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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 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.

Effectively, the right averages to be unreasonable, and the left to be reasonable. I find the media reflect that quite well. Maybe CNN forgot to consider an option, so they reconsider. Fox news doesn't, they're not trying to be reasonable.

So what's happening currently is all reasonable people on the left is trying to give a chance to the minority of reasonable people on the right. While the bigger chunk of unreasonable people on the right are trying to avoid all reasoning about alternative options.

In that sense, its normal for most reasonable news source to appear tied to the left. And most unreasonable news source to appear tied to the right.

> 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 could be for a variety of reasons, not limited to:

1. Right wing media is louder in their publicizing of these issues

2. Your media sources are more liberal and you view right wing media outlets as "unreasonable"

I am not American, but I have American friends. You cannot generalize political beliefs into who is reasonable or unreasonable in all their beliefs. Politics is a spectrum, and right now in America you have the loudest people screaming from the extreme right and (IMHO) the centre left. If you identify as more liberal, you're far more inclined to view this coverage as "reasonable" compared to more right leaning coverage.

> Effectively, the right averages to be unreasonable, and the left to be reasonable. I find the media reflect that quite well.

No, this is the current media situation in America. In other countries this kind of propaganda from both sides of the political spectrum is not as prominent, and it's far easier to have a rational and reasonable debate about political issues.

You can draw your own conclusions about America, but please do not come away with the impression that all right-leaning people are unreasonable. It's a big world, and this most certainly is not the case in other countries.

I'd argue it's also not the case in America. American media has just been hijacked by the most loud, extreme group of people (from both sides) because the executives have figured out this style of coverage earns more money.

From an outside view, American news media has basically turned into The Jerry Springer Show. It's trashy and devoid of almost any meaningful content, but people watch it to be entertained.

> 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.

> That whole categorization is a joke

It's a very serious distinction. One which wars have been fought over many times over (from the french revolution to the cold war). To trivialize it is more than naive.

> Tell me what you want, why you want it and how you believe will work best to get it

There are many things I personally want but underlying it all is the idea of non-egalitarianism. I want structure in any society where merit and hard-work are given the utmost priority. Why do I want it? Because it is the most natural and most proven way to create proper incentive structures for the best outcome for other humans and myself.

How will I get it? First of all, remove most, if not all, government involvement in citizens' affairs. Allow for free markets to prevail and for the best ideas and the best people to rise to the top. I will take aristocracy over democracy any day. Democracy has become a tool that's been used to take away the liberties of individuals in the guise of freedom and equality.

The American right and the French revolution right are competly different things, which is another good reason for me to believe the categorization is a joke. They've lost meaning, and serve only to avoid talking details, they naturally lead to partisanship.

From what you said, we could have a reasonable conversation, but you sound more libertarian then the current American right. Here lies the issue of affiliation. You sound reasonable, but if you affiliate yourself with breitbart, fox news, and the rest of the leading right, you're associating yourself with a lot of unreasonable people in position of power. And since you've mentioned soviet communism and german fascism before, you might know that's exactly how reasonable people got tricked in the past also.

> The American right and the French revolution right are competly different things

https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/26029/what-is-th...

I'd point you to that and say I'd only support your statement in so far as saying part of the American right is not as pro-liberty as it ought to be - this is in reference to neoconservatism and similar ideologies.

> They've lost meaning, and serve only to avoid talking details

They're shorthand and I think they're useful when you're genuine about discussion but want a quick way to understand where an argument is coming from. If you're disingenuous about conversation, it doesn't matter whether labels are used or not, you simply cannot self-regulate your bias to give room for discourse is all I'm saying.

> 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.

This applies to people on the left and the right. Choosing not to compromise on anything is as aspect of someone's personality which is independent of their political beliefs. You cannot unequivocally state that this mentality only applies to people on the right.

> I don't even know what right or left leaning imply. That whole categorization is a joke.

It's mostly because America has a two party system that you get a massive amount of political spectrum concentrated under the categories of "Democrat" and "Republican"

Go abroad and look at how many parties other countries have in politics:

Canada: Liberal, Conservative, NDP, Green, Bloc Québécois

UK: Conservative, Labour, LibDem, SNP, DUP, Green

France: En Marche!, National Front, Republicans, La France Insoumise, Socialist Party, ...

Germany: CDU/CSU, SPD, Die Linke, Green, FDP, AfD

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.

To be fair, the entire political spectrum in America is far right of anything in any other developed country. And so I agree with you, not all right-leaning people are unreasonable, take the US Democratic party, who I am to the left of but I consider reasonable. They are right-leaning -- they are a pro-business centrist conservative party. Democrats are so conservative they do not even support universal healthcare. Imagine in your country if the left wing party proudly campaigned to deny healthcare to the poor, but the right wing campaigned to deny healthcare to even more poor people and to give that money to the ultrawealthy. We have an actual left wing and its policy positions are popular if you take polls but there is almost no political representation of it or platform for it in traditional media.

It's tempting to pull out "both sides" rhetoric because reasonable people sympathize with others and try to see things from their point of view and assume since they believe something, there must be a grain of truth to it so they always feel like they should compromise. The problem is unreasonable people (or simply malicious ones) will take advantage of this impulse every single time and have been for decades. "But both sides!" is the climate that guarantees it's going to be impossible to have a rational or reasonable debate about political issues -- approaching a political debate assuming a compromise is inevitable and the other side is just as reasonable as you are is just accepting defeat before a single word is spoken. In this context, if both parties approach it with good faith debate can happen, but if not (as is our current situation) whoever is the most extreme always wins.

> 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 justify any extremists' actions but rather to illustrate that even when you are supposedly trying to appear centrist, you really aren't and what's worse is that you don't realize it. When this type of thing happens, you end up with bad outcomes. If you're going to be reasonable, also realize you're biased as I am (rightist).

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.

> at that point they'll "correct" with a new holocaust

Seriously ?

It's the pendulum I spoke of earlier at play.

Love your HN bio BTW. Too funny.

Your question is a bit cryptic. But yes, I believe tragedies on the scale of the the holocaust and the american civil war are a regular occurrence in human history and we've not seen the last of them yet. I think conservative estimates of climate change related deaths are already in that ballpark.

The death toll for the Iraq war was about a million dead for example, and likely only happened due to the influences described in the article, taking advantage of 9/11 (e.g. the surveys showing that Fox News viewers were more likely to believe Iraq perpetrated 9/11 than people who watched no news at all).

> Fox News viewers were more likely to believe Iraq perpetrated 9/11 than people who watched no news at all

They can be forgiven that considering that W perpetuated that lie as readily as the news outlets.

When left goes "too far", we have Mao's China or USSR. Or it OK as long as left thinks it's not "too far"?

... 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".

They hire political consultants to do the commentary for those election-night shows. They outnumber the journalists pretty overwhelmingly, that's just the way it works.

In defense of CNN, Democratic consultant James Carville was the first person on any of those shows - I was scanning pretty heavily - to acknowledge that Hillary Clinton was really hosed. Nobody else, even on Fox, seemed to believe it.

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.

> Marc is a partially closeted rightist

Closeted?

Ambiguous. Please let me know what's not clear and I'll respond.

Can someone point to this massive liberal bias that CNN has besides "being anti-Trump"?

It just feels like people on the right have made liberal mean anti-Trump.... Which seems like a bad definition to stake your own ideology on.

> When CNN gets a story wrong, the right creates a huge storm and people get fired. When the right gets a story wrong (Breitbart still pushing the hard anti-climate change line, Hannity with the Seth Rich conspiracy, the entire birther movement, Pizzagate, and on and on and on)... nothing happens. Nothing.

We see this in Australian media too, and I'm guessing everywhere else in the world is seeing it becoming more prevalent too. There's a real elitism around "what you are allowed to say"...

But they are! At least that's how it is perceived by the other side, and that's how you understand that perspective.

For a large number of people, truth is in the eye of the beholder. If a story confirms your preconceived biases, the journalist got it right and is telling the truth. If it opposes your beliefs, it's factually wrong. Truth is like relativity: There is no aether, no privileged reference frame.

When one believes, for example, with all of their soul and being, that climate change isn't happening, or that vaccines are good for you, then any reporting on the "facts" is ridiculous conspiracy, no matter how measurable it is. It's those greedy ivory tower elite, at it again! Reports about the falseness of climate change and the dangers of vaccinations are the lone voice of truth shining through.

You could write a report that you believe has zero bias. All observable facts. It will be seen as ridiculous, biased conspiracy by some people out there.

Maybe it's because defining what the "truth" is is complicated.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truth

The way humanity uses that word can sometimes be complicated, but don't fall into the trap of thinking that truth is:

http://yudkowsky.net/rational/the-simple-truth/

Good one.

But what happens when you have two competing truths?

You discover that "truth" is the wrong word to describe at least one of them.

There are two truths: 1) People need jobs today 2) Coal drives global warming

Which one do you act on today?

Those are the type of discussions people in decision making roles are wrestling with, which may be a different perspective than that of arm-chair decision making like the one we do here in this thread.

A truth being inconvenient in combination with a different truth... doesn't make it any less true.

You don't need to decide between them. They're both true, regardless of your policy choices.

> There are two truths: 1) People need jobs today 2) Coal drives global warming

> Which one do you act on today?

The two competing options seem to be:

(1) both, or (2) neither, using denial of the second as a empty gesture toward addressing the first.

Doesn't really seem to be a fundamental conflict between them.

I recommend this article to you about the failure and death of journalism.

https://www.google.com/amp/nypost.com/2016/08/21/american-jo...

CNN's Trump/Russia coverage has been ridiculous, theyre running that story 33% of the time 24 hours a day, and nobody has or will be fired for that. Unless their ratings sink so far that upper management needs to be changed.

Do you not think that covering the (admitted!) collusion between a presidential candidate and a foreign power warrants that coverage?

How was this admitted? You're probably misusing the word collusion. There's no evidence of collusion yet, and there's barely evidence of the Russia hacks. Those intelligence agencies are relying on the investigation that CrowdStrike did. They were the only ones with access to the compromised servers. It's not like they all took a look themselves and came to the same conclusion. It's been consistently exaggerated and misrepresented by the media because they have a bias.

> How was this admitted?

When Don Jr. tweeted out the emails specifically inviting him and other Trump campaign staff to a meeting in Trump Tower (fairly good chance Don Sr. was there too) with a Russian government connected lawyer to get dirt on the Clinton campaign.

> compromised servers

I think you're only talking about the DNC hacks? Where this is now a much wider scope and context due to their own admittances.

The Russian lawyer, Natalia Veselnitskaya, has closer ties to Fusion GPS, the people who came up with that "dossier" with the whole golden shower blackmail conspiracy theory, than she does the Russian government. The worst you can reliably take away from that meeting is that they decided to take a meeting with someone who claimed to be a Russian government lawyer with information on Clinton. Plus, there's more evidence of the Clinton campaign colluding with the Ukrainian government against Trump than there is evidence of Trump colluding with the Russian government.

And yes, I was referring to the DNC hacks.

> they decided to take a meeting with someone who claimed to be a Russian government lawyer with information on Clinton

Even if you want to claim that's all that happened, that is -still- collusion ("secret or illegal cooperation or conspiracy in order to deceive others") in the midst of a presidential campaign.

> there's more evidence of the Clinton campaign colluding

Oh please.