After reading through the real life issues thing, i notice a odd thing.

There is people on these boards and in the media that i have notice seem to equate everything to a political stance? "thats left", "thats right"

Two more recent examples is one about the enviroment on a thread in the forums and someone saying it will just prove to be a left wing things. Its a scientific report, how and why is political parties involved? The second, my favorite animated show, The Boondocks, Osg, and a couple of people who PM'd me said the show was to rightwinged for them. WTF?

So this is my question, do people not read, watch, enjoy anymore? Some people take every thing they see on TV and categorize it into left and right...i don't understand how that line of thinking comes about. I swear soon people will start watching baseball and say that the new rules on the strike zone are leftwing rhetoric or something....Help me understand

Well, the only thing I can figure with this is people are so inundated from all sides these days by the polarization that it is almost an non-stop battle to keep from being swayed into that mindset.

I know the radio station I listen to (KQRS-FM) has been my main preference for the last thirty years at least, but during the Clinton years when Rush took to the airwaves (or became popular, if he was already there) my favorite station started doing more political commentary than I had ever noticed before. Bob Sansevere, the alleged sports reporter from the St Paul Pioneer Press, is one of the "guest celebrity" on-air personalities and seemed to make it a personal crusade to tie any negative thing happening anywhere in the country to Clinton being responsible for it. This trend got picked up by some of the others (most are conservatives on that station, as am I) to the point that I found myself switching to other stations in the morning to be able to have an enjoyable morning, rather than getting worked up first thing of the day.

It is not just radio, as we have seen Fox News making their grand attempt to be the Rush Limbaughs of the visual media. Everything is spun these days, to the point that you can no longer get straight news; there always seems to be a rider attached that points a finger in some manner at one side or the other.

I do not see this changing, Greystone, until after the next civil war in this country. With the level of rhetoric escalating as it has, and the Republican Party being hijacked by far right wackjobs just as the Democrats have had to deal with the opposite side's nutcases, I firmly believe that there will be an all-out civil war fought in this country which will start out as a revolution of the poverty-stricken versus the elitists, and spread to encompass every cause the country has been so emotionally divided on.

Those of us who have given up on the two parties and attempted to stay in the middle ground (think of a Goldwater Republican who realizes that sometimes people do indeed need a hand up) are constantly being frustrated by Party leaders who are more concerned with victories than by providing good government. Reid plays his games, and Frist plays his, and nothing meaningful is accomplished. The House is even worse. I have made it no secret that I consider Cheney no better than a traitor to the country until proven otherwise, and Bush a bumbling "accidental" politician.
But I have no better to say about Gore or Kerry, in terms of their ability to lead. I do admit I liked Clinton's statesmanship.

Sorry I am rambling, but what the heck, it is a Friday night and I have had a couple glasses of wine with dinner. :p

To sum it up, Grey, it is only going to continue to worsen until a drastic action occcurs. The culture has become one of us vs them, rather than all of us being in the same boat, trying to keep it afloat. We can write pages and pages of posts sharing our ideas, opinions, and the occasional barbs tossed out, but as long as we are consistently bombarded by all of these outside stimuli telling us we have to be one way or another, and no compromise is acceptable, we will not solve any of our major problems.



YAY YAY - g'bye to Tom DeLay

GREAT GREAT - McCain in 2008

/shrug, any idea how hard it is to rhyme shit when buzzed?

You are witnessing the success of a long and often deliberate movement fueled by sound bite culture that has directly created an environment in which people judge first based on social indoctrination along irrelevant lines to avoid any discussion of real issues by political elites in democracies -- because they are never, ever given a chance to get real information and have real discussions. Everything is an argument between two sides with short, nominally witty invective. No one born after the 60s has heard anything different.

I know I will be named a leftist for even suggesting it, but you really ought to read Manufacturing Consent. Whether or not you agree with Chomsky's politics, that particular book and his followup are about as dead-on a critique of the modern confluence of political shyster and their media shills you will see. Some people are awake to it, witness the Jon Stewart circus on Crossfire back when, but for the most part modern democracies are deadened to the world around them by constant bombardment of hyper-polarized "analysis" and ratings bait that has surpassed the days of McCarthyism in both pervasiveness and insidious effect.

Grey, I would recommend reading the book Moral Politics (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0226467716/) which explains where the main divisions are coming from. Some people don't like what he has to say, as it is both too simple and too complicated at the same time. The short explanation is that people use "frames" to understand complicated situations. So we end up with shortcut labels like "right" and "left." They become slogans that prevent people from actually thinking. Other slogans are words like "freedom" or "democracy" as the definition of them is never uttered, but the words themselves stand in for your feelings for the words, and your feelings for those words replace actual thought.

Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_Politics) synopsis.
His page (http://www.rockridgeinstitute.org/people/lakoff).

Truthiness

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/7/76/Colbert-truthiness.jpg/250px-Colbert-truthiness.jpg (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Colbert-truthiness.jpg) http://en.wikipedia.org/skins-1.5/common/images/magnify-clip.png (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Colbert-truthiness.jpg)

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Colbert)


Truthiness is the quality by which a person purports to know something emotionally or instinctively, without regard to evidence or to what the person might conclude from intellectual examination. Stephen Colbert coined this definition of the word during the first episode (October 17, 2005) of his satirical (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satire) television program The Colbert Report, as the subject of a segment called "The Wørd."

By using the term as part of his satirical routine, Colbert seeks to critique the tendency to rely upon "truthiness," and its use as an appeal to emotion in contemporary socio-political discourse. He particularly applied it to President Bush's modus operandi in nominating Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court and in deciding to invade Iraq.


Colbert gave a rare interview out-of-character with The Onion (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Onion)'s A.V. Club, in which he responded to the question, "What's your take on the 'truthiness' imbroglio that's tearing our country apart?" by elaborating on the critique he intended to convey with the word "truthiness":

"Truthiness is tearing apart our country, and I don't mean the argument over who came up with the word... "It used to be, everyone was entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. But that's not the case anymore. Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything. It's certainty. People love the President because he's certain of his choices as a leader, even if the facts that back him up don't seem to exist. It's the fact that he's certain that is very appealing to a certain section of the country. I really feel a dichotomy in the American populace. What is important? What you want to be true, or what is true?... "Truthiness is 'What I say is right, and [nothing] anyone else says could possibly be true.' It's not only that I feel it to be true, but that I feel it to be true. There's not only an emotional quality, but there's a selfish quality."

Colbert's definition of "truthiness" effectively encapsulates an observation by George Orwell: "We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right."

This morning, setting up my mail for the day's deliveries, I came across a catalog for Northern Sun (www.northernsun.com) which had me laughing so hard I attracted a crowd, who all subsequently were laughing. This catalog carries items that speak exactly to this topic, such as Bush bobbleheads, dress up magnets, stuffed Bush stress toys, etc.

I will be checking the site out later more in depth, and may be ordering some of those stuffed bush toys, hehe. The fact that there are markets for such merchandise is what got me thinking of this thread tho, because without people taking sides and wanting to root for their guy such enterprise would never be sustainable. It is only when that preference, or bias, for one's choice becomes a filter through which everything else is viewed and judged that we come to the state of politics where we find ourselves today.

And to the mods, my apologies if this is taken as promoting a commercial site, and please delete if so. But take a look at the site, cuz it is full of neat stuff.

I think everyone above me here has explained really well why people gravitate and pigeon hold things to one type of catagory or another. In my stated example - The Boondocks- I said I have never watched it because it was too far left for me to enjoy. I think it's as simple as birds of a feather flock together. I have read Boondocks in the funny section of the paper and I do not like that type of humor. We all run things through filters. 99% of things I watch/read have nothing to do with polotics at all. I enjoy WIde varaties of movies and shows, but when shows make overt attempts into the polical/issue environment I really only like to watch my sides view of things. That's not to say I do not try and get a well rounded perspective of an issue. I read the NY Times when I can. I read Democraticunderground.com all the time(for a good laugh). Hell I even read crazy people stuff like Inforwars.com. I just happen to be ok with the way Bush does things. Doesn't mean though I have to put those labels on everything I take in. Not sure I made any sense here, but I think you get the idea.

I think I posted something about this on another thread. Truthiness is the perfect term.
Facts are facts. How people interpret those facts is always subject to debate. I still blame Vietnam for this divide.
People saw on thier televisions, the horrors of War. Every night they got a daily dose of the battlefront, and they didn't like what they saw, for the most part. War isn't pretty.
Soldiers who saw the same images on TV would probably have said, "Yep, that's the way things are in War."
Ever since then, there has been a divide in how facts are interpreted. If you are for something, or against something, you will interpret the FACTS to bolster your opinion.

I hope I've never posted something that said this thread is too left or too right. I've come in to some threads with varying swings and posted how I feel.

Hell, I supported the ousting of Iraq's prior government and I support "undocumented" migrant labor. That doesn't mean I don't think Bush is an idiot either. Was that a double negative? Oh well, Bush is an idiot who made president on his father's name. Clinton is a hick and reminded me of a used car salesman when I first saw him running for the Democratic nomination and never proved himself otherwise, in my opinion.

I suppose I'm in the middle somewhere. I don't know. I just know I love the commercial for Vault energy drink with the guy making a scarecrow to run off the hippies. :D

...and this thread has lots of big words in it. :\