601–610 of 717 posts
LiveLeak was the only place I know where I could find footage of warcrimes in Ukraine that will more than likely never be "a part of our national conversation". Does the media tell you who Azov battalion or right-sector is? That we have no problem funneling weapons and money to them? Even if they did, would they show you the video of them crucifying and setting on fire a captured enemy? Liveleak did.
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Man those essays are some hot garbage. If you read them, you come away thinking that the US just decided to attack Iraq to make a point to Saddam. Let me quote it > Unlike earlier wars, in which there were political aims either of conquest or domination, what is at stake in this one is war itself: its status, its meaning, its future. A beautiful sentence, but Saddam invaded Kuwait with the intent of conquering it. Th…
I never came away thinking these things after reading those essays. The novel insights he presents in these essays deal with the West's ability to structure the narrative - via mass-media - of the Gulf War, resulting in the very real and senseless violence that occurred. All the while for the citizens of those Western nations though, none of the "Vietnam effect" was witnessed. In a sense, your post proves his point q…
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It’s pointing out that while objectively different, subjectively it’s often the same emotional weight - as counter intuitive as it may be - especially for those that don’t have prior experience or calibration in the objectively more serious environment. In my experience (as someone who grew up with extensive food insecurity, parents who barely kept the family afloat, etc.), it’s hard NOT to have the bar shift too if…
> It’s pointing out that while objectively different, subjectively it’s often the same emotional weight - as counter intuitive as it may be - especially for those that don’t have prior experience or calibration in the objectively more serious environment. This seems like incredibly useful behavior. When things improve it allows us to tackle new problems with similar conviction as before. It also helps us not get comp…
Man does it suck sometimes though if you’re on the ‘push even if it hurts’ part of the spectrum!
Something that has helped me over time is the awareness that the stories we tell (both ourselves and others) are almost always post-facto attempts to rationalize what we fundamentally do not understand or control (our own thoughts and reactions, and those of others).
This is often for safety - both the illusion of control for ourselves, and to spin a safe and beneficial story for others to magnify the good or hide the bad of what happened. It gets even more interesting when the possibility of influencing others (or yourself!) to your benefit comes into play. Also a necessary and useful survival trait! There are a great many things it is helpful to believe that may be plainly contradicted by evidence.
If you cut away the noise produced by this process, ignore what people say, and look at action/reaction and reverse engineer it a bit - it almost always produces a far more reliable and predictable model for understanding people and the world overall.
Either way it takes a lot of experience and data points to have any accuracy, so it’s going to be confusing as hell for a long time. Especially if you haven’t figured out that almost everything anyone says (especially yourself!) is fundamentally self serving and post-facto - not due to malice even (though that happens), but because that’s the way it has to work!
This is a big loss and it comes at a time where it will soon be more needed than ever. The last years has been brutal to "free information". Ever since Trump became president it seems a lot of people has begged the tech giants to filter and censor. And now they do. I remember early 2020 when rumors about a new virus in China came out. There were very little news about it. But on YouTube and Twitter you could find sca…
The world is a scary and violent place. Without Liveleak, you might never feel it. Until you see the actual violence and gore, it doesn't mean anything, it's just empty words. I didn't care at all about wars in the middle east until I saw the reality on Liveleak. Seeing dead children and people with their legs blown off made all the commentary on CNN and Fox seem so understated. A lot is said about desensitization as…
> The world is a scary and violent place. ... A lot is said about desensitization as a result of seeing horrible things on the internet, but in my experience, only the opposite was true. Seeing violence online when I was in my late teens sensitized me and made the stories on the TV real. I can understand this idea. I tend to agree that confronting the harshness of reality (death, suffering) is an important act, parti…
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Years ago a lived with someone one who loved to watch videos of people getting hit by cars. I watched a bunch of these by proxy. The thing that still sticks in my mind is that almost none of them were jaywalking. It was almost always a car running a red light. The people that got hit put too much faith in the lights.
It's amazing the narrative that is spun around cars and the deaths they cause. Take a closer look at the "accident" reports you see in newspapers. It's disgusting how many times reports of people and children getting hit on sidewalks, sitting on benches, etc is spun as their fault for not getting out of the way of the person driving the car!! There's been a bit of a grassroots push to get journalists to stop calling…
I have difficulty in believing anyone in their right mind would victim blame someone sitting on a bench for not getting out of the way of a car. This reeks of urban legend or motivated anti-motorist propoganda. The motor vehicle would have to have completely departed from the designated motorway and would as a result be completely at fault. Failure to respond to signal is also the motorist's fault, and even when out of compliance signalwise on a crosswalk, the pedestrian has right-of-way. It's right in the driver's manual for most States in the U.S.
Unless we're talking somewhere with much more fluid road laws. For the record, I've been that pedestrian getting clipped several times, and people on bicycles make me so paranoid in city driving, I've been known to lower windows to try to verbally communicate.
My issue is generally with other motorists for the most part.
>Automatically pardoned in reader's minds
There was a time I'd say you were over stating tilted journalism's influence. Nowadays I'm not so sure anymore.
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Man those essays are some hot garbage. If you read them, you come away thinking that the US just decided to attack Iraq to make a point to Saddam. Let me quote it > Unlike earlier wars, in which there were political aims either of conquest or domination, what is at stake in this one is war itself: its status, its meaning, its future. A beautiful sentence, but Saddam invaded Kuwait with the intent of conquering it. Th…
Baudrillard himself freely admitted at the time that his work was not meant to be taken as "political analysis," or even poetry. He is quoted as suggesting it be read as a SF novel, even :) I usually don't read French philosophers, but when I do, I simply take it as an elaborate language game. It's like enjoying any team sport, where when one players says, "we are going to crush them!", it's generally not an actual p…
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What policy change could possibly be made to make people better drivers?
Middle of the road separation barriers. Separate bike lanes, more like the sidewalks, not just painted lines on the car roads. Roundabouts instead of crossings and traffic lights. (Roundabouts force the drivers to slow down. And on average, saves time I think) More trains, buses, subways.
That actually leads to more collisions at intersections.
The reason that sidewalks work for pedestrians is because they move at walking speed. That means its easy for drivers to see them approaching an intersection (since they're a short distance away).
Cyclists, on the other hand, move far faster than a walking pedestrian and can be much further away from the intersection where a motorist isn't looking and still can end up in a collision.
The best policy is to have cyclists integrate with vehicular traffic, because cyclists are vehicles, just like motorcyclists.
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Ugh. Having the ability to comment really does add an entirely new dimension to a service, but a culture of bad comments can be so disheartening, and it seems like a tough cancer to treat.
Yep. The comments consisted of both extremes: analytical, reflective or informative responses, paired with "haha he got OWNED!" type of comments. The latter made me really wonder if those commenters had ever experienced loss or hardship in their lives.
As terrible as folks are who would laugh at someone getting sucked into an industrial grinder, they’d be untroubled by anxiety or worry and associated mental issues in a Mad Max type post apocalyptic wasteland and hence more able to survive.
At least that’s what I tell myself to help sleep at night.
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>Counter-point; the world is mostly a neutral, even OK, place It isn't, you are lucky to be in a privileged environment. And I don't even mean warzones. People who live paycheck-to-paycheck with family or medical issues wouldn't agree with you.
The book "Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World - and Why Things Are Better Than You Think" [0] brings a different perspective to this conversation. I strongly encourage folks to read it, but if I had to summarize the point that feels relevant here, it'd go something like this. Relative to the whole of human history, the time we're living in right now is by far the most neutral, even OK, (in some cases…