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Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed

scientificamerican.com

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Re: Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed

#831
post #785
post #570

Living in Poland ruled by trumpists for 8 years I have these experiences: - Get subscription of high value newspaper or magazine. Professionals work there, so you will get real facts, worthy opinions and less emotions. - It is better to not use social media. You never know if you are discussing with normal person, a political party troll, or Russian troll. - It is not worth discussing with „switched-on” people. They…

> Get subscription of high value newspaper or magazine. Professionals work there, so you will get real facts, worthy opinions and less emotions. I struggle with this. It's incredibly challenging to find reliable, unbiased news sources these days, especially with the perceived slant of many major outlets. It's discouraging when even subscriptions to reputable publications like the NYT and WSJ leave you feeling like yo…

Focus on outlets that prioritize reporting. You can't find a "neutral" outlet -- all human beings have biases, and that gets magnified once we're talking about collective human endeavors such as newspapers, magazines, etc. But we can at least avoid solipsism ("the view that the self is the only reality") by grounding ourselves in outside, shared reality. That's what reporting is -- actually being at a place in real life, talking to actual people involved. Sure, the transmission of those observations will inevitably be shaped by the human reporter's own biases, but you're still getting access to shared reality. Even if the opinions aren't ones you share, you can at least see what they're based on and so have some ability to make your own evaluation on if the implicit conclusions the reporter is drawing match up with the base facts they are sharing.

Re: Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed

#832
post #786

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Part of the problem is the incredible corruption at the Supreme Court. The courts increasingly can't be trusted to be a stopgap. Just because a body disagrees with your desired interpretation of the law does not mean its corrupt. I disagree with the liberal justices on just about every split decision, but I don't think they're on the take. They simply have a different philosophy of the law. I challenge you to find…

For your challenge: https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/supreme-court-grants-tru... The context of the Supreme Court choosing to reverse 50 years of precedent regarding abortion is pretty important there. Especially as the justices involved were going against their explicit answers from their confirmation hearings, that it was settled law. Schumer also did not threaten violence.

> For your challenge: https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/supreme-court-grants-tru...

I fail to see how this is a valid example of a corrupt decision.

And if you're going to start prosecuting Presidents for official acts, we definitely should start with the one that was executing US citizens via drone strikes without a trial.

> The context of the Supreme Court choosing to reverse 50 years of precedent regarding abortion is pretty important there. Especially as the justices involved were going against their explicit answers from their confirmation hearings, that it was settled law.

So a judge can never change their mind on anything? And once a ruling is decided, it's carved in stone forever?

By that bankrupt logic we'd be stuck with Plessy v. Ferguson.

> Schumer also did not threaten violence.

I'd love to hear what other consequences you think he was eluding to when he said they will "pay the price". It's clearly not at the ballot box as SCOTUS are appointed for life.

Re: Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed

#833

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Subreddits like r/pics are packed full of thinly veiled death threats towards the sitting president or Elon Musk. This is just blatant misinformation. Since r/pics is the only example you've chosen to give us, let's evaluate it: I've scrolled through the current first 50 posts in Hot, and 0 of them are death threats, thinly veiled or otherwise. "Packed full", indeed. And here, so it isn't simply my word vs. his; th…

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Re: Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed

#834
post #779
post #734

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What’s wrong with the separation of powers in the USA? Once the same party controls the Senate, House, Presidency and Supreme Court, the powers are no longer meaningfully separate. Which is now the case. (state powers are still separate; I'm guessing we'll see action from state AGs against sudden Federal actions which have disadvantaged their state) Also, as Musk has figured out, the simple power of fait accompli.…

> Once the same party controls the Senate, House, Presidency and Supreme Court, the powers are no longer meaningfully separate. Which is now the case. Three out of four of those are the direct will of the voters. And the fourth is the indirect will of the voters as expressed by their President. I think insisting that they always be at odds with each other is unrealistic and goes against the fundamental idea that peop…

Will of the voters doesn't mean it's not a dictatorship. Plenty of dictators were popular and democratically elected.

Re: Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed

#835

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I checked reddit recently for the first time in a while, and I was shocked by how radicalized its become. An echo chamber of hateful people and perhaps GPTs that are agitating the big subreddits. The contrast is stark with all the "no place for hate" in the rules and endless banning of microaggressions. I saw dozens of death threats. Even an explicit death threat thread with over 40,000 upvotes before reddit stepped…

I just stick to the niche subreddits (games, interests, whatever). The main subreddits have been especially aggressive echo chambers for a long time now.

I tried that with work. I created an account where I can just follow a few things related to my job. The problem is that reddit will start showing you things you didn't subscribe to. It's a battle to keep them at bay. If you look at my work account feed it's all mycology, bad tattoos, what-is-this-thing. I never subscribed to any of them. Yea, they are interesting but that's not what I wanted or need at work.

Re: Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed

#836

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You know what you can do? Subscribe to multiple papers, from both sides. Then you can do some comparison to see when things are reported differently. When I grew up we had at least two papers, sometimes three. One was leaning left, other leaning right. These days it's what Ground News[1] is trying to do from what I can gather, though haven't tried them as they don't cover the news in my country. [1]: https://ground.n…

Why should there be only two sides?

That was probably mentioned from US-centric point of view where they have two-party system.

Re: Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed

#837

I think "being informed" is very overrated in general. Often it means being informed about palace intrigue and intelligence service/corporate narratives. I would say that in general media consumption or "staying informed" should be seen as a vice not a virtue

It's not overrated, it's often confused with "to understand what's happening". To "be informed" is like to take a look at a chess or go board: positions are clear, black and white pieces are here and there, but it takes skill to really understand the current dynamics of a game. Add media bias ("let's show the board at this angle that looks better for our side") and now we have "informed" population that's being surpr…

in some handwavy simplification:

[start] data --(meaning/interpretation)--> information --(interpretation/understanding)-> knowledge ----> ...

probably more levels. At any step one can take action.. faster if more to the start but also less thoughtfull/"correct". primal instincts are at the start

the whole point of news-machine is to never get to beyond information.. same as <2sec video-frame switching..

Re: Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed

#838
post #570

Living in Poland ruled by trumpists for 8 years I have these experiences: - Get subscription of high value newspaper or magazine. Professionals work there, so you will get real facts, worthy opinions and less emotions. - It is better to not use social media. You never know if you are discussing with normal person, a political party troll, or Russian troll. - It is not worth discussing with „switched-on” people. They…

[deleted]

Re: Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed

#839

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What helped me is to realize: Sadness and anger come from within, not from the outside. Nobody can "make" you mad. They will do what they do, and it's up to us to decide if and how to emotionally respond to it. We are not amoebas that simply respond to stimulus. We have agency over our own thoughts and feelings. This is something I try to teach my kid, and I think it's also helped her deal with others who she would p…

The simplest way to control your inner life is to not let whatever miserable output in. In other words turn it off. It’s really entitled (by whom? who knows) to say that people have control over their inner lives as a response to the News being misery-inducing (according to them). Yeah. So turn it off. You don’t own the outside world your attention.

* you don’t owe

Re: Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed

#840
post #673

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But when Democrats did change course they were blocked because Trump explicitly said Democrats passing something on the issue would hurt his election chances: > In February 2024 and again in May 2024, Republicans in the Senate blocked a bipartisan border security bill Biden had pushed for to reduce the number of migrants who can claim asylum at the border and provide more money for Customs and Border Protection offic…

I agree that Trump's move was very bad, but we know that Biden didn't need a new law to "fix" the situation at the border. After Trump blocked that law, Biden made the executive order that for years he claimed he couldn't make, and then the situation at the border got "better". If Biden had instead made that executive order in, say, Fall 2022, there's a good chance that the situation at the border would not have been…

The border situation is a red herring. I'd say that the transgender issue is too.

The main reason Trump won in 24 because he captured the Great Lakes area. Outside of major cities, there are not large Hispanic communities in the Upper Midwest. Migration has far less of an impact there than, say, inflation. And that's what Trump campaigned on.

Now, did he cause that inflation? Partly. Does the US government have to print off money en masse in order to make up for deficits that have been made larger by three decades of GOP refusal to have an adult conversation about revenue policy? Yes.

Does that matter to the average person in the Upper Midwest? No.

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