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.
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.
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.
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.
Are you by any chance in denial of the PIJ missile which misfired into the hospital carpark a couple of weeks back? The one which Hamas lied was a direct hit by Israeli bombs killing 500?
No, I think it is likely that it was a rocket that misfired. Israel has been responsible for all the intentional bombs hitting hospitals, schools, places of worship, etc though, so I’m not sure what significance you are attributing to what someone believes about the one unintentional one?
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.
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.
Not attributing the particular mass shooting, but attributing mass shootings as a phenomenon, yes.
Don’t try to play dumb about your choice to call it a “lifestyle”. No one calls stabbing attacks “the British Lifestyle”, or anti-Muslim legislation “the French Lifestyle”, despite those things being common to those places, and them being infamous for them.
You mean where they found weapons and a tunnel with an armored door with a firing port?
Yes, that one. The one where all that was behind that door was a room with 2 cots and a table, where Israel had claimed (complete with a fancy 3D animation) that there was an entire multi-level command center with tens of rooms, housing potentially hundreds of Hamas fighters. That one, that didn’t exist.
Or the al-Shifa hospital where a surveillance camera recording shows terrorists bringing in a hostage?
This is always such a weird argument. Yeah, of course Hamas brought the hostage there for treatment. They were trying to keep them alive. They’re also the government in Gaza, so it would be no different than Israeli military bringing one of their hostages to an Israeli hospital. Are you under the impression that hospitals that treat war wounded are military targets?
Let me ask you this: How should Israel have reacted to the terror attack on October 7? What would, in your eyes, an appropriate, justified response look like? Please be honest.
Netanyahu made a similar point at a Likud faction meeting in early 2019, when he was quoted as saying that those who oppose a Palestinian state should support the transfer of funds to Gaza, because maintaining the separation between the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank and Hamas in Gaza would prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state.
Then, I’d say they should have conducted a ground invasion backed with actually targeted strikes on Hamas targets using precision weapons that the US is so enamored with.
and also permitted foreign aid through the border crossing with Egypt
Permitted a pittance, after blocking all of it initially.
I’m not Israeli.
That just makes your caping for their genocide and ethnic cleansing even more ridiculous.