We have a lot of arguments in politics and eventually, it comes down to "Well prove it". How do we assess the value of a source authority?

For all any one of us may know, we are all the stars of our own personal Truman Shows, where everything in our lives are carefully scripted by some screenwriters in the sky. Eventually, it all comes down to who do you trust for good information?

I want to know how y'all make these decisions.

I've lived long enough and experienced enough that when any given subject comes up I can make up my mind based on past experiences or what history has taught.

Empiricism and logic in any case that it can be applied. The rest of the time, I just gather as much evidence as possible from diverse sources and make the best decision possible.

what he said,get as much information as possible and my own experiences and come to as rational a conclusion as I can

I get all of my information from the left wing sites that get posted here.

I mean how can you trust anyone else when you get nothing but the facts from sites like TheSmirkingchimp, democracynow, worldsocialistwebsite, thinkprogress or truthout?

The depth of knowledge and insight coming from these sites is so overwhelming that I can't even bring myself to look for anything better.

Lefties have this stubborn, unrealistic insistence that the world should operate in a fact-based reality. It's a pretty foolish notion.

There are so many false memes out there that it's hard to stay in the real world. Some aren't even the result of deliberate misleading.

One of my favorites it that, "50% of all marriages end in divorce". It's not true, and you can prove it to yourself. If you Google "marriage divorce", you will soon find an article with official statistics on this. Sure enough, you will find that the number of divorce decrees last year are about 50% of the number of marriage licences issued. This does NOT mean that "50% of marriages end in divorce". It is merely a comparison of the number of wedding events from the last year with the divorce events for all the marriages from the last, say, 50 years.

We'd be much better off if we were all getting our news from Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, right?

Well, how about this? I get all my news heads-ups from progressive sources. But I don't stop there. It's important to me to verify what I hear there, so I am really quite good about checking the sources that THEY use. I don't worry about stuff from the right side. There's a big credibility problem there, and I trust that, if there IS any good stuff from the right, They are going to let us all know about it.

...TRUST NO ONE.....does anyone even know the truth..or is the truth that which one read or sees on t.v....fact is unless one sees it with their own eyes,most conclusions are formed by someone else's

agenda and whether one agrees with what they hear and whether it falls within the parameters of what they believe is true..the fact is we may never know the real truth..and that's the way "they" want it.

..while "they" line their pockets with your gold..you are left out in the cold..the question is tho..where is all the transparency we heard about...

As I mentioned, we could all be the stars of our own Tuman Show for all we know. Don't you have to eventually trust SOMEbody?

I am sure there are plenty of leftist talk shows on the western shore that you can listen to. There have to be leftists somewhere in this state because the democrats always seem to win state wide elections.

Definitely not too conservative around here, which is a good thing!

Yeah.. You can leave the conservatism to us folks down on the Eastern Shore..

Sounds good to me.