reason why people have come to feel that news sources are more biased. Sure, some significant part of that perception could be due to people feeling that the only objective outlooks on the world are ones that agree with them. But the thing about human-interest stories is that to the degree that they're about someone's experiences, their objectivity is measured by fidelity to those experiences, emotions and all, and not in terms of accurately describing the broader situation and circumstances. And one would expect that some significant portion of the reason why people in positions of advocacy make themselves available to the media is to advocate for their causes and/or constituents.

To be sure, I don't believe that there is some cynical plot afoot to mislead people by presenting them with a steady diet of stories about people, rather than facts. But I do think that presenting human-interest, rather than hard-fact, stories is that it enables news outlets to better position stories in ways that their audience approves of, while staying within the lines of objectivity. Which I'm not sure helps people's overall understandings of the situations at hand, but then again, that's not really what people are asking for, is it?