Blog 8 - Antiwar

Right, so I've looked at both sites. I'm not sure if it's because of the bad wifi, but the article on American Conservative you sent us doesn't actually work. I'll refresh and refresh and hit "load more" but there is nothing. I'm going to base this on just the sites in general. I'm going to try to go into this with an open mind, but as someone who does lean left, my thoughts might have unintentional bias. (Especially on one literally called "American Conservative")

So let's start with Antiwar. Right off the bat, it looks like it was created in 1997 and hasn't been updated since, design-wise. It's not aesthetically pleasing either, like some retro websites look cool, but the color palette on this with the fonts and the way it's haphazardly sorted makes me want to internally scream!

Getting over the utter dysfunctionality that is the main page, it's actually not the worst when it comes to sorting. You see things from a lot of countries on there, so it might be a good launch point for looking at international news.

They also have a nice tribute to fallen soldiers. It doesn't show their names, and the dead people are in caskets, but it is nice knowing that while they are anti-war, they're not anti-veteran or anti-soldier.

The number of sources they use is INSANE. A lot of what they send is links to articles for other sites. It isn't stuff that I generally see and it feels like I'm jumping into the middle of a chapter book. Like, I jump into chapter 10 and miss all of the exposition and I have no idea the meaning of the plot.

So now, I am going back onto the American Conservative and the first thing I see is about some dude named Abimael Guzman who apparently killed capitalists, but what really caught my eye was something about vaccine lotteries and how they failed. As someone who lives somewhere in Ohio where they did that, it sparked an interest and I clicked. Honestly, I felt like it wasn't the best way they could've done it. I got vaccinated pretty early on, but using taxpayer money for something that isn't going to inherently benefit everyone just seems like a waste. 

There has also been research done on how the lottery exploits lower-income households. It can come across as Mike DeWine exploiting poor people to take a vaccine that they may not want to take just so they can have the chance for money. 

Reading the article, I totally see where it comes from and this person seems to be looking at both sides of things. The only real confusing thing is how they want the government to take away the ability for corporations to enforce vaccine mandates, even though ... shouldn't republicans be not wanting the government to intervene? That's their whole basis, is it not? Granted, political parties are not just on a linear plane of left to right. There's a test you can take to see where you fall on the graph.

So, I lost my exact results in a depression purge of my pictures but I was around where it was on the left side when I took it last year. I probably should retake it because anyone who doesn't have character development in a year scares me and I'm sure I've changed a little bit.

So I wanted to find stuff on war since that's what you asked for. But as soon as I got onto the main page, I didn't see anything on war. It just seems like a bunch of social issues (and the article in the top right made me gag) I feel like a lot of conservatives do look at this because the interface doesn't make me want to scream and force whoever to take a design class. 

I clicked on another article and the way they seem to alienate people in California in the first couple of paragraphs speaks for itself. Grow up. It makes me think that articles are all written by different people and whoever wrote the vaccination lottery is definitely not who wrote this one. Only half the article didn't seem like a joke\slam on people in California.

But I FINALLY found war articles recommended. I clicked on the Poland one and honestly, it's so long that it lost my interest halfway through, but I skimmed anyways. There's literally nothing about invading Poland and it's all social issues. I'm not Polish so I don't care. That being said, this blog is supposed to be war and all this website happens to be is just conservative analysis. I want the basics of something and I don't get it, depending on whoever wrote it. I also see stuff about LGBTQ rights and I don't feel like reading about my own existence being debated upon so I will just stop there.

So overall, why do I think people don't read these? I actually think American Conservative gets a fair amount of traffic. As biased as some of it seems, people tend to like confirmation bias. The website also looks polished, professional, and good. It doesn't look like it hasn't been updated since 1997. 

I personally am someone who wants to understand why people think the way they do. As much as some of them dehumanize both myself and those I care about, I want to understand why. I want to understand how people have hatred in their hearts and how to prevent it if I were to ever have kids or someone I'm mentoring. 

I also don't think all conservatives are in the group above. I think a lot of people just think differently about how the government should be run and I think those dissenting opinions are very important. 

I think the current state of half of the country hating whoever's the president every 4 years isn't sustainable, and I think it will eventually get to a point of war. I don't want that. I think war is costly in lives, life, and money. For those who die, that's it. For those who survive, they have to deal with mental illnesses and loss of time doing what they love or furthering their careers. Their lives are put on pause. 

There's also the issue of us just not having money and using so much money on hurting other innocent people in other countries that have nothing to do with their government instead of helping us and our own citizens with money. War seems like a bartering of one's own citizens and it's wrong.

There's also foreign affairs, such as the fact that literally any time any Middle Easten country want to stop using USD for their oil, the US gets mad at them and targets them. It's because of the whole USD not being backed by anything physical so the government wants their currency to be backed by oil so other countries accept it. That being said, maybe fix your problems from within before yelling at others.

War is depressing. War is overwhelming. War is mentally taxing. This whole thing has made my mental health die inside. I think I've covered why people don't want to read about war.