15 years ago, I watched/read the news a lot. I stopped about 10 years ago. It was one of the best things I ever did.
No matter who is in office, the news coming out of Washington D.C. will always be depressing. Someone or some group you despise will always be there bashing people you like. The people you like will never get the attention you think they deserve, their good ideas will be squandered, etc. Just turn it off.
</unsolicited-advice> :-)
Others bashing people you like is always inevitable
But, I like to read it from the perspective of not where CURRENT public positions lie, but where they are going. Not a point on the graph, but the vector of how it is changing
I found it has made me empathize much more with those who I normally would not. Understanding current events discussing their position, but going deeper to find that "root cause" of why they hold that
Regardless of where you lie politically, everyone wants the same things in life. It transcends politics and different world cultures. We disagree HOW we get there, but normally we all agree on what are baseline values. We want to live in a world that is fair, we want the highest quality of life for all capable to everyone's abilities (ignoring initial allocation of resources to get there), safety, a sense of community and security. I may be missing some points, but I bonded getting to that root cause with many
I like the idea, and I used to believe in it (or maybe "intentionally believe" in it).
But over the last few years I have seen so many people write casually about how other people should suffer (from poverty) or even die (from lack of medicine, or starvation) because they don't have citizenship or whatever. As if non-citizens "deserve" what happens to them. They mostly don't say it explicitly, but it is undeniably an obvious consequence of the policies they advocate.
And the schadenfreude. When stories come up about those things actually happening to people, I see comments in favour, cheering on the suffering. Sometimes a lot of comments.
As a result, I'm pretty sure a lot of people really don't wish for a world that is fair to everyone else.
This is clearly false, and a very dangerous assumption to make. A lot of current turmoil in Europe stems precisely from this assumption. And even if it were true, the modalities would differ enough from different groups for conflicts to emerge.
It seems people on that side want "america first". Throw all political shenanigans used to try to implement that and party leaders outside of the window; that idea is not absurd
I'm sure if we found a macguffin that instantly catapulted us into a true post-scaricty economy, lots of that rhetoric would subside. Over a few generations
It is of course a privilege to ignore the news completely. I don’t advocate totally unplugging. But once you better understand the material value of information, you can make better decisions about what to consume.
[1]http://www.collaborativefund.com/blog/expiring-vs-lt-knowled...
Could be problematic if large numbers of people did this.
Oh wait...