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Love it or hate it, truckers say they can’t stop listening to public radio

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141–150 of 288 posts

Re: Love it or hate it, truckers say they can’t stop listening to public radio

#141
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's liberal as in "tolerate how other people choose to live" and there's liberal as in "spend a lot of money on big government solutions to social problems" and nobody can claim to be libertarian and be liberal in the latter sense.

> nobody can claim to be libertarian and be liberal in the latter sense. To be fair it's not a blanket black and white thing. You can be both, one in one area and one in another. I think we worry too much about labels.

While arguing over definitions is usually a waste of time, the libertarian platform is basically defined by its anti government stance.

Re: Love it or hate it, truckers say they can’t stop listening to public radio

#142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm a Libertarian and thus social conservative and economically liberally That's fascinating; I've been called Libertarian because I'm the opposite. I'm socially progressive yet fiscally conservative, and from what I've read, there are branches of Libertarianism that can embrace either extreme or a mixture. I've listened to NPR since I was a teenager in the early 90s, and while I don't always agree with the comment…

It was a mistake (see bellow - I edited my post). It's late at night and I'm tired. I in fact meant the opposite. I am most definitely not socially conservative or economically liberal.

A whole flamewar erupted over defending a typo :)

Re: Love it or hate it, truckers say they can’t stop listening to public radio

#143

I love NPR. My wife makes fun of me because sometimes I sit in the car with the battery / radio on after I park just to hear a story finish. New Hampshire Public radio has a lot of local news and features too, which I can't hear anywhere else. I'm sure other markets are the same. You can get it on Alexa too because most of the shows are also podcasts which is also great. I've also heard a lot from my conservative fri…

> I'm a Libertarian and thus social conservative and economically liberally That's fascinating; I've been called Libertarian because I'm the opposite. I'm socially progressive yet fiscally conservative, and from what I've read, there are branches of Libertarianism that can embrace either extreme or a mixture. I've listened to NPR since I was a teenager in the early 90s, and while I don't always agree with the comment…

As long as you can be given a label that allows you to be put in the "with" or "against" category, people don't really care about exact and paradoxical definitions, you Libertard Tea party Deep State believer.

Re: Love it or hate it, truckers say they can’t stop listening to public radio

#144
post #51
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'm a Libertarian As a libertarian, don't you find the economic news reports from NPS cringeworthy though?

Marketplace with Kai Ryssdal? Cringeworthy? Edit: Or Planet Money?

Marketplace is extremely cringe worthy. Planet Money seems to do better though.

Nevertheless hey are both good sources of facts if you look past the naïve understanding of economics.

Re: Love it or hate it, truckers say they can’t stop listening to public radio

#145
post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your politics clearly lean left. I emphatically disagree with your assessment. Not surprisingly, I am center right/libertarian.

Is NPR really liberal, or do conservatives just say that because it doesn't have an explicitly conservative spin? It seems like whenever I hear people talking about "the liberal media", the list of names seems to cover basically any journalism outfit that isn't explicitly and overtly conservative. It feels like anything left of Fox News is commonly labeled as liberal media which seems a little off to me.

About once a day I hear some piece that is overtly liberal, by media standards. For example, today there was a piece about protests and counter protests where there was a far left protester and a center-left talking head in the studio, and the Trump supporter only got a quick pre recorded sound bite. It's not propaganda to be sure, but it is a definate bias that is imho inappropriate for a supposedly public service.

Re: Love it or hate it, truckers say they can’t stop listening to public radio

#146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If liberal is defined as "not alt-right" then sure. But if you expect to find prominent socialists or leftist political activists or their ideas on NPR, you'll be waiting a long time. Chomsky, nader, said, hedges, parenti ... none of them get mentioned or make an appearance. Who teamed up with Richard Wolff's radio show? NPR? Nope, it was iHeartMedia. You can find these people on Al Jazeera, the CBC, RussiaToday, the…

Whatever. Most people who identify as "liberal" in the US would not call themselves socialist, anarcho-syndacalist, Chomsky or Nader supporters, etc. They are mostly centrist Democrats. /s/liberal/neo-liberal/g Does that make you feel better?

Mainstream Republicans (not alt-right) are also neoliberals. They also believe structuring all of societies ills as free markets as the optimal solution (eg, CAFTA, NAFTA, Obamacare were started/proposed by Republicans and finished by Democrats and many of Reagan's championed policies were actually started by Carter). That's what's academically called "classical liberalism".

Honestly, the form of liberal that NPR is, is mostly just target demographics; what set of values an effective identical policy gets justified with. Hillary Clinton praises Kissinger, punted for Monsanto as Secretary of State...Obama used advisers from Milton Friedman's Chicago School...it's different wrapping paper on the same present.

For instance, job creators of the right become entrepreneurs and innovators on the left; it's the same people, different label. On the right, they shouldn't be taxed because they earned their wealth and on the left is because they invest in the innovation of tomorrow. Same policy, different backstory.

The American dynamics doesn't equate to substantive advocacy differences. They are effectively sports team playing the same game by the same rules with different fan bases.

Re: Love it or hate it, truckers say they can’t stop listening to public radio

#147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's about 10x more if you count just police and fire; about 2x more if you count defense spending along with policing, using UK numbers. (Nowhere near 100x!) Of course, many more people spread colds, cause accidents, etc than commit crimes, so it makes sense that the cost of controlling their externalities is more than those of criminals. But your choice seems arbitrary: you couch it in pragmatic terms, because you'…

I would definitely not categorize defense spending as police. Healthcare doesn't stop people from spreading colds. You're not actually reducing externalities with most categories of care. And if there were no police you would see a lot more theft. Anyway, you can put it in cost-benefit terms, but you have to include a strong freedom factor. A government that takes 2% of GDP to keep public order is far better than not…

> Healthcare doesn't stop people from spreading colds.

If it includes vaccinations then yes, it very much does.

Re: Love it or hate it, truckers say they can’t stop listening to public radio

#149
post #54

I love NPR. My wife makes fun of me because sometimes I sit in the car with the battery / radio on after I park just to hear a story finish. New Hampshire Public radio has a lot of local news and features too, which I can't hear anywhere else. I'm sure other markets are the same. You can get it on Alexa too because most of the shows are also podcasts which is also great. I've also heard a lot from my conservative fri…

In general it's about story selection. 80% of the "stories of the day" are related to minority rights, empathy stories and a bunch of others. Rural white people are rarely mentioned except in the context of an environmental disaster. I like the stories myself but I definitely feel like the average conservative doesn't feel like they're included in any of the coverage.

Is it possible that you would consider any story that isn't about a white heterosexual man one of those? I'm really wondering, because I could see myself keeping a running tally like this once I thought I noticed a trend–kinda like noticing how they put pumpkin into everything in the fall.

But of course, 80% is actually pretty close to the number of Americans that are not white heterosexual men. We may just have gotten used to an overrepresentation in movies, politics, and our social life.

Re: Love it or hate it, truckers say they can’t stop listening to public radio

#150
post #131

I love NPR. My wife makes fun of me because sometimes I sit in the car with the battery / radio on after I park just to hear a story finish. New Hampshire Public radio has a lot of local news and features too, which I can't hear anywhere else. I'm sure other markets are the same. You can get it on Alexa too because most of the shows are also podcasts which is also great. I've also heard a lot from my conservative fri…

In my own experience driving for a little while around the Four Corners area in the desert, there were more than a few spots where the only option was NPR, because all other stations on the dial were glassy-eyed christian proselytising, especially driving Utah -> Colorado. I mean, the kind of radio that even normal christians would be uncomfortable listening to. I like NPR's content anyway, but if you lived in some o…

Unfortunately many of these Christian stations have poorly maintained transmitters that broadcast not only on their assigned frequencies but also all over the adjacent NPR stations. Only Christian stations seem to get away with this.
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