para-government tech companies are working as hard on that as possible, it will be soon. It doesn’t even matter if it really works, they’ll just say it does.
Detaching yourself from the reality of what’s happening in the world is certainly one way of coping, but IMO unless you’re doing it to protect your mental health (in which case I highly recommend reducing your news consumption), it is just a form of isolationism at best, and an abdication of our shared human responsibility to protect and help each other at worst.
Let me reiterate: if you are seeing your mental health decline as a result of news consumption, you should reduce that consumption, or at least make changes to which news sources you consume.
Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.
I strongly disagree with the person in this article’s recommendation of detachment for the average person. This is akin to advocating for political non-participation, because how can you intelligently assess who is best to represent you in the world if you don’t know the state of the world?
We on the Left (rightfully) criticize people who cannot seem to care about an issue unless or until it personally affects them… well guess how they got there; not being informed about anything external to their own immediate lives.
It’s quite the privilege to be able to cut off externalities and be happy; many people do not have the luxury of being able to do that, because those externalities will intrude into their lives whether they like it or not, like Roe being overturned.
/rant
Since you asked for recommendations, I only really have one that worked for me, which was to cut off social media news (i.e. ditching Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit).
All 3 of those were news… combined with some of the worst takes on that news by the horrible people on those sites. I don’t need to hear a bunch of conservatives and white nationalists and misogynists and racists (apologies for the redundancy) give their takes on the news, especially because we know that they gain an outsize representation on social media due to ‘interaction’ being rewarded, good or bad.
i don’t drive often, maybe once or twice a week, and the car always has NPR on. other than that, i’ll skim headlines, but don’t tend to read them unless it’s something positive or local.
i do read up on the candidates nearing election day.
No more than the more common types of viruses and other steadily-evolving microbes though, plus humans have not changed genetically all that much from chimps even from 6+ million years ago, so most of this is clickbait hype.
We do need to maintain science funding around the world though - the next pandemic could strike at any time, without warning (as the last one showed us), and gee it sure would be good if we could be ready, with modern tools to meet whatever challenge comes our way.
Otherwise it is all too easy to fall for bait traps such as what happened with GISAID, which said the words that people wanted to hear but then were not skeptical enough to look at the source behind who was saying them. So now that’s a treasure trove of data lost to the public as a result.:-(
For the last several months I reduced my news intake and unfollowed a lot of stress-inducing accounts on social media. I have been happier and more relaxed. Can recommend.
If you think you can compensate with the strength of your own inner contemplation, you are wrong
Is that a thing about neurotypicals, or just people without any selfcontrol?
I know I can compensate all the rhetorics, because I can spot most of the techniques by name, never get “pulled in” by the news, extract only the facts (if there are any), then contrast them with other sources, before “making my mind” about anything. I’m not afraid of saying “beats me, I don’t know enough”, until I do learn enough to build a consistent picture without holes or contradictions (doesn’t mean I’m always right, just coherent). Most times when I look at news, I end up taking away maybe a single sentence, which almost never is the one being highlighted.
There is also picking which news sources to care about. Right now I only know about two sources that are somewhat impartial: one of them is the weather channel, and the other a news meta-debate where they like inviting people with opposite points of view, without letting it turn into a cage match.
As for the rest of the article… it’s just describing the techniques used to produce what I like to call “news for toddlers”: fake human interest, full of rhetorical resources, cut down into tidbits easy to chew and swallow, aimed at eliciting an emotional response rather than a rational one (BTW, they’re the same techniques used by trolls).
You shouldn’t care about “that kind” of news. There are other kinds, like scientific breakthroughs, investigative reports, or news meta-analyses, that you might want to care about. Or whether to take an umbrella tomorrow.
After I freaked out during the last couple elections, I basically stopped most news. It’s pretty unclear what I could do with it anyway. The theoretical benefit was mostly around politics, but the vast masses just do it as a team sport, so my being “informed” by the news isn’t helping hold politicians accountable or affecting elections. Outside of politics, except for the information about COVID during the pandemic, most specifically the vaccines, I have a hard time thinking of any useful information.
Even local news usually isn’t too relevant. I guess the “avoid this intersection because of power out to lights, flooding, icing or whatever” could be helpful, but usually I don’t get it till it’s later on anyway.
This article is a great example of the struggles of living in our highly constructed world. It has been thousands of years since the mathematically average human lived a natural lifestyle and the rest of us trying to make big interconnected settlements work have been blundering it because what a big society needs is for us to constantly work against many aspects of our nature. No one can just live by their instincts and expect everything to work out, and anyone encouraging people not to think are literally trying to take advantage of what people tend to do when they forgo rationally considering key decisions.
It is very uncomfortable and distressing to hear about major disasters my government is responsible for, and it would be much more natural and fulfilling to me if all I needed to know was how to master my local environment with the rest of my band, but we have historical examples of atrocities being allowed for long periods of time due to nothing more than popular carelessness. If more people had the moral courage to expose themselves to the realities of our government and their own beliefs, I can’t imagine Hillary, Trump, or Biden would have come anywhere close to winning their respective primaries over the past so many years. These elections took place as a consequence of trusting that there were no ulterior motives for any information offered by the Washington Post, New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News by most who cared to vote and the rest simply closing themselves off from the process. Just carelessness. Simply hearing about the information spread by these outlets second-hand is probably even worse since it will be filtered through an individual’s interpretation of it. The solution can’t be to try to close oneself off from the outside world.
Uncritical reading of the product of highly compromised information companies is a bad thing, as this article discusses. The solution is not willful ignorance, but the more difficult and less comfortable path which is ultimately more beneficial to oneself and their society. Continue to read the news and in addition, be critical of it. Understand that the news starts with a reporter and then goes through a process of edits influenced by the editors’ biases, the advertisers’ desires, and the orientation toward maximizing profit. Reading foreign news coverage of the same events filtered through an often totally different set of biases can make the important information itself more clear. Just as important as what the major news sources are covering are important events they aren’t covering which tend to get picked up by independent outlets with fewer restrictions. The American media blackout of the Standing Rock protest was particularly notable. I have always wondered how that event may have turned out if it were given more coverage than page 7 of the AP one time.
It almost certainly is better for our mental health to block out unpleasant information. We weren’t built for this society we have. We have a lot of work to do before we can approximate a natural lifestyle in our constructed society. There are powerful forces creating an information environment to manufacture our consent, and ignoring that they are doing that will not fix anything.
I pay very little to no attention to the news at all and could honestly care less. And I feel as if I am better for it because I am not concerned about every little thing. Big news stories I will hear about through the grapevine, but the little things just pass me by and that’s okay.
We protected our borders long before these surveillance technologies existed. We should keep doing it without, because it’s just a matter of time that what is normalized for travellers is normalized for us.
The UK just had a big article revealing that their Prevent database was being shared with border control (edit: link). The Prevent database covers people who have not committed any crime but have shown some indication of potentially becoming radicalised towards terrorirsm or towards some other crime. The vast majority are labelled “no further action” but still have been shared with customs. Some were children as young as 6 and 4.
You absolutely don’t need to do anything wrong to get on a list. Hell, just browsing the internet gets you put on all sorts of lists.
That phase-out was in the works for 15+ years. Pretty sure I’ve read somewhere that the UK has been stalling it for years, so they definitely knew it was coming.
Shame they lost their voice in the EU commission and have yet another consequence of their own actions to swallow.
Wow, I like the one guy farther down who claims Likud is awful but it's Hamas propaganda that the IDF kills kids.... like the massive dead civilian and kid numbers are just all propaganda to make a genocidal ethnistate look bad.
theguardian.com
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