The “right” side is the one supported by evidence. There are some things maybe people can never agree on, but for the vast majority of issues, there is evidence that supports one side more than the other.
And that's a shame. People are scared to debate values because they don't want the value structures that their lives center around to crumble. Without debating values, you might end up spending a huge proportion of your life on something that later doesn't matter to you...
The propagandists would love you to throw up your hands and believe this; their goal is to paralyze you, sow chaos and despair.
It's like a liar saying to you, after they lie to your face for the 10th time, 'everyone lies'. It's a false attempt to justify and normalize their bad behavior. Technically yes, but it's meaningless; some people are far more trustworthy than others. The trustworthiness of information and politicians varies greatly.
> The trustworthiness of information and politicians varies greatly.
Yes it does - and we are hopeless at determining who is trustworthy and who isn’t.
For example I am a well educated, well paid, and politically aware person and I trust Trump. Other equally educated, paid, aware, etc people distrust Trump.
> throw up your hands
I think we need techniques to move in a positive direction even in the face of propaganda.
Techniques to ensure politicians are worse off when we the people are worse off. E.g. Salary capping for life at say 2x median state pay.
Techniques that help us risk adjust decisions based on how easy it is to back out of them. E.g. It’s far easier to add more immigrants if we find out we have taken in too few than it is to kick out immigrants if we find out we have taken in too many.
Techniques that ensure negative consequences of voting a particular way are felt by the voters. E.g. if you vote to ban private schools and it goes through then your kids are assigned to a bottom 25% public school.
> we are hopeless at determining who is trustworthy and who isn’t
We are not at all hopeless. We're not perfect, but we do pretty well. Just because people make mistakes sometimes doesn't at all mean that everyone is hopeless. Bad software is written, but we can produce good software. People trust the wrong person, but democracy and human rights has blossomed and spread.
Your proposals about politicians are interesting in that Trump likely wouldn't agree to facing the consequences of his actions.
> Bad software is written, but we can produce good software.
Great example! How do we make our political system more robust like software dev?
Even good software developers make plenty of mistakes and the system overall manages to keep trucking on.
It’s because we have a whole host of techniques to limit our losses - for example at work we have systems in place to automatically roll back recent changes if we detect a problem.
We could apply this technique to legislation by putting in a set of conditions under which the legislation would be automatically revoked.
> Your proposals about politicians are interesting in that Trump likely wouldn't agree to facing the consequences of his actions.
It is not just politicians - we all have an aversion to taking responsibility for our actions and beliefs.