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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

#201

Post by neillyons »

komali2 wrote: 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…

There is a good book called "7 habits of highly effective people" and it talks about "circle of concern" and "circle of influence".

It basically says be mindful of the time you spend concerning yourself with things you can't do anything about. Spend your brain cycles on things you can influence in the world.

E.g. Trump. Reading about him is a waste of your brain cycles. What productive thing are you actually doing with this information?

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

#202

Post by smallnamespace »

konradb wrote: post #187
humanrebar wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> maybe understanding a Trump voter really is just that difficult Well, over 40% of voters last time around certainly understood. I've read thoughtful and/or insightful things as well, so there's media out there. It's just a matter of people with appropriate credibility consuming, curating, and re-explaining these things to their audiences. I could repost things I've found compelling, but until the Terry Gross's and…

> start taking white blue collar concerns at face value What concerns are these, specifically?

Losing their position in society. Becoming marginalized socially and economically. Being made economically irrelevant by automation, immigrants, or outsourcing. Seeing their beliefs and value systems being ignored, circumvented, eroded of traditional legal support (e.g. gay marriage, Roe v. Wade) and replaced by secularism.

Middle-aged white people in the US are seeing increase in mortality while other groups in the US and outside see drops [1]. This is the result of chronic long-term stressors.

[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/03/health/death-rates-rising...

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

#203

Post by smallnamespace »

mikeash wrote: post #139
banned1 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

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…

> I cannot understand how anyone can look at him and say, yes, that man should be leading this country

They support Trump because they admire him, plain and simple. He's a blowhard who's blustered his way into becoming President of the United States.

A regular working-class guy knows he's no Obama, or Lincoln, or Ronald Reagan. But he looks at Trump and thinks to himself, 'If THAT guy can make it, then so can I.' To them, Trump is literally the American Dream of upward mobility incarnate.

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

#204

Post by [deleted] »

mikeash wrote: post #139
banned1 wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

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…

[deleted]

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

#205

Post by FRex »

komali2 wrote: 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…

What do you think of The Straits Times global news section?

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

#206

Post by pluma »

tertius wrote: post #52
komali2 wrote: 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…

The No Agenda show analyses (twice weekly) exactly what you're talking about and compares many sources. They deconstruct the media. They frequently also use European (France 24 and Deutsche Welle) and Asian (like CCTV) to contrast the news in the U.S. They also include RT and compare. http://www.noagendashow.com/

I prefer Unfilter:

http://www.jupiterbroadcasting.com/show/unfilter/

They admitted being directly inspired by No Agenda but they're less prone to conspiracies and try to point out when they're entertaining them.

I feel they have a bit of a (US) libertarian bias, which as a German makes them feel too conservative for my taste, but their reporting seems somewhat more objective at times than going straight for CNN.

That said, I found their reporting more interesting in the beginning when they were heavily focused on the fallout from the Snowden revelations. It feels like they've started going more in the radio show host entertainment direction lately with Patreon mailbags and such, plus there's a lot of reporting on the cannabis situation in the US (though they usually leave that out of the main show).

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

#207

Post by DanielBMarkham »

The internet promised to make every man a publisher, and it has succeeded. The problem is that most professional publishers shouldn't be publishers, much less the average person. There's simply too much money to be made with eyeballs. A press with no overhead is a race to the bottom with a cast of billions, many of whom would fight to the death over pennies.

I tell my friends to monitor and severely cut their intake of news. Ingesting news today is a profoundly emotionally unhealthy thing to do, and to the degree people ingest it, they are usually over-the-top in their fear of various things, the vast majority of which are no threat to much of anybody.

We've always had this situation with small publications. As a former freelance journalist, what I've seen over the past several years is that the big publications, after being brought over to Facebook and Twitter for better access to readers, are being forced to play this game too -- while they continue to lay-off staff and reduce costs. There's more than a whiff of desperation I see in the majority of headlines from most major news sources. It is a sad thing.

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

#208

Post by tonyedgecombe »

kilroy123 wrote: post #130
tormeh wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Economist is good, if you can swallow their ideology It's very open about it, but it does not conform to most people's idea of what news should be. Süddeutsche Zeitung is good in Germany space, although it may do a bit too much of normal and national news.

Just curious, what exactly is their ideology?

Pragmatism.

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

#209

Post by tonyedgecombe »

pdubbs90 wrote: post #42
komali2 wrote: 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 find the BBC and the Economist good for this reason. They are/seem a lot less biased than U.S. stuff through some combination of higher standards and that they'd rather manipulate the emotions of Europeans than Americans (and I am an American).

A lot of the bias is in the eye of the beholder, whoever is in government in the UK will complain about the BBC's bias.

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

#210

Post by circlefavshape »

tgb wrote: post #190
rdtsc wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Conspiracy theories on the left are prevalent. Anti-vaccination is the obvious one. There's plenty about GMOs and Monsanto. I had a health teacher in highschool who gave us an alternative "food pyramid" the only justification of why it was better being that it had been rejected by congress while the other one was accepted. She was obviously left-leaning and is where I'm getting most of these ideas. Anti nuclear power…

Anti-vaxxers are typically left-wing? Really??

Good lord America, you are so confusing

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