I can relate to a lot of what the author of my article has to say. He makes many of the same points that I've made over the years - albeit, I made them more frequently on the FART board than here.
If you remember, before I joined POPE, I used to post on ROUND and FART. ROUND died due to attrition, a general lack of interest in the markets by others, as well as my own frustration that things I'd posted - in hopes that they'd be a permanent record I could periodically reference - were wiped by Bob in the great DENVER POST purge of . . . 2011 or thereabouts.
FART became my preferred haunt.
Why did I post there? Definitely not because I agreed with its members. I did it because I could find dissent. Reasoned dissent is how we learn. It's also how we teach. Let's face it: I don't tell you guys much that you don't already know. Nor do I read much on POPE that I haven't read many times before. (NEMO BEING THE NOTABLE EXCEPTION, which is why I value him.)
I don't view myself as either a right-winger or a left-winger. I seek truth. Truth isn't a right or left wing thing. It's what it is: the truth. In the war of the Eloi versus the Morlocks, I'm a time-traveller. I'm a conservative (which is very different from being either a right winger or a Republican.) I only come across as a right winger because reasoned thought is hard to find in anything produced by the left. I'm therefore more critical of the left than the right, so the perception is that I'm to the right. Not so.
This flaw of the left's is actually a shame because the left is correct on a few things, some of which are important. But I'll leave that for a future date. It's out of scope for today.
So, I used to hang out on FART. It was mostly for my own benefit. As a seeker of truth, if my understanding and conclusions are wrong, I want someone to point it out. I am always open to changing my position when it's appropriate to do so. That didn't happen often, but it did occur more than once, notably in a debate I had with OCU on the death penalty. Afterward, I realized that he was right and my support for the death penalty while maintaining a 'human life is sacrosanct' view on other issues was irrational. I subsequently changed my stance so that it wasn't hypocritical and became a death penalty opponent.
Ironically, this didn't make OCU happy either, but at least today I'm not the one with the flawed thinking. I now favor putting scum such as murderers, rapists, traitors and serial car thieves onto an island or into a cavern with some possibility that they'll be able to fend for themselves, then ensuring that no one in the outside world EVER has contact with them again. No food. No removal. No checking upon or reporting on conditions. Just enough maintenance to ensure that no one ever gets out or contacts the outside world. I call this the 'DEAD TO US' penalty and have OCU to thank for it.
That's one example of learning from a dissenting news source and I think more people should do it.
My time on FART was mostly spent pointing out the flaws in what passes for "thought" on their board. Their incorrect information. Their lies. The inconsistencies between what they were writing and what they'd previously written. Their tendency to rush to judgement and what a whopper of a mistake that almost always turned out to be. Their foulness. Their self-serving motivations. Their worship of the most base of human behaviors.
Eventually, to my chagrin, I was banned. When someone asked clo why she'd done it, she simply said "He was annoying." I hadn't violated any of her board's policies. But she was tired of being corrected.
There's a huge irony in this. *I* was looking for truth, both adapting my thinking as needed and dispensing truth as best I could. But clo could not handle truth and found it annoying. Hence, she banned the person who was consistently posting truth and unveiling lies.
I believe clo revealed something fundamental about liberals in general.
Right-wingers seem to be able to face the truth. They might be slow to change when they learn they're wrong, but they gradually do. They might not love being wrong, but they don't prevent honest discourse to the extent that left wingers do. If you notice, nearly all of the left-wing news sites have blocked or severely curtailed responses from their readers. If they allow responses at all, the responses are carefully controlled. On left wing sites that allow responses, you generally either need a paid subscription... or you must provide extensive personal information which can be used to lock you out.. or messages are filtered... or there is a timed response period after which no more can be said. This last ensures that activity will never get too heated, and also gives readers a limited amount of time in which to prove that the author is full of it. (The early articles about the Orlando shooting are a prime example. They were quick to judge the killer "not a terrorist" and to blame "haterz" like Donald Trump, but terminated the rebuttal period long before the flood of connections to terrorism began to come in.)
The worst of the liberals now openly discuss making it criminal to question the science behind Anthropognic Global Warming. Wow. In other words, they want science to become a religion. Forget the 2nd amendment; these guys want to ban the 1st.
You don't see that coming from the right. Visit Breitbart.com and you'll see thousands of responses to the daily articles. Many are in agreement, of course, since Breitbart IS a right wing news site - but there are many dissenters too. AND THEY DON'T GET BANNED.
It's how news should be.
It's not the function of a Free Press to sell people on what to believe. Its job should be to convey what happened, as best as is possible, then leave it to the readers to form their own opinions. Right now, you can accomplish that to some extent by reading right wing articles AND reader responses.
Reading the publications on the left, though, is just a waste of time. Not only do they have a predictable slant, they don't even want to have their mistakes obviated. As writer Josh Marshall says about politically slanted websites in the article I posted, "I enjoy it more. It's always more fun to listen to people you happen to agree with."
That might be true, but it's such a shame. Listening to and reading those with whom you probably agree might be enjoyable, but it's not the way to find flaws in your thinking. And it's guaranteed to amplify skewed perceptions of the WHOLE truth.
Ultimately, the truth is what matters. It's the only thing that matters. And you don't get to the truth by exposing yourself only to those with whom you agree.
| 
