I lost my dad to Fox News: How a generation was captured by thrashing hysteria

And some are also terrified of increasingly consolidated broadcasters that choose to have an obvious political bias.

Fox News is part of the problem, as part of News Corp. As is ABC/ESPN/Disney/Touchstone/Pixar, and CBS/Viacom/Columbia/Tristar/Paramount, and NBC/Comcast/USA/Universal, and Time Warner/CNN/HBO/AOL/Castle Rock/New Line, and Clear Channel/Bain. And those same companies own newspapers, magazines, and book publishers, too.

On top of that, investigative journalism has been in a death spiral ever since CNN debuted and inaugurated the 24 hour news-entertainment cycle. You're more likely to find something interesting in niche blogs and foreign media than on television.

From my perspective, the faulty programming being pumped into the older white guys (my dad included) is not the content of the message, but the methods of how to manipulate ideas to transform them into other ideas, and transform those into actions.

For example, in my dad it started out around age 67 as the "bird people", the "green weenies", or the "save the whales" people. How they were ruining everything, stopping the corporations (of which he has no part in), stopping some business or something, and how it was such a travesty that someone could be so bold as to place the convenience of humans over the lives of critters we eat for lunch and dinner every day.

So far so good, but the disturbing part I found was in how he responds to a rebuttal or a devils advocate. Even if I were to go out of my way and say several times: "I am not opposing your conclusion that your conclusion is absolutely right, I am simply offering the opposing view as a way to zoom in on the issue". Even if I ought right tell him that he can't get angry when I tell him that I'm about to disagree with him for purpose of having a debate. It's like those words don't have any meaning anymore. The opposition to his view causes anger like pushing down on a lever causes the other end to go up. He was not always like this.

The faulty programmed response is one where the fox viewer should immediately sabotage, attack and oppose anyone taking up the alternate view. If I offer up an argument that tries to track in toward when animal protection is bad, and when it is good, immediately the anger kicks in. How can you be in bed with Them? How have you given up your soul to the enemies? It's THEM vs US and we have to protect what little we have. He's set in his ways, he's found the answer to everything in life, and the only thing left undone in the universe is to conform the universe to those structures.

I would bring in hypotheticals, like what if mankind grows to 200 billion people, should we focus more on stopping corporations? It doesn't matter, the argument is not one that sparks discussion, it's one that reveals the position of the enemy. Things may be offered up to resist the opposing view. But I'm not opposing, I'm trying to clarify.

I think its the Anterior cingulate gyrus that is responsible for causing pain when you hold two contradictory ideas in mind at once. As we age, this ability to juggle opposing views is reduced to nothing. And brains become like hashmaps, all we can do is map our universe onto predefined outputs. It's a descent from there down to other serious psychological and neurological problems, and when the damage spreads to necessary system functions, the person dies.

There's a human 'set point' for fear. If there aren't enough real things of which to be afraid, the mind will latch onto the next-most-credible things, even if relatively farfetched.

With current long lives, lower crime, domestic peace, reasonable prosperity, and social insurance, there's a lot less to genuinely fear, in the US, than ever before. Without the challenges and stresses of full-time, market work, the retired are especially lacking in 'common project' or 'tribal team' fears (as opposed to say personal-health or relationship fears).

Politics, among other industries, competes to answer this craving for objects-of-fear. The cable-news/permanent-political-campaign/crusading-government-busybodies nexus is an extremely efficient, low-cost, high-emotional-salience provider. Small staffs, recurring themes, and grandiose good-vs-evil narratives can be constantly redeployed, as a neverending modern fairy-tale with the added sheens of 'reality' and 'import'.

Compare also: the hygiene hypothesis, for how an immune system unchallenged by real threats may tend towards misguided allergic or autoimmune overreactions.

Meanwhile, people who have been actually libertarian for 30 years have to find another word to use for themselves. Again.

If you want to be truly libertarian, guys, you also have to embrace open borders, support non-interventionist foreign policy, and desire that drug prohibitions cease. Defending gun rights and complaining about taxes and welfare is just a tiny part of the package. You can still oppose state-sanctioned gay marriage if you want, but only to the extent that you oppose government involvement in any kind of marriage.

As I am a long-time libertard, the people who talk about freedom after watching Fox News make me laugh. They fill their heads with mass-media talking points all day, meet with like-minded people to create an echo chamber for the ideas they were force-fed, then worry about having adequate self-determination.

From the perspective of the rest of the world, your Democrats and your Republicans seem so similar that it is bizarre these two had enough differences to argue over.