One of my college professors was Steve Bell, the first news anchor of Good Morning America. I’m not an old man, but at the time, he talked about how partisan news shows were starting to gain popularity.
Until then, people could choose from a few news outlets that would tell you what was happening in the world. His position was that with so many cable news outlets and even more popping up online, people were no longer being told what they needed to hear. Instead, they could find some article somewhere that would tell them what they want to hear.
No matter what you believe, you can find some article to back up your existing biases [“It’s a good idea to take horse drugs to treat COVID-19,” for example].
We’ve now taken that a step further: We don’t just want our existing beliefs reinforced, we want them reinforced in easily shareable meme form.
The result is a Facebook feed that more and more people are getting rid of. Several associates are actual military veterans who actually have some insight and are understandably dismayed about Afghanistan. Others are actual doctors or nurses exhausted and also dismayed about the spike in hospitalizations.
Others still are shocked to learn many of their associates are both epidemiologists [“I bet those charlatans at the National Institutes of Health haven’t even watched a fraction of the videos I’ve seen online!”] and experts in global affairs [“Everything Biden or Trump has done in Afghanistan is wrong, depending on my political affiliation.”]
Loyal Scaiaholics aren’t shocked. We’ve discussed this issue before and are just adding military experts to the list.
I’ve met George W. Bush several times. He didn’t just go into Iraq or Afghanistan on a whim. He supports veterans and takes their struggle seriously. The first year he held the Wounded Warrior ride, he did a media blitz before leaving town. He told us we shouldn’t call it, “PTSD.” If you’ve seen what veterans have seen, you’d have stress, too. It’d be a disorder if you didn’t have post traumatic stress, so maybe just call it, “PTS.”
Similarly, I’m almost certain Joe Biden didn’t wake up one morning and think, “I could totally withdraw from Afghanistan, like, right now.”
But now, we spend most of our time arguing with each other in comments sections. Not to try to prove we’re right, mind you, but because we just want to get the information out there. Everyone else has the wrong opinion.
#ScaiaBlog does not allow comments. Mainly because most comments have been spam but also because I can’t imagine anyone who reads this cares about what anyone else who reads this thinks about the sequel to Coming to America.
Which brings us to this afternoon. The Texas House passed the election bill after, as the author of the House bill added up, 35 hours of debate.
Republican Andrew Murr was even a bit hoarse after all that work, but you know what? That’s not going to stop him from loving his Democratic colleagues.
And then Democrat Alex Dominguez declared that he loved Republicans, too.
My politics-free social media network, Cram It [patent pending], is still in development, but I’m going to instruct the R&D team here at 1 Scaianalysis Esplanade to also start work on a new meme. A meme that’ll bring people back to social media by explaining how little the average person cares about what other average people think about politics.
