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.
"We have seen evidenced once more that women and children are the first victims of conflict and that our duty to seek peace is a duty to them. We are failing them,” UN Women Executive Director Sima Bahous said in a statement issued alongside the report....
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.
In recent years, China’s LGBTQ+ community has been swept up in the Chinese Communist party’s broader crackdown on civil society and freedom of expression. In May 2023, a well known LGBTQ+ advocacy group in Beijing announced it was closing due to “unavoidable” circumstances. Last February, two university students filed a...
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.
As I have repeatedly said… Just because Biden has repeated the US company line of unequivocal support for Israel, etc etc (Because even among democrats it’s political suicide to say anything else). That doesn’t mean that he hasn’t been trying the entire time to get Israel to stop the bullshit. This is more or less a...
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 made a post on r/civ (Civilization games subreddit) showing a really funky shaped randomly generated river I saw and most comments were fine but one guy was convinced that I went through the comparatively monumental effort of opening the map editor and changing the river for karma, as opposed to just starting the game and...
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.
Nearly 90% of the foreign investment inflows into Chinese equity markets in 2023 has been withdrawn as sentiment crumbles and investors losing confidence in major Chinese institutions....
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.
One of the TikTok trends is to show the process of loading a projectile into a tank and firing it. Another is to put trance music to a video, along with the words “2-3, sha-ger.” This is the order that a military drone operator is given to drop a bomb, with the syllables separated so that the message is clear. The trend...
You are either willfully ignorant about how wrong what you’re saying is, or you are truly a lost cause.
I don’t think you are aware of just how small this war is in terms of death toll compared to other wars that are currently going on.
And I don’t think you realize just how many insane ratios this war is producing. For being so small, it is resulting in more aid worker, doctor, and journalist deaths than other, much larger wars. It has resulted in level of destruction (e.g. 60% of homes damaged) that hasn’t existed since WW2. The sheer percentages of children being killed versus adults (nevermind combatants), is just staggering.
If your only defense is to say, “but who cares about ratios and percentages?”, then you’re just arguing that it’s okay to genocide small groups.
But I’m suuuuuure you’re just weeping non-stop for them, right?
Neither is not supplying your enemy with resources
They are denying civilians water and food, and Israel is not the ones supplying those resources anyways, other countries are, and Israel is blocking them.
nor is bombing civilian infrastructure that is being used for military purposes
Which the water infra and power plants were not, but they were bombed anyways (and to be clear, Israel has never claimed that they were used to launch attacks, before you try to pull that out of your bum).
At no point did Israel make the unrealistic promise that they would be safe from bombs.
Ah yes, unrealistic to not bomb civilians. Of course. So smart. Why even have stipulations about war crimes, since apparently no one in a warzone can expect not to be killed indiscriminately anyways? Checkmate, human rights!
Given that Hamas operates from there
Hamas doesn’t “operate” from the 60% of residential buildings that have been damaged in Gaza, any more than the IDF could be said to “operate” from Israeli neighborhoods. Israel has shown no evidence (and in fact has been shown to have been dead wrong with their claims, such as at al-Shifa) that they are using the refugee camps and homes and businesses that Israel bombed to launch rockets (if they were all actually rocket launch sites, where were all the people actually living?). Simply having your soldiers live somewhere doesn’t make it a valid target, otherwise the rocket attacks into Israel are all justified too.
There’s a reason that Israel is rapidly losing support on the world stage, and why it’s going to find itself a pariah state before too long.
You would do the same if you were in their place.
When you wake up and find that most of the world is rejecting your country’s claims of conducting a war legitimately, perhaps you should question why, rather than rushing to spew out half-baked justifications and appeals to empathize with an abused group becoming the abusers.
Why do I suspect that even if we said, “after”, you would still turn around and object to these Israeli assholes being held accountable if tribunals came to pass?
There’s a significant age gap between most of the vocal critics of Israel in congress right now, and its ardent supporters. In even just 15 years a lot of those ardent supporters will be dead. Younger Democrat congresspersons already have a significantly different set of politics than the old guard, and it’s only going to become more apparent as they become the majority, and don’t have to fear censure by the fogeys.
No, police are the enforcers of state power. States are bad. Police are bad.
Community defense groups are not “police”, and “solving neighborly disputes” does not require authority figures to get involved outside of adjudication, which police and/or community defense groups cannot and do not do; that’s what courts are for.
Nothing in those links you provided said that Palestinians invaded Israel, so I’m not sure what relevance they have to the statement of mine that you quoted, unless, as I said, you are conflating the other Arab states which did invade Israel in an attempt to help Palestinians.
But go off, fam.
Also, what part of my comment struck you as ‘riled up’?
I got bad news for you: no one cares what an economist says about how they should feel, they only care about how they DO feel, and most Americans feel worse off.
That’s not Biden’s fault, obviously, it’s Capitalism’s, but try explaining that to your average American.
Yep, and the worst part is that it’s proving that as long as you do a genocide slowly, and through systems like cultural erasure, forced abortions of Uyghurs, and ‘reeducation’ camps rather than straight deathcamps, world governments won’t put any real effort into stopping it.
Imperialists like America don’t like China’s imperialism, but not because they’re opposed to Imperialism, only because it threatens their own hegemony.
Meanwhile, anti-colonialists who should know better, like Mbembe, fall for China’s positioning of themselves as a counter to Imperialism simply because they’re opposing American and European hegemony with their own hegemony.
The right-wing leader appeared on multiple cable news shows to speak on the current state Israel’s monthlong siege on Gaza, which human rights experts have warned amount to ethnic cleansing and war crimes....
Netanyahu is going to bomb the hostages and then blame Hamas, saying they were used as human shields, just like he’s been doing with Palestinian civilians. 200 Israeli hostages “murdered by Hamas (using Israeli bombs)” is more useful politically to his war-machine than 200 live hostages.
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?
“Yeah, but if there’s one Hamas guy inside a densely-populated refugee camp, what possible other choice do we have than to bomb literally tens of buildings in there? He could have been in any of them! We gave those civilians ample warning that they are subject to murder at any time, anyways! How can you say we’re not merciful and restrained!?”
what it means (people in support of that use of force and tanks to suppress civilian revolution)
This ^ is the incorrect part of your statement. That is not what it means now.
edit: Also
Tankie refers to those people who supported the Soviet use of tanks to quell the Hungarian revolution.
Emphasis added. If you meant “referred” in the past tense, that was a typo on your part. Otherwise, you are just trying to reclaim the term to an earlier meaning.
“Rising up” insomuch as they were protesting his proposed changes, not in that they were contemplating actually removing him from power, or even trying to oust/disband/etc Likud.
How much should I care about news? (www.theguardian.com)
I read this article recently and I was just thinking about my news consumption and how much I want to be affected by it....
Two mothers killed each hour in Gaza conflict, UN says (news.un.org)
"We have seen evidenced once more that women and children are the first victims of conflict and that our duty to seek peace is a duty to them. We are failing them,” UN Women Executive Director Sima Bahous said in a statement issued alongside the report....
‘It’s difficult to survive’: China’s LGBTQ+ advocates face jail and forced confession (www.theguardian.com)
In recent years, China’s LGBTQ+ community has been swept up in the Chinese Communist party’s broader crackdown on civil society and freedom of expression. In May 2023, a well known LGBTQ+ advocacy group in Beijing announced it was closing due to “unavoidable” circumstances. Last February, two university students filed a...
Biden "running out" of patience with Bibi as Gaza war hits 100 days (www.axios.com)
As I have repeatedly said… Just because Biden has repeated the US company line of unequivocal support for Israel, etc etc (Because even among democrats it’s political suicide to say anything else). That doesn’t mean that he hasn’t been trying the entire time to get Israel to stop the bullshit. This is more or less a...
Why are redditors like this?
I made a post on r/civ (Civilization games subreddit) showing a really funky shaped randomly generated river I saw and most comments were fine but one guy was convinced that I went through the comparatively monumental effort of opening the map editor and changing the river for karma, as opposed to just starting the game and...
The Great China Unwind: Foreign Investors Pull $29B Out Of Chinese Equity Markets In 2023 despite the People’s Bank's efforts at making China an attractive opportunity for foreign investment (markets.businessinsider.com)
Nearly 90% of the foreign investment inflows into Chinese equity markets in 2023 has been withdrawn as sentiment crumbles and investors losing confidence in major Chinese institutions....
Gaza war's staggering toll reaches a grim milestone: 20,000 dead (apnews.com)
Prague shooting: Gunman dead after killing more than 15 at Charles University (www.bbc.com)
Biden says Netanyahu must change, Israel losing global support (www.reuters.com)
On TikTok, the war in Gaza is a game (english.elpais.com)
One of the TikTok trends is to show the process of loading a projectile into a tank and firing it. Another is to put trance music to a video, along with the words “2-3, sha-ger.” This is the order that a military drone operator is given to drop a bomb, with the syllables separated so that the message is clear. The trend...
US reviewing Amnesty International report that said US-made munitions have killed civilians in Gaza (www.reuters.com)
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Far-right party set to win most seats in Dutch elections, exit polls show (www.theguardian.com)
IDF evidence so far falls well short of al-Shifa hospital being Hamas HQ (www.theguardian.com)
Separated From Their Families, Hidden From The World: China’s Colonial Boarding Schools In Tibet Come Under UN Scrutiny (feddit.de)
Cross-posted from: feddit.de/post/5674446
Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu says Palestinian civilians being killed en masse are simply “collateral damage” (www.huffpost.com)
The right-wing leader appeared on multiple cable news shows to speak on the current state Israel’s monthlong siege on Gaza, which human rights experts have warned amount to ethnic cleansing and war crimes....
China is slowly erasing Tibet's name (feddit.de)
Cross-posted from: feddit.de/post/5651275...
Don’t fall into the trap of ‘picking sides’ over Gaza: Hamas’s attacks were unconscionable, razing Gaza to the ground would be abhorrent. In both cases, basic humanity is at stake --- [Opinion] (feddit.de)
Cross-posted from: feddit.de/post/5185724...
Israel Closes Al Jazeera Facilities (www.telesurenglish.net)
The ban comes after Al Jazeera presented a well-documented report suggesting that Israel was responsible for the attack on Al-Ahli Hospital....
Ex-Human Rights Watch chief - Israel violating humanitarian law in Gaza (www.aljazeera.com)
ghostarchive.org...