Gary's First Post
Greetings!
I’ve had ideas for what this site could be floating around in my head for years. Early ideas were far more complex, and implementing them would have required significant funding, or at least many months or years of my programming time.
In the end, it seemed that I should keep things simple as possible,1 and focus on finding out whether people would actually be interested in the most fundamental idea behind the Reality Party. And that is that in order to have a healthier political landscape, we need to help each other see things as they are–rather than, as members of one side or the other, we would like them to be. We all have our own biases, our own tendencies to frequent some news sources and not others, etc.
Moreover, news sources fall into two groups:2
- Some are openly biased toward one side or the other. Fox News and MSNBC are exampled of two very similar news outlets, though biased in the opposite directions.
- Some such as ABC News, are not very biased, but generally don’t help one side understand the other’s thinking. This is probably because of a perception that not many people want to exert the effort it takes, so it’s not a sizeable enough market for a major news organization to focus on.
The Reality Party web site is intended to be a place for people who do want to make the effort. Beyond that, I have a hope that people who do want to make the effort can have a ripple effect beyond this community, by discovering ways to spread actual facts in a world where people are largely only interested in reinforcing their pre-existing assumptions. In particular, there is the opportunity to help spread facts that help each side understand where the other is coming from, thus lessening the need to assume that members of that side have to be ignorant, stupid, or acting with malevolent intent.
Then, maybe we can start to move back toward a time where the two sides can work together toward common goals. An example of such a time: late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg was approved in the Senate by a vote of 96-3. That was a time when senators could vote for a nominee based on their qualifications, rather than only on the question of whose side they would help.
I look forward to interesting and, hopefully, useful discussions with you here at the Reality Party.
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