Alt-Right
The media is suddenly obsessed with 'Alt-Right, as FoxNews reporter Howard Kurtz says in the article below. The term "has been wildly popular for the last 10 minutes". The Washington Post said it this way; A whole lot has been written lately about the alt-right, that insurgent, Internet-born identity movement that seems dead-set on swallowing the Republican party whole. Brietbart defines the alt-right this way. The alternative right, more commonly known as the alt-right, is an amorphous movement. Some — mostly Establishment types — insist it’s little more than a vehicle for the worst dregs of human society: anti-Semites, white supremacists, and other members of the Stormfront set. They’re wrong. Previously an obscure subculture, the alt-right burst onto the national political scene in 2015. Although initially small in number, the alt-right has a youthful energy and jarring, taboo-defying rhetoric that have boosted its membership and made it impossible to ignore. It has already triggered a string of fearful op-eds and hit pieces from both Left and Right: Lefties dismiss it as racist, while the conservative press, always desperate to avoid charges of bigotry from the Left, has thrown these young readers and voters to the wolves as well. This shows the impact of the mainstream media in picking up on negative images and then turning them into something to be used against conservative candidate and now president -elect Trump. Are right wing fringe groups worse than left -wing fringe groups which get little or no reporting?

The world is doing much better than the bad news makes us think

12/8/19
from The Washington Post,
12/2/19:

“Major portions of the world are in conflict and some, in fact, are going to hell,” President Trump said two years ago in a speech before the United Nations. Most things the president says are controversial, but the only disagreement most Americans across the political spectrum might have had with this statement was his use of “some.” As a rule, we tend to believe — mistakenly — that the world is getting worse.

... however, the bad-news bias gives us a highly inaccurate picture of the world. For example, according to a 2013 survey, 67 percent of Americans think global poverty is on the rise, and 68 percent believe it is impossible to solve extreme poverty in the foreseeable future. Meanwhile, starvation-level poverty has decreased by 80 percent since 1970, according to economists at Columbia University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The truth is that while there is plenty to worry about on any given day, the world is generally getting better.

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