And besides, you don’t have to care. The news are just out there, free to be ignored. I just don’t see why you think that for those who care, it’s a bad thing to be aware and be moved by the struggles of other humans on the other side of the planet.
> is that really a bad thing and is it as big a problem as you’re making it to be?
Yes, and yes. As way of example, I’m familiar with a particular subreddit which is used to promote far-right ideology in a specific country. They do it by grabbing news from anywhere in the world in which an immigrant has done anything “wrong”, no matter how small, and use it to stoke xenophobia in the subreddit’s country. They are making it seem these events are more prevalent than they really are, when they aren’t even happening in that country. It is a transparent tactic which nonetheless works.
> Supply chains are global and what happens in one corner of the world will most certainly have an impact on your local economy.
The overwhelming majority of news have nothing to do with supply chains and don’t affect them in the slightest.
> And besides, you don’t have to care. The news are just out there, free to be ignored.
The news live off ads and are made to be addictive. That’s why everything is reported with an insane sense of urgency. Most people consume news and social media the same way, without realising when it’s harming their mental health.
Even if you personally don’t watch the news, your fellow countrymen do and they act in response to them. You are affected by the news either you consume or ignore them.
> be aware and be moved by the struggles of other humans on the other side of the planet.
That’s not what most news are. Most are sensationalist garbage to get you to stay hooked. They are neither important nor urgent and they certainly aren’t designed to get you to empathise.
One of my usual news sources is SVT, the national Swedish broadcaster. Their svt.se website is good and, aside from Swedish news, they're also quick to cover major foreign events, if something is breaking news they'll have it up right away. But one of my main complaints is SVT covers local American crime too much. It pops up as one of the top "just in" headlines. I went to look just before replying here, and it's actually happening again right now - there's a "just in" headline "Four dead in a shooting in Mississippi". It's fast, I don't even see it on cnn.com as I'm typing this. But, with all respect to the victims, mass shooting are pretty much a daily event in the US and generally have no global importance.
What were you trying to convey by starting with "Er...", and all the other rhetorical and dismissive tone and techniques?
Your entire post reads like you're quite offended, and you're dealing with that by being quite confrontational and dismissive towards someone who probably wasn't trying to offend or start a fight.
You could have stopped there. I don't think we (in the U.S.) get too much international news — to the contrary in fact. But to be sure we are not getting enough local and relevant news.
For example, just opened Google news and saw "Joy Behar calls out “The View” cohost's revealing outfit: 'Where are you going in that dress?'"
(Of course it's easy to cherry pick dumb celebrity "news".)
My brain holds on to the weirdest shit. Back in May my wife texted me: "Hot Lips died" and I immediately replied, "Loretta Swit or Sally Kellerman?"
And thinking about that: why in the world should I remember either of their names? But seriously: Sally Kellerman? I saw the MASH movie when I was...ten? I'm pretty sure never since then.
And just typing that, my brain gremlin is cataloging everything it recalls from the movie: Elliot Gould, sure. Donald... oh crap. So this right here is the crux of the issue: objectively I know I shouldn't care, like, AT ALL. But right now I have a subprocess running to retrieve that guy's last name. I know his son was the star of 24, and Stand By Me, and he's escaping me at the moment, and my brain Will Not Stop until it recalls... Sutherland! Kiefer Sutherland, and Donald his dad.
<sigh> I could be remembering something important. I do remember actually important things -- but I could remember more important things if my brain didn't care deeply that Gary Burghoff was the only person to play the same role in the movie and the TV show.
Who does the flooding? It surely ain't the people.
> Every news channel would inundate you with global news as if all that is happening in your neighborhood.
Not all global news. Just some global news. And framed in a particular manner for effect.
> This is partly the reason why governments of the western world are forced to act on everything that happens on other side of the world.
You have it backwards. These governments and the elites who control these government want to act and use media to generate popular support.
> Because people feel that their government should do something about it.
No. People generally want their governments to not get involved. For example, no war the US was involved in was a result of "the people putting pressure on the government".
Unfortunately, I think there's much evidence that most people would verbally agree with this but their subsequent actions would reveal that they choose to seek out, and believe as true, information that confirms rather than challenges their already established beliefs.
In other words: the Righteous Mind by Haidt.
They can't. Language is for confirmation bias first and foremost. It embeds the illusion of subjective perspective in every statement.
We quit language, replace it, or go down for the count.
"It feels as if the whole world has been transformed into images of the world, and has thus been drawn into the human realm, which now encompasses everything. There is no place, no thing, no person or phenomenon that I cannot obtain as image or information. One might think this adds substance to the world, since one knows more about it, not less, but the opposite is true: it empties the world, it becomes thinner. That’s because knowledge of the world and experience of the world are two fundamentally different things. While knowledge has no particular time or place and can be transmitted, experience is tied to a specific time and place and can never be repeated. For the same reason, it also can’t be predicted. Exactly those two dimensions – the unrepeatable and the unpredictable – are what technology abolishes. The feeling is one of loss of the world." Knausgaard
https://privatebin.net/?4c31faa3cd73a20c#3fu148gYZqMAwHCY2xx...
Beware times when private edifices rival, or subsume, the states' majesty.
If your concept is that your work should be heard, you're obligated to take whatever steps are accepted to meet the bar for 'culturally being heard', a bar that you don't yourself set.
I think Adam Curtis makes non-tinfoil points and takes pains to present them as explosively as possible, something he's good at doing. I sympathize with the idea that it's distasteful to do that, but within the culture that hosts him, it's correct action.
The problem is actually quite simple, we use words, which are lossy, arbitrary, and narratives which are rhetorical same.
There's no virtue ability that overtakes these incredibly leaky systems, they're illusions laypeople accept while those in higher status operate as bypasses to extract value. Narratives are not only illusions, they entrance audiences into whatever deception the control system requires: they're state-mythical, they're time-wasters in entertainment, they convince the audience that events are knowable, like news, they convince people that behaviors are malleable as in history. Yet we know we make the same mistakes as countries, as families, as individuals.
This whole “post-truth” talking point exists because one power system is concerned about the erosion of their ability to impose their pile of lies on a particular society. It is itself post-truth in nature.
For cultures that were historically more honest this is more of a shock, but that only ever applied to a tiny minority globally.
We now do not, and it has nothing to do with power systems [0] and everything to do with a newfound facility to mislead at scale, which states and individuals alike will use.
[0] except that elements of one power system —- west coast tech firms —- are inventing the very tools of this destruction of consensus.
Indoctrination.
Part of it is to make you not see it for what it is.
We have to face truth constructions are lures in folk science societies like ours, they are not valid. Science is not understood (correlational thinking) or accepted b a majority of the population anywhere on this planet.
Those two worlds are not equivalent.
You only lived in a world where you couldn’t tell that they didn’t. All that changed is your awareness of their biases.
Who is we? I nor anyone I know never lived in such a world. Maybe there was a time when I was naive and brainwashed enough to believe we lived in such a world. But such a world never really existed.
> Now we live in a world where reporters care about their ability to mold what they report on to fit their preferred narrative.
It's always been that way. The oldest newspaper in the US ( NY Post ) was created by Alexander Hamilton to push his political agenda. Nothing has changed since. Newspapers exist to push the narrative of the elites who control them.
> Those two worlds are not equivalent.
Agreed. One of those world is a fantasy and the other is reality.
https://youtu.be/xBVtO0XnQNA?t=12m58s
Compare those 3+3 to Aristotle's 5: intuitive understanding (nous), scientific knowledge (episteme), wisdom (sophia), art/skill (techne), and practical wisdom (phronesis).
Or to Laozi's (n)one--- as popularized by Alan Watts, not r/Stoicism
https://old.reddit.com/r/Stoicism/comments/5rbyzl/superior_v...
Things you personally see = 10
Things you heard from a friend = 9
Things you heard from a stranger on the internet = 1
Things you heard from a professional talker on the internet = -10
Right now, truth is based mostly on those last 2.
Obviously, now, AI generated content sort of makes seeing on the internet not necessarily true.
Humans like all primates, are easily deceived by arbitrary signals, which is almost all of our signaling. No narrative is true as it's always a construction reducing cause and effect to a local illusion. We're trapped in a highly competitive chain of subjective statements in news, history, politics, none of which find a legible scientific ability to correlate reality and other statements. Read any news story about murder. The story details the conditions for the murder as causal, but we know from science that not every condition the news describes ends in murder. The news is rather fantastical in that it pretends to explain the cause while denying the scientific reality of any event. This is simply what words and narratives provide. Grammar competes for attention and status, that's its primary function. To embed status, control, even manipulation PRIOR to the signal making sense or being true. That's fundamentally flawed.
Humans did not build a system for shared communication, rather for subjective statements that build value. That's an individual premise of survival, and it infects all of our signaling. This is the central tenet of evolution, and language does not evade it or provide a workaround. The idea we are collective in language is a fantastic illusion that this principle of evolution rigorously maintains at the cost of our collective survival. All the evidence supports this, from language dispersal, diffusion, to mistranslation or untranslatable, to lexemes. It's the arbitrary all the way down. Even the binary is about the individual before it's about the collective.
People have to confront what we built here.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1d-ODky2MzGuTCoFCKWPw6Jx2...
A cult of virtue. A monastic tradition where virtue is cultivated intensely and scarily. Put them in charge.
An immortal group mind. A dozen or a hundred people, chipped and networked. Totally mindmelded. Such vast Intelligence and perspective, virtue would be unavoidable. Put that thing in charge.
