191–200 of 333 posts
I've stopped bringing my phone to bed. Leave it in the office downstairs. The only device upstairs is a Kindle loaded with a lot of fiction and some nonfiction.
It's a start, anyway. I now believe that it's possible to be too well informed, be exposed to too much information of an ephemeral nature. Our brains aren't really designed for it.
When I came back, I installed an extension to get rid of the trending section and some other garbage on there. It's been so much nicer since then (Retweets can still be problematic, but I don't want to block them entirely because I use Twitter as a way to follow artists that were forced to flee Tumblr. Retweets are how those artists share art from others that they like)
In the time that I was off Twitter, I didn't fully disengage from the news. I checked Apple News+ to stay up-to-date, but that was only once or twice a day instead of dozens.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I enjoy reading The Economist and I’m glad that I’m able to filter out their editorialism from the facts. I think it’s easy to do due to their combination of forthrightness and writing style, plus my own ability to cut through the BS that I’ve worked hard to sharpen over many years. The one thing I dislike about The Economist is their cover art. I grew to strongly dislike having some caricature of Trump or nuclear bl…
The problem is that most biased articles aren’t using outrageous headlines or pushing false and/or improbable facts. Most of the bias happens by simply omitting the facts that go against the narrative. No critical reading of the article will give you the missing facts. You kind of need to read away from biased newssources. Or read both sides on every topic.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Commercial television news is very manipulative and the intent of the manipulation is to keep eyeballs glued to the screen to sell ads. They use lots of elaborately animated transitions with bright colors, swooshing sound effects and musical cues to mesmerize viewers, just as slot machines in Vegas use such things to mesmerize gamblers. It's the same sort of graphical bullshit they pad out televized American football…
I wouldn’t even put it in the pedestal of psychological manipulation. It’s gossip, the same as teen magazines and tabloids. They just dress it up with authority. Standard low minded stuff. I tune in for some gossip from time to time, no harm no foul. But jesus, do it all the time and you might as well become this: https://youtu.be/XUT8ec24anM
In other words: mass media is one big superfund site.
Not being informed enough to be politically involved is often the worst possible thing for your wellbeing in the long term. If you don't fight for your wellbeing, someone who is fighting for theirs might do so at your expense. But of course, news is a pretty questionable source for this goal, because its always filtered through an ideology that might not really have your wellbeing in mind.
Which highlights your point imo. If we change the way politics is done, then we can eliminate this issue. But it requires being politically informed.
As I've noted here a few times: Just over 10 years ago, I conducted an experiment. I watched an hour of CNN every night but it was never that night's coverage. It was from exactly two weeks ago. It was amazing how much "breaking news!" was irrelevant or just outright wrong, how many large trend predictions were wrong, and how many "[person] will do X" were wrong. While the predictions could have been portrayed as opi…
1. Read the headline. 2. Ask - Is the topic likely to be relevant after 2-3 weeks? 3. If yes - Read/Watch it. 4. If no - Ignore.
Worth a read for explanation as to why: https://rb.gy/81ygny
this is a link to the wikipedia page on "Trump Derangement Syndrome", and contains little, if any, "explanation as to why". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_derangement_syndrome
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2013/apr/12/news-is-bad-ro...
> They found that those watching the most partisan television news sources—on both the left and the right—were often less knowledgeable about world events than those who consumed no news at all. This is some very fancy footwork to leave out some key information. The study found that those watching only Fox News and MSNBC answered worse than people who watch no news programs at all. As far as I can tell, this latter g…
Country song I heard some years ago, a weary older man is singing (obviously in the era of newspapers) I read Ann Landers and the comics And know as much as the people of the left and the right Some days it feels that way, even with things as urgent as they seem today in the US.