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Comment by frellus | Hacker News Reader

Amazing story, and real journalism. If only the news spent more time uncovering the truth instead of opining about politics. I'm so sick of politics.

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Well, a bit of advice from eastern european dictatures -- the more people try to refrain from politics, the worse politics screws up their lives.

So I ended up respecting politised people, regardless of their views.

For a functioning democracy, everyone must do politics, even if it's unpleasant.

That's probably partly why certain entities try to make it so toxic. People are more controllable when they're rabid and when they're inert.

Also reasonable people check out when people are running around livid because of false information.

> Also reasonable people check out when people are running around livid because of false information.

The comment you are responding to both recognizes that and is telling you that that is a fact that is deliberately being manipulated by and to the advantage of the people promoting false information.

A major part of the goal of extreme political propaganda, nearly as important as mobilizing unreasonable people, is getting reasonable people exhausted with the political system so that they check out.

This seems like you are restating the same thing I said as if it is contradicting it.

>> For a functioning democracy, everyone must do politics, even if it's unpleasant.

I've been voting and voicing my displeasure regularly for the last year at my governor and elected officials, down the to the local ones, and nothing has changed. Actually that's not true, the majority of the decisions made have changed quite a bit and have further ruined my small business and my children's education.

Can't imagine how much worse it would get if I didn't waste hundreds of hours writing to my officials while they feed my concerns into a shredder.

Try to motivate people you know to pressure the officials. By the way, not sure about US, but I've seen that often you actually need very little votes to register a motion/discussion/voting/etc for expelling an official from their office. Whether that motion is satisfied or not -- official should be stressed about it immediately.

What matters the most is how many people you can motivate to do something, and that is democracy.

72% of the people voted for the official in question. (1MM+)

Sorry, man, I'm gonna just not do politics. There's literally no point.

Here in the US the media effectively controls who people vote for, and the DNC/RNC is quick to "aggressively interject itself" if that tactic fails; so it seems to me that democracy as we know it is nothing more than smoke and mirrors. The media stopping opining about politics would not change that, even though it will never happen.

You're being downvoted, because it's an uncomfortable truth that challenges people's beliefs that they, themselves, are not falling for the media manipulation, but you're correct.

Well, a lot of feel-good "one person fought the system/the mob/etc" stories are effectively political by giving the impression the way to deal with these huge problem is individual initiative.

And indeed, a lot of purely repression based solutions to different social ills lean heavily on the "heroes can fight the bad guys" trope. This reinforces the "drug war", which is in many ways the source of the orgy of murder this woman confronted and this isn't going to be solved by more heroics of her sort.

She had to go through this ordeal because the Mexican government is broken. That’s politics.

Did anyone read to the end? Some of the people she put into prison for kidnapping and murdering her daughter were part of a prison escape and then murdered her.

The other victim in this story was kidnapped like her daughter and like her daughter was found dead. Furthermore, they later found out that it was relatives who planned the kidnapping and murder of the other victim in the story.

This story is about a systemic failure of policing leading to people being regularly victimized, which seems pretty political to me.

There's a reason that we don't have quite this level of random violence in the US -- even in areas where drug traffic is high. Our politics have a lot to do with it. Ignore it at your peril.

I found the pointed reference to 'Born Again Christianity' political, and in line with NYT political philosophy.

The NYT will go to great lengths to point out alignment with right-side politics in such matters. Left-side alignments seem not to get much mention, at least as far as I can tell.

In the context of the sentence (contrasting the banality of the roles the murders tried to take with the crime) it didn't seem political at all:

"In three years, Mrs. Rodríguez captured nearly every living member of the crew that had abducted her daughter for ransom, a rogues’ gallery of criminals who tried to start new lives — as a born-again Christian, a taxi driver, a car salesman, a babysitter."

Evangelicalism in Mexico is a considerably different topic than in the US as well.

As a subscriber to the New York Times, that's exactly the opposite of what I've observed. A frequent criticism, in fact, has been interviewees not being identified as GOP political agents.

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