- Unfollowed any news accounts and use Ublock to block suggested content on Twitter
- Unsubscribed from any news subreddits
- Of course never check news sites
And honestly feel better overall and less stressed. Sure you can claim being apathetic/ignorant towards global current events makes me a bad person, but I do not care. To me, no human is designed to handle as much information input as we experience today.
100% agree. I think the 24hr news cycle is a huge contributor to negative mental health.
When we travelled to the in-laws over the most recent holidays, the news was always on, and always talked about and my wife and I both commented afterwards it felt like an oppressive blanket of stress was laid over everything while we were there.
> And honestly feel better overall and less stressed. Sure you can claim being apathetic/ignorant towards global current events makes me a bad person, but I do not care.
I would not say so. But, I would expect you to NOT be outspoken and confident when someone else starts to speak about stuff related to current issues. And I would expect you to check yourself especially when it seems like the other person is saying something you intuitively disagree with, because chance that they are simply better informed is high.
It is quite possible you do it, I don't want to imply that. But, I have met quite a few people who don't follow news (proudly) but then are full of opinions about issues they don't follow.
That's the second part of de-stressing. First, stop watching news. Second, stop having an opinion on everything because at the end of the day nobody's opinion matters.
“Stop having an opinion on everything because at the end of the day nobody’s opinion matters.”
…don’t you see how nihilist this sounds? And also unrealistic. You will have opinions, everyone has opinions and beliefs and feelings or else they wouldn’t be able to function on a day to day basis. There is a scale to beliefs and opinions, based on how informed those beliefs and opinions are, and how well they mesh with conditions in your everyday life. It’s important to inform your opinions and beliefs; the news, however flawed in its current state, forms at least one source of that information.
I think that taking all of this as one absolute or another is unnecessarily polarizing this debate. It is very easy to argue that them news media economy is quite poisonous, but that doesn’t mean that all of the information is useless. For example: I need to prepare for a storm that is approaching the area, I need to know if a COVID wave is nearing so I know to be more careful, I need to know if parking rules change or trash day is being moved. These immediate events affect my actions directly and so I must pay attention, sifting through the other crap as necessary.
But even beyond that, this resignation to political nihilism is societally destructive. Like it or not, we are all connected in a society. Our actions affect others. We have shared infrastructure and services we all contribute to and benefit from. Part of that responsibility is a participation in politics. Is it currently toxic and despairing? Certainly. But sticking your head in the sand isn’t an option, as we depend on cooperation in order to preserve a society on any level and that requires coordination.
Should we reduce our news consumption? Of course. But we also shouldn’t eschew all outside information and live in a self-imposed bubble. Maybe skip the entertainment section and focus on stuff that impacts you directly. If there is something that is shallowly followed by the news that sounds important, of course dig into longer-form articles until you understand it in full or discard it if it is important. Discretion matters.
That was general attitude in post communist countries. I remember that well and had same opinion.
Later on, I realized that was what made us risk slipping back... and likely was contributed factor to why Russia actually slipped back to authoritarian, oppressive and aggressive. The countries that moved more toward democratic did so thinks to people who were not apathetic.
"...because at the end of the day nobody's opinion matters."
This is a danger that is in my opinion developed by over-consuming news and information from many sources. Of course, it is generally good to take news from multiple sources but if you are not payed for dig in information, you won't have much time to get deeply into problem and finally you just stay on the shallow top - which naturally let to resign on any opinion, because everything seems to be relative. It is not, it is simply a lack of invested time into subject.
Matrix 4 btw speaks a little bit about it if you pay attention.
On the other hand it is perfectly fine to say "I don't know". Which is not what we are learning at schools. We are persecuted to say that unfortunately. And here we are... Everyone has opinions on everything.
I agree with the general concept that, at the individual level, news consumption is bad for your mental health and pretty much useless. At the societal level though... if everybody took this approach there would be no accountability for politicians or corporations.
How do you cover, for example, the behavior of the spouse of a US SCOTUS justice? You indicate that you think it can be done with "almost no bias" and "raw and short". Maybe. But this provides absolutely no context, which whether you feel that Ms. Thomas' actions are fine or reprihensible and disqualifying towards her spouse, you absolutely need in order to understand what is actually going on.
The context can be set in a second paragraph. With teletext we often (not usually) had a two page text for a new so you could get more info on important news such as major terrorist blasts or natural disasters.
Check in once every few months. That's plenty. Done. [EDIT] Exception for local news. Maybe every week or two.
Use the extra time to read books on political science, economics, and history. Maybe some media studies. You'll be a better voter doing that instead of following the news closely. It's not as if it should have taken someone who knew nothing about either person, but a lot about the actual issues and how politics works, a ton of time to figure out if they wanted to vote for Trump or Biden. 20 minutes of googling right before going to the polls should have been enough.
I'll come out of my shell a few times a week and won't understand what's going on. News sites just tell me the last 18 hours' worth of updates... So... I either disengage entirely and can't carry on a conversation or I stay engaged and worry about events I cannot affect.
I'd like a "I haven't checked the news in [7] days and some guy at work mentioned [Ukraine talking to the UN], what's that all about?" website.
I guess it'd be 7 days worth of news synopses for the topic.
[7 days ago this city fell, Joe said stern words about it, and the Sauds started selling oil in Yuan because it didn't want China to get all its oil from Russia.]
[6 days ago that city was retaken, and everyone was surprised.]
[5 days ago Joe said more stern words but had no effect.]
Perhaps more like globalist/corporatist, which reflects their recent ownership?
In 2015, Pearson - a publishing company - sold its controlling stake to a bunch of corporate owners, like the Agnellis (43%) and the Rotschilds (21%), among others.
The change in their editorial direction was immediately visible (I had been a subscriber/reader for 35+ years until 2016)
I wouldn't argue with that one, either. But it's also not "hard left" :)
The word - if we're willing to shed many of the more populist overtones around it - is probably "neoliberalism". Consistently siding with money & corporations, with a democratic bent. (But not too much!)
Since 2016, it's more and more living on its reputation and not coming quite to terms with the changes in the world. It is still firmly rooted in facts - can't really provide economic guidance when you deny realities - but it seems somewhat unable to engage with the rise of populism and nationalism in an economically intertwined world.
It's not distinctly or memorably left, either. It really, really isn't. It's milquetoast centrist with a helping of globalism, and a good chunk of neoliberalism.
You won't see it calling to defund the police, or that we should tax the bejeezus out of billionaires. And these are moderately left, not memorably left.
The Rothschilds have had a substantial stake in the Economist for 70 years, including prior to the time when Pearson was a shareholder. Pearson did not control the board, had only 6 of the 13 board seats, and never had majority control of the company. It's unclear what is meant by "corporate owners;" Pearson is a publicly traded corporation.
I'm also a long-time subscriber and do not understand the "shift" you are referring to. The Economist has been pro-free-trade, generally against heavy regulation, and a magazine that consistently takes small-l liberal positions for a very long time. That stance means that sometimes they are right - deregulation has been good in many areas - but sometimes they get it wrong, when, for example, free trade may have adverse effects.
Sometimes they take positions that are bad - they argued for the second Iraq war - but they are pretty up front about their biases, and generally don't represent their biases as purely objective facts, as many traditional newspapers do. Their writing is clear and concise and is not meant to be consumed uncritically. The magazine is still unparalleled for what it offers.
Pearson had a 50% stake, most of which was sold to the Agnellis. So now, the Agnellis and the Rotschilds are the largest (and, together, controlling) shareholders.
Board members like Lady de Rothschild and Eric "you have no privacy" Schmidt publicly supported/donated to the Hillary Clinton campaign. The Rotschilds were invited by the Clintons to spend their honeymoon at the White House. The rest of the board reads like the attendees at the Bilderberg Group and the Council on Foreign Relations. The very definition of elitism, and collusion with the governments (Schmidt, Alex Karp, who is also on the board, there are also Sirs and Baronesses). "Free trade" - yes, reserved for the multinationals, Most definitely not mom-and-pop, small/medium business oriented anymore (which they used to be, before the sale).
The fact that they (probably still) have superbly written articles should not disguise the shift in their political stance.
I've actually found that Improve the News [1] is good for something like that. It has sliders to let you select what kind of new you are looking for with one of the sliders which controls "shelf life" ranging from short to long and "recency" from evergreen to recent. Not exactly what you are looking for, but I've found it can serve a similar purpose.
I used to think the same, but eventually realized that both "facts" and, perhaps most especially, the omission-of-coverage categorize a journal as left or right...
Even the words a journal uses are dog whistles for "we think alike". "Latinx" versus "Latino". "Illegal Immigrant" vs "Undocumented Worker".
I believe you'd have a far more satisfying and productive time coming out of your shell if you redirected Joe's conversation to asking about him, or his kids, or his hobbies- keeping it local like the article concludes.
Unless it's your job, neither of you really understand whatever is happening with Ukraine and your conversation will be mostly limited to repeating what you've been told to each other, which doesn't enrich either of your lives.
I think that OP meant Joe Biden. Timeline checks out. It is unlikely OP is in position to talk about presidents kids and hobbies.
> Unless it's your job, neither of you really understand whatever is happening with Ukraine and your conversation will be mostly limited to repeating what you've been told to each other, which doesn't enrich either of your lives.
A bit of very practical issue here is that Russian troll force is in full force right now, at least where I live. Trying to affect general opinion of people, in order to influence future elections and to make NATO/Eu passive due to pressure from population. The money were in fact flowing from Russia toward our right-wing nearly fascist or clearly fascist parties.
I dont think "everyone else should be passive" is good strategy here.
The Ukraine example might be true for a non-european country, but as a European in these times I want to be informed. I want to help refugees and the victims of war (either by donating or giving shelter for some days). If I wouldn't know things from the news, I wouldn't know about these things.
Knowing in what direction world events might change is good to be at least mentally prepared when things turn worse.
It doesn't have to be checking the news 24/7 but checking it once a day for the important parts I think it's important. I would rather say people need to learn how to distance themselves from the news a bit to keep a healthy mental state with all the things happening right now.
As a fellow European, IMO it’s very important to follow especially what non-Ukraine politicians are doing. That will help a lot in elections in coming decades. Let’s keep them accountable for once.
I doubt there will be a non-biased compilation that doesn't bend narrative here or there.
But it will be interesting to compare my own experience to what people will try to make out of this later on.
Regarding COVID at least in my country it was pure madness. A lot of double standards, different media channels skipping different bits to bend the narrative, people who did little trying to claim credit, discrediting people based on information we have today even if they acted okay-ish given what we knew at the time....
It's very interesting to watch history that I witnessed being written. It will be even more to see how people reflect on this 20 or 50 years later. A lot of food for thoughts if history we know reflects what actually happened in other cases.
It’s pretty easy to understand what is going on in Ukraine in general. It’s also pretty easy to notice certain politicians/institutions/companies reactions. Then it will be pretty easy to make choices. If people ain’t passive, we can ensure this ain’t happening again in 5-8 years.
This is an awful subreddit. It's mostly used for catching up on stupid Youtube/Twitch drama or asking why some other subreddit has been banned/locked/quarantined. On real stories the answers are very often very misinformed.
There are usually news programs on Sunday that will go over the past weeks worth of news. I like Bloomberg radio, which airs like 3 or 4 different weekly recap shows on that day.
Far away problems are so much more interesting than those nearby. You needn't really do anything about them, and its much easier to assign your own valuation to anything you do. Your successes can be trumpeted as much as you like and your failures need never be known to anyone but you.
Yes! And unlike nearby problems you know you can't really do anything about them. How many people in the US would read a national story about crime or education without knowing who the police chief is of their city, or who is on the school board, or even who is on their city council..
This is true, there's an inner kibitzer inside all of us who needs material. This is the real source of entertainment that the article mentions. Every section of the paper caters to this: what would you do about the war, would you have given poor people better benefits, would you have slapped Chris Rock, what would you have worn to the awards, would you go out with that guy, how should your team have set up their defense?
The only actionable section is the weather report, you can decide shorts or umbrella.
The piece is utterly right. News in the constantly-coming format is junk food. Almost no context is given, even thought nothing at all makes sense if you just watched the news. What is NATO, what is a central bank? Why are the same teams at the top of the league? All of these things need some basic explanation that is never in the news, but always in any basic long-form piece.
International and national news are often important, but rarely immediate. By not immediate I mean that you can't affect it, it won't affect you and you don't have to do anything about it. Hyperinflation in Zimbabwe? Interesting, but nothing to do with me really. Ship stuck sideways in a canal? That might cause problems at work later and maybe I should get that bike I was planning on now rather than later, but I'll be fine. War between nearby countries that produce oil and food... I better check my emergency stocks are in good shape and that full electric car sounds good right about now? And so on, important and some of them will affect you, but usually with a delay or in a roundabout way.
Local on the other hand. Very immediate, but often not that important, at least outside your local area. Sometimes you can even affect things and if it's something that can affect you and requires action, it might be a matter of hours. Water main breaks, you won't have running water for three days? Fill up buckets, head to the store, right now! But that's a minor inconvenience compared to international news, if they end up affecting you.
> News makes you scared of highly dramatic and highly unlikely events (plane crashes, shark attacks, terrorism etc) while also being oblivious to insidious and creeping risks that are low-key and hard to make dramatic and visual (say antibiotic resistance or indeed chronic stress caused by being in a news-induced perpetual state of physiological arousal).
This is perhaps one of the most important points in this post that's buried pretty deep in the article.
The author here is not advocating for "head-in-the-sand" avoidance of reality.
Often when I see real, systemic issues brought up on HN or elsewhere: climate, the overshoot of industrial society, resource depletion etc. These concerns are often dismissed as "the media just wants you anxious!". But, by and large, the real scary pieces of information about these topics are not published by major media.
The media wants you anxious, but not so concerned that you seriously question our mainstream mode of life. You should worry about nuclear war with Russia, but not about the war for natural gas that's really going on. You should be anxious about climate change, but only enough to make you recycle, not so much that you question the economic system that is fundamentally unstable.
The media is owned by powerful corporations and individuals, but at the same time it's profitable to keep people in heightened emotional states. So on one hand they want to induce fear and anxiety, but at the same time they don't want to give anyone real concerns about the world we live in that might cause them to want to disempower the media's owners.
Yeah, well, no. You can't really function in society these days without following 'The News' to at least some extent.
That doesn't mean you should buy into the '24h News Cycle' or the 'Extremism-inducing-filter-bubble', though. Myself, I don't pay any attention to 'The News', except as delivered on paper once-a-week via The Economist(1), and daily via their 'The World in Brief' email.
So, this morning, I learned that 'At one point an actor slapped a comedian, sending the internet into a frenzy' -- which is, like, all I needed to know, right?
Footnotes: (1) Yes, which is a relatively right-wing, centrist if you will, publication. I love it, especially disagreeing with it...
In what way can you not function in society? Is that just in the sense that the news creates common cultural touchpoints for people to chat about around the water cooler? If so, as you say you don't really need to be that engaged to know the gist of what's going on. An occasional glance at a reputable, less-doomscrolly news source like the Econ, BBC, NYT or something like that should suffice.
I'm not sure we disagree? If you read The Economist weekly, you should be fine (although you can still be caught out not knowing about, say, today's Oscar's <tm, now go away> scandal.
But completely disconnecting from 'The News'? That won't work at all these days, I'm afraid. I quite vividly experienced this a while ago when I returned from living in the US to my native Netherlands: I was completely unaware of some extremely-popular local hit songs. So, when people quoted these to me, I just didn't get the reference, like, at all. This caused quite some awkward moments.
Now, magnify that experience to the world stage...
oh yeah I wasn't disagreeing with you, just trying to think about what you meant. I agree, you probably want to know the basic pop-cultural and international goings-on in order to not be left out of conversations.
I’m still not seeing the need for “The News” here. There’s no reason not to follow your interests/hobbies. And there are other ways to catch up on world events without the daily drip of sensationalism. The author isn’t saying you shouldn’t read anything ever.
But you don’t need to read the front page of CNN every day to stay up to date on the latest music. In fact, you’d be much better served by reading publications focused on that - the opposite of consuming the content meant for mass consumption.
People quote things that I don’t recognize all of the time. This is likely to happen for all kinds of reasons, e.g. generational gaps and not just because you stopped reading the daily headlines.
I think what you’re highlighting is that getting off the news hype cycle might make people around you notice. But a different response to that would be to have a conversation about why you unplugged.
That’s what I do, and it leads to some interesting conversations.
Only you can decide if the personal cost of continuing to consume is worthwhile just to maintain a certain vocabulary so you can continue socializing as you always have.
This isn’t a value judgement by the way, just an observation.
I'm afraid I don't follow your point. Saying that something "won't work at all these days" means that there are meaningful, and I stress: meaningful, aspects of our life that totally break down in the absence of said thing. An occasional few seconds of awkwardness (which is a totally fine emotion to feel) regarding some celeb drama is, in all honesty, insignificant.
You didn't talk about being fired or being shunned, being discriminated or being laughed at; you presented a very very bland example equivalent to admitting to your colleagues that you didn't notice a new coffee machine was installed.
Maybe you suffer from a mental condition that amplifies these emotions so much that you can't stand that occasional awkwardness, but I don't see how that justifies defending being addicted to the news cycle.
Articles that engender good feelings, either by revealing a positive story or reporting a positive event, do not receive nearly the same level of engagement.
Anger sells. Outrage sells. Media companies have known it since the dawn of the newspaper. Bad news generates anger and outrage, hence all news is bad news. It's a natural consequence of the human condition.
Today I discovered a video of someone who walks into a forest in winter and builds an overnight shelter out of pine trees, lights a fire and sleeps the night in -25C/-9F temperatures with just a woolen blanket. There is no talking. His channel has about 380k subscribers.
The video has TEN MILLION views. So many of the comments are of the form "this is the most beautiful/relaxing/wonderful thing I've seen in years".
I like stuff like that. A similar (but warmer) channel I subscribe to is “Primitive Technology” [0], and most of my subscriptions are about what is good in the world rather than what is bad.
Exceptions on my subscription list are Kurzgesagt (self-described as “Optimistic nihilism”) and the maker of the machinima “Freeman’s Mind” [1](voicing the silent protagonist as an antihero).
Thing is, I’m not normal. If my nature was the modal average of humanity, the horror genre and tabloids and spectator sports and celebrity gossip wouldn’t exist.
IMO news comes in two flavors, one of which should be avoided like the plague it is, and one which you should pay somewhat close attention to (relatively). The first, national and international news. And the second being local news. We should embrace the local journalists who shine light on local politics.
I would really like to follow this advice and stop reading news completely. But I like talking to people and generally, news is among the most commonly discussed topics. Furthermore, it helps me evaluate if I have similar opinions to the person I'm talking to (and thus the conversation is likely to continue someday). The article doesn't mention how to fulfil this need and it seems that I would become isolated if I decided to really follow it. I agree with the assessment but I don't know how to fix the problem I've mentioned.
I spent my life trying to be a well-informed investor. It turns out that all you have to do is buy real assets when you are young and just hold them forever. And don’t ever sell anything. That’s it. As long as the world is relatively peaceful you will get rich.
I generally think news(a majority of it) is shameless drivel with extreme bias to certain perspectives. That being said with the pandemic and all the changing laws/issues surrounding it, not to mention covid community case counts were invaluable to understand. I would completely abandon the news in a heartbeat but I trade stocks and need to understand world news along with business dealings for me to make intelligent trading decisions.
I have been a very strong adherent of this philosophy for over 30 years.
There’s an adage, “there’s nothing as worthless as yesterday’s news”. Which led me to wonder, “was it even worth knowing yesterday?”
I realized the solution was a low pass filter.
I first switched to a seven-page newspaper (CSM) delivered through the mail. I realised the editors had to figure out whether it would still be interesting by the time it arrived and important enough to take up space in the paper.
I soon switched to a weekly newspaper (The Economist) and monthlies. I haven’t looked back. The nice thing about a paper like the economist is remained relatively small (few pages) so had to make the same class of decision as the CSM, rather than expand the paper.
I also have an RSS list of trade journals and such that I skim once a week, reading the odd title that looks interesting. Most of the time it’s only a handful of articles.
As for the high frequency stuff and stuff outside my bubble: I still talk to people and so I hear about stray stories. I do find it interesting that I have yet to have anyone bring up the Ukraine situation. At all.
Good point. I interpret “nothing as worthless” to mean “extremely low worth, but not necessarily nil” and indeed instead of “worth” I could say “worth in aggregate”
Clearly there things worth knowing and not all of them were by Aristotle, Bach, Newton or Wittgenstein:-). The low pass filter screens put the froth; the selection of sources, the dross.
Not that I even read every article in The Economist, but I do read about things I wouldn’t notice or bother to were I reading from the firehose.
Side point: great thing about HN is that someone can say “here’s a clarification or contradiction in what you said” and have it often not be hairsplitting, so can spark a conversation rather than shut one down.
That’s a great question! I do scan titles from an RSS feed more often than one might expect but ignore what I think of as “froth”. More example while a “show HN” might be like catnip to me, in reality I skip most of them (sorry, brave show-ers, you guys are great).
I’m not much of a social media conversationalist but I do find the discourse level of HN in the topics that interest me typically high enough that I often learn from it, thus it’s worth it and fun to participate.
(Discourse quality is bimodal but that’s true at a cocktail party too, even one full of nerds)
Similar to you, I keep my news limited to the local Sunday paper, HN, and word of mouth. Unlike you, I’ve found that Ukraine seems to be all anyone wants to talk about lately.
> I do find it interesting that I have yet to have anyone bring up the Ukraine situation.
Speaking of "weekly" discussions, the Ukraine situation has been brought up in my weekly Church prayers since it started.
Generally speaking, if it a current event that the Priests make 2 or 3 "intentions" for (in the Catholic mass, the prayers that occur after the Homily but before the preparations), its an incredible event. In many situations, the words are vague so that it applies to as broadly as possible (ex: there usually is something about wars and disasters), but Ukraine specifically is brought up in those prayers in my experience.
Which makes sense, the suffering and pains of that country are the greatest seen in many decades.
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Generally speaking, the intentions are specific to the parish community (pray for X who died last week) and local. Sometimes, a "sister parish" from another side of the world get their intentions emailed to our Church (ex: a hurricane that affects Haiti will be brought up, because our "sister-Parish" is in Haiti, so their "local" issues are brought up in our prayers as well. My current Parish doesn't have a sister-parish, but my last one had one in Haiti). For a global event to be brought up in specific terms (more so than just "prayer to end wars". But a specific "prayer to help the people of Ukraine") is pretty rare.
This gets at what I was talking about. I think people in other regions have also suffered greatly. This is not to detract from the suffering of the Ukrainians, but is just to clarify the facts.
I think that this is larger and more intensive than the Yemen war - it seems that already in this month the combatants in Ukraine have had as much or more casualties than all the years of Yemen war; Yemen has had 15000 civilians directly killed by war but I think Mariupol alone will see that much when the fighting ends and bodies are dug out of the rubble, if we look at displaced persons, Wikipedia states that Yemen has displaced 4 million but this conflict has already displaced 10 million, etc.
The last weeks in Ukraine have seen more damage than Yemen-like conflicts had on their worse year, the Russian invasion firepower is simply on a different scale than what Yemen or Houthi forces could muster. The intensity of this war, as a mass full scale industrial land war, actually is unusually large.
The shear amount of large-scale artillery barrages going on is large enough to be picked up by NASA's FIRMS satellite. And there seems to be many Twitter threads where people collect information from that FIRMS / Forest Fire satellite to document the artillery strikes in realtime.
Not even in the earlier wars of Russian aggression (Second Chechen War or Georgia War) seem to have this level of artillery.
That being said: a fair amount of it is Ukrainians counter-artillery striking Russians and fighting back (which Chechnya and Georgia were largely unable to do effectively). So perhaps your point is that Ukraine isn't a one-sided massacre and has mounted at least some effective means of defense?
Ukraine would be suffering more if Russia managed to get within Artillery Strike of Kyiv for example, but the Ukrainian forces have stalled out that advance... largely keeping Kyiv safe from destruction (well... to a greater degree than we've seen so far anyway). Mariupol on the other hand isn't as lucky, and widespread artillery is clearly being used upon that city.
With humanitarian corridors closed, its clear that Mariupol is being sieged, Leningrad style, and there's widespread reports of starvation to death. There's also reports of many civilians being transferred to Russian camps. Then there are also the famous "hospital strikes" and "theater strikes" have have killed hundreds alone.
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But I guess you're right. Things could be worse for some other cities / areas who were unable to fight back against their oppressors. Most of the genocide events of the past decades are pretty horrible as well.
But there needs to be something to be said about the huge, large-scale use of artillery that really hasn't been seen since WW2-era mass combat.
Countries don't suffer or experience pain, people (and other living things) do.
The notion that individual suffering can be added up for some total of inhumanity is somewhat dubious, as are comparisons of individual deaths: is it the number of casualties that matters, does it suffering experienced before death factor in, and does it make a difference if it was caused intentionally and without good cause, accidentally, naturally, etc.?
But yeah, it's rather gruesome. Syria is very similar, for some reason.
Suffering caused by armed conflict, in Europe? Probably. (I'm from Sarajevo and I think we are a close second if not the first.)
Mass suffering by any cause anywhere? Between the Tsunamis and diseases and earthquakes and awful civil wars and genocides, sadly, I think the competition is quite stiff :(
I'm more concerned that a lot of friends in our parish called for war and justify censorship or strict sanctions. I guess this are not Christian values.
Sure, we should help. But not only Ukrainian's but all people that are damaged by war. We should also pray for our enemies.
> I still talk to people and so I hear about stray stories. I do find it interesting that I have yet to have anyone bring up the Ukraine situation. At all.
Could be your own bubble. Most everyone in my circle has brought it up. Many of us brought it up because we know people who are from Ukraine or have lived there extensively. I live and work in SV. Lots of Ukrainians work and live here.
Read my other comments in this thread about HN, but I mainly do a title skim, and a topic that’s an outlier but appears on the front page might cause me to look. Also I do comment and follow up.
I much preferred the print CSM to their online version. With the print I knew what to read front to back. With their web version it seems less organized. Stories remain for a week or longer as new ones crop up. It’s hard to know where to focus.
The economist model is much better. A dedicate weekly edition you can read front to back with daily articles posted outside of that.
In the olden days when coal fires in open fireplaces were part of daily life, old newspapers were used to build up the base of the fire. You would scrunch up sheets of newspaper, pack them into the hearth, then add some kindling on top, then add a modest amount of coal, preferably dry coal.
With a single match you would then set light to the scrunched up newspaper, which would set light to the wood, which would get the coal started. Once the coal was glowing you could add more coal and the fire would be truly lit.
To speed up the process you could hold up a sheet or two of broadsheet newspaper over the fireplace, so air would be sucked in at the bottom to hold the flat sheets tight over the fireplace opening, making the fire roar. This was like 'turbo mode'.
This whole process was time consuming and you would generally be using newspapers that were a few days old. Frequently this 'news' had some real gems in it. Removed from the original context by a few days, the news articles often had details that were not important at the time, but, with hindsight, made them somewhat curious.
Because you might be holding this news up around the fireplace for a few minutes with it lit up by a roaring fire, you were sort of obligated to read beyond the headlines.
There were different wars at the time, as well as labour disputes. It was often that you would read something that foreshadowed the news of the day on the radio - which we called 'wireless' back then.
I found that the old news, read this way, was a lot more thought provoking. I found myself questioning more.
Nowadays you could go onto the Internet Archive and find the headlines for a given day. However, we tend not to do that. The news just morphs from one day to the next, lacking distinct daily episodes like it did in the days of printed papers. Articles can be edited and updated, to be the same but different.
I agree with the article and try to encourage relatives to stay away from the gogglebox. The TV news is utterly toxic. But I feel that it is end times for this mainstream media. Only boomers truly consume it, anyone under fifty isn't tuned in and were not around when the news informed a national conversation.
The blanket propaganda/news of today is not the same as the national conversation that was once a thing. The Overton Window has gone widescreen and narrow at the same time. If you are not with the mainstream narrative then you can only be deemed to be 'worse than Trump/Putin/Assad/Hitler/Farage'. Or a communist. What was the left has got old and conservative. Or co-opted, particularly when it comes to identity politics. It has become infantilised with the majority under fifty just opting out of giving a damn.
LOL the "olden days" of open fires are very much alive and well here in NZ. There's a small town near me that gets smog in winter due to coal smoke from people who only have space heaters and single glazing.
I tend to agree; I don’t really follow news myself. If there’s anything big going on, I’d know anyway.
But IMO there are two blind spots in that philosophy:
- If everybody did that, even the big things would not propagate. You’d only know there is a war going on if you heard the bombs.
- Voting becomes a problem. Since everything you hear is from people around you, it is most likely an opinion, which you will then echo. Also you might miss stuff which would affect your opinion, but which your friends didn’t care for.
I dont read news except cs related because they have no direct impact on my life meanwhile big stuff like covid is big enough that i will eventually hear about it
All that negative stuff you have to go thru when reading news makes it being bad deal
As far as the terminology goes, maybe. As far as people choosing to believe what is convenient, profitable, or flattering about the world around them, that's been the case as far back as anyone can recall. I think we like to imagine that technology both makes us immune to the problems of our ancestors and makes our problems immune to historically-informed solutions.
Oh most definitely - I'm talking about the meaning of "fake news." It used to be a very specific phenomenon: sites/articles designed to spread misinformation, usually by cloning actual news outlets in order to make it more convincing. These weren't just "overly-spun" opinions or something, it was stuff like "Ilhan Omar doesn't want you to see these photos of her training at an Al Qaeda camp" featuring doctored photos or just grainy photos of some woman with a gun (actually saw that posted by a cousin) and "Obama signs bill opening 100 abortion factories." Just absolutely ridiculous, completely fabricated stuff, designed to spread like wildfire for ad dollars by capitalizing on "just reading the headlines and sharing what looks right" culture.
Oh yes, I agree. I have decided to create one tailor-made also for me.
During few weeks without the information overload I discovered that:
• Having the overview and discussing the current affairs personally as an unbiased listener is more liberating than analysing the text alone behind the screens.
• The categorization of received news reveals those which simply interpret the source and those which really generate the original information.
• Working on a computer presents a risk of being distracted by reading various articles and clicking on random links. Their reduction increases my productivity and I am able to be more focused on my tasks, without temptation of countless distractions.
• Ignorance is bliss. It eliminates the prejudices, teaches us not to be opinionated nor to ask the right question.
• Any form of “decentralization” of receiving information eliminates the manipulation of thinking.
We are being indoctrinated by a fear agenda to excessively consume media, television and radio. Let’s not forget that a frightened mind can be easily manipulated, which is used by both political power and corporates. Few of the wealthiest IT companies with a monopoly set the global opinions. They decide which information we receive; thus, they have boundless power. Because we don’t care. We consider the freedom of speech as a right without any duties and responsibilities and meanwhile it slips through our fingers.
I think this is a great and useful perspective. The most salient point being that "fake news" and "bias" and "balance" is a red herring to the much bigger problem of "news" in general. The near-universal acceptance that one can and should have firm opinions about complex ongoing events, some constant stream of incomprehensible information that is most likely completely unrelated to you, is the actual problem. I think the author is basically spot on here.
Where I think it breaks down is the prescription that everyone can necessarily separate themselves from "news". I think this is increasingly infeasible. Even if you, personally, don't buy a subscription or scroll twitter, I don't think it's too outlandish to expect that people around you in your family or community might take action based on some national or international news that is admittedly basically pointless. Are you supposed to righteously shut down every news-related conversation about that you're a part of?
More broadly this also runs into the absurdity of trying to define arbitrary boundaries around "news". You're just begging your unconscious mind to label subjects you are personally uncomfortable with as "news" and therefore not worthy of considering.
So removing "news" from your life as much as possible, or at least separating if from yourself and your ego to some significant extent, can really only be part of the answer and is also by definition an endless uphill battle. I don't think there's any getting away from the need for a broader media literacy.
Also:
>And perhaps there is something to that, given that my online avatar is a pixelated rendering of Stanczyk the Court Jester. But jesters are kept around because they say what needs to be said. And they express these unpopular messages with enough wit and entertainment that the kings let them keep their heads and indeed value their council.
This faux-humility disclaimer made me cringe. I thought this was a good piece overall, but this made me almost close the tab. Don't do this. They already opened the blog post, don't desperately plead with your reader that you promise that your thoughts are worth reading.
Ah yes. Reading the news is useless in the sense that reading the mainstream news is useless. It's both deliberately (pushing a narrative) and by incompetence (Gell Mann Amnesia) wrong more often than not.
That doesn't mean cutting yourself off from the world is wrong. Large outlier events often cast shadows (Covid, Ukraine war) and if you're in the path of the outlier events, knowing early pays off.
The hard question is, how do you see the large shadows without having to twitch at every small event. The answer to this is, to some extent, mentioned in the article - expensive, subscription-based newsletters. It's still not the full answer. There are too many areas to pay attention to. Best answer I've found so far is having a group of friends & contacts with wide-ranging interests.
How important news is too you depends on your relationship to where the news is coming from. In times of disaster, we pay greater attention to those places we are most familiar with, or emotionally attached to.
Before email was so prevalent, my mother said the same thing when me and my siblings went travelling overseas for months at a time without calling. Now, she's in contact with us a few times a week and acting as the central news source for us all.
So of course: if one of us was in a country that was having some "news" she'd pay extra attention and reach out to share what's going on with us and the entire family.
I agree with much of what the author states. However I find it hard to completely quit cold turkey.
I’ve settled into three subscriptions: the local paper (which also carries syndicated inter/national stories that I ignore completely–I’m looking for local politics and economy, and especially the special interest pieces in the Sunday edition and the monthly community-events inserts, not the crime report type stuff); The Economist, in which I ignore all the leader articles and merely try to find at least one or two interesting articles to read each week; and The Atlantic, with mostly the same strategy as that for The Economist.
I recently let my IEEE membership lapse but did the same with their Spectrum magazine.
I try to do the rest of my reading in books and not social media–HN excluded, of course!
I still have this teetering idea that I should cancel The Economist, it often seems like a gossip rag dressed up in sophisticated verbiage. But every now and then I do find interesting, if not useful, articles. Maybe I’ll switch out The Economist and go back to IEEE Spectrum or something similar.
I usually enjoy the long featured pieces in The Atlantic.
I'm an IEEE member mostly for Spectrum, and have noticed that some recent issues seem slimmed down a little bit. My assumption is that they just haven't had as much content to publish lately, and I'm glad they have made the decision to shrink the magazine rather than pad it out with filler. Aside from "Numbers Don't Lie", I'm continually impressed by their staff, and the submitted articles are often pretty good too.
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- Unfollowed any news accounts and use Ublock to block suggested content on Twitter
- Unsubscribed from any news subreddits
- Of course never check news sites
And honestly feel better overall and less stressed. Sure you can claim being apathetic/ignorant towards global current events makes me a bad person, but I do not care. To me, no human is designed to handle as much information input as we experience today.
When we travelled to the in-laws over the most recent holidays, the news was always on, and always talked about and my wife and I both commented afterwards it felt like an oppressive blanket of stress was laid over everything while we were there.
I would not say so. But, I would expect you to NOT be outspoken and confident when someone else starts to speak about stuff related to current issues. And I would expect you to check yourself especially when it seems like the other person is saying something you intuitively disagree with, because chance that they are simply better informed is high.
It is quite possible you do it, I don't want to imply that. But, I have met quite a few people who don't follow news (proudly) but then are full of opinions about issues they don't follow.
…don’t you see how nihilist this sounds? And also unrealistic. You will have opinions, everyone has opinions and beliefs and feelings or else they wouldn’t be able to function on a day to day basis. There is a scale to beliefs and opinions, based on how informed those beliefs and opinions are, and how well they mesh with conditions in your everyday life. It’s important to inform your opinions and beliefs; the news, however flawed in its current state, forms at least one source of that information.
I think that taking all of this as one absolute or another is unnecessarily polarizing this debate. It is very easy to argue that them news media economy is quite poisonous, but that doesn’t mean that all of the information is useless. For example: I need to prepare for a storm that is approaching the area, I need to know if a COVID wave is nearing so I know to be more careful, I need to know if parking rules change or trash day is being moved. These immediate events affect my actions directly and so I must pay attention, sifting through the other crap as necessary.
But even beyond that, this resignation to political nihilism is societally destructive. Like it or not, we are all connected in a society. Our actions affect others. We have shared infrastructure and services we all contribute to and benefit from. Part of that responsibility is a participation in politics. Is it currently toxic and despairing? Certainly. But sticking your head in the sand isn’t an option, as we depend on cooperation in order to preserve a society on any level and that requires coordination.
Should we reduce our news consumption? Of course. But we also shouldn’t eschew all outside information and live in a self-imposed bubble. Maybe skip the entertainment section and focus on stuff that impacts you directly. If there is something that is shallowly followed by the news that sounds important, of course dig into longer-form articles until you understand it in full or discard it if it is important. Discretion matters.
Later on, I realized that was what made us risk slipping back... and likely was contributed factor to why Russia actually slipped back to authoritarian, oppressive and aggressive. The countries that moved more toward democratic did so thinks to people who were not apathetic.
This is a danger that is in my opinion developed by over-consuming news and information from many sources. Of course, it is generally good to take news from multiple sources but if you are not payed for dig in information, you won't have much time to get deeply into problem and finally you just stay on the shallow top - which naturally let to resign on any opinion, because everything seems to be relative. It is not, it is simply a lack of invested time into subject.
Matrix 4 btw speaks a little bit about it if you pay attention.
On the other hand it is perfectly fine to say "I don't know". Which is not what we are learning at schools. We are persecuted to say that unfortunately. And here we are... Everyone has opinions on everything.
And that's the right answer that should be used by more people.
100% agree. The Media complex is the one that keeps pretending news is important-- its like a drug dealer saying drugs are important.
How do we find a healthy middle ground?
In Europe we had teletext. In Spanish, but you get the concept:
https://www.rtve.es/television/teletexto/noticias/129/
Small paragraphs. Almost no bias. News condensed to be read on a small tv. No bullshit, no yellow journalism. Raw and short.
Teletext as shown on old TVs:
https://live.staticflickr.com/1453/25222724604_15d7a974a2_b....
Now they should create pages like this. Like https://lite.cnn.io or https://text.npr.org, but with small content, too. Not just the design.
Use the extra time to read books on political science, economics, and history. Maybe some media studies. You'll be a better voter doing that instead of following the news closely. It's not as if it should have taken someone who knew nothing about either person, but a lot about the actual issues and how politics works, a ton of time to figure out if they wanted to vote for Trump or Biden. 20 minutes of googling right before going to the polls should have been enough.
I'd like a "I haven't checked the news in [7] days and some guy at work mentioned [Ukraine talking to the UN], what's that all about?" website.
I guess it'd be 7 days worth of news synopses for the topic.
[7 days ago this city fell, Joe said stern words about it, and the Sauds started selling oil in Yuan because it didn't want China to get all its oil from Russia.]
[6 days ago that city was retaken, and everyone was surprised.]
[5 days ago Joe said more stern words but had no effect.]
etc.
The rest of the world would mostly call it "left-leaning", or maybe "radical centrist".
In 2015, Pearson - a publishing company - sold its controlling stake to a bunch of corporate owners, like the Agnellis (43%) and the Rotschilds (21%), among others.
The change in their editorial direction was immediately visible (I had been a subscriber/reader for 35+ years until 2016)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economist_Group
The word - if we're willing to shed many of the more populist overtones around it - is probably "neoliberalism". Consistently siding with money & corporations, with a democratic bent. (But not too much!)
Since 2016, it's more and more living on its reputation and not coming quite to terms with the changes in the world. It is still firmly rooted in facts - can't really provide economic guidance when you deny realities - but it seems somewhat unable to engage with the rise of populism and nationalism in an economically intertwined world.
Not unlike centrism :)
You won't see it calling to defund the police, or that we should tax the bejeezus out of billionaires. And these are moderately left, not memorably left.
I'm also a long-time subscriber and do not understand the "shift" you are referring to. The Economist has been pro-free-trade, generally against heavy regulation, and a magazine that consistently takes small-l liberal positions for a very long time. That stance means that sometimes they are right - deregulation has been good in many areas - but sometimes they get it wrong, when, for example, free trade may have adverse effects.
Sometimes they take positions that are bad - they argued for the second Iraq war - but they are pretty up front about their biases, and generally don't represent their biases as purely objective facts, as many traditional newspapers do. Their writing is clear and concise and is not meant to be consumed uncritically. The magazine is still unparalleled for what it offers.
Board members like Lady de Rothschild and Eric "you have no privacy" Schmidt publicly supported/donated to the Hillary Clinton campaign. The Rotschilds were invited by the Clintons to spend their honeymoon at the White House. The rest of the board reads like the attendees at the Bilderberg Group and the Council on Foreign Relations. The very definition of elitism, and collusion with the governments (Schmidt, Alex Karp, who is also on the board, there are also Sirs and Baronesses). "Free trade" - yes, reserved for the multinationals, Most definitely not mom-and-pop, small/medium business oriented anymore (which they used to be, before the sale).
The fact that they (probably still) have superbly written articles should not disguise the shift in their political stance.
[1] https://www.improvethenews.org/
Even the words a journal uses are dog whistles for "we think alike". "Latinx" versus "Latino". "Illegal Immigrant" vs "Undocumented Worker".
Unless it's your job, neither of you really understand whatever is happening with Ukraine and your conversation will be mostly limited to repeating what you've been told to each other, which doesn't enrich either of your lives.
> Unless it's your job, neither of you really understand whatever is happening with Ukraine and your conversation will be mostly limited to repeating what you've been told to each other, which doesn't enrich either of your lives.
A bit of very practical issue here is that Russian troll force is in full force right now, at least where I live. Trying to affect general opinion of people, in order to influence future elections and to make NATO/Eu passive due to pressure from population. The money were in fact flowing from Russia toward our right-wing nearly fascist or clearly fascist parties.
I dont think "everyone else should be passive" is good strategy here.
Knowing in what direction world events might change is good to be at least mentally prepared when things turn worse.
It doesn't have to be checking the news 24/7 but checking it once a day for the important parts I think it's important. I would rather say people need to learn how to distance themselves from the news a bit to keep a healthy mental state with all the things happening right now.
It seems to me that by waiting, you'll have more information on how their policies worked out. JIT judging, if you will.
But it will be interesting to compare my own experience to what people will try to make out of this later on.
Regarding COVID at least in my country it was pure madness. A lot of double standards, different media channels skipping different bits to bend the narrative, people who did little trying to claim credit, discrediting people based on information we have today even if they acted okay-ish given what we knew at the time....
It's very interesting to watch history that I witnessed being written. It will be even more to see how people reflect on this 20 or 50 years later. A lot of food for thoughts if history we know reflects what actually happened in other cases.
https://rumble.com/vwzzth-donbass-english-subtitles-2016.-do...
It's not quite for this use case but could be of help. I regularly use it to find out what that thing is people are joking about on Twitter or such.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events
The only actionable section is the weather report, you can decide shorts or umbrella.
The piece is utterly right. News in the constantly-coming format is junk food. Almost no context is given, even thought nothing at all makes sense if you just watched the news. What is NATO, what is a central bank? Why are the same teams at the top of the league? All of these things need some basic explanation that is never in the news, but always in any basic long-form piece.
Local on the other hand. Very immediate, but often not that important, at least outside your local area. Sometimes you can even affect things and if it's something that can affect you and requires action, it might be a matter of hours. Water main breaks, you won't have running water for three days? Fill up buckets, head to the store, right now! But that's a minor inconvenience compared to international news, if they end up affecting you.
However, as the world gets more and more connected, far away problems have a tendency to become nearby problems real fast.
This is perhaps one of the most important points in this post that's buried pretty deep in the article.
The author here is not advocating for "head-in-the-sand" avoidance of reality.
Often when I see real, systemic issues brought up on HN or elsewhere: climate, the overshoot of industrial society, resource depletion etc. These concerns are often dismissed as "the media just wants you anxious!". But, by and large, the real scary pieces of information about these topics are not published by major media.
The media wants you anxious, but not so concerned that you seriously question our mainstream mode of life. You should worry about nuclear war with Russia, but not about the war for natural gas that's really going on. You should be anxious about climate change, but only enough to make you recycle, not so much that you question the economic system that is fundamentally unstable.
That doesn't mean you should buy into the '24h News Cycle' or the 'Extremism-inducing-filter-bubble', though. Myself, I don't pay any attention to 'The News', except as delivered on paper once-a-week via The Economist(1), and daily via their 'The World in Brief' email.
So, this morning, I learned that 'At one point an actor slapped a comedian, sending the internet into a frenzy' -- which is, like, all I needed to know, right?
Footnotes: (1) Yes, which is a relatively right-wing, centrist if you will, publication. I love it, especially disagreeing with it...
But completely disconnecting from 'The News'? That won't work at all these days, I'm afraid. I quite vividly experienced this a while ago when I returned from living in the US to my native Netherlands: I was completely unaware of some extremely-popular local hit songs. So, when people quoted these to me, I just didn't get the reference, like, at all. This caused quite some awkward moments.
Now, magnify that experience to the world stage...
But you don’t need to read the front page of CNN every day to stay up to date on the latest music. In fact, you’d be much better served by reading publications focused on that - the opposite of consuming the content meant for mass consumption.
People quote things that I don’t recognize all of the time. This is likely to happen for all kinds of reasons, e.g. generational gaps and not just because you stopped reading the daily headlines.
I think what you’re highlighting is that getting off the news hype cycle might make people around you notice. But a different response to that would be to have a conversation about why you unplugged.
That’s what I do, and it leads to some interesting conversations.
Only you can decide if the personal cost of continuing to consume is worthwhile just to maintain a certain vocabulary so you can continue socializing as you always have.
This isn’t a value judgement by the way, just an observation.
I'm afraid I don't follow your point. Saying that something "won't work at all these days" means that there are meaningful, and I stress: meaningful, aspects of our life that totally break down in the absence of said thing. An occasional few seconds of awkwardness (which is a totally fine emotion to feel) regarding some celeb drama is, in all honesty, insignificant. You didn't talk about being fired or being shunned, being discriminated or being laughed at; you presented a very very bland example equivalent to admitting to your colleagues that you didn't notice a new coffee machine was installed. Maybe you suffer from a mental condition that amplifies these emotions so much that you can't stand that occasional awkwardness, but I don't see how that justifies defending being addicted to the news cycle.
A comment above, in response to the publication being labelled as having "a sharp left / European bias" says:
> The rest of the world would mostly call it "left-leaning", or maybe "radical centrist".
I would probably categorize it as centrist myself, but it's funny how confirmation bias works.
Anger sells. Outrage sells. Media companies have known it since the dawn of the newspaper. Bad news generates anger and outrage, hence all news is bad news. It's a natural consequence of the human condition.
The video has TEN MILLION views. So many of the comments are of the form "this is the most beautiful/relaxing/wonderful thing I've seen in years".
Things that engender good feelings do propagate.
Exceptions on my subscription list are Kurzgesagt (self-described as “Optimistic nihilism”) and the maker of the machinima “Freeman’s Mind” [1](voicing the silent protagonist as an antihero).
Thing is, I’m not normal. If my nature was the modal average of humanity, the horror genre and tabloids and spectator sports and celebrity gossip wouldn’t exist.
[0] https://youtube.com/channel/UCAL3JXZSzSm8AlZyD3nQdBA
[1] https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6PNZBb6b9LvDWpI-5CPYUxG1...
There’s an adage, “there’s nothing as worthless as yesterday’s news”. Which led me to wonder, “was it even worth knowing yesterday?”
I realized the solution was a low pass filter.
I first switched to a seven-page newspaper (CSM) delivered through the mail. I realised the editors had to figure out whether it would still be interesting by the time it arrived and important enough to take up space in the paper.
I soon switched to a weekly newspaper (The Economist) and monthlies. I haven’t looked back. The nice thing about a paper like the economist is remained relatively small (few pages) so had to make the same class of decision as the CSM, rather than expand the paper.
I also have an RSS list of trade journals and such that I skim once a week, reading the odd title that looks interesting. Most of the time it’s only a handful of articles.
As for the high frequency stuff and stuff outside my bubble: I still talk to people and so I hear about stray stories. I do find it interesting that I have yet to have anyone bring up the Ukraine situation. At all.
...maybe it was that bad and it deserves all the downvotes, but given the context of the previous comment, I didn't think it was so awful...
1. Extremely high quality publications. 2. In a controlled manner.
That's not "no news" at all, it's a healthy relationship to quality news.
Clearly there things worth knowing and not all of them were by Aristotle, Bach, Newton or Wittgenstein:-). The low pass filter screens put the froth; the selection of sources, the dross.
Not that I even read every article in The Economist, but I do read about things I wouldn’t notice or bother to were I reading from the firehose.
Side point: great thing about HN is that someone can say “here’s a clarification or contradiction in what you said” and have it often not be hairsplitting, so can spark a conversation rather than shut one down.
I’m not much of a social media conversationalist but I do find the discourse level of HN in the topics that interest me typically high enough that I often learn from it, thus it’s worth it and fun to participate.
(Discourse quality is bimodal but that’s true at a cocktail party too, even one full of nerds)
Speaking of "weekly" discussions, the Ukraine situation has been brought up in my weekly Church prayers since it started.
Generally speaking, if it a current event that the Priests make 2 or 3 "intentions" for (in the Catholic mass, the prayers that occur after the Homily but before the preparations), its an incredible event. In many situations, the words are vague so that it applies to as broadly as possible (ex: there usually is something about wars and disasters), but Ukraine specifically is brought up in those prayers in my experience.
Which makes sense, the suffering and pains of that country are the greatest seen in many decades.
--------
Generally speaking, the intentions are specific to the parish community (pray for X who died last week) and local. Sometimes, a "sister parish" from another side of the world get their intentions emailed to our Church (ex: a hurricane that affects Haiti will be brought up, because our "sister-Parish" is in Haiti, so their "local" issues are brought up in our prayers as well. My current Parish doesn't have a sister-parish, but my last one had one in Haiti). For a global event to be brought up in specific terms (more so than just "prayer to end wars". But a specific "prayer to help the people of Ukraine") is pretty rare.
> the suffering and pains of that country are the greatest seen in many decades
Could this really be true?
In the years following the Second World War, a timeframe that could be construed as ‘many decades’, I’d call it true.
Unless your reading of the referent is ‘all humans everywhere’ in which case, it’s probably debatable. Either way, it’s bad.
Humans’ abilities to make others suffer continually amazes and horrifies me.
The last weeks in Ukraine have seen more damage than Yemen-like conflicts had on their worse year, the Russian invasion firepower is simply on a different scale than what Yemen or Houthi forces could muster. The intensity of this war, as a mass full scale industrial land war, actually is unusually large.
The shear amount of large-scale artillery barrages going on is large enough to be picked up by NASA's FIRMS satellite. And there seems to be many Twitter threads where people collect information from that FIRMS / Forest Fire satellite to document the artillery strikes in realtime.
Not even in the earlier wars of Russian aggression (Second Chechen War or Georgia War) seem to have this level of artillery.
That being said: a fair amount of it is Ukrainians counter-artillery striking Russians and fighting back (which Chechnya and Georgia were largely unable to do effectively). So perhaps your point is that Ukraine isn't a one-sided massacre and has mounted at least some effective means of defense?
Ukraine would be suffering more if Russia managed to get within Artillery Strike of Kyiv for example, but the Ukrainian forces have stalled out that advance... largely keeping Kyiv safe from destruction (well... to a greater degree than we've seen so far anyway). Mariupol on the other hand isn't as lucky, and widespread artillery is clearly being used upon that city.
With humanitarian corridors closed, its clear that Mariupol is being sieged, Leningrad style, and there's widespread reports of starvation to death. There's also reports of many civilians being transferred to Russian camps. Then there are also the famous "hospital strikes" and "theater strikes" have have killed hundreds alone.
------
But I guess you're right. Things could be worse for some other cities / areas who were unable to fight back against their oppressors. Most of the genocide events of the past decades are pretty horrible as well.
But there needs to be something to be said about the huge, large-scale use of artillery that really hasn't been seen since WW2-era mass combat.
The notion that individual suffering can be added up for some total of inhumanity is somewhat dubious, as are comparisons of individual deaths: is it the number of casualties that matters, does it suffering experienced before death factor in, and does it make a difference if it was caused intentionally and without good cause, accidentally, naturally, etc.?
But yeah, it's rather gruesome. Syria is very similar, for some reason.
Suffering caused by armed conflict, in Europe? Probably. (I'm from Sarajevo and I think we are a close second if not the first.)
Mass suffering by any cause anywhere? Between the Tsunamis and diseases and earthquakes and awful civil wars and genocides, sadly, I think the competition is quite stiff :(
Sure, we should help. But not only Ukrainian's but all people that are damaged by war. We should also pray for our enemies.
Could be your own bubble. Most everyone in my circle has brought it up. Many of us brought it up because we know people who are from Ukraine or have lived there extensively. I live and work in SV. Lots of Ukrainians work and live here.
The economist model is much better. A dedicate weekly edition you can read front to back with daily articles posted outside of that.
With a single match you would then set light to the scrunched up newspaper, which would set light to the wood, which would get the coal started. Once the coal was glowing you could add more coal and the fire would be truly lit.
To speed up the process you could hold up a sheet or two of broadsheet newspaper over the fireplace, so air would be sucked in at the bottom to hold the flat sheets tight over the fireplace opening, making the fire roar. This was like 'turbo mode'.
This whole process was time consuming and you would generally be using newspapers that were a few days old. Frequently this 'news' had some real gems in it. Removed from the original context by a few days, the news articles often had details that were not important at the time, but, with hindsight, made them somewhat curious.
Because you might be holding this news up around the fireplace for a few minutes with it lit up by a roaring fire, you were sort of obligated to read beyond the headlines.
There were different wars at the time, as well as labour disputes. It was often that you would read something that foreshadowed the news of the day on the radio - which we called 'wireless' back then.
I found that the old news, read this way, was a lot more thought provoking. I found myself questioning more.
Nowadays you could go onto the Internet Archive and find the headlines for a given day. However, we tend not to do that. The news just morphs from one day to the next, lacking distinct daily episodes like it did in the days of printed papers. Articles can be edited and updated, to be the same but different.
I agree with the article and try to encourage relatives to stay away from the gogglebox. The TV news is utterly toxic. But I feel that it is end times for this mainstream media. Only boomers truly consume it, anyone under fifty isn't tuned in and were not around when the news informed a national conversation.
The blanket propaganda/news of today is not the same as the national conversation that was once a thing. The Overton Window has gone widescreen and narrow at the same time. If you are not with the mainstream narrative then you can only be deemed to be 'worse than Trump/Putin/Assad/Hitler/Farage'. Or a communist. What was the left has got old and conservative. Or co-opted, particularly when it comes to identity politics. It has become infantilised with the majority under fifty just opting out of giving a damn.
But IMO there are two blind spots in that philosophy:
- If everybody did that, even the big things would not propagate. You’d only know there is a war going on if you heard the bombs.
- Voting becomes a problem. Since everything you hear is from people around you, it is most likely an opinion, which you will then echo. Also you might miss stuff which would affect your opinion, but which your friends didn’t care for.
All that negative stuff you have to go thru when reading news makes it being bad deal
In my experience it is more commonly used to describe news which the speaker does not like.
NPR did a great interview with a "fake news creator" back in 2016: https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2016/11/23/50...
During few weeks without the information overload I discovered that:
• Having the overview and discussing the current affairs personally as an unbiased listener is more liberating than analysing the text alone behind the screens.
• The categorization of received news reveals those which simply interpret the source and those which really generate the original information.
• Working on a computer presents a risk of being distracted by reading various articles and clicking on random links. Their reduction increases my productivity and I am able to be more focused on my tasks, without temptation of countless distractions.
• Ignorance is bliss. It eliminates the prejudices, teaches us not to be opinionated nor to ask the right question.
• Any form of “decentralization” of receiving information eliminates the manipulation of thinking.
We are being indoctrinated by a fear agenda to excessively consume media, television and radio. Let’s not forget that a frightened mind can be easily manipulated, which is used by both political power and corporates. Few of the wealthiest IT companies with a monopoly set the global opinions. They decide which information we receive; thus, they have boundless power. Because we don’t care. We consider the freedom of speech as a right without any duties and responsibilities and meanwhile it slips through our fingers.
- https://tobiaskucera.art/the-silent-march
Where I think it breaks down is the prescription that everyone can necessarily separate themselves from "news". I think this is increasingly infeasible. Even if you, personally, don't buy a subscription or scroll twitter, I don't think it's too outlandish to expect that people around you in your family or community might take action based on some national or international news that is admittedly basically pointless. Are you supposed to righteously shut down every news-related conversation about that you're a part of?
More broadly this also runs into the absurdity of trying to define arbitrary boundaries around "news". You're just begging your unconscious mind to label subjects you are personally uncomfortable with as "news" and therefore not worthy of considering.
So removing "news" from your life as much as possible, or at least separating if from yourself and your ego to some significant extent, can really only be part of the answer and is also by definition an endless uphill battle. I don't think there's any getting away from the need for a broader media literacy.
Also:
>And perhaps there is something to that, given that my online avatar is a pixelated rendering of Stanczyk the Court Jester. But jesters are kept around because they say what needs to be said. And they express these unpopular messages with enough wit and entertainment that the kings let them keep their heads and indeed value their council.
This faux-humility disclaimer made me cringe. I thought this was a good piece overall, but this made me almost close the tab. Don't do this. They already opened the blog post, don't desperately plead with your reader that you promise that your thoughts are worth reading.
That doesn't mean cutting yourself off from the world is wrong. Large outlier events often cast shadows (Covid, Ukraine war) and if you're in the path of the outlier events, knowing early pays off.
The hard question is, how do you see the large shadows without having to twitch at every small event. The answer to this is, to some extent, mentioned in the article - expensive, subscription-based newsletters. It's still not the full answer. There are too many areas to pay attention to. Best answer I've found so far is having a group of friends & contacts with wide-ranging interests.
Before email was so prevalent, my mother said the same thing when me and my siblings went travelling overseas for months at a time without calling. Now, she's in contact with us a few times a week and acting as the central news source for us all.
So of course: if one of us was in a country that was having some "news" she'd pay extra attention and reach out to share what's going on with us and the entire family.
I’ve settled into three subscriptions: the local paper (which also carries syndicated inter/national stories that I ignore completely–I’m looking for local politics and economy, and especially the special interest pieces in the Sunday edition and the monthly community-events inserts, not the crime report type stuff); The Economist, in which I ignore all the leader articles and merely try to find at least one or two interesting articles to read each week; and The Atlantic, with mostly the same strategy as that for The Economist.
I recently let my IEEE membership lapse but did the same with their Spectrum magazine.
I try to do the rest of my reading in books and not social media–HN excluded, of course!
I still have this teetering idea that I should cancel The Economist, it often seems like a gossip rag dressed up in sophisticated verbiage. But every now and then I do find interesting, if not useful, articles. Maybe I’ll switch out The Economist and go back to IEEE Spectrum or something similar.
I usually enjoy the long featured pieces in The Atlantic.