As an easy example: looking up where to get a booster shot for COVID-19? That's very political, at least in the US.
Your terms are acceptable
But generally i don't want to see/read stuff that's political news(stuff that a party is doing, some political goon getting arrested.etc) unless i am seeking for it
Instead I think it’s more productive to change your news diet away from histrionic, click bait to more reasonable sources that offer balanced perspectives. Then you can engage your curiosity about a topic with different perspectives rather than your reptilian, tribal “us vs them” brain that exemplifies most media.
i would like to go even wider and just block all news sites
Fixed it
you’ll also have to be willing to cut some good things out . like uninstalling twitter which is probably 90% unhealthy and 10% constructive content
you don’t need to read news or politics more than once a month . most of it is drama and regurgitation rather than developments and trends
as for tools you can use adblock custom filters to hide political banners but the ROI is low . install pihole and you can blacklist domains . the awesome lightweight list links to text only news which can help reduce news cravings
https://github.com/mdibaiee/awesome-lite-websites
when you do a review ask yourself “is this edifying “ and if not delete it
it’s nascent but with a few more contributors it should be usable
- Delete accounts with twitter/tumblr/insta/social media. Twitter especially is a cesspool of people who want to be miserable and/or mad.
- Opt for hand-built sites, tightly curated RSS feeds from non-political blogs, or discord servers that have a strong resistance to those topics. It'll take some searching. I tend to keep my interests around pretty and/or sleazy art.
- Using HN as the "daily newspaper" - if there's no article in the top three slots that have to do with real world events, it's a slow news day and nothing big/bad happened.
Alternatively, you could utilise a closed set of resources: Dev docs, offline manuals, StackOverflow, man pages, arxiv, wikipedia, etc.
Wide platforms appear to inevitable blue the lines.
Politics also overlaps with morality, philosophy, society, ethics... so having a stance or discussing any issue could be viewed as politically motivated content.
Persuasive writing is especially political. As the author defines their stance on a topic, they will inevitably leak their political beliefs in their expression...
Fortunately or unfortunately, you'll have to learn to get along with the other humans on the planet. This is called politics.
It’s not easy, but I’m sure it’s doable as the big G and others have done much more sophisticated analysis.
alexfromapex’s RSS suggestion is a good one too — I primarily use RSS for finding articles.
"Humans are the likely culprit of rising global average temperatures" Is that political?
"COVID-19 vaccine side effects" Is that political?
"June 4th, 1989" Is that political?
"Russia" Is that political?
"Q" Is that political?
Even on stuff like stock ticker boards there are always people that insist on bringing up Biden/Trump etc
For clarity, perhaps it's worth just stating those.
