Both Political Sides Are Wrong - An analysis

For Lent this year, I decided to give up Twitter. And in my infinite wisdom, I made the *amazing* choice of spending more time on Reddit.

I don't think I've been that generally angry in a while.

There is a blatant ignorance happening among the people of our world when it comes to the political spectrum, and it's a real problem. Both the right and left have become so entrenched in their own sides that they've both lost their meaning and fallen into a hole of their own making. This is an awful problem.

Misinformation

This is really the primary problem. While it makes sense that we rely on so much of our modern understanding and information to come from the internet, thinking about it for more than about two seconds results in a complete astonishment that anyone would ever believe anything they saw on the internet.

Why would I trust javadrinker32 to tell me the truth about what's going on in Austrailia?

The news outlets aren't much better, either. In fact, at this point I would be more inclined under certain circumstances to actually believe javadrinker32 over a major news outlet. 

This has dug us into a hole. Our worldviews already create a chasm of interpretation of modern news and events, but that is only multiplied by the sheer amount of misinformation on the internet. This is a severe problem.

My real question is why does anyone believe what they see on the internet?! I can't be on FaceBook for more than two minutes without seeing a blatantly fake news story with a poorly-made AI generated artwork. But the sad thing is that people actually believe this stuff. It's disheartening. 

People will tend to believe stuff they want to hear. This is the sad reality of this modern society. I imagine the more extreme your beliefs are, the more you will accept or even spread misinformation, as well. Naturally, we can conclude that the more right or left you are, the crazier this sort of thing becomes.

Both the far right and far left has become so far gone and so blatantly opposed to each other that we're literally on the brink of war. People are spraying swastikas on Teslas, and even worse, publicly shaming others on Twitter (which, as we all know, is the ultimate disgrace). In all seriousness, it's bad. I see no intention to fix this, either. This will only get worse if left untouched.

It's sad because there's an easy way to fix this: Talk things out. Get second opinions. Don't be so quick to believe everything you hear just because you like it. The more you do that, the closer we become to understanding each other.