[jcp123]

Originally Posted by redpoint5

Our politicians tend to sway around the middle regardless of political affiliation, which is mostly a good thing.

Trump's "Make America Great Again" slogan is very conservative, suggesting some things in the past were great and worth conserving.

Obama's "Hope and Change" slogan is very liberal, suggesting things are bad now, and need to change.

Of course, both viewpoints hold merit. Things right now are fairly great, and those great things should remain. Things could be better though, and in those areas, change is needed.

I don't purge any friends, and I listen to extreme viewpoints on all sides, usually finding agreement somewhere in the middle. I have no interest in the big box "news" outlets though. If I wanted to listen to awful noise, I'd put something metallic down the garbage disposal.

Looks like I slightly bought in to the US ideal of freedom and personal responsibility.

The world needs more of you, open to people on their own merits and not so destructively and toxically tribal. I fall on a distinctive and different part of that political diagram, but I sense in you someone who's badly needed these days. You're also spot-on that news is more about providing a circus for profit rather than informing. It's turned reasonable people into slavish partisans who just want to hear some confirmation bias. We need both a conservative and a liberal side which exist in some tension to keep things from going too far, but the tension has been too strong for a number of years, and the pendulum swings risk becoming too great.

To tie it into the thread, global warming has become such a political issue that there's no room at all for nuance, which frankly is sad and precludes any real discussion on what to do, since we are still stuck on doing something vs. doing nothing. Once our politicians grab ahold of an issue, you can more or less kiss goodbye any notion of a sensible outcome.