Meditation for July 30th, 2016
Some Things Have to be Believed to be Seen
We have this great tool at our finger tips called the World Wide Web. It is like a super information library right at our finger tips. We can access it from our mobile phone. If we want to to know something, we can just google it and we will find what we are looking for.
The Internet is also a source of news. A lot of young people only get their news on the Internet with most getting their news via Facebook. Facebook is literally the biggest news agency in the world. You’re reading it, your mom is reading it and now your grandma is reading it.
The problem is that 99% of the news on the Internet is complete utter bullshit. They don’t have any oversight or “truth” regulation. I can write whatever I want and get away with it. Just look at this blog for pete’s sake. Could I get away with this on TV or the radio? Unless my name is Rush Limbaugh, I can’t.
Most of the time you will just find a news headline that benefits your feelings on the matter, speed read it and if it still seems like it captures your beliefs, you’ll post it to prove you are right to feel the way you do. You have no idea that the news story is an opinion or utter malarky.
How can you be a more skeptical and a more reasoned Internet news reader? Follow some of these easy steps:
What are the sources?
If there are no sources, then don’t believe it. A lot of blogs will just say things like, an anonymous source, a person with knowledge of the situation and some other hazy way of saying the writer made it up. A TV or newspaper has to have two sources and one of those can’t be anonymous. Look for links.
The author is not a news source because that is called opinion, which is what most news blogs are: getting you emotionally wound up and clicking on their link, reading it and reblogging it getting more readers to pay the blog’s bills.
Can you tell the difference between opinion and fact?
Judging by what most of you post as news stories backing up your ideals point of view, you don’t. Facts are unbiased truths and opinions are bending those truths to fit a belief. You think with your belief system and not your reason, so you are going to be easily susceptible to opinion pieces.
It doesn’t matter what people say
A lot of blogs will rely on what the masses are saying and unfortunately the masses like McDonald cheeseburgers and Taco Bell. Not the greatest source for bolstering a belief system. Right now the number one book on Amazon is, Armageddon: How Trump Can Beat Hillary. This means everyone wants to be scared. It’s as if that old fear of success is plaguing all of America. The number one song on Amazon is, I Want to Live by Skillet. This doesn’t really give me any hope of trusting the masses to be smart informed voters.
Ask some fucking questions
Ask some questions out loud about the news story you are reading. If it seems to hold up to scrutiny, then it might have some merit, but unless you yourself are a fucking idiot, then the article shouldn’t hold up to any line of questioning. Is there a lot of unanswered questions in the article itself, then it was either written poorly or is a lying sack of shit.
Yes, your beliefs might be (are) wrong
You might actually have to question your precious little belief system once in awhile. Let articles that are written about other belief system challenge your belief system. You won’t learn if you ignore other belief systems because it might offend yours. This makes you easily controlled if you fit nice and neat in a belief box where we can just feed you some emotional shit for you to react to. Be ok with being wrong and changing your mind.
The whole reason you even saw this great news article that proves your political belief is better than other people’s is you have to believe something to see it.
History really did happen
You younger people are so completely unimpressed with gaining knowledge that you seem fine repeating history. History is a great place to see if your belief system worked or didn’t work before and if it didn’t work, why? We keep repeating history because we ignore it or we think we’re so fucking special that the things that happened in history won’t happen to us.
So go ahead and conveniently read the news that stir your belief system the right way. Be enraged with Huffington Post and be vindicated by a think piece in Medium. Go ahead and read opinions believing they are facts because you’re too stupid to tell the difference. Go ahead and make the Internet less of a tool for democracy and more of a hammer of authoritarianism. They got your number asshole. Now go like the new fad or keep posting cool links.