Mr. Dazzle wrote: ↑Wed Feb 10, 2021 7:52 pm
Dodgy Geezer had a brilliant phrase..."the sniff test". It's pretty easy to see (smell?) when something deserves scepticism IMO.
Well it's a good point. As I allude to above, it's difficult being a skeptic and there is the danger of leaning one side or the other and ending up submerged in madness. That is true for both left and right, neither extreme is a good place to be.
But what I discover is that in leaning to the right, it's like a switch. Suddenly, you're one of them. A Trump supporter! I'm not as it happens, I just think he's had a ridiculously hard time and I find myself defending his position more as an advocate. Devils advocate if you will.
Being "on the other side" i.e. not automatically accepting some stupid left wing woke nonsense (lets not go there!) means people really won't enter into a dialogue within any (non anonymised) social media. You're either one side or the other and you dare not challenge any say, anti Trump dialogue or you get booted. Lost a couple of FB "friends" that way.
Whenever I visit some media approved forum or social media, I see a lot of stories being circulated which I know are simply not true (AOC springs to mind) but you literally cannot question them. On top of that, people with my right wing tendency are being labelled domestic terrorists or white supremacist and that in itself does not particularly convince me to "see the other side".
So I have to hang out on the right and you appear to be correct, I have been "taken in" by a statistic relating to proportion of police shootings**. I don't know exactly were I picked that up and tbh, there's still the massively disproportionate representation of criminal activity for one particular group but I will try to find out how exactly I fell for it.
**even a quick Google suggest that while the actual statistic is incredibly difficult to pin down (thats statistics for you) the overwhelming volume of evidence suggests that blacks are in fact disproportionately more likely to get shot.