And we are gearing up for the next presidential election.
I just read a comment on a security blog which proclaimed about politics that “dirty tactics and irresponsible behavior by whoever you oppose. However, most people consider this a bad, but legitimate, part of politics.”
The legitimate part is what I’m having an issue with. This is my reasoning.
Dirty tactics and irresponsible behavior should never be considered legitimate in political elections. If your friends have agreed on using those tactics while playing scrabble, that’s up to you and if everyone knows about it nobody is being taken advantage of.
When money has become so important that honor, integrity and responsibility are waved, then you have lost your bearing. Why, you might ask?
Look around and tell me if you feel everyone is being treated evenly and fairly?
Why do you think this is?
Just human behavior, could be a common reply and it would be partly correct. Partly. The missing point is that we are basically good and caring when all the attitudes, social and financial pressures, peer pressure and so on are washed away, you have someone with inherit goodness. “Goodness” here means having a strong will and desire to do the right thing that is more helpful than destructive.
Various pressures comes down on us and it can be easy and may even appear that the only thing you can do is to take advantage of others, the system and so on, to just survive. And the old if I don’t do it someone else will argument. Which is a beautiful justifier but the point being that when you stop respecting and loving yourself, then you become a burden, a problem and not a solution.
Interestingly, natively (without all the above noise) we are problem solvers, practically running on automatic solving problems left, right and center. It’s what we do.
The point is that not all solutions are good workable solutions as we make wrong evaluations, not using valid information and then just walk away from it even if we see it did not work out properly.
When you don’t know all the relevant facts it’s easy to not to arrive at a proper and useful conclusion.
When you are being marginalized, considered unimportant and ignored, it would be easy to see why you feel you are on your own. And then as not being part of others, at least not anyone that you feel matters, then it’s easy to decide to ignore them in your decision making.
But, here’s the horrible truth. We all share this rock flying through space. We are all more or less dependent on each other. Everything available in society that you did not grow, build, maintain, etc. was done by someone other than you.
You might feel they all abandoned you, went against your wishes and desires!
Do you know why? I mean really know all the facts involved?
Maybe they thought the same way as you… and now you are in a loop of ignoring each other.
This requires that someone steps off and raises to the occasion. You’d be surprised how happy and relieved the other fellow would become. We expect to be met with force and we dish out force whenever life throws a curveball. Force, it seems, is the one thing this universe is full of.
It can therefore be easy to buy into force being the universal solution type of idea.
It is 100% not the case. YOU are the universal solver, or at least have the potential to be so. Your actions matters a whole lot more than you give yourself credit for. You are factually important as a member of this world. Never buy into anyone telling you differently.
They might not, just like you might not, acknowledge your importance because after all you are only you. WHO TOLD YOU SO?
Certainly not those who wish to keep you ignorant and into dark of what they are up to. [sarcasm]
What is vital to have, is knowledge.
Knowledge is not just for those who live in a library type of thing, knowledge belongs to ALL. When we hide knowledge we are undermining society and indeed ourselves, though it might not be immediately apparent. With knowledge comes security and certainty. Proper pro-survival decisions can be made that does not come back to bite you.
It has been said to never judge a person until you have walked a mile in his shoes. In other words knowing all the facts behind a persons decision makes it easier to understand how his decision came to be. The proper response might be to share some knowledge, to bring about an understanding on the ramifications of his decision. Maybe it is a cry for help by someone lost and feeling unable to win.
Most bad decisions are not made to hurt others, in fact we hate hurting others so much that when we do and cannot stop ourselves, we try to remove ourselves from the situation. Failing that we try to have others remove us.
So what is going on today, I’m referring to having knowledge which applies to the situations we try to resolve?
A big change in society is how cheap, easy and fast communication flows around the world. Never before have this been possible. There’s a combination of a few things that allows things to not work out for the greater good.
People with vested interest, in other words, personal gain, are making the wrong decisions. I’ve talked about being a leader and the importance to be an actual leader by action not by your title. When power and money is more important than doing your job then things will go wrong. Again, someone needs to rise to the occasion. And that someone needs to be heard. Then others need to support such a person.
The vested interest lies with everyone in a position to make decisions which affect others. The more they can affect the higher the responsibility.
When media, with their vested interest of having as many eyeballs looking at them are more interested in that rather than doing factual reporting, then they are undermining society. Not all media is all bad, but many make the wrong decisions too often or and at key points because it appears to solve a problem for them.
I imagine you have noticed how much bad news there is on the news. It begs to ask if there are any good news at all, doesn’t it?
Fact is that there is many more good things that occur in the world, than bad. The definition of news, by the way, is something reported on. It is only news if reported. It is made.
This choice of what to report becomes the job of the senior editor. He decides on what will sell more. And he has to answer to the owner, or board of directors. This process creates an imbalance as what they consider important. They want to see one or more of these; sex, money, celebrity, injury, crime, controversy, danger, and opposing views so that they can be seen as being on Your side against the others.
Look those through and see how much room there is for good every-day news. Someone opened the door for Mrs Smith and complemented her. It might have totally made her day, or more. But for most of us we are sensation hungry and don’t want to read about her.
But without all the above points, good news are rarely favored over bad. Unless something has people’s attention that day.
When I grew up reporting was done factually with no added drama, just the facts ma’am. Someone realized that by adding a bit of drama they got more readers/viewers. No doubt they were not that good at competitively finding stories that they reached for this unusual solution.
Case I point, a Florida TV reporter was standing at an intersection and reporting on the heavy wind while hanging on to his hat and leaning into the wind so as to not loose his balance, occasionally needing to shift his stance to maintain it. Unbeknownst to him an old couple was crossing the street right behind him in a casual and easy walk, and since it was live it was not edited out.
There are moments in life where we as a society establishes new norms or standards. Many might be related to some imbalance such as men and women, majority vs minority, the same vs different. If you don’t have much knowledge about people, someone who’s different in some way can be seen as a threat. When lacking enough knowledge and understanding, life can appear to be mostly threats.
The thing to do is to always seek to understand, and failing that to ask questions. And if asked in a way so as to invite someone to answer, you may find someone valuable to you too.
When you see controversy, seek to understand who’s reporting, and how it might benefit them to do so. Are they sounding like an actor in a drama, or simply stating their observation?
How much “flair” do you add when telling someone about something you saw? Maybe making it a bit more than it actually was?
If you know this about yourself you can be sure others have done the same. Imagine if you got more pay according to how much you add to the story. Things not necessarily being “all the facts and nothing but the facts.”
OK, so you can see how easy it is to give things a “twist”. Which over time can become a big turn far away from what actually was.
Then add the fact that the whole world watches the United States, because we are currently the most powerful. Think of being the fastest draw in the west, or the best boxer. Would anyone want to prove better?
Yeah, that is a silly question as there will always be someone trying to be the fastest, strongest and so on. See the Olympics. When a contender has more to loose than he might feel he can afford to use he may also resort to an unusual solution. See Russia being banned for doping, and many others from many countries in many sports.
The old Soviet Union (United Soviet Socialist Republic, USSR, now the Russian Republic) went on to conquer countries because of their own lack of food resources. You see, the USSR cannot produce all the food it needs. So it steals a country, or twenty, to secure their food supply. And when that is not enough it simply steals from their own, who cannot defend themselves and left to starve to death.
There is something not functioning properly over there. My opinion is that people are so used to living under dictatorship they don’t know any better. Not entirely unlike the so called Stockholm Syndrome where the kidnapped become friendly with their captors to try to have a normal life.
One of those Russian dictators announced his version of democracy, which was even worse than what they had that they wanted back to “good ol’ dictatorship. Ever since, the older generation knows that democracy is “bad”. Fortunately the younger generation have seen a lot more of the world through the internet and may not live under the same illusion.
Russia, Iran and at least China, are known to want to conquer the US in various ways. Much like we try to influence them and their population. Putin made a huge miscalculation when he entered Ukraine, and now cannot get out of it without looking weak. And weak is not working any more in Russia than it does here. They too want to see a strong leader, which explains the pictures circulating of him half naked riding a horse.
Putin used to be in the equivalent of our CIA, the KGB (later renamed FSB) where he was in charge of a section that worked on people control. Meaning he is well versed with manipulating people through social media. The idea that they are doing less to try to manipulating us than we do them is silly.
Russia, Iran and China want to see us weaken. They operate with various degrees of lack of democracy, and certainly less than ours, and when their population see how good it can be here, that undermines their leaders control. Therefore they are all motivated to undermine us here.
That means that it is highly likely that you are reading/watching online facts that are outright lies.
What’s one to do?
When something seems too outlandish, just too much! It probably is. You are looking for people who are more level headed, less dramatic, more actual stats brushing aside so called facts unless you have gathered information from ALL sides and honestly (to yourself) evaluated the stats (accomplishments), good and bad, and come to a conclusion as to where they are at in their actions. Especially looking at what REALLY matters, which ALSO has to be evaluated properly.
This is not an easy accomplishment, there are a lot of vested interest in fooling you. Some may already have done so, thoroughly enough that you are already convinced.
I’m afraid at this point it is probably not about politics anymore, as much as the character of the people who want to be supported.
Let’s put things into a perspective that might help.
If you worked in a business selling things and you are stealing from them and when management announced they were going to make an in-depth investigation, you would not exactly want to support that investigation. And by doing so you may in-fact turn attention onto you. If someone opposed an investigation into wrong doing, you would expect them to not have clean hands.
After all the violence on January 6th, of a mob storming and breaking into Congress. Threatening to hang the VP and the Speaker of the House. You would assume that the people in that building, who worked there, would be very interested what threatened their very lives. Would you not?
Yet, a good number of Republicans quickly changed their mind about supporting it to do all they could to undermine it. Yes, I’m not saying they are all bad or that the party is, but I am saying there are some real issues that needs to be evaluated in the behavior of some of them. Right now the GOP seems too happy to fight each other and damn the consequences for the country.
(Full disclosure, I’ve lived on three different continents (EU, Africa and of course the US of which I’ve seen over 30 states), seen many countries political parties and designs, and I’m surprised how we only have two parties, which lends it self too much to one sided behavior. My own views do not really align well with either, as both have pro’s and con’s. I’m both conservative and liberal in my views.)
But seeing some of the new people in Congress, I cannot but conclude they are only there for their own personal gain. There is nothing about honest caring for the people but mass attempt in manipulating them towards their own personal gain. With all its shortcomings there still used to be a decorum, and agreed upon sense of manners and willingness to come to a mutual agreement, for the good of all the people they represent.
It get’s even more “interesting”. Political parties are huge on research and surveying, they know what people express on most any subject. They have also been aware that some minorities races will overtake the whites in a not very distant future. This is a threat to their establishment, and many a scheme has been and is being dreamed up to protect their future as the ruling “class”. However, this is not what a republic stands for.
What I’m trying to say is that we are having a hard time operating as a true republic, and just because someone is afraid of fair competition is not a valid reason to fall in to anarchy, as that will only make things significantly worse.
The short of it is that there’s a massive amount of information being pushed. Some is more factual than others. Some are more false than others. Which one you have to decide. I once learned to look and not listen to people when trying to learn about them.
Observe as much as you can. Ensure you brush aside your own bias when looking to ensure you don’t color your actual observations.