If you just casually listen to garbage or propaganda like shapiro, some of it you’ll retain without retaining the source. Some of his bullshit will land in your brain under “Oh yeah I heard somewhere [complete bullshit]”. Especially if it’s something that gets repeated a lot.
Also if you’re listening uncritically, some of the entry level bullshit might land with you. He might lay blame on some outgroup and you might be like “huh that does make sense”. If you don’t go and do the work to research his claim to contextualize and possibly debunk it, now you’ve got right wing nonsense planted in your brain.
That’s why you see multiple sides. If what Shapiro is saying doesn’t jive with what you’ve heard on other sources (liberal, neutral, etc), then you’ll doubt it.
The main problem is that many people don’t look at multiple sources.
They often have more extreme takes of what the mainstream conservatives think, so it’s good to be aware of what they’re saying. I generally try to avoid opinion pieces like Shapiro and whatnot, but when I do, I try to get a good variety.
That’s why you see multiple sides. If what Shapiro is saying doesn’t jive with what you’ve heard on other sources (liberal, neutral, etc), then you’ll doubt it.
I mean, maybe? How is the hypothetical omni-consumer supposed to suss out which ones are legitimate? Especially when the propaganda is engineered to appeal emotionally.
It’s a lot of work to go and unpack something that’s deliberately designed to mislead you. That’s why I do not recommend casually consuming media like this guy. You’re not going to know when he’s just lying, and you might not notice the subtle misleads like a chart with a cropped y axis. It’s all going to slot into your brain as “Oh yeah I heard [racist quasi-fact] somewhere”
Like if someone says “More blacks are arrested for crimes” that just completely ignores unequal enforcement as a factor. A casual listener isn’t going to think about that. Especially not when it’s packaged in a slick fast talking youtube video.
Some sources are garbage and shouldn’t be consumed without the equivalent of a hazmat suit.
The main problem is that many people don’t look at multiple sources.
The main problems are the right wing is trending hard towards authortiarian fascism, and our capitalist hellscape doesn’t do a great job of promoting truth and education. Hot takes get clicks even if they’re wrong on numerous metrics. Clicks get money. Money is power. Power is what matters. Being factually correct or having beliefs that promote better outcomes for whatever metrics you care for isn’t as important as making money.
It’s a lot of work to go and unpack something that’s deliberately designed to mislead you
I agree. Unfortunately, it seems like everything is trying to mislead me these days, so the choice is to either combat it or pick which side I’d prefer to mislead me.
Hot takes get clicks
That happens all over the spectrum. The best solution isn’t to try to shut out media from one side (then you’ll overcorrect to biases from your preferred side), but to look for popular media from a variety of sides so you can start to notice the BS in more places.
That’s why I periodically listen to Ben Shapiro, Sam Seder, and other political commentators, to understand what the various sides are saying. I try to avoid clear nonsense like Alex Jones that’s just spewing hate, but otherwise try to get a good sample.
If a media source sounds more like one extreme than another, I know to look things up and perhaps find an alternative source. Even major, trusted publications have biases, so it’s good to be able to detect that.
Not trying to poop on your ability to tell propaganda from not, but considering liberal news the opposition to Ben Shapiros bs is a one way ticket to it. You’ve included 3 types of sources that all appeal uniformly to capitalism and left out leftist/socdem/socialist, which is a very “enlightened centrist” thing to do and basically saying your centrism is centered on the right. Your demographic are exactly why people like Tim Pool succeed in messaging and pulling people further right. Usually anyone who uses liberal as the opposing viewpoint to modern conservatism fits cleanly into this box.
Feel free to provide them. I’m not familiar with which sources are high quality to post them confidently.
Most I’ve seen are poorly cited opinion pieces, at least on the socialist camp. Democratic socialists like Bernie Sanders do a decent job, but that’s a very different thing, and usually larger media orgs do a decent job of covering their positions.
Tim Pool
Not a fan. I think I’ve watched a few videos of his, but I honestly don’t see the appeal. Shapiro is at least kind of entertaining, so I occasionally tune in to see what rhetoric the right is using.
Usually anyone who uses liberal as the opposing viewpoint to modern conservatism fits cleanly into this box.
That’s a pretty broad brush you have there.
I consider myself a left-leaning libertarian, which means I see myself as the opposite of both conservatives and progressives, at least in terms of authority of government to control peoples’ lives.
I think the political compass is useful, and when I take the test, I’m usually about halfway down the bottom half of the chart, and I drift around the middle of the left/right spectrum (most recently, I was a little to the right).
I do periodically listen to socialists, but they usually support aggressive governments, so I rarely agree with much they have to say. I’m okay with libertarian socialism (e.g. Noam Chomsky), but I don’t think it’s practical and it’s certainly not popular. Instead, I promote co-ops, private unions, and similar business structures.
The humanist report on Youtube is a reliable leftist source of news that I’ve never caught in a lie. As leftists go he’s also pretty nonreactionary by including things inconvenient for socialist messaging which I appreciate.Vaush is a more reactionary but still rarely wrong source with nuance that most creators across the board miss. Of these two Humanist report is very hard to critique as anything other than genuine so I’d start there.
Government control and avoiding it is a common call in on the majority report and you may benefit from watching just how quickly those views fall apart with some scrunity from Sam Sedar.
The socdem viewpoint is that there are some government functions that shouldn’t be in the hands of private companies because they’re too important, such as healthcare, the millitary, and elections.
I don’t often find libertarians who disagree that some things should be wholly under regulatory agencies because it’s so apparent that corruption in privately owned fields is just as if not more rampant than public and objectively people who want government to fail leading government into the ground by leeching off of it isn’t really the proof that government is bad that they think it is. Personally if one side wants to control healthcare the way other nations do and lower cost to patients and taxpayers and the other wants to control the police and repress protests and the right to vote I don’t see them as equivalent violators, so libertarians voting republican in every election is a bit unconvincing of their objectivity to me.
Thanks for the recs, I’ll check them out! I’m not a fan of Sam Seder, but I’ll certainly check the others out.
there are some government functions that shouldn’t be in the hands of private companies because they’re too important
My view isn’t about importance, but whether something can reasonably be competed over. Monopolies should be state run IMO, but pretty much everything else should be privately run.
healthcare
This can actually be competed over, but some parts cannot.
I believe the government should provide emergency care (e.g. ambulances and ER), whereas private orgs can and should provide routine and longer term care. So if you get in a car accident, the government would cover everything until you’re stabilized enough to make decisions about longer term care yourself.
military
Agreed, though I’d like to restructure the military to prevent abuse by the commander in chief. I think private groups have a place here, but only with a formal declaration of war and to avoid the draft.
elections
Agreed. I think it’s just insane that we’re okay with private orgs making voting machines. I’m not saying there was any form of tampering with our elections so far with these machines, but election officials should have full control of the source code and hardware.
I honestly don’t like the idea of voting machines anyway, just process paper ballots with counting machines and random human audits so there’s at least a clear audit trail.
corruption in privately owned fields is just as if not more rampant than public
Eh, debatable, it’s usually a mix of both.
Companies will do whatever they think they can get away with, and that includes getting favors from politicians. The more you mix the public and private sectors, the more corruption you get, as a general rule of thumb. A corrupt company w/o assistance from the government will likely just fail to competition, whereas with assistance it can drive out competition and thrive.
libertarians voting republican in every election is a bit unconvincing of their objectivity to me.
Why would a libertarian vote Republican consistently?
I typically vote Libertarian, unless there’s a good reason to vote for a major party. I did just that in 2020 when I voted for Biden, and the last time I voted Republican for President was in 2008 when I voted for McCain (not libertarian, just he seemed reasonable). I didn’t vote in 2012 because I just moved to a new state and didn’t feel comfortable voting for local offices (and Romney flipping from a reasonable moderate to a conservative in the general didn’t inspire me to vote for him, and I didn’t know about the Libertarian Party).
My state ballots (I’m in a very red state) are usually about 25% R, 25% D, and 50% L. I’ll only support a major party candidate if they’re particularly well suited for the role, or if the other candidate is especially dangerous (e.g. Trump).
I used to consider myself Republican, but that’s when I thought Republicans actually cared about small government, but that hasn’t been true for a very long time, if ever. Democrats certainly don’t, so I can’t consistently vote for them either.
If you just casually listen to garbage or propaganda like shapiro, some of it you’ll retain without retaining the source. Some of his bullshit will land in your brain under “Oh yeah I heard somewhere [complete bullshit]”. Especially if it’s something that gets repeated a lot.
Also if you’re listening uncritically, some of the entry level bullshit might land with you. He might lay blame on some outgroup and you might be like “huh that does make sense”. If you don’t go and do the work to research his claim to contextualize and possibly debunk it, now you’ve got right wing nonsense planted in your brain.
No one is immune.
That’s why you see multiple sides. If what Shapiro is saying doesn’t jive with what you’ve heard on other sources (liberal, neutral, etc), then you’ll doubt it.
The main problem is that many people don’t look at multiple sources.
I don’t think Shapiro or anyone like him have any sources of fact. None. Zero. Zip.
They have opinions, and they swap those between them as if they were facts, but that’s not the same thing AT ALL.
They often have more extreme takes of what the mainstream conservatives think, so it’s good to be aware of what they’re saying. I generally try to avoid opinion pieces like Shapiro and whatnot, but when I do, I try to get a good variety.
I mean, maybe? How is the hypothetical omni-consumer supposed to suss out which ones are legitimate? Especially when the propaganda is engineered to appeal emotionally.
It’s a lot of work to go and unpack something that’s deliberately designed to mislead you. That’s why I do not recommend casually consuming media like this guy. You’re not going to know when he’s just lying, and you might not notice the subtle misleads like a chart with a cropped y axis. It’s all going to slot into your brain as “Oh yeah I heard [racist quasi-fact] somewhere”
Like if someone says “More blacks are arrested for crimes” that just completely ignores unequal enforcement as a factor. A casual listener isn’t going to think about that. Especially not when it’s packaged in a slick fast talking youtube video.
Some sources are garbage and shouldn’t be consumed without the equivalent of a hazmat suit.
The main problems are the right wing is trending hard towards authortiarian fascism, and our capitalist hellscape doesn’t do a great job of promoting truth and education. Hot takes get clicks even if they’re wrong on numerous metrics. Clicks get money. Money is power. Power is what matters. Being factually correct or having beliefs that promote better outcomes for whatever metrics you care for isn’t as important as making money.
I agree. Unfortunately, it seems like everything is trying to mislead me these days, so the choice is to either combat it or pick which side I’d prefer to mislead me.
That happens all over the spectrum. The best solution isn’t to try to shut out media from one side (then you’ll overcorrect to biases from your preferred side), but to look for popular media from a variety of sides so you can start to notice the BS in more places.
That’s why I periodically listen to Ben Shapiro, Sam Seder, and other political commentators, to understand what the various sides are saying. I try to avoid clear nonsense like Alex Jones that’s just spewing hate, but otherwise try to get a good sample.
If a media source sounds more like one extreme than another, I know to look things up and perhaps find an alternative source. Even major, trusted publications have biases, so it’s good to be able to detect that.
Not trying to poop on your ability to tell propaganda from not, but considering liberal news the opposition to Ben Shapiros bs is a one way ticket to it. You’ve included 3 types of sources that all appeal uniformly to capitalism and left out leftist/socdem/socialist, which is a very “enlightened centrist” thing to do and basically saying your centrism is centered on the right. Your demographic are exactly why people like Tim Pool succeed in messaging and pulling people further right. Usually anyone who uses liberal as the opposing viewpoint to modern conservatism fits cleanly into this box.
Feel free to provide them. I’m not familiar with which sources are high quality to post them confidently.
Most I’ve seen are poorly cited opinion pieces, at least on the socialist camp. Democratic socialists like Bernie Sanders do a decent job, but that’s a very different thing, and usually larger media orgs do a decent job of covering their positions.
Not a fan. I think I’ve watched a few videos of his, but I honestly don’t see the appeal. Shapiro is at least kind of entertaining, so I occasionally tune in to see what rhetoric the right is using.
That’s a pretty broad brush you have there.
I consider myself a left-leaning libertarian, which means I see myself as the opposite of both conservatives and progressives, at least in terms of authority of government to control peoples’ lives.
I think the political compass is useful, and when I take the test, I’m usually about halfway down the bottom half of the chart, and I drift around the middle of the left/right spectrum (most recently, I was a little to the right).
I do periodically listen to socialists, but they usually support aggressive governments, so I rarely agree with much they have to say. I’m okay with libertarian socialism (e.g. Noam Chomsky), but I don’t think it’s practical and it’s certainly not popular. Instead, I promote co-ops, private unions, and similar business structures.
Check out democracy now
The humanist report on Youtube is a reliable leftist source of news that I’ve never caught in a lie. As leftists go he’s also pretty nonreactionary by including things inconvenient for socialist messaging which I appreciate.Vaush is a more reactionary but still rarely wrong source with nuance that most creators across the board miss. Of these two Humanist report is very hard to critique as anything other than genuine so I’d start there.
Government control and avoiding it is a common call in on the majority report and you may benefit from watching just how quickly those views fall apart with some scrunity from Sam Sedar.
The socdem viewpoint is that there are some government functions that shouldn’t be in the hands of private companies because they’re too important, such as healthcare, the millitary, and elections.
I don’t often find libertarians who disagree that some things should be wholly under regulatory agencies because it’s so apparent that corruption in privately owned fields is just as if not more rampant than public and objectively people who want government to fail leading government into the ground by leeching off of it isn’t really the proof that government is bad that they think it is. Personally if one side wants to control healthcare the way other nations do and lower cost to patients and taxpayers and the other wants to control the police and repress protests and the right to vote I don’t see them as equivalent violators, so libertarians voting republican in every election is a bit unconvincing of their objectivity to me.
Thanks for the recs, I’ll check them out! I’m not a fan of Sam Seder, but I’ll certainly check the others out.
My view isn’t about importance, but whether something can reasonably be competed over. Monopolies should be state run IMO, but pretty much everything else should be privately run.
This can actually be competed over, but some parts cannot.
I believe the government should provide emergency care (e.g. ambulances and ER), whereas private orgs can and should provide routine and longer term care. So if you get in a car accident, the government would cover everything until you’re stabilized enough to make decisions about longer term care yourself.
Agreed, though I’d like to restructure the military to prevent abuse by the commander in chief. I think private groups have a place here, but only with a formal declaration of war and to avoid the draft.
Agreed. I think it’s just insane that we’re okay with private orgs making voting machines. I’m not saying there was any form of tampering with our elections so far with these machines, but election officials should have full control of the source code and hardware.
I honestly don’t like the idea of voting machines anyway, just process paper ballots with counting machines and random human audits so there’s at least a clear audit trail.
Eh, debatable, it’s usually a mix of both.
Companies will do whatever they think they can get away with, and that includes getting favors from politicians. The more you mix the public and private sectors, the more corruption you get, as a general rule of thumb. A corrupt company w/o assistance from the government will likely just fail to competition, whereas with assistance it can drive out competition and thrive.
Why would a libertarian vote Republican consistently?
I typically vote Libertarian, unless there’s a good reason to vote for a major party. I did just that in 2020 when I voted for Biden, and the last time I voted Republican for President was in 2008 when I voted for McCain (not libertarian, just he seemed reasonable). I didn’t vote in 2012 because I just moved to a new state and didn’t feel comfortable voting for local offices (and Romney flipping from a reasonable moderate to a conservative in the general didn’t inspire me to vote for him, and I didn’t know about the Libertarian Party).
My state ballots (I’m in a very red state) are usually about 25% R, 25% D, and 50% L. I’ll only support a major party candidate if they’re particularly well suited for the role, or if the other candidate is especially dangerous (e.g. Trump).
I used to consider myself Republican, but that’s when I thought Republicans actually cared about small government, but that hasn’t been true for a very long time, if ever. Democrats certainly don’t, so I can’t consistently vote for them either.