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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
