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The brain was not designed for this much bad news

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Re: The brain was not designed for this much bad news

#111

Post by dokyun »

anon7725 wrote: post #83
devsda wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People vote for a government that does something very tangible about all of those things People don't do that. Politics in US(and democracies in general) have what I call the cable tv bundling problem. Imagine you have only two bundle packages with your most preferred channels split evenly across two packages along with some unwanted channels. Regardless of which package you choose, you'll miss out on some of your…

In this case, one of the packages is uninspiring and the other is fascism, so the choice is fairly clear.

Don't blame me, I voted for Kodos.

Re: The brain was not designed for this much bad news

#112

Post by IneffablePigeon »

retired wrote: post #104
seba_dos1 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can be done too. I live in a rather big city, so I don't own a car, as I can perfectly go by using public transport.

Only if you limit your work and social life to that particular city. Not something most people want to do.

There are many places in the world this is not true. I would say about half the people I know who live in London don’t own a car. They travel plenty - probably more than the people I know who don’t live in London. If they really need a car once they get to their destination they will rent one, or use taxis.

Re: The brain was not designed for this much bad news

#113

Post by shevy-java »

> Humans evolved to pay close attention to danger, but today that instinct is being overwhelmed by an endless supply of bad news from around the world

This insinuates that the human brain can not cope with overflow of bad news. That's wrong. For instance, I stopped consuming horrible news media for the most part. So I get fewer bad news in. I also don't watch everything on youtube either; rather than watching a video where person xyz lost family members abc in some crash, I watch and study surstromming reaction videos (these are fascinating to me, because of group behaviour and also individual's showing varied results here). I can select what I do and watch; the whole article feels as if someone had a need to publish a paper rather than make an objective observation. Publish or perish days...

Re: The brain was not designed for this much bad news

#115

Post by paganel »

spking wrote: post #3

Neil Postman called this the “Peekaboo World”. “What steps do you plan to take to reduce the conflict in the Middle East? Or the rates of inflation, crime and unemployment? What are your plans for preserving the environment or reducing the risk of nuclear war? What do you plan to do about NATO, OPEC, the CIA, affirmative action, and the monstrous treatment of the Baha’is in Iran? I shall take the liberty of answering…

> ? Or the rates of inflation, crime and unemployme

A proletarian revolution would be a good start, not sure what this ideologue writer was on about. History is far from having ended, change can still happen through the union of individual wills.

Re: The brain was not designed for this much bad news

#116

Post by retired »

IneffablePigeon wrote: post #112
retired wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only if you limit your work and social life to that particular city. Not something most people want to do.

There are many places in the world this is not true. I would say about half the people I know who live in London don’t own a car. They travel plenty - probably more than the people I know who don’t live in London. If they really need a car once they get to their destination they will rent one, or use taxis.

For The Netherlands you are really constricted to the city you live in if you don’t own a car. You can forget about going to a concert, a birthday party or catching an early flight without one. Or if you want to do anything fun on a Sunday in the east. Most people I know have a social life or do sports that require a car. If your children play football you really need a car. Last time I used a taxi in The Netherlands it was €210 for a 40 minute ride, that is reserved for the very wealthy.

London is a well connected metropole with 15 million people, not really comparable to most cities.

Edit, reply to Alex as I am rate limited with my comments:

Please tell me how I can cycle the 60 kilometers from the airport to my home at 23:00 with a rolling carry-on suitcase.

Renting a car is around €50 for a night out. And you need to reserve way in advance which is not great for spontaneous trips. Car ownership becomes cheaper and more convenient very quickly. I did car renting and after a couple of €1000/month bills I went back to car ownership.

Renting a bus for the sports team is a lot more expensive than using the parents cars which are at no cost to the club.

Reply to consp: You need the cars for football matches as public transport doesn’t get you there. The fields are outside of cities and matches are in the weekend when public transport is very limited.

Re: The brain was not designed for this much bad news

#117

Post by stratocumulus0 »

spking wrote: post #3

Neil Postman called this the “Peekaboo World”. “What steps do you plan to take to reduce the conflict in the Middle East? Or the rates of inflation, crime and unemployment? What are your plans for preserving the environment or reducing the risk of nuclear war? What do you plan to do about NATO, OPEC, the CIA, affirmative action, and the monstrous treatment of the Baha’is in Iran? I shall take the liberty of answering…

Postman wrote this in context of television, which is a broadcast channel with no means to interact with it. But in times of social media, your reaction to the news is something you can broadcast yourself, at the very least to your online followers (if we are talking about story feeds). Now, a lot of groups enforce their members to take political stances and show action as a sign of belonging. These might be anything from a writing circle to a raver collective. Everyone already shares the group opinions (sincerely or not), but then they need to perform token activism to maintain their image as a "safe" person to have in the group. Examples of such actions I've seen recently would be:

- A special edition of a writing workshop dedicated to writing poems which can be used by people protesting against the ICE in the US. We are thousands of kilometers away from the US, by the way.

- A street protest against whatever the most recent armed conflict is. The protest has a DJ, a great sound system and everyone is just dancing while singing the slogans.

- A charity party collecting donations for a very narrowly defined vulnerable population in a war-torn area, most often someone the participants can personally identify with.

Case in point is that the vast majority of the population has no power to drive any meaningful change, as Postman rightly noticed. But then, the new source of mental load comes from the fact that you have to be performatively concerned if you don't want to lose your status in a group.

Re: The brain was not designed for this much bad news

#118

Post by kstenerud »

spking wrote: post #3

Neil Postman called this the “Peekaboo World”. “What steps do you plan to take to reduce the conflict in the Middle East? Or the rates of inflation, crime and unemployment? What are your plans for preserving the environment or reducing the risk of nuclear war? What do you plan to do about NATO, OPEC, the CIA, affirmative action, and the monstrous treatment of the Baha’is in Iran? I shall take the liberty of answering…

It's not that you plan to do nothing; rather, it's because you can do nothing about them. The only people who have any sway are the various foreign offices and the country leaders. But even their power is incredibly limited, because humanity moves like the tide.

Sure, Trump can continue chastising Netanyahu for continuing Israel's attacks into Gaza and Lebanon (which will sabotage the already comical agreement between the USA and Iran), but Netanyahu is in a bind with an October election coming up (and a hardliner rival who's already calling him a 3-failed-war-leader), so he can't change course no matter how much Trump (who needs a Republican victory in November) gets pissed off and threatens him. And even those threats will largely be empty because losing the religious right would be catastrophic. And no one else at either helm could do any better.

And because of that, Iran knows it can just continue like it always has, slowly working towards a bomb, with Saudia Arabia and Turkey soon following suit (they can't allow Iran to be the only nuclear power in the region - not with an isolationist USA).

Then we have Russia, whose insecurity and "defensive expansionism" spans centuries, stemming from its geography, so there's simply no way to placate them, and no way for them to ever be happy about NATO (which everyone already knows is a paper tiger anyway - it's just a matter of sussing out where the real alliance lines lay).

So yeah, you're not going to solve it. I'm not going to solve it. Nobody's gonna solve it. We're just gonna ride the tide.

Re: The brain was not designed for this much bad news

#119

Post by kristiandupont »

devsda wrote: post #58
applfanboysbgon wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a weird quote. It reeks of pretentious pseudo-intellectualism. People vote for a government that does something very tangible about all of those things. The media influenced how Americans voted in the US election, and they voted for a guy that predictably started a major new war in the Middle East. That is a real thing that happened and has impacted billions of people globally with second-order economic effec…

> People vote for a government that does something very tangible about all of those things People don't do that. Politics in US(and democracies in general) have what I call the cable tv bundling problem. Imagine you have only two bundle packages with your most preferred channels split evenly across two packages along with some unwanted channels. Regardless of which package you choose, you'll miss out on some of your…

The US suffers from Duverger's Law which means that any vote for anything other than one of the two big parties is wasted. In my country, we currently have 17 different parties, each with different variations of policies. Some are outliers, but many of them have or have had power to some degree over the years. Your cable-tv problem still exists, but to a much smaller extent.
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