Fear is America’s top-selling consumer product

You probably caught him at a bad time. He's also argued that third parties are the only way forward in America (which I think is not true). At this point, his Common Sense podcast is somewhat repetitive of his previous stuff, but he's trying to say new things each time, which is tough.

His Hardcore History stuff, on the other hand, is mind-blowingly awesome!!! And not repetitive.

I tend to think one way. To help me understand the "other way," I try to understand their belief system before I try to understand their arguments. Let me try to use two examples, one from each side. Don't worry about why some people believe in welfare before you try to understand their beliefs in "justice." Don't try to understand gun rights before understanding "liberty."

In my opinion, being a person who tries very, very hard to read both sides of everything to form my own intellectual model (it's a bug, not a feature), NO. One does not exist. YET.

Editorial independence in the current US environment is simply not possible using traditional models. Disruption has been taking place, but it's not all constructive. Bezos buying the Washington Post was one marker, and Thiel helping destroy garbage Gawker is at the other end of the spectrum. Hanging in the balance are tens of millions of people trying to find the truth.

Honestly, the only website I can mention in confidence is Medium, and it still suffers from signal-to-noise ratio and present models of information / emotion distribution.

This can be changed, but it will take somebody planting a flag so far out on the scale of TRUTH like Hunter S. Thompson railing against Richard Nixon and in spite of his own significant issues. The dialogue has changed, the methods have changed, and they have surpassed our adaptation capability timing in my opinion.

There is an opportunity for Journalists and Writers in the United States to re-ignite the fire that the First Amendment was designed to protect. It's the natural order of things, we're witnessing evolution, and also participating in it. I have hope that one day a team can come together to build on what ProPublica and The Intercept aimed to achieve, but do it in a fashion like Kurt Cobain when Nirvana's songs and messages suddenly turned people's attention from junk-food-Hair-Metal toward something worth giving thought.

I'm optimistic.

> it's screamed at me, dripping in panic: "Trump DID A THING!!!" "Cops Shoot a Guy AGAIN WHY DID THEY DO THAT?!!"

No joke.

Someone a while back asked here, where are all the leftist conspiracy theories?

We know the right wing ones - the contrails, lizard people, Obama is a secret Muslim etc. How come the left doesn't have any? And my idea was that in a bubble environment where all the news is filtered through narrow ideological framework, the party that lost the election, is forced to come up with conspiracy theories to explain their loss. So they all watched Fox News, read Alex Jones or whatever news channel and well America is pure and good, they are the good guys but those evil Lizards from Outer Space came messed everything up at the last minute.

Then I predicted then that we will have just as vibrant and colorful leftist conspiracy theories after the election, and we kinda do.

The Russians in the bushes hacking elections, is one such thing. This is a massive PR campaign, it was very well done at first. And it makes the Tea Party look like a joke. It's got people in Congress on it. Journalists talking about it night and day. Though lately I think it's finally running out of steam.

Or the other was the "dossier" - Trump hired hookers to pee on the bed where Obama slept. And of course it's called a "dossier" because that makes it look official and important.

Impeaching Trump. If you happen to read /r/politics, which I do sometimes, you'd get the impression that in just a few days Trump will finally be impeached. I think they have an idea of impeachment that's more like someone walks into his office and tells him he's fired and then escorts him outside. I remember getting excited watching the Comey's testimony in Congress. Someone on /r/politics convinced that "Thursday he is going down, finally!" so Thursday came and nothing really happened. Comey said Trump was mean to him. Which is unfortunate, but that was about it.

He had 2 scoops of ice-cream. He shook Macron's hand for too long. He made secret coded gestures toward Putin during their G20 summit dinner. It just doesn't end.

These conspiracy theories and "news" are an important narrative because they explain why the election was lost. We have all been in a bubble, watching the main news channels, saw the poll results, explained as "Trump has only a 5% chance of winning" by the "experts" and "analysts" and so on. Then all of the sudden he did win and wah! instead of Lizard people it has to be the Russians or whatever.

As for what news sources to look, it's really hard to find any. You might try a something like Al Jazeera, although they are biased when it comes to Middle East, especially Qatar. Usually if a country or news channel doesn't have a stake in the game, they might as well report something more fairly. But yeah I haven't really found anything reliable. Things like CNN, NBC, Washington Post, NYT have turned into what Fox used to be pretty much.

I do this, or at least I like to think I do. For example, I am firmly in favor of socialized medicine, but I understand why many people are against it (both the "they don't understand how it actually works in other countries" camp, and the "they understand it and just don't think it's a good idea" camp). I'm firmly in favor of stricter gun control (although I think the Democrats should ditch it, as it's hurting them and it's way down on the list of priorities) but I understand why people oppose it.

I was basically raised Republican, spent some time as a libertarian, and gradually came around to a Democrat-leaning independent viewpoint. I understand why someone would have voted for Mitt Romney. I understand why someone would have voted for John McCain. I seriously considered voting for John McCain, and the main reason I didn't was his choice of VP.

But Trump eludes me. The man is basically what you get when the worst kind of used car salesman is born into money. I cannot understand how anyone can look at him and say, yes, that man should be leading this country. Not because he disagrees with what I, a Democrat-leaning independent believe, but because he clearly has no actual beliefs, principles, or policies of his own, and for nearly every position he has ever espoused, he has also espoused the opposite, sometimes within the same sentence.

I can understand why a person would believe that we should have less gun control. I can't understand why that person would then vote for Donald Trump, who said that the police should search people on the street and confiscate their guns.