Two sides to every story

It's important to remember, when you're reading anything at all, that there are two sides to every story. When you come across an emotional article, or an emotional person, and you start to get caught up in the content of their story... perhaps it seems too outlandish to be true... take a step back, it probably is.

In fact, I've found myself reading serious articles in well known newspapers and then said wait, this is crazy, it can't be true. You're left with a "the sky is falling" sense of the world. So my habit is to go back into the article and find the sources, what in this article is solid truth that they have evidence of and how much is speculation.

I'll give you a brief example of an article I only read briefly and am by no means an expert on. It was in the Taipei times last week and had a headline that really caught my eye: "US says Taiwan should be prepared to stand alone in case of an invasion," I am certain this was not the actual title of the article, but it had this sort of feeling, at least when I read it.

So my first impression was holy crap, why... who is invading... mainland China? Now? Shouldn't the world be more focused on North Korea? Wait is North Korea attacking Taiwan... why? So I started to read and I got to the statement from the US. It said something along the lines of Taiwan should be prepared militarily to stand on it's own for at least a little while in the face of an invasion.

This doesn't mean the US is abandoning Taiwan, it means be prepared, just in case. Of course what would happen if Taiwan was invaded by mainland China? I asked my boss, he's a hard core Taiwanese patriot.... that would never happen. That wasn't my question.. you can't just make up answers for stuff like that (my girlfriend does the same thing when she's upset ;)). But what would happen?

Well, my point is if you read this article and take it as it is written you may find yourself extremely paranoid, not only of an upcoming invasion, but also of a lack of support from the US. What the hell? But in reality there's a lot more gentle politics going on behind the scenes and this was a comment that was blown out of proportion and made into a real spectacle, for what purpose? To sell magazines. Such is the power of the almighty $.

It's not that you shouldn't read the news, or the opinions of others, in fact you can read them and learn a lot from them. You just need to learn how to separate truth from reality with everything you are exposed to, especially if money is involved.

Once again, as a disclaimer, I only read the article in passing and really only skimmed over it, before realizing that this was probably a comment that got blown out of proportion and then dismissed the rest of the article. My statements on the actual subject matter are therefore subject to be completely erroneous, but my purpose here was not to critique the article, I was merely using it as an example.

Henceforth I will try my best to clearly distinguish between fact and opinion in my posts so that you all have a clear idea on what I am actually observing here, but do remember that I still have my biases.