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.
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.
Gangs are running profitable businesses inside the correctional facilities, and even have the keys to their own units. Recent rioting showed the extent of their power, posing a difficult challenge for the government of Daniel Noboa.
These local ruinations are just a temporary blip versus China’s hard demographic facts like how over the last 10 years their birth rate has crashed harder than the birth rate of the Jews during the Holocaust.
“On 11 November 2023, it was alleged Tuta was being used as a honeypot for criminals with a backdoor from authorities. An ex-RCMP officer, Cameron Ortis, testified that the service was used as a storefront to lure criminals in and gain information on those who fell for it. He stated authorities were monitoring the whole service, feeding it to Five Eyes, which would disperse it back to the RCMP in order to gain more knowledge about the criminal underground. Though, no evidence is ever presented to back up this statement.”
Are we really worst off without Pop-White-Feminism from a website that made articles about the virtue of beating their boyfriends? Eeerh… I don’t known, I’m not convinced.
And I know it’s the example everyone jumps to, but there’s a good reason why. This is still up. It was never taken down. Which means that it was okay to post and okay to keep up for them. No one thought there was something wrong with it.
REGARDLESS OF ALL THAT, THOUGH.
Let us not lose the sight of the fact that this is yet another fucking series of layoffs in this space. We are talking about people who just lost their whole fucking career, some of them worked there for years and now it’s gone.
These are people whose life has been turned upside down because of poor management and greed from the parent company. And this is nor funny, nor worth celebrating, nor anything good at all. It’s just depressing. It’s just something that keeps on fucking happening again and again.
I wish them luck. Maybe they can get together and form something independent and worker owned. Like a bunch of gaming journalists recently did. Because we are in a world where anything even remotely creative or artistic is bound to be fucked over cynical monetary reasons…
theguardian.com
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