331–340 of 376 posts
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War with Iran was not on anyones bingo card.
No one expected the guy who previously almost decided to bomb Iran to bomb Iran? https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/jun/21/donald-trump-r... I don't know what could be stronger evidence than that. People just decided not to pay attention to it.
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This is literally oil industry propaganda.
No it isn’t. I live in Zürich, I don’t even need a bike, I just take a tram to do my groceries. Many of my friends have bikes though, I’ve considered getting a cheap one but my apartment’s bike storage room is kind of crowded…
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I don't think most Americans even knew what the strait of hormouz was, expecting them to vote differently based on that last November is wild. Trump constantly ran as the "no more wars" president and people fell for it. At that point, the blame is just for believing in that he was not lying. But strait of hormouz was a non topic for almost the entire world before the war.
November 2024 nobody could have reasonably predicted that the strait of Hormuz would be closed in February 2026 because Trump would declare war on Iran. But they could have seen he was a fool and predicted that putting a fool in charge of the presidency would make something bad happen. Last year we had stupid tariff wars, now we have stupid actual wars and a screw worm infestation. Who knows what's next? I don't, but…
The other option is to be more realistic - people often have wildly unrealistic expectations of how the world should work and seem to get a bit stressed when they are confronted with reality. The more pressing problem is the voters who accept policies being put in place based on something going wrong one time without accepting that things go wrong and we have to tolerate problems to some extent. If policies were made…
A city bus ran over a 17yo girl during a right turn, in ljubljana, slovenia, and killed her a month ago. It's been multiple decades of dozens of city bus routes being driven by bus drivers in buses, accounting for millions of left and right turns, in sunshine, in the dark, during snowstorms and hot sunny weather, and we had was one dead girl in a freak accident. Reading the online comments the day that happened (and…
And this carries on for all the other sources of injury and other "bad" things. Provided, of course, the cause it's explicit and direct.
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It’s more a question of knowing when to unplug yourself on things that are affecting you but that you cannot control. From government news to something bad happening miles from you. These news can affect you but you have no control over the situation. Not doing so is actually one way to get depression.
Not sure you can “unplug” from things that affect you that you cannot control? Sooner or later you’ll have to deal with that issue. I do think you can “unplug” from things that do not affect you that you cannot control. For instance, if you’re an immigrant, and ICE is rounding up immigrants in your neighborhood, you can go ahead and mentally “unplug” as you like. But you’re going to have to deal with the reality of y…
For ICE it’s kinda a big stretch can we agree? And in this case the person does have control. This person does have agency over the issue and should regularize their situation as soon as possible.
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Your first paragraph sounds like a religion.
As an autistic person this has never made sense, the things people are willing to do in order to fit into a group, like at it's extreme murdering others. After becoming aware of my diagnosis I've started studying "normal" people and it's insane what you are willing to withstand just to belong to a group or in society. Now I think that some things "normal" people participate in they think is actually fun, like hanging…
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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…
I feel this is somehow reducing all expression of opinion as performative, i.e. serving to heighten the social standing of the expressor. I have a handful of other motivations: - to persuade - to develop my worldview (speaking, typing, thinking all use different neural pathways) - to collect feedback and be challenged The activism against “performative” activism is equally grating when it misfires, and the movement p…
Note that I'm not claiming that this is the only way people interact with media nowadays. Change can happen if people become mobilized; but the phenomenon I'm describing is the pressure to take any action (token or real) on every single issue the group is supposed to be concerned about.
Factfulness helped to show me that, despite our brain's bias, the world is actually consistently getting better.
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We have the same problem in the UK. Local councils went all in on the Palestine thing when their job is basically collecting trash, roadworks, planning and education. I can’t realistically vote a candidate in who doesn’t talk about trash collection but does talk about Middle Eastern politics.
Sounds like all the noise in Texas right now about sharia law. Muslims are a tiny proportion of the people there, what are the politician all worked up about?
Reading Factfulness was an epiphany for me: our brains are wired to pay attention to the superdramatic in a way that is now harmful to it - the same way that preferences for sugar and fat are now harmful. Factfulness helped to show me that, despite our brain's bias, the world is actually consistently getting better .