That whole "one side is evil and don't bother responding if you disagree" tone is part of the problem.

Honestly, I think it's part of the solution. Too many words are spent in online arguments between two people who aren't at all open to changing their beliefs. If people are willing to admit that at the outset, everyone's time is spared.

But anyway, mrlala said "wrong", not "evil", and in this particular case, the evidence is on Trump's Twitter account for everyone to see.

Until you can assign the people you disagree with to the gas chambers, it’s not a solution. They are still there, still voting, etc.

4 years of hysterics and the guy got even more votes than before. Calling them dumb/wrong and not worth engaging is not working.

I don’t think the “don’t bother responding” part is productive, but I also think we have to avoid false equivalences, pretending both sides are anywhere close in terms of how much they’ve misbehaved (not saying you’re doing that, but a lot of people are in an attempt to stay above the fray). False equivalence is how the frogs got boiled and we ended up where we are today.

So, one side is evil?

The idea of "false balance" cannot be so quickly wiped away with a one liner.

Imagine the current media shit storm was being given credibility by the media by devoting half of their reporting to ways maybe Trump is right, maybe Trump did win. They would be enabling authoritarian behaviour.

Balance in reporting should be aiming to centre around objective truth. Not trying to find the mid point between one side or another's narrative.

> should be aiming to centre around objective truth

What is objective truth in politics ? It's the most non-objective aspect of society there is, arguably even more non-objective than art.

We're not talking about the philosophical elements of politics for the most part. There are plenty of parts of government policy where there is an objective truth and one side (or even both on occasion) are trying to manipulate the narrative away from that.

To use a non-US example: Boris Johnson claiming that he is going to deliver 50000 more nurses in the NHS. Except that figure includes some 19k nurses who are already employed in the NHS.

Back to Trump: Great, but we also won the election!

Donald Trump objectively did not have the largest inaugural attendance of any president. Windmills objectively do not cause cancer. It's objectively true that we should not nuke hurricanes. You could fill pages and pages of examples of objectively false statements, not just things the left and right disagree on.

> not just things the left and right disagree on.

Yes, but the objectively false statements that the left and right don't disagree on are not politics.

Politics is pretty much what's left that we disagree on, that can't be settled objectively in other domains. And is an expression of people's values, like what's the right way to live a good life, is there even more than one, who's gonna get the rare exclusive things in life that we can't all get (e.g. apartments with views on Central Park or your local equivalent).

There's enough variation in these values that we can't agree on these things and they conflict. Hence, politics.

Whatever you want to call it, it's clear that the left and right disagree about actual objective facts, not merely goals or their policy agenda, and that these disagreements drive (and are driven by — the causality can run in multiple directions) political support and decision-making. Right now there's a big debate about whether there was widespread fraud in our recent election (though I would be remiss not to point out that there doesn't seem to be any credible evidence for that). That's a politicized factual dispute, the adjudication of which (by which I don't merely mean in courts or the Electoral College or what-have-you, but also in the public's perception) will have fairly profound real-world consequences for some years to come.

That is one of many recent examples of these sorts of politicized factual disputes.

> Balance in reporting should be aiming to centre around objective truth.

Yet how much time was spent reporting on the piss tapes. Then how much time was spent reporting on how fake they were and where they came from?

Was any time spent reporting that? That's an honest question, because I do not remember that being a story outside of reddit and other social media.

Unfortunately this still misses the important point of consistent and repeated bias against Trump to the point of attempting to undermine his legitimacy by the media and political establishment ever since he was elected; it's not reasonable to suddenly assume good faith and objective analysis on their part - regardless of his own trollish culpability in that process and unpleasant history.

> consistent and repeated bias against Trump to the point of attempting to undermine his legitimacy by the media

most of what I've seen pointed to as bias is basically reporting on what he said/did, and he didn't like it. In the first month(?) Sebastian Gorka said ... "There is a monumental desire on behalf of the majority of the media ... to attack a duly elected President in the second week of his term... and until the media understands how wrong that attitude is, and how it hurts their credibility, we are going to continue to say, 'fake news.'"

The term from day one was meant to point out reporting/news that the administration didn't like, regardless of the truth of the news/facts/reporting.

There's a possibility that people are 'biased' against stuff you say because they have a 'bias' for truth, and you're lying on a regular basis. You may be correct in saying people are 'biased' against you, but that doesn't make their statements wrong, or what you say truth.

Looks like it, not sure which one though.

When people have that attitude, even if I otherwise agree with them, I basically just stop listening to them. It's always more nuanced than that and I haven't got the time or stress-level to deal with people who can't handle nuance.

>any other president before trump would have resigned in disgrace about 100 times

Reagan supported death squads in Latin America and didn't resign. G.W. Bush started a war based on bullshit and had people tortured and didn't resign. Every president going back years now has overseen the NSA surveillance system.

My history isn’t amazing, but let’s say they did those things. Why should USA presidents care what non-Americans (myself included!) think? I can’t vote them out, nor the Senators supporting them. (Would I even be able to sue them if they injured me with their policies?)

What matters is limited to their actions with regard to America and Americans. For the actions which led to the impeachment, for their actions during the pandemic, and for the post-Election behaviour, a normal politician would demonstrate shame. And those are just the biggest and most obvious ones.

One thing that bewildered me about reddit talking about Trump is that the amount of Non-americans that would chime in about our politics. Like why the hell do you care about my country so much? Are we a zoo to you? We equally dislike our system as much as you but we're at ground zero and understand the harsh reality of our system better than them. Why do they think our countries influence is something they should try to sway?

>It's just not a concern I have.

Because when you fabricate a war we send our young men and women there to die a pointless death as your allies. Because if you descide to use nuclear weapons its over for us, and if you descide to ignore global warming its equally over for us.

Because “when America sneezes the world catches a cold”.

In my view, that insanity is mostly based around fabricated outrage from the media. Trump's presidency has been pretty predictable. The first person fired from his inner circle may have been newsworthy, but every subsequent firing or leak or twit should have been nothing more than a byline on page 6.

So yes, I too avoid the news (and have been for over a decade). It hasn't made my life any poorer.