It is such a crying shame people fall for this shit. I mean seriously, I am scared to death of being ignorant. The people that consume “the news” as their main source of information and believe it…or worse those BS sites that perpetuate “opinions” like your talking about…they are asking to have a distorted view of the world…no context…little substance…virtually no fact…and emotionally charged which causes people not to think clearly. This leads to bad habits, heightened suspicion, poor decisions (especially in their personal lives).

My experience with this is not in politics, but with finance. Financial news is probably less emotionally charged than political news, and a little bit more fact, but they still do a mediocre job at explaining how things work.

There are certain myths that are in the financial ether that gets people into a lot of trouble…using a house as an investment…or as collateral for debt financing…that is peddled at scale…especially to lower socioeconomic individuals…which gets people into a heap of financial trouble when they enter a recession.

Or when these fund managers or analysts get on CNBC or any other financial network and say why they like a stock, or there’s value still in the market, or the reason a stock goes down or up, or whatever… those are pitches…to get people to buy those stocks from those companies that are selling…especially during recessions when companies want to offload risk (sell risky assets)…so they find some poor dumb bastard to sell to that thinks they're getting a discount, and they're not.

Not having a good grip on reality is incredibly devastating financially to people, and also for their mental health, that is the most devastating thing about dis and misinformation. That is why intelligence agencies use it, to develop assets, and get people (assets) to do things that benefit “the handler” and are against their own interests.

People need to listen to Elon Musk more. He has talked about first principles a lot, breaking things down into their constituent parts, understanding the foundation, why things work the way they do, and then reasoning from there. Understanding foundations takes more work though, more work than being spoon-fed BS…especially from people that have less intelligence than the consumer does…which is incredibly tragic.

How do we know if the people that are giving us this information are dumber than we are? If they are, would we be consuming what they’re vomiting up?

News, opinion websites, etc…do not give good foundational knowledge or any foundational knowledge. And that is essential to understanding the world around us. There are tons of places to get foundational knowledge of how things work, the history of the issue, why we do what we do, the players that are involved, the money that is involved.

Anyway, as you can tell this is a rant, hehe. That's how good your post is :)