mike.mainguy

This morning I saw a Facebook post from a fairly liberal friend about how he watched something on Fox News and couldn't believe people thought this stuff was real. It's interesting to me, because of course it's "real", but it's only telling the parts that their audience want to hear. So to that end, I thought I'd share some tips on how to detect bias and separate "opinion" from "fact". I'm not a journalist, but this skill is very helpful in "real" life too. All people can have a variety of opinions, some deeply held, some changing all the time, but some people confuse opinion with fact and it is a major reason reason for conflict. Opinions are judgements (hopefully) based on facts, facts are verifiable For a little more detail, here's a pretty good assessment I won't go into detail, but a key thing to consider is "how can I disprove this?". If it is possible to disprove something, then it...

I'm not really a political guy, in my lifetime, I've voted for: Bush, Clinton, Nader, Mccain, and Obama, so it should be clear I'm all over the board and have no political affiliation (If you're keeping score, that's 2 Republicans, 2 Democrats, and a Green Party candidate). In previous elections I was largely indifferent to the primaries and really only started researching a month or so before the election. The cycle, while I still ignored the primaries (largely), I did a little bit of research as the VERY broad republican field and the interesting wild card (Bernie Sanders) on the Democratic ticket was unavoidable (thanks twitter and Facebook! :). As we near election day, I thought I'd share my observations as a person who "doesn't have a horse in the race". What I mean by this is the following: I don't care about political ideologies... Political Parties such as: Republican, Democrat, Green, Constitution, Natural Law, Pirate (yeah, it...