This thinking is the basis for the Independent voter. The myth is that they're some type of deliberate, open-minded voting demographic, in their wisdom they like to keep the door open to all possibility. The reality is that they just don't follow the news and instead base their opinions on sound bites and article ledes. The sad consequence is that, as pockets of our society work to unravel the institutions that make this nation great using just the weakest veneer of misinformation, those of us who take the time to read what's happening begin to realize that human-made ruin is largely avoidable. Only if more of us would pay attention.
Things you notice when you quit the news (2016)
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Re: Things you notice when you quit the news (2016)
#332As someone who just stepped back into pop culture after being in prison for years (so might as well been on the moon) my first shock was just how horrible it all is now. There is no news worth watching. Cable news is just a pile of filth excremented by a Labrador Retriever that solely eats baby diapers. I thought I will watch Bloomberg since if real money is involved it can't be too manipulative. Nope, wrong. The int…
Welcome back! You might find these better uses of your news time.
* The Conversation - https://theconversation.com/us
* Ground News - https://ground.news
* sumi.news - https://sumi.news
* Wikipedia - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portal:Current_events
If you find yourself reading too much this can help too
* LeechBlock - https://www.proginosko.com/leechblock
Re: Things you notice when you quit the news (2016)
#333As someone who just stepped back into pop culture after being in prison for years (so might as well been on the moon) my first shock was just how horrible it all is now. There is no news worth watching. Cable news is just a pile of filth excremented by a Labrador Retriever that solely eats baby diapers. I thought I will watch Bloomberg since if real money is involved it can't be too manipulative. Nope, wrong. The int…
If you don’t mind when did enter prison? Basically what time period are you comparing against?
Entered in 2017 and got back to "the World" six months ago.
Re: Things you notice when you quit the news (2016)
#334If you want an extremely quick scan of the front pages of many world newspapers (less than 5 mins), check out "NEWS ACC" on YouTube.
Re: Things you notice when you quit the news (2016)
#335Earlier quoted context omitted.
The president has a very significant impact on many people’s lives via judicial nominees. The biggest this year is expected to be the effects of the 3 Republican Supreme Court judges installed by Trump on many women’s access to abortions, but many other judges in the system are appointed by presidents as well that make decisions that affect many people’s lives.
To further clarify the sibling's point, the reason for this is that the Progressive wing of the Democrats couldn't convince people to approve abortion access through democratic means as soon as they would have liked, so they decided to get a rather dubious Supreme Court interpretation of the Constitution that declared it to be a Constitutional Right. Now they are totally dependent on keeping agreeable Supreme Court j…
> Living in a Democracy requires us to consider the opinions of our fellow citizens and try our best to accommodate them, rather than steamrolling them.
The majority of americans believe in abortion by a non trivial margin. The reason it's not guaranteed is precisely because the united states is not a democracy, but a democratic republic, giving significantly more political power to some voters based on where they live.
Re: Things you notice when you quit the news (2016)
#336There are things that happen in the news that may affect your day to day life. Apart from the obvious things such as covid, there are a lot of things going on all the time that may influence your voting decisions (not just in the run up, but the entire time someone is in office), purchasing decisions, where you go on vacation, who you want to work for, how you get to work today etc. I guess if that is fine for you, t…
> feel free to carry on and go book your vacation to the Ukraine, drive a Volkswagen, work for facebook...
These could all be researched at the time of purchase though. There's nothing in the daily news about VW or Ukraine that can't be learned more efficiently by doing some research just before purchasing a vehicle or vacation.
There's nothing wrong with keeping tabs on the latest headlines, I personally do so and am fine with it, but there's nothing essential about it either. A person who never reads the news will still find out about something like Covid from a hundred other sources in short order.
Re: Things you notice when you quit the news (2016)
#337Re: Things you notice when you quit the news (2016)
#338I fully agree with this. Scanning Google News or a couple of the more professional international news services like BBC / Al Jazeera / Reuters I still feel pretty well informed (and confident that there's usually nothing of immediate consequence to me) but it doesn't grow into "expert analysis" or impact my feelings much. Here's another thing I noticed: how manipulated / manipulative it is. And not just news and I do…
That was really shocking for me the first time I went to China and watched their version on state sponsored television, around 2005. The contrast between the doom version of the news back home, to china's overly positive "15 people are missing in a coal mine but we are trying our darnedest to get them out" was really confronting. Made me realise that it has entertainment/manipulation as a goal, not providing information.
Re: Things you notice when you quit the news (2016)
#339There are things that happen in the news that may affect your day to day life. Apart from the obvious things such as covid, there are a lot of things going on all the time that may influence your voting decisions (not just in the run up, but the entire time someone is in office), purchasing decisions, where you go on vacation, who you want to work for, how you get to work today etc. I guess if that is fine for you, t…
I agree with your assessment.
To completely quit news is not a good idea, unless you want to live under a rock, metaphorically speaking.
Fact of the matter is, day-to-day events affect each one of us who live in a modern society. You don't want to be the guy who has no mask and 0 preparation for a pandemic when it hits. You don't want to be the guy who keeps buying/using a product when there's news circulating that it could be unsafe.
The author mentioned reading a 5000-word report, which is great if you're into that sort of things. But the mass majority of people have jobs to work, kids to take of, important things to do. They don't have time to spend hours every day reading deep into all the issues going on in the world.
Most people just want to stay up to date with the latest events, so they can plan their lives better.
Of course you can get addicted to news and let it negatively affect you. But the alternative of having no idea what's going on in the world until it's on your doorstep is not a good idea either.
A balance is good. Stuff like limiting yourself to spending 15 minutes in the morning during breakfast quickly going over important news, and making a commitment to not waste more time reading news for the rest of the day.
Re: Things you notice when you quit the news (2016)
#340As someone who just stepped back into pop culture after being in prison for years (so might as well been on the moon) my first shock was just how horrible it all is now. There is no news worth watching. Cable news is just a pile of filth excremented by a Labrador Retriever that solely eats baby diapers. I thought I will watch Bloomberg since if real money is involved it can't be too manipulative. Nope, wrong. The int…
A fair perspective. It's also possible that your isolation from media has let you return to see what was wrong with that media all along. Possibly you were simply blind to how bad it was before, or just used to it.
I concur that it is worse than it was, but I would say 10-30% worse not "completely different."
It would be nice if there was a little less hate generally.