Everything in moderation.
I can feel you. This year I tried to follow politics a bit more thoroughly. It didn’t change anything in how I acted or voted. But it made me feel depressed and stressed out.
I did that last year. This year I set up so many filters and block lists to avoid the toxic bullshit. It’s really helped to restore my sanity.
- There is no good news
- The news exists to capture your attention
- You cannot fix all of the problems
- Secure your own mask before helping others
Agree with all the points you’ve got there. The point is to be informed of the facts and that’s becoming increasingly difficult to do. Here’s what has helped me:
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Use RSS feeds. News sites are trying to compete with social media now and try to put gossip junk all over their front page. RSS serves up news stories in time order.
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Use an RSS app that lets you set filter words (I like Pluma on Android, or now I’ve moved to Tiny Tiny RSS on my home server with Read You app on Android). Filter out the stuff you don’t want to see. I don’t care about Elon Musk “news”. I don’t care about the British Royal family. My list keeps getting longer, but set it up to filter out all the stuff you don’t want.
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Pick the sources that work best for you. I like BBC and Guardian (checking out France24 as well), but take a few reputable quality sources you like.
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Following the news isn’t a moral good (as many would portray). You can follow the news as little or as much as you like. I check it once a day to skim headlines mostly, and take breaks for a number of days at a time.
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I tend to block breaking news stories from minute by minute updates and prefer to know the facts once the story has developed. Youtube channels like TLDR news do a good job of summarising events a day or two later. E.g. the recent Bondi Beach incident in Australia, I want to know the details of events once they have some idea of what’s happening (usually by the next day), and don’t care so much about hearing every 5 minutes about a reaction statement from some political figure.
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Not knowing about a bunch of stuff is ok. There’s so much information out there that it is too much for one person to study on a daily basis. If you’ve got other stuff to do, that’s ok.
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Stop getting your “news” from social media, messaging apps forwards, and other ragebait sources.
Mind to share your blacklist?
Thats very specific to my interests and biases. Sharing it would serve no positive purpose. I’ll give you an idea of the categories though: I’ve tried to remove as much as I can about the British royal family, American politics, Musk, sports, and many large ongoing events that get repeated coverage with minute updates (that I get summary updates for from other sources and don’t need it to overwhelm my news feed at the expense of all else). Also depends on what is popular at the time, Twitter was constantly in the news at some point and has dropped away…but that filter also served its purpose well.
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I’m pretty sure I agree with this take? I do think it’s your civic duty to be familiar with every major story that passes through the 24 hour news cycle. The lie the news media tells is that the best way to do that is to check headlines every 6.8 seconds, when in reality reading a few articles (although you do have to click through and read the whole story) from a reputable source every 1-3 days will leave you much better informed than someone who looks at headlines constantly.
Finally! A bell curve meme we’re I’m the Jedi wojack
Wondering which of the two extremes I belong to. I guess the first, since I’m not sure.
I have a job to do instead of reading news (mindlessly scrolling internet for free is my job)
Let me sum it up: People are doing bad shit. The people that aren’t are actively enabling said people to do bad shit. There is nothing you can do about it.
So yeah, I’ve got better shit to do
you definitely can do things about it, but there’s a whole sphere of influence/realistic expectations type shit everyone should consider, when trying to do something about it. worrying about things you can’t control and that don’t immediately effect you or the ones close to you you (i hate English) care about is just draining and robs you of agency over the things you can control.
also We Didn’t Start the Fire
Unrelated to your point: Placing the word “that” or “which” between the two "you"s can make that less clunky
Related: I was mostly talking about your point of spheres of influence. 0.001% of people have more wealth (re: power) than the bottom 50% of people. I almost certainly fall in that half, as do half of humanity. If we all got together, we could draw and quarte that 0.001%. But the systems put in place with all that wealth make it impossible
Im probably somwhere in the lower 14-34% I dont keep a good watch over current news although i wish i did.
“I’ve disengaged with the world around me and justified doing nothing to help make it better”.
I help my community by donating clothes and food, and I donate heavily to progressive causes and campaigns. I really don’t think reading every little bit of information about how the world is falling apart really helps me, and I reject the idea that’s connected to making the world better. If I had more money and could act at a global scale, maybe. But I don’t.
That’s wonderful and I’m glad you do. The majority of people who make this argument are liberals who like to give themselves an excuse to not have to get up and do anything though. They convince themselves they are powerless when the reality is the opposite.
This is a very common response I get. People literally get angry when I say I don’t follow the news/political infotainment cycle the way they do. You do you bro. I’m making the world better in a lot of ways already.
The point is no change in society at the scales we needs happens with this attitude. All of our freedom is inextricably linked to one another - to ignore transgressions on someone else’s liberty is to ignore transgressions on your own.
the people paying attention to the news constantly and using that to actually makw change are not watching a constant stream of it from their phone…they’re coordinating in groups to affect the most effecient change for their time/sphere of influence (first step generally being to secure the local government, the majority in the US are captured by local business/real estate baron interests)
if your sphere of influence just comprises your immediate family and friends, it does you no good to occupy your mind with the suffering of those halfway across the world (unless you think their suffering is tied to an easily solvable problem you have the answer to). doing so just robs you of energy/agency to affect change where you can have the most impact.
there’s saying i don’t remember where it’s from… before you fix the world you have to fix your country, before you fix your country you have to fix your community, before you fix your community you have to fix your neighborhood, before you fix your neighborhood you have to fix your family, before you fix your family you have to fix yourself.
Organizing works necessitates being up to date with the latest political developments and with Trump that means you gotta have people on the pulse constantly. There’s an aspect of guarding your mental but not to the point of hindering your understanding of things.
All organizing must start local correct. There is no top down solution for this it must be bottom up by the power of the average person, the worker. But I disagree with this framing where you can’t care about people half a world away. Their struggle is our struggle. It is one in the same. And while maybe my direct actions can’t change things my actions sure as hell can help raise awareness or build a movement that can change things.
My dad loves to use that line to excuse him playing golf 6 days a week instead of doing anything to help people beyond some donations. I’m not saying he can’t golf but maybe one or two of those days could be spent doing organizing and activism work.
This line of thinking is more pablum to keep yourself docile and subservient to the powers that be. Emancipation from the oppression of capital is a global fight that requires us to always keep the international struggle in the back of our mind.
¯\(ツ)/¯
Well, that’s my attitude. There’s plenty I ignore. I apologise for nothing.
Decide for yourself how invested you want to be. Let others decide for themselves.
Liberals man. Y’all are gross with your inability to see outside of yourself and how your life can only materially improve by working with everyone around you to achieve that goal.
The half hearted commitment to progress as long as it’s convenient and doesn’t make you feel bad is literally why our country is in shambles.
You’re so lucky there are more people who disagree with your mindset than agree with it. All of our freedoms and liberties were won with blood in the streets not with whatever attitude this fucking is.
Yeah, comments like OP are so infuriating because ignoring the collapse of society doean’t mean its not happening.
Wow, my favorite false dichotomy! Oh how I missed it so. The sheer beauty of the strawmanning, the amount of effort to willfully misinterpret statements! It’s the perfect blend of self righteousness and reading comprehension failure!
Hey little man I don’t know if you’re aware but the attitudes that I am yelling about that have led to the crumbling of the United States over the past several decades is literally happening in your backyard right now.
Y’all liberals will come around to how wrong just ignoring things is as a strategy to improve your life in a few years once all those social programs you have left are stripped away just like us.
Mmmmm yes daddy billionaire business mogul, feed me more headlines, tell me what to think! Seed and manipulate my entire worldview harder! I love it when you twist my point of view! Twist it harder! Oh, you’ve brought vague state-sponsored talking points to double team me? Yes. Yes! Make me your sloppy anxiety ridden mess daddy! Let me slurp up your scum! Make me forget about how innacurate articles about my field of expertise are while I swallow every other article you give me! Fill me with your news daddy! ❤️
Dropping the shitposting though? (Not that you really deserve it with the blatant patronizing)
There are so many better targets for your effort than people choosing to not be led around by corporate interests through intentionally emotionally charged news.
There are fucking 20 year old studies that show that over exposure to news media causes people to overestimate crime rates to a ridiculous degree, and even more so with violent crime rates. The news has only become significantly more polarizing and emotionally charged in the many years since.
Save your efforts for careful organization and planning locally. Understand that 90% of the news will have no impact on you and those around you and is only meant for shifting public opinions. Not for actually informing. Shut the fuck up online and stop painting a target on your back. Practice fucking OPSEC if you have absolutely any seriousness about this, otherwise admit to yourself that you’re just larping or not going to take any action yourself.
I sure as hell aren’t taking any action that could put the people I care about at risk before shtf. It’s not a judgement or impugnment of your character, it’s just that you should stop being so damn openly judgemental if that’s the case for you.
Most importantly, as I called out in my first fucking sentence of my last comment responding to you, it’s a massive fucking false dichotomy. It is entirely possible to stay informed and up to date on events without fucking wallowing in the nonstop deluge of “sky is falling” headlines.
And even if this black and white dichotomy was in any way valid, your insistence that only “duh libruls” do it is even more absurd. Get outside and meet people. I’m fairly introverted and I still regularly meet and see people from all across the political
spectrummultidimensionalhypercompass showing the full variation of news awareness from “What do you mean ICE has built a Guantanamo on US soil for illegal immigrants?” to “I read every headline from 6 different news sources and cross reference each article”. Yes, that means I see fucking MAGATs that are absurdly tapped into the vein of fresh news but somehow still deluding themselves into MAGA. One is a relative of mine unfortunately.Hey man I’m not reading all that but thanks for playing
Go ahead back to .ml’s China comm. Your blatant attempts to keep people fighting amongst each other instead of doing anything better with their time won’t be missed.
I think what the world needs is people that constantly and consistently do small good deeds. Strongly acting on the currently trending topic causes pushback from the other side and ends in polarization. There are a few exceptions of course, natural disasters for example that very time sensitive.
What we need are people banding together in solidaristic movements not individually doing a little mutual aid here and there. Doing small good deeds is the permissible way people are allowed to change society which is to say in a way that never fundamentally threatens the power structures we live under.
We can do both, if time and energy allow.
Revolution is one way to change a society. It’s the one that gets all the attention because it makes a big splash. It’s also less stable and often more violent than slow change. Sometimes it is indeed the only way, when incremental change is repressed. But it is glorified and should not be the first option.
Revolution doesn’t just happen all at once. It takes intentional and strategic action over time. But revolution is the only way out of where we are now. Capitalism is a death cult. It’s an exterminationist ideology on a long enough time scale. Doing away with it completely is the only option.
What you suggest will only draw out the pain and suffering of humanity longer at the behest of the rich and powerful.
Oh hey, it’s those “better things to do instead”!
