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Comment by cblconfederate | Hacker News Reader

What are we supposed to read then? Politics is the current day s soap opera

Books. Replace the instant gratification of doomscrolling with more thoughtful consumption that encourages self-reflection rather than reaction.

It's a good time to re-visit old friends on the shelf, or find new ones.

I picked up a series that I'd stuck a bookmark in 30 years ago, and I wish I'd continued reading it back then. On the other hand, I have roughly 2,000 pages of greenfields escapist fantasy to crawl into. [For a number of reasons, I won't mention the series]

I agree with this approach. However, politicians and talking heads generally lack self-irony. Many refuse to acknowledge the farce they are participating in.

Even worse, audiences have a tendency to take it all a bit too seriously.

Everyone would be better off if pundits would look into the camera and wink occasionally. Just let us know that they know we know it is all a spectacle. A little acknowledgement goes a long way here.

You do other things to improve your life and the lives around you. This culture where everyone is compelled to be a participant in politics is relatively new, or wasn't common once civilization made small tribes obsolete.

When Trump caught Covid I actually thought to myself that this is a soap opera plot from a parallel dimension and the writers had just jumped the shark.

The news actually feels like it's just messing with me now. We live in the timeline where Osama Bin Laden's QAnon conspiracy theorist neice went on Fox News to say that she is really an American at heart and to give Trump her endorsement.

WHAT??? Looks like the writers decided to bring back a reference to two seasons ago.

[1] https://www.mediamatters.org/qanon-conspiracy-theory/tucker-...

Damn the plot is thickening

I'm actually curious to understand why it was such a big deal. A fair amount of world leaders, ministers, representatives and all did get sick. Was this not mentioned in the news at all in the US?

The US media's coverage of Covid-19 outside the US mostly seems to be focused on pushing the narrative that the US is uniquely failing at dealing with it due to Trump. Most of the time they don't actually lie to do this, but the facts they include are very selectively chosen. So for example Boris Johnson's Covid infection got a lot of attention since he's seen as a kind of Trump analogue, but I don't think others did so much.

(There was a really... interesting progression in the NYT's coverage of the Covid-19 outbreak in Spain where they downplayed it as obviously less severe than say Florida, omitting the already much worse trajectory it was on, then when it finally and inevitably became too bad to ignore they turned that whole thing into an allegory for Trump's failings too.)

That would have only been true had he also been attacked by murder hornets.

Step away from the screen

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