Selective hearing, selective seeing, selective reading.

There's a line in the movie The Sixth Sense that goes "They only see what they want to see."

It seems to be so true nowadays, especially in politics. I read somewhere that, at one time, the strongest insult you could lob at an American was to ask them if they believed everything they read in the papers. I don't know if this is totally accurate, but I'm thinking it needs to be asked more often nowadays: "Do you believe everything you see or read online?"

I see it right here. Somebody will post an OP "as true," without offering a link to something or any background information. Then someone else asks for a link, and that's when the spitballs begin flying. This morning I had the "unspeakable temerity and near-traitorous audacity" to pop over to Conservative Underground and Discussionist to see what they were saying about posts here on DU, and it was really interesting. For the most part, they didn't respond to the subject of the OP here; they just busted on the writer.

BTW, I've been flamed here for poking around over there, which I think is hilarious. They poke around over here; why shouldn't we poke around over there? And heaven forbid -- another near-traitorous thought -- that either one of us learns something from the other. Send me to Guantanamo right now.

I posted here recently about forwarded emails I received from an old friend who is a Republican. Usually he just forwards jokes, but a few times he forwarded something political. One was a story about Nancy Pelosi and California (which went back to 2006 and was debunked several times back then), and the other one was about the Clintons and a talking dog (which turned out to be an expanded version of a joke that appeared in a lifestyle website and had nothing to do with the Clintons or the dog). But both emails had language at the bottom to the effect of "if you believe in America, forward this to at least two friends, and ideally a hundred." So somebody gets this, gets ticked off, and forwards it to "two friends, and ideally a hundred" without bothering to check whether the story is true or not. In my case, it took a minute or two to find out that each story was fake.

And speaking of fake, "fake news" seems to have become the catch-all description for anything we don't like. I didn't say anything we don't agree with: I said anything we don't like.

So yeah, selective hearing, selective seeing, and selective reading seem to be the modus operandi of this day and age. There's an opinion piece in HuffPost about possible ways to get people on both sides to get over being offended by anything the other side says, but it's going to take getting over selective hearing, selective seeing, and selective reading first.

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/opinion-giridharadas-outrage-america_us_5aaa93b6e4b073bd82929695