Sticking your head in the sand is more comforting than facing the horrors above it. That doesn't mean that's what you should do.
Things you notice when you quit the news (2016)
571–580 of 741 posts
Re: Things you notice when you quit the news (2016)
#572Aaron Swartz has also a good piece about avoiding the news: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/hatethenews
Re: Things you notice when you quit the news (2016)
#573I 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…
My father tells me - "Why do you care what Andrew Cuomo is doing in New York city?" and it kind of was eye-opening. I really don't. I wish I paid more attention to local news, local politics, and perhaps check-in on international news on a weekly basis. The internet changed all this. When I was growing up, my dad read local newspaper daily. National and international news were briefly covered in the local paper. He'd…
I think Cuomo is maybe a bad example of why you shouldn't care. The Cuomo affair should hold a lot of interest because it was a true test of the health of public institutions.
Here is a powerful public official who was lauded by the media for his response to COVID, while simultaneously implementing terrible public health policies in old age homes that led to thousands of deaths, who then fudged his COVID reports to the CDC, and passed legislation that shielded executives that managed old age homes from liability for following those terrible public health policies. Other representatives tried to draw attention to these problems but couldn't get traction because Cuomo was a media darling in how he stood up to Trump.
Cuomo's public image was further bolstered by his brother at CNN, and with all this free publicity Andrew signed a multimillion dollar deal to write a book about his career.
But his incompetence and fraud wasn't enough to trigger a fall from grace, it took several sexual harassment complaints.
So as a health check on your democratic republic, I'd be a little worried given the multiple failures up and down the line: failure of the executive to implement sensible policies and report data accurately, failure of the press to check their claims, provide coverage free of conflicts of interest and otherwise keep them executive branches in line, failure of the justice department to prosecute blatant misconduct.
Re: Things you notice when you quit the news (2016)
#574Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 li…
> The majority of americans believe in abortion by a non trivial margin.
That great, then you should have no trouble passing an actual Constitutional Amendment recognizing that right in a way that can't be interpreted away. I'll just sit here and wait while you go and do that.
> 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.
You omit an awful lot of history in order to sound snarky. In reality, we started with a loose confederation of independent states. Some skillful negotiators tried to convince them all to unite into one nation. Naturally, the more rural states with smaller populations were concerned that their opinions and needs would be steamrolled by the more populous states, so to bring them all aboard, those negotiators biased a few things towards them a little bit. Everyone, including those more urban states, signed onto it, and everyone lived happily ever after*.
Now, making those states' concerns appear rather prescient, quite a lot of modern urban progressives seem to want to renege on that promise, primarily because they think they can get away with it, and they hate those people anyways.
Re: Things you notice when you quit the news (2016)
#575Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> Progressive wing of the Democrats Actually the Supreme Court that decided Roe vs Wade was mostly appointed by republicans.
Who were almost certainly appointed long before any of those issues were of a concern to anyone. Exactly what are you attempting to prove by that statement?
Re: Things you notice when you quit the news (2016)
#576As 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…
I built https://legiblenews.com for this very reason. Once per day at 6p PST it grabs the latest headlines from Wikipedia and displays them in a minimal format that does not induce anxiety. My fav part is that it judiciously links to Wikipedia articles so you can actually learn about the areas where things are happening.
You can find the backstory at https://legiblenews.com/about
Re: Things you notice when you quit the news (2016)
#577Earlier quoted context omitted.
My personal favorite recommendation in this vein is The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/ . They've got some great writers and editors and often deliver pretty unique insights. Their articles tend towards long-ish-form, but not nearly as long as e.g. the New Yorker. They're a little less world-focused and more US-centric, but not completely. There is some bias (isn't there always?), but I've seen them cover a si…
The Atlantic. The New Yorker. The Economist. These are neutral to left facing. In a feeble effort to avoid being put in a different bubble, does anyone have something that an educated republican/conservative would read?
Reason?
Re: Things you notice when you quit the news (2016)
#578I 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…
I'm a firm believer in quality over quantity when it comes to news. Google News has gotten increasingly annoying though, forcing me harder toward the "personalized" results, the kind of filter bubble I'm intentionally trying to avoid. What worked well for me was getting a print subscription to the Economist. They definitely have a bias (particularly in their editorials), but it's mostly of the "free trade" variety, w…
Business oriented publications work well for news because their biases tend to be of the “how can you make more money variety” as opposed to something catering to their reader/viewer’s cognitive biases (their readers want to make money, not fool themselves). Fooling yourself isn’t profitable, so why bother watching ideological conservative foxnews when time spent reading the conservative biz newspaper WSJ is much more productive?
Re: Things you notice when you quit the news (2016)
#579[deleted]
Re: Things you notice when you quit the news (2016)
#580I 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…
I'm a firm believer in quality over quantity when it comes to news. Google News has gotten increasingly annoying though, forcing me harder toward the "personalized" results, the kind of filter bubble I'm intentionally trying to avoid. What worked well for me was getting a print subscription to the Economist. They definitely have a bias (particularly in their editorials), but it's mostly of the "free trade" variety, w…
Quick curiosity question. Why do you find The Economist’s coverage of Africa and the Middle East leaps and bounds better than others?
Here’s why I’m asking. I find The Economist’s coverage of the US a 7/10 and Turkey a 3/10. Having lived in both for roughly the same time, The Economist’s coverage of the US feels vastly superior to that of Turkey.
Yet, when I talk to my friends here, they say they read it for the international coverage. That always came to me as curious.