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Fear is America’s top-selling consumer product

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Re: Fear is America’s top-selling consumer product

#71
post #41
post #37

I'm slowly trimming away the means I acquire news, because it's all becoming so editorialized. Twitter is bombarded with bots and flamewars, reddit is a lost cause, and news.google.com is mainly driven by larger syndications that have mastered the "Big Headlines Sell" strategy. That leaves HN and my little local papers, Mountain View Voice and its ilk. Great for local stories and tech news, but I feel like I'm missin…

Business news sources tend to be clear headed, because they are in the space of news you can put a dollar value on, and hence will pay for to make more accurate. That doesn't make them perfect, since they still tend towards an editorial agenda favoring "business as usual" power centers over disruptive forces, but I don't feel like I'm being fed outrage most of the time.

>Business news sources tend to be clear headed, because they are in the space of news you can put a dollar value on, and hence will pay for to make more accurate.

It also pays to put out dishonest hit pieces against competitors, or dishonest reviews of your own products to make them seem better than they really are.

Re: Fear is America’s top-selling consumer product

#72
post #59
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Try using wire services such as Reuters and AP for 'factual' news. Most news outlets get their news from these places and then add their own flavour to it.

I have definitely seen editorialized headlines from both of those sources

There are Reuters 'viewpoint' and 'big read'-type stories, roughly paraphrased. But as a wire service they tend towards facts, as perfectly as you'd expect from humans.

Re: Fear is America’s top-selling consumer product

#73
post #37

I'm slowly trimming away the means I acquire news, because it's all becoming so editorialized. Twitter is bombarded with bots and flamewars, reddit is a lost cause, and news.google.com is mainly driven by larger syndications that have mastered the "Big Headlines Sell" strategy. That leaves HN and my little local papers, Mountain View Voice and its ilk. Great for local stories and tech news, but I feel like I'm missin…

I watch Vice News through HBO, high-density domestic and international news during the week.

I've found Vice News to be great for firsthand reports, but lacking on background material.

For example, they did a segment [0] on brown coal strip-mining in Germany. The reporter examined the stark human and environmental toll of the mining, but failed to address why such a dirty form of energy was in demand in the first place. I had to do my own research to find out.

What I found, in part because I knew some of the background already and was confused by the Vice report, was that Germans chose to abandon nuclear power - a cleaner, safer form of energy - in the wake of the Fukushima disaster [1]. This boosted their dependence on coal, and was a direct cause of the increase in strip mining portrayed in the Vice report. The devastation caused by mining to the landscape and nearby villages took on a different meaning for me with this information.

Overall, I enjoy and appreciate the out-there, unfiltered style of journalism that Vice sells. However, I'd encourage you to do your own research and not rely on their reporting to capture the bigger picture.

[0] https://youtu.be/xCrVYd3aKcA [1] https://www.the-american-interest.com/2016/10/26/green-germa...

Re: Fear is America’s top-selling consumer product

#74
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Joy is fleeting, fear is forever. Manufacturing joy is easy, yes. Tie a counter to a semi-random process that's semi-controlled by a human and they experience joy when the counter goes up. The so called slot machine. THis is how HackerNews karma, Facebook notifications, your email inbox, and other addictive activities are designed. You experience momentary joy. But fear, fear is forever. How many fears have you been…

I think that's a fair point, but would argue that it's likely not true for a sizable amount of the population (e.g. my childhood fears have mostly left me). But further, there are lots of services which actually sell getting past your fears, perhaps they are just not selling well enough yet to overcome the amount of fear being produced continuously? Mainly, just questioning how much it is "forever" fear vs. a constan…

>but would argue that it's likely not true for a sizable amount of the population

I'm afraid you are incorrect. This is neuropsychology.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/24/your-money/why-people-reme...

Re: Fear is America’s top-selling consumer product

#75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mix of Local news + RT(Russia Today) or Al Jazeera works pretty good

Neither RT (Russian government propaganda) nor Al Jazeera (Qatari governmennt propaganda) is sufficient by itself, if you want to figure out what’s going on in the world.

Nothing is sufficient by itself if you want to figure out what's going on in the world. Reading from different sides even biased sides, Chinese, Russian, Qatari or Western 'propaganda', is the best way to train a critical mind and not be fooled into believing simple 'truths'.

Re: Fear is America’s top-selling consumer product

#76
post #32

I think it's quite ridiculous that any author can get away with the obscure clairvoyant claim that people are really irrational and desire to be fearful——it's a claim contrary to primitive animal and human psychology alike. The motivation to go buy products associated with fear has nothing to do with fear itself even when you explicitly define fear as an uncomfortable uncertainty. The reason to want to know fear, why…

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/24/your-money/why-people-reme...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negativity_bias

Re: Fear is America’s top-selling consumer product

#77
Without a doubt the business news has a greater interest in delivery of facts on the ground than your typical national newspaper. To that end I pay for (and only pay for) the Financial Times due to their attempt to seek out truth. For example, on controversial issues they'll have editorials from both sides, long articles, and they publish letters criticizing and correcting articles. As it's investment-minded and British owned, there's more of an international focus.

The sad thing about the FT is how expensive it is.

Investors tend to care about facts more than feelings, so objectivity becomes a worthwhile pursuit. When you're investing in a commodity, foreign currency and so forth, you're going to read everything with squinted eyes, looking for the facts.

Re: Fear is America’s top-selling consumer product

#78
post #37

I'm slowly trimming away the means I acquire news, because it's all becoming so editorialized. Twitter is bombarded with bots and flamewars, reddit is a lost cause, and news.google.com is mainly driven by larger syndications that have mastered the "Big Headlines Sell" strategy. That leaves HN and my little local papers, Mountain View Voice and its ilk. Great for local stories and tech news, but I feel like I'm missin…

Wait why is reddit a lost cause?

Re: Fear is America’s top-selling consumer product

#79
post #31

This is not this essay's first time[1] making it to this front of hacker news. And I am glad for it, because Petrified Forrest essay is great, and Lapham's whole issue[2] on fear is fantastic. Unfortunately two pieces I found most relevant for HN crowd from this issue so far aren't available on Lapham's Quarterly website. They are a moralistic Japanese 17th century account of an entrepreneur in "All the goodness gone…

When I entered the link I kind of expected to be notified it had be posted already, but no such notice came up. I was revisiting the site today and couldn't remember seeing that article linked here so I thought I'd give it a try.

Nice to see it get around some more. It really is a high quality site and one I look forward to each update with real anticipation.

Re: Fear is America’s top-selling consumer product

#80
post #43
post #37

I'm slowly trimming away the means I acquire news, because it's all becoming so editorialized. Twitter is bombarded with bots and flamewars, reddit is a lost cause, and news.google.com is mainly driven by larger syndications that have mastered the "Big Headlines Sell" strategy. That leaves HN and my little local papers, Mountain View Voice and its ilk. Great for local stories and tech news, but I feel like I'm missin…

Not really. CNN has gone the way of MSNBC (i.e. liberal, one-sided, pretty much echo-chamber). HN is the same way when it relates to political news (i.e. liberal, one-sided, pretty much echo-chamber). Fox News is, well, Fox News. NPR is, well, for the most part, the Fox News of the left. So on and so forth. In a world of two echo chambers (The Right-wingers and The Left-wingers), it's up to you to make up your mind.…

I don't understand this perspective. When CNN gets a story wrong, the right creates a huge storm and people get fired. When the right gets a story wrong (Breitbart still pushing the hard anti-climate change line, Hannity with the Seth Rich conspiracy, the entire birther movement, Pizzagate, and on and on and on)... nothing happens. Nothing. It took Milo saying "maybe pedophelia isn't that bad" before there was enough of an outcry for him to be fired. It truly frustrates me when I see people pushing this "oh both sides are just as bad, but one is left and one is right". No. They are not.

And it isn't hard to see the direct effects this is having, now. When the governor of Texas calls out the national guard to keep an eye on the US Army doing training exercises, because of right-wing conspiracy insanity that has hit the mainstream, we are having problems. When President Trump can claim that Obama is the founder of Isis and people just eat it up, we are having problems. For God's sake, the man had his press secretary go out on Day One of his presidency and lie about crowd sizes. He spouts bullshit about crime statistics in Sweden and for months, Breitbart suddenly has constant articles about how immigrants are causing everything wrong in Sweden ever (I particularly remember an article with an image of a mangled child, with the claim this was caused by immigrants, only for word to come out later it was a dog attack).

The "mainstream media" (and I use the term in quotes because all the biggest radio shows are right-wing, fox is the biggest cable channel and the WSJ is the biggest paper aside from USA Today) is like a dog chasing a car, towing a pro-business line and chasing after whatever will give them the most eyeballs at the moment. But at least they aren't a goddamn propaganda force for the left, marching in lock-step and feeding off each other the way the right media does.

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