On the only real bubble there is

So a lot of words, including many of mine, have gone into the aether on the topic of silos and bubbles and the fracturing of news and information sources that have created a divide in the country — and, in so doing, the world.

If you think things like Brexit and the unrest in Germany do not have anything to do with the US, you haven’t been paying attention.

The rest of the world has, though.

And even as air travel corporations seek to strip rules that keep them from shitting on customers (including changing fares and having to help you find a flight if they fuck up), the rest of the world has been studying stuff.

Oxford University has recently published something about bubbles.

The three-month study, published Tuesday as part of the school’s Computational Propaganda Research Project, scrutinized the habits of 13,477 politically active U.S. Twitter users and 47,719 public Facebook pages in the months leading up to the State of the Union address late last month

The money line, as noted by Huffington Post (because of course the political enemy of FOX News will carry it, since News Corp makes money off of the gullible and fearful) is pretty unsurprising:

Trump supporters and extreme conservatives consume and share more “junk news” on social media than every other political group combined, a University of Oxford study has found.

Now, what this means is that there really is a bubble problem. A huge bubble problem. And it is the problem of those who seek to save this nation. Because the bubble includes white men, white women, and a scattering of fringe groups from everything else, who collectively are terrified out of their poorly informed and deceit addled minds.

So they get up and vote.

Now, the source of the problem is that truth in media is no longer a matter of law. Hell, FOX News went to court to prove they could lie without legal consequence. And kill them and the power of the bubble is broken, but you won’t be killing them anytime soon unless we get everyone out to vote against the folks in this bubble.

But the bubble is there, and it is an intentional bubble built up over the last 40 years of cuts to education.

And it holds about a quarter to a third of the voting population and their kids.

We need to save them. Because that is what liberals do. We give a shit. It comes with the whole human rights thing. And applies especially to folks that we would really rather just walk on by.

Of course, if you aren’t a liberal, then you generally disagree, and think we should walk on by. But you might be thinking in conservative bubble terms, and think that being a liberal is bad or has nothing to do with human rights.

So let me seriously make this clear:

You cannot, literally, be a liberal without supporting human rights. The literal thing that makes someone a liberal is human rights.

So when anyone calls someone else a liberal — as an insult or anything else — they are calling them someone who supports human rights. Because liberal means someone who supports human rights.

Now, you can add an adjective to it, and maybe you want to talk about the variations and shades therein, but they are all still liberals.

If you oppose human rights — even just one — then you are not a liberal. You may be liberal leaning, you might be kinda liberal in outlook, but you are not a liberal.

And if you are not a liberal, what the fuck are you doing here?

If you think you are, read The Line, the page here. That is human rights. With space for more. That is the line in the sand.

But, in the meantime, while you decide if you are a liberal or not, we liberals still have to save those damned fools who put us all in this mess.