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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

#221

Post by slice_of_life »

kogepathic wrote: post #219
didibus wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The truth is, there's actually a huge amount of centrist in the USA. Those centrists are reasonable people. They'll hear you out, think, analyze and make up their mind. They'll accept compromise, and they'll try hard to see if maybe there's truth to consider, even if most things said appears exaggerated, or ridiculous. And then there's unreasonable people. They don't want to think, or consider options. In the USA, if…

> In the USA, if you are unreasonable, you're most likely on the right. Most reasonable people are clustered with the left. And a minority of unreasonable people are also on the left, with another minority of reasonable people clustered on the right. I don't think it's fair to generalize 330 million people like this. Certainly it feels like there are more reality-denying theories peddled by right wing media, but that…

> but please do not come away with the impression that all right-leaning people are unreasonable

Nor that even MOST right leaning people are unreasonable. It's all a matter of vantage point.

Edit: grammar

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

#223

Post by slice_of_life »

banned1 wrote: post #116
refurb wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... nothing happens That because of expectations. Everyone knows Breitbart is hard right. Even conservatives will admit that. Even Breitbart will admit that. CNN like to position itself as the news . You know, the straight shit. When they go off the rails people get pissed because they don't expect CNN to do that.

I stopped watching CNN during election night when the table was full of people who at least once said "we" when they intended to say "the Democrats".

I stopped watching CNN as well because the bias was all too blatant and here I was all these years thinking that it was unbiased or at least tried to be balanced.

Marc Andreessen (whom I consider one of the smartest people I like to learn from) touches on this media issue here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZhBVBBBNs0

Even Marc is deeply conflicted when it comes to this particular issue. I think Marc is a partially closeted rightist and it's understandable because he works in California which is largely leftist. If you've followed Marc on Twitter(when he used to post) and on is interviews, you'll notice he'll be deeply inclined towards rightist views (he'll mention Venezuela as a cautionary tale) but not even he had the courage to support the republican party during the last election. The only person I know who had the chutzpah to come out, so to speak, was Peter Thiel and I respect him deeply for this.

That said, even Thiel is human after all; he was supposed to attend the PFS(a conference led by one of the best right leaning economists of our times - Hans-Hermann Hoppe) last year but cancelled as it had begun to draw unwanted attention.

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

#224

Post by ZeroGravitas »

slice_of_life wrote: post #220
didibus wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The truth is, there's actually a huge amount of centrist in the USA. Those centrists are reasonable people. They'll hear you out, think, analyze and make up their mind. They'll accept compromise, and they'll try hard to see if maybe there's truth to consider, even if most things said appears exaggerated, or ridiculous. And then there's unreasonable people. They don't want to think, or consider options. In the USA, if…

> if you are unreasonable, you're most likely on the right. Most reasonable people are clustered with the left. I hope you realize there's nothing reasonable about this statement. IMO, most times when the right has been considered to be unreasonable, so to speak, it has been a response to the left taking things too far. And yes, this includes WWII; there is no Hitler without communism. This is not to validate nor jus…

Bringing this back to the topic at hand, it doesn't really matter if the left is going "too far", but rather whether the consumers of right-wing media think they are going too far based on the lies they are being fed. And at that point they'll "correct" with a new holocaust or civil war or whatever the very, very rich people who have the most to lose will support to protect their wealth.

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

#225

Post by mathiasrw »

[deleted] wrote: post #222

[deleted]

> I'm no joke starting to see the value of Chinese, Singaporean, etc. and maybe even North Korean (!!) censorship - people can't be fucking idiots and destroy the country over stuff on the news if it's not on the news.

Sounds like you assume that state based censorship will remove/limit fear from the news. States are the main beneficiary from a fear-based population. It's a tool to direct anger away from relevant areas that could threaten established structures towards areas that has little or no significance (or even better: other parts of its own population)

If you don't fear anything, there is no reason for a state

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

#226

Post by didibus »

kogepathic wrote: post #219
didibus wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The truth is, there's actually a huge amount of centrist in the USA. Those centrists are reasonable people. They'll hear you out, think, analyze and make up their mind. They'll accept compromise, and they'll try hard to see if maybe there's truth to consider, even if most things said appears exaggerated, or ridiculous. And then there's unreasonable people. They don't want to think, or consider options. In the USA, if…

> In the USA, if you are unreasonable, you're most likely on the right. Most reasonable people are clustered with the left. And a minority of unreasonable people are also on the left, with another minority of reasonable people clustered on the right. I don't think it's fair to generalize 330 million people like this. Certainly it feels like there are more reality-denying theories peddled by right wing media, but that…

I tried to be explicit about saying USA more then once, specifically because what I'm saying is not about other countries in the world, and wouldn't apply.

Certain countries have vastly different distributions, with most unreasonable people on the left instead. Others have an equal split, etc.

Oh, and I actually feel like you can very easilly model politics with two categories of reasonable and unreasonable. It's a much better model then the right vs left one.

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

#227

Post by didibus »

slice_of_life wrote: post #221
kogepathic wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In the USA, if you are unreasonable, you're most likely on the right. Most reasonable people are clustered with the left. And a minority of unreasonable people are also on the left, with another minority of reasonable people clustered on the right. I don't think it's fair to generalize 330 million people like this. Certainly it feels like there are more reality-denying theories peddled by right wing media, but that…

> but please do not come away with the impression that all right-leaning people are unreasonable Nor that even MOST right leaning people are unreasonable. It's all a matter of vantage point. Edit: grammar

I don't think it's a matter of vintage point. It's all about intention. You can work to be more reasonable if you choose to. You can teach people to be more reasonable. Its a skill, a quality that everyone healthy can choose to practice or not.

I don't even know what right or left leaning imply. That whole categorization is a joke. Tell me what you want, why you want it and how you believe will work best to get it. Only after that's been cleared up can we start discussing meaningfully.

What I do know though is that in the media, in the USA, in 2017 (it hasn't always been this way), most unreasonable people making noise associsate themselves with the right and like to associate reasonable people with the left.

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

#228

Post by ZeroGravitas »

humanrebar wrote: post #104
knodi wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What the hell are you talking about, just because NPR report the news that not pro Trump doesn't make them liberal or left.

If NPR is so objective, why were (are) NPR listeners so shocked that people would actually vote for Trump? I say this as someone who was also confused about this for the longest time. NPR certainly didn't help me figure things out at all.

I realised Trump would win when I saw an interview with a Republican campaign chair who said there was "no racism before Obama":

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/sep/22/trump-ohio-c...

The video she said it on, was part of a series that toured the states and asked people what they thought. It became clear that many people were unmoored from reality.

NPR viewers are outside the right-wing media bubbble. People responds to the "crazy" things that Trump says because he's just repeating what he heard on Fox News. So it's not an out of the blue statement to them, it would be like Clinton saying "of course climate change is a problem", they're already accepted facts in their worldview.

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

#229

Post by slice_of_life »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #224
slice_of_life wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> if you are unreasonable, you're most likely on the right. Most reasonable people are clustered with the left. I hope you realize there's nothing reasonable about this statement. IMO, most times when the right has been considered to be unreasonable, so to speak, it has been a response to the left taking things too far. And yes, this includes WWII; there is no Hitler without communism. This is not to validate nor jus…

Bringing this back to the topic at hand, it doesn't really matter if the left is going "too far", but rather whether the consumers of right-wing media think they are going too far based on the lies they are being fed. And at that point they'll "correct" with a new holocaust or civil war or whatever the very, very rich people who have the most to lose will support to protect their wealth.

> it doesn't really matter if the left is going "too far", but rather whether the consumers of right-wing media think they are going too far based on the lies they are being fed

But it does. That's exactly the point. It's a pendulum of sorts. A symbiosis where one cannot exist without the other in equal proportion. For any 'reasonable' discourse to happen there must be the acknowledgement of this fact; right or left, you come to the table biased. The one-sided blame game won't work because all it does is exacerbate the situation.

> very, very rich people who have the most to lose will support to protect their wealth.

Here's a fallacy that was debunked in the election. If the very rich are 1%-ers then how is it that so many sound-minded individuals chose Trump? The math doesn't support your statement.

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

#230

Post by ew6082 »

systemvanilla wrote: post #129
Dobbs wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how NPR and Fox News can be compared in good faith. Yes NPR has a liberal bias, but for the most part it attempts to reasonably source its articles and publish a journalistically accurate news report. Fox News is not a news channel. They have one or two news programs mixed in with "entertainment". Sean Hannity is not news, but entertainment pretending to be news[^1]. [^1]: https://www.dailykos.com/storie…

NPR is known by pretty much every right-of-center person in the nation as being the Fox News of the left. If you're left-of-center you have a stake in NPR's skewed coverage being the neutral truth (because that validates your world view), but it's just not the case. The bias isn't necessarily in the sourcing or the facts, it's in the selective coverage and the constructed narratives and the overt bias in what kind of…

We need to distinguish between NPR the human interest/artsy radio station and NPR News. NPR TV news hour is legitimately the most moderate and unbiased TV news left standing, at least when i watched it last (admittedly been a while).
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