I am sorry for the loss of your father. I am also happy for the seventy years you had with such a great role model. Someone made you into the kind of compassionate person you are today. Your father may be losing his grip on reality, but he made sure his compassion lives on in you.
I don’t think Fox news only attracts ‘angry’ people with their rhetoric. I am 60 and I am angry. I am angry about where our country has gone in less than a year. I am angry that so many people demand the right to believe flagrant lies coming from the White House. I am angry that 63 million people voted a benign cyst into a full-blown carcinoma.
Our America has struggled the last decade or so, but I always had confidence that we could turn the corner and see more prosperity for more of our population. I have been just an old fool, believing in a fairy tale.
I am sure you have made other choices in your life that weren’t easy to make. I understand how you want to remember your dad, but don’t throw away the time that you can have with him just because he is different than you wish he was.
Your Dad may also be unhappy because he misses you, and what you used to be to him. His politics might be poisonous, but you don’t have to be. Love him while you have him. Don’t let Trump dictate your relationship with your Dad.
I’ve always been the black sheep in my family. My parents are ultra conservative, and most of my siblings follow suit. They sometimes wonder, out loud in front of me, where they went wrong with my upbringing.
It made family get togethers a bit tense, and sometimes led to arguments.
Since trump came along, it is impossible to go more than an hour without one of them bringing up how evil and despicable democrats are.
Because of this, I have spent probably less than a total of 3-4 hours in the presence of my family since trump was elected.
Sucks, because I actually do enjoy being around them when they aren’t being political hacks, but that’s all they can be anymore.
The only thing I would guess at is that your Mom continued to grow with the rest of the world around her, and your Dad decided to make his world as closed as possible. PTSD could be a very real factor in your Dad’s desire to define his world as only black and white. At least he has shared some ‘snippets’ of his life with you, he obviously trusts you as well as cares about you.
I can tell by your post that you have made both of your parents proud.
It sucks how many of us have lost friends and family to the fox news cult. I generally don’t mind people who have different opinions, but a lot of them live in a fantasy world now where facts only exist if they verify their existing beliefs. They can’t distinguish fantasy from reality and they don’t want to. It is disappointing seeing people who you’d expect to be wise in old age be the most ignorant and gullible.
Having said that, Russian Trolls didn’t just target Trump voters. They targeted Stein supporters, Sanders supporters and Black lives matter supporters too. Their goal is to foment civil unrest.
Looking back, I can kind of see why the FBI was afraid of communist infiltration into the civil rights movement. The Russians are empowering both the liberal left and the alt right to create divisions.
That is how Fox designed their broadcasts. They set up a premise and ramped up a discourse designed to infuriate their viewer. Then they would offer the outlet. The whipping boy that the masses could unleash their faux fury upon, liberals.
Fox was nothing more than a daytime soap opera spun around current events. The politics of the Right were the hero’s, while the politics of the Left were the bastard step-child trying to get a piece of their promiscuous parents property.
I don’t know either, it would be a good subject to study. Why are so many white people over age 50 so prone to right wing political brainwashing? Maybe they get addicted to the rage, contempt and fear that right wing propaganda fills them with. I notice this on the left too (our news sites fill us with rage, contempt and fear for the other side too).
However what I haven’t seen on the left is a wholesale disassociation from reality, a refusal to trust any news outlet that isn’t propaganda (leftists use a wide range of news sites, conservatives generally only like propaganda sites), or a wholesale embrace of easy to disprove conspiracy theories on a massive scale. There are issues here and there (9/11 truth) but it isn’t like on the right. I feel like 9/11 trutherism was a fringe thing on the left, while on the right blaming Obama for Katrina or saying he was born in Kenya are mainstream beliefs. When I talk to my dad and mom I can take it on faith that if they open their mouths what will come out will be easy to disprove lies and propaganda. I have no idea how it happened.
I think it has to do with your position in the existing power structure and whether you feel you are losing.
For the most part, it is only white people who do this in my experience. There aren’t a lot of blacks, latinos or asians who become fox news robots. And it is mostly older people over 50 (usually over 60) from what I’ve seen too. Men more than women. Fox news’ audience is 92% white, and the median fox news viewer age is 68 years old.
Perhaps it is anger over losing their position of power and priviledge in life. It used to be that whites and men were guaranteed the best positions in society. The best jobs, the best mates, all the power (social, political, economic, etc) now society is becoming multicultural. I don’t know who wrote the quote but ‘When You’re Accustomed to Privilege, Equality Feels Like Oppression’ is pretty fitting. Instead of white men being guaranteed the top of the socioeconomic totem pole, they have to fight to be there.
But this is also a double whammy, because a lot of white people aren’t privileged, and they get pissed too when you discuss white privilege. So not only are the people upset about losing their position angry, so are the people who are told they are privileged but who don’t feel they are.
Also older people have been indoctrinated against communism, and now they thing moderate liberalism is the same as communism.
Anyway, I’m just speculating. But for the most part it is old white people, more often men, who become hate filled ignorant fox news zombies in my experience. Within the existing American power structure, old white men used to be the undisputed top of the socioeconomic totem pole, and now they are sliding down and the growing equality feels like oppression to them. So maybe they develop a victim mentality about it.
Fox news is attractive. Busty blondes wearing skirts that ride up their thighs. That is real news. If you want to do your Dad a favor, find another cable channel that interests him, there are hundreds of channels to choose from.
It is sad that your Dad’s politics are nothing more than the bullet points from the Fox Five Live broadcast, aka Trump Tweets. As much as it upsets you, do what you can to point him away from the Faux News, but if he is happy there, don’t be upset. Just be glad he is still around for you.
So, the idea is to make pornhub a news outlet? That could work.
A complaint I voiced recently to my friends, when we were talking about how annoying it is that every newspaper and magazine seem to be behind a paywall anymore, was “Why pay for news, when you can get porn for free?”
And in that statement, I don’t mean just erotic sexual porn, but porn in the same idea as “food porn” catagory. Stuff that doesn’t inform, stuff that makes you feel good while you watch it, but a bit disgusted with yourself after.
Fox News is just the easy out. Attractive people talking about their ‘news’. Alternative Facts are delivered here!
There are other cable news channels that don’t show as much leg as Fox,but there are other stations that vet their news and sources. Try to give your Dad other choices for his political education. Fox is easier to watch, CNN makes you think a bit.
Fox News has always pandered to the populace that wants to join their team. An open setting with a couch in the middle, inviting the viewer to take a seat on the couch.
If you watch TV for 20 hours a day, you will find Fox News to be more entertaining than most other Networks channels. If you want accurate information about the politics in the region, Don.
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I think there’s a fairly strong awareness of mental and physical deterioration among the older parts of our society. So they’re already somewhat apprehensive and fearful of the future already, and that translates into a very insecure feeling that seems to permeate everything.
I mean, my parents are 70 and 73, and live in the southwest Houston area. They’re not racist or anything, but they’re absolutely convinced that “things are different these days” and that there are tons of violent criminals and crazies out there just waiting to steal, murder, beat them up, and so on and so forth. To some degree I think this is because the area of Houstonwe grew up in, and that they live SW of (Alief), underwent a rather dramatic transformation over the 40 years or so they lived there. It went from a very desirable upper-middle income suburb in the 1970s and part of the 1980s, to being an entirely ghetto, crime-ridden, run down, low income predominantly black and hispanic section of town. So from their perspective, the area HAS gone to shit, and they didn’t move far enough out of it to realize that everything hasn’t gone that direction.
That aside, they still seem unusually fearful, and it shows in their politics. They’re both surprisingly conservative, being most interested in the law-and-order aspects of that political philosophy. Which is interesting, because I don’t think my mother is otherwise very conservative- I could totally see her being all for poverty reduction, equal rights, and so forth, but that fear has overridden that to the point where she’ll vote for Republicans because they trumpet themselves as the law and order party.
I suspect this preoccupation with security and order overrides good sense on a lot of other older people as well.
Back in the early 1990s my mom and her husband bought a place about 45 miles outside of Denver. The entire area is horse country and the minimum size of the plots is 5 acres. Before the century was up, they installed a gate at the end of their ¼ mile driveway. When I asked why they wanted the gate, I was told that they thought they needed it for security, because of all the drug gangs. :eek::smack::rolleyes:
None of the other properties anywhere around them have gates to this day.
I have long said that FOX hires attractive women to deliver their “news” because when men are listening to an attractive woman the part of their brain responsible for critical thinking shuts down.
Republicans = Vote for me because I will lock up every person that scares you.
Democrats = Vote for me and I will try to create a world where we don’t have to lock everyone up that scares you.
There is something to the racial divide on this issue. I believe the older white man (and I know a few) was feeling un-seated from their places of power, they had indeed held these places for decades. Trump showing up and talking their language, so to speak, has given them a reprieve, they think. Sad part is Trump could care less about their middle class lives or their needs as aging Americans. Who will be around to pick up the pieces? There will be collateral damages, folks, it is inevitable!