Bah. They could just as easily blame Fark.

We were all bound to get to a football team mentality about everything anyway. No one has the time to fully understand every issue out there today. This was all well and good when news was filtered and the issues were limited, but now that we're inundated with information, no matter how minor, choosing a side automatically is the easy way to go.

For instance, there was a one minute radio piece tonight about PG County near DC having to force parents to come to court to get their kids immunizations for school or face jail time. A concerned parent might make a compelling argument about their right to choose what their children take as medicine. A legal scholar might argue about personal freedoms and legal rights of children. A poor person (and most of the parents are poor) might point out they are probably working too much to force their kids to do much of anything.

But a guy listening to the radio on his way home from work? I thought "It makes perfect sense because they're offering the vaccines right there in the courthouse". I didn't even think that most of the parents probably can't take off work to make it there in the first place. If you had asked me three hours ago if they should put the parents in jail, I might have said "Sure" without even thinking about it.

Getting all the information about any conflict would be tantamount to reading every thread on Fark. And even then, how does one filter out the truly bad information without doing some work themselves?

It's much, much more efficient short term to figure "my team or their team" and go from there. The long term damage is obvious.