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I Hate the News (2006)

aaronsw.com

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Re: I Hate the News (2006)

#31

Post by KennyBlanken »

rcarr wrote: post #7

> This seems to be true, but the curious thing is that I’m never involved. The government commits a crime, the New York Times prints it on the front page, the people on the cable chat shows foam at the mouth about it, the government apologizes and commits the crime more subtly. It’s a valuable system — I certainly support the government being more subtle about committing crimes (well, for the sake of argument, at lea…

This right here is why I hate the pedestal Swartz has been put on since his suicide. His "hot take" is just straight-up trash you'd expect from any random 20-something techbro libertarian off the street.

How did he not fall over from the irony of being a Jewish man and saying "well nothing in the news today doesn't directly concern me, so I don't care about the news ever"?

How would you know if the news concerned you if you didn't read it?

Re: I Hate the News (2006)

#32

Post by thenerdhead »

I also hate the news (and advertisements).

The news will never teach you how to think. It will tell you what to think.

I love books though. Books don't tell lies to you because you have to think for yourself.

Re: I Hate the News (2006)

#33

Post by toomim »

SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #18

I do wonder whether encouraging people to exist entirely in their bubble is healthy. I agree with the article to a point. I don't really have a "daily news ritual," though I tend to stumble across major stories. But enough people being isolated from the news can result in an uninformed populace. People continuing to vote R or D simply out of habit. I mean, I'm unlikely to vote anything but D for the foreseeable futur…

I find that "the news" is what is creating those bubbles. The more you read the nytimes, or watch fox, the more you lock into that particular bubble mindset.

Re: I Hate the News (2006)

#34

Post by sealeck »

jmcgough wrote: post #27

As a queer person watching a slew of recent anti-LGBT laws pass, I wish I could have the luxury of just ignoring the news and not caring. Aaron was 20 when he wrote this and it shows.

I think his perspective is a bit more nuanced than this; the complaint is with "real-time" news (somewhere on his blog, Aaron wrote about how he preferred to read post-event summaries in the New Yorker rather than being up-to-date every day).

Re: I Hate the News (2006)

#35

Post by assimpleaspossi »

belval wrote: post #26
chrisco255 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess for context I'll add this is Aaron Swartz, a cofounder of Reddit, and fierce advocate for free speech. He was federally prosecuted for wire fraud in 2013 for downloading academic journals from MIT, faced up to 30 years in prison, and committed suicide just before his trial. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz

I had seen his name thrown around but I didn't know the story. Thank you for sharing, from the layman's perspective it really seems like an overreach of federal prosecution.

Well, he did create reddit.

Re: I Hate the News (2006)

#36

Post by assimpleaspossi »

nexus7556 wrote: post #5
Kye wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think you'll need to worry about how he feels about you not following him on Twitter considering he died 10 years ago.

It is easy to forget what a different world it was back then.

17 years ago is now a different world.

Re: I Hate the News (2006)

#37

Post by assimpleaspossi »

throw0101a wrote: post #17

If someone feels this way it may be worth getting a (paper) subscription to a weekly paper (assuming those still exist: The New Yorker ?): * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weekly_newspaper There's a lot of noise day-to-day, so some smoothing/averaging may be useful in reducing that. Perhaps monthly (e.g., The Atlantic ) for longer-form articles on bigger topics as well.

Some days, when reading the paper, it's not worth getting up off the toilet.

Re: I Hate the News (2006)

#38

Post by sealeck »

e40 wrote: post #30
SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #18

I do wonder whether encouraging people to exist entirely in their bubble is healthy. I agree with the article to a point. I don't really have a "daily news ritual," though I tend to stumble across major stories. But enough people being isolated from the news can result in an uninformed populace. People continuing to vote R or D simply out of habit. I mean, I'm unlikely to vote anything but D for the foreseeable futur…

For whatever reason liberals always seem to be the ones who withdraw into their bubbles. The problem is this leaves the other side the opportunity to capture various government organizations, like SCOTUS.

I'm not sure conservatives are exactly the social butterflies you make them out to be.

Re: I Hate the News (2006)

#39

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

It is straight unreal to me that this guy partially creates Reddit, what his intentions were vs what it has become.

If someone came to me saying “I want to get things wrong, I want to have a surface understanding of topics, I’d really like to be distrusting and skeptical and believe everything I’m told by behind the scenes powers ensuring I think a specific thing”… I would introduce them to Reddit.

Re: I Hate the News (2006)

#40

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

thenerdhead wrote: post #32

I also hate the news (and advertisements). The news will never teach you how to think. It will tell you what to think. I love books though. Books don't tell lies to you because you have to think for yourself.

> Books don't tell lies to you

That is entirely inaccurate though. There are a LOT of books designed for a goal.

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