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.
Combine the patriarchal commodification of women and children together with the mindset of toxic masculinity that treats the death of a man cynically as both a removal of competition, and as a failure on their part to survive, and you get a subconscious mindset that anyone else will only care about deaths if they were women’s or children’s.
Also, more specific to this conflict, Israel is actively framing any adult male (and many male minors) as being a potential combatant, and using that to dismiss their deaths as not bad. Pointing out that they are killing so many women and children (not just minors, but children) is also being done to make it harder for them to claim that their attacks are all or even mostly killing combatants.
Honestly, there is so much art and so many services and tools out there, that I try to avoid sending money towards ones made by shitty people.
I loved HP as a kid, but I’m not going to support JKR’s dullard takes on trans people. It’s clear she knows literally nothing beyond what her transphobic friend and their wine club “LGB Alliance” of straight white women tell her, but she still feels the need to parrot it online in front of millions of people. And guess what? There are other books about magic out there.
In terms of my judgement criteria, it’s not some fixed system, but my 2 main considerations are:
How much does a bad person benefit financially from the product?
How much are bad people responsible for the creation of the product?
Generally-speaking, if either of those can be answered with “A lot”, I avoid it.
So for instance, in the case of Hogwarts: Legacy, while JKR wasn’t responsible for making the product almost at all, she publicly indicated that she was making a lot of money from it, so I did not purchase it.
Ditto for AWS; once I was able to afford a cheap refurb server, I shut down my AWS accounts and been self-hosting everything.
Being in the infosec space and seeing her blow up back in 2017-2019, I’m shocked it took the CCP this long to come down on her. She always kept any political criticism at arm’s length, but her not being the Beijing-approved image of femininity was always going to make her a target in Xi’s China.
Biden has pushed for supplemental aid, and he doesn’t have to. He can signal that he’ll veto any additional aid. He can certainly put pressure on Democrats to repeal already-appropriated aid, and he’d even pick up a number of Republicans on that. I also seem to remember a thing where Trump was blocking delivery of approved aid to Ukraine (with the illegal part being that it was for a quid-pro-quo), so stopping aid is certainly possible for a president.
But instead he’s pushing for more aid to Israel’s military. So once again, performative.
Speaking at someone who actively tells you they’re not listening, while still handing them money and weapons and other resources, and then throwing up your hands and going, “They won’t listen! There’s nothing more I can do!” is purely performative.
Put the aid on the chopping block, or it’s just hot air.
Yes, the US news media has a fairly long complete-since-the-founding-of-the-US history of dehumanizing people of color in their language. No surprise it’s kicked into overdrive with this “conflict” in particular.
I just had someone here accuse me of being part of an astroturfing campaign because I disagreed with them about FOSS licensing. At that point I just stop responding because there’s no use having an argument about whether my entire comment history is just a facade to cover for my secretly paid-for opinions about FOSS.
I think that the “post-truth” world that is blossoming in Right-wing political circles, where incorrect facts are hand-waved away as “differences of opinion”, is causing people elsewhere to react defensively and be very guarded against any actual differences of opinion, and some are overreacting and treating any difference of opinion as immediately suspect or even malicious.
To be fair, they have a very good knowledge of what apartheid states (like Israel) look and act like.
Recognizing that Israel has moved from the “regular” oppression and killing of their sub-citizen population into full-on genocide is something that much of the rest of the world seems to be having trouble with.
Scale is half the problem. There is a reason that climate destruction, world-spanning wars, nuclear weapons, etc. all took off the same time that population exploded. You can’t separate scale from technology from destruction. I’m not arguing for de-dev, but the complex, “scalable” systems we’ve built and now rely on are literally either designed to kill us or are inadvertently killing us (emission, plastics, deforestation, PFAS, etc.
I’m not sure where you got the idea that I’m advocating being unprepared for evil? Even in Anarchist systems, which do not have systems of authority, the use of force to counter someone hurting you is well understood.
If your argument is that state systems will scale large enough to destroy non-state systems, I agree, but then you’re just agreeing with what I said about the state setting itself up as a threat that must be participated with in order to counter (i.e. in this case arguing, “if you don’t want the state to consume you, make your own state”). That doesn’t make those other systems bad, it makes states bad. “Might makes right” is not generally considered a very modern or positive way of interacting with each other.
Communism is a very doable system, the problem is that people have false expectations of it and what it should look like (largely thanks to Leninism).
Collaborative, democratic consensus, is the normal way that groups of people work. Coercion is not, but that is how majoritarian systems work, and it is how states work. People have been living under Western nation-state and administrative-state systems for so long, within defined borders that denote both behavior and identity, that it’s tough for people to take how things work on a micro scale (e.g. family or friend-group dynamics), and apply that thinking at larger scales. The common response is, “but someone will always try to take charge/ seize power”, and that is true, but before the time of the modern state, you could walk away.
Now the state itself has become a self-perpetuating threat to its own citizens (which you can’t leave without subsuming yourself to another state), and majoritarian democracy is just used to maintain the state through the illusion of choices that hold that threat at bay. “Don’t let ‘x’ get in power, because if they do they’ll hurt those of us that are ‘y’.” You can’t fuck off and make a community that doesn’t allow ‘x’, because a state will come along and destroy or seize it.
It’s so hilarious seeing them just plain state that people aren’t allowed to talk about normal-ass stuff if the government doesn’t like it, and then seeing people online who try to defend them.
Fuck Lenin for turning a philosophy of freedom and cooperation and consensus into just another tool of State/authoritarian power.
bUt It’S nOt PrAcTiCaL oThErWiSe
No, you’re just scared of what it would actually look like. Lots of supposed Communists who are scared of the whole “stateless” part meaning they can’t finagle their way into power, or who just want the revolution as a vehicle to change who is in power (i.e. them).
It’s going to be very difficult for China to attract money when other countries with less authoritarian practices are stepping into spaces that China previously dominated, and China really cannot afford to lose that money and those jobs.