My response is directed towards Laura's project. For those of you who don't remember, hers was called "Get the Facts" or something along those lines. And honestly it was by far one of the most revealing projects, which really is saying something being that I thought multiple were extremely interesting (I was going back and forth between this and the Iraq War poster) But there's a reason the Get The Facts project resonated in me the most, and it was in the subtitle. "Opinions of Honor Students." Then when you're eyes scroll down the page, you get a feeling that I'd describe as a cross between laughing in disbelief and a getting nauseous over nervousness for the future. These students, honor students at that, summed up an issue in our society that's likely to tear us apart, without even knowing it. The issue is more than just misinformation. It's opposition to information. It's holding on to your own misinformation, playing dumb to any and all contradicting facts or evidence, simply because it's
yours.
I'm not going to claim to be unbiased, because I'm not whatsoever. To get it out there flatly I'm pretty obviously left-wing, even though I try to see the merit in other political ideologies. The problem is, not only is that something rare to come by, it's increasingly difficult. Obviously political polarization is at it's peak right now. You have Fox News and MSNBC peddling whatever news they're political sponsors pay for. And you can tell people this all you want, it's not going to stop them from preaching it at every opportunity. Because who cares about a bias, if it's
your bias, then it must be the
right bias. But the real problem, the shockingly dangerous problem, lies in the implications of holding onto bias in the face of fact. The poster displayed this better than anything.
Believe what you want. But take fact into account. It's increasingly difficult for me to sit still at the systemic ignorance Fox pushes, that should go without say I guess and you can entirely disagree if you want. But when it's an issue that
will harm us, everyone, if the ignorance towards it persists, it hard not to point out the bias being taken to an absurd extent. 50% of honor students believed global warming does not exist. Period. Now had they been informed by anything other than the selective reporters on Murdoch's payroll, they probably would have known that that issue has already been compromised. Even the Republicans now admit to global warming. The
cause of it is now the debated area, but that doesn't matter. I'm not blaming anyone for not believing in it, I really blame the source the misinformation knowingly comes from, but there's still an amount of personal responsibility that comes with holding/preaching an opinion, especially if that opinion is rooted in Big Oil's pocket-politicians anti-intellectual propaganda.
It's not difficult to see this trend in history. Whenever there's progression, there's backlash. For every action there's an equal and opposite reaction, etc. It's fairly easy to look to scientists, the people in the world we should trust more than anyone, and come away with the realization we're harming our planet. It's easy to see we're living in an equivalent of a widespread SCOPES trial. Even further, it's easy to look at undeniable facts surrounding global warming (Carbon levels, tree rungs, sentiment analysis, ice caps melt rate, temperature charts, comparisons with the "natural cycles" of the past, ect ect.) that 97% of climatologists agree point to human causation. To put that into perspective, and this is the real kicker here, that's literally the same percentage of scientists that agree on evolution over creationism.
So why, in the face of fact, do many still view global warming as a 50/50 debate? Well technically if it didn't interfere with the business of Big Oil that runs this country and it's politicians the information age would have put it to rest long ago. But that's unfortunately not the case, and the longer we promote anti-intellectual thinking through bias the more harm we'll cause to ourselves and generations to come. Politicians are bought and paid for, Inequality for All proved that in our own class. They pay for the news. The news will pedal whatever the politicians want, who will pedal whatever the money wants. That's only one step of the problem though. Blindly repeating and following whatever they say as fact because of your bias, I don't care what issue it is, perpetuates this state of ignorance in our society that's starting to feel unavoidable. It can be stopped, but that would take realizing and consciously acting against our own bias. And that's not something most people would think to do, let alone even want to.
So, anyway, global warming's just one of many issues to point out our progressing ignorance in this country. It doesn't have to be a left-right issue, in fact it shouldn't, but we're too busy feeding into our bias to see that. You would think the information age would be a cure to this kind of behavior, but bias is what's perpetuating it. And this can go towards a multitude of issues, many of which seen in the poster this is a response to. All the information you could want is in your pocket, but you don't want it.
I want to end this with what I think is a perfect representation actually calling out the systemic bias and selective information that's plaguing America. It's from the Daily Show (Which is left wing, yeah.) I'm gonna miss Jon Stewart:
http://on.cc.com/1Ocmd71
