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Comment by systemvoltage | Hacker News Reader

My father tells me - "Why do you care what Andrew Cuomo is doing in New York city?" and it kind of was eye-opening. I really don't. I wish I paid more attention to local news, local politics, and perhaps check-in on international news on a weekly basis. The internet changed all this. When I was growing up, my dad read local newspaper daily. National and international news were briefly covered in the local paper. He'd delve into the Economist and the sunday edition to catch up with the rest. This is almost unheard of today.

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Exactly. Now the major team sport is who you want for President, even though he arguably has the lowest impact on your life. As long as he doesn't hit The Button.

IMO people ought to put down social media, put down the national news, and pick up their local newspaper. Read about their own mayor, city council, whatever. And maybe even get involved -- depending on the size of your city, an ordinary individual can actually get involved at a meaningful level.

The president has a very significant impact on many people’s lives via judicial nominees. The biggest this year is expected to be the effects of the 3 Republican Supreme Court judges installed by Trump on many women’s access to abortions, but many other judges in the system are appointed by presidents as well that make decisions that affect many people’s lives.

I think your example just highlights my point. Currently abortion rights are enshrined at the federal level. The SCOTUS is not going to ban abortions. They are going to throw it right back down to the state level. If you lose access to abortions, it is because your local politicians decided to ban them. This is exactly why you don't put your faith in the federal government and pay more attention to local government.

Love 'em or hate 'em, the Republican Party appears to understand this very well. They made state and local government a priority because they know that is where politics begins. Their success at the national level is disproportionate to the size of their voting bloc because they know how to play the game.

Anyone who opposes their ideals needs to remember that, and get involved locally.

Your claim was the President has the lowest impact on one’s life. As I showed, it is a reality that the President’s actions have a significant impact on people’s lives, probably bigger than a mayor or state senator or state representative probably has in the recent past.

Whether the President should or should not is irrelevant. The salient fact is that if the presidential election results for 2016 were different, then abortion access for millions or tens of millions of women would not be on the chopping block.

> Their success at the national level is disproportionate to the size of their voting bloc because they know how to play the game.

This is a trivial fact when the game is designed such that certain voting blocs in certain arbitrarily drawn boundaries have more voting power than other same size or bigger voting blocs in other arbitrarily drawn boundaries. Unless you live in a place that can be flipped to your candidate or party, there is not much to do locally.

>As I showed, it is a reality that the President’s actions have a significant impact on people’s lives, probably bigger than a mayor or state senator or state representative probably has in the recent past.

The president nominating a justice that decided to allow the Texas abortion law to remain in effect while it is being challenged has a bigger impact than the state senator who drafted the law?

Of course, the President has more power overall, but your ability to have any impact in that election is infinitesimal if you're in a swing state and non-existent otherwise. The fact Congressional districts are gerrymandered is all the more reason to vote for state legislatures. Even in local districts that are dominated by a single party, the real election occurs during the primaries. Chances are, if you get to know the candidates, there's going to be one you prefer.

People seem to forget that the purpose of democracy is to give a chance to make sure your own interests are heard, not to give you an opportunity to impose your will on the rest of the country. Our government isn't designed for the latter. You'd need a more authoritarian structure to do that. Trying to do so in a democracy just results in politicians who are more interested in virtue signaling absolutist positions than drafting policy that genuinely benefits their constituents.

I was referring to the expected outcome of the Supreme Court essentially overturning Roe v Wade later this year.

The rest of your comment is agreeable, but does not address the jist of mine which is that the President can and does have an effect on people’s every day lives in a noticeable way, hence people paying attention to them in the news.

> People seem to forget that the purpose of democracy is to give a chance to make sure your own interests are heard, not to give you an opportunity to impose your will on the rest of the country

As an aside, this is what the pro abortion choice position is. The people who want an abortion can get one, and the people who do not, do not get one. The abortion anti choice bloc wants to impose their will the rest of the country/state/city/whatever.

To further clarify the sibling's point, the reason for this is that the Progressive wing of the Democrats couldn't convince people to approve abortion access through democratic means as soon as they would have liked, so they decided to get a rather dubious Supreme Court interpretation of the Constitution that declared it to be a Constitutional Right. Now they are totally dependent on keeping agreeable Supreme Court justices in order to preserve that interpretation.

It didn't have to be this way. They could have left it to the states or local jurisdictions, and moved to a state with policies they agreed with. They could have (tried to) pass a Constitutional Amendment making it a clear and obvious Constitutional Right instead of a weird interpretation. Instead, they did this.

Living in a Democracy requires us to consider the opinions of our fellow citizens and try our best to accommodate them, rather than steamrolling them.

Consider the position of a Pro-Life activist. They will think that all abortion is murder, that the ruling is a grotesque twisting of the Constitution, and fight every inch of the way on every nominee. Does this sound like the way we were meant to resolve contentious issues? You may disagree with them, but they are also our fellow citizens, and will not be happy about steamrolling their positions.

Consider also the position of a Gun Rights activist. They will be outraged at how the courts have ignored attacks on an actual enumerated Constitutional Right, and fight every nominee on those terms, not particularly caring whether they are also likely to be anti-Abortion.

Maybe it's best if we resist using the Supreme Court to decide everything and try to pass clear Amendments for what's really important and broadly agreed upon. Though this goes back to how dysfunctional and useless Congress has become in their prescribed role.

> Living in a Democracy requires us to consider the opinions of our fellow citizens and try our best to accommodate them, rather than steamrolling them.

The majority of americans believe in abortion by a non trivial margin. The reason it's not guaranteed is precisely because the united states is not a democracy, but a democratic republic, giving significantly more political power to some voters based on where they live.

The majority of Americans also live in urban areas, but not letting urban concerns steamroll rural concerns is also an important consideration.

> The majority of americans believe in abortion by a non trivial margin.

That great, then you should have no trouble passing an actual Constitutional Amendment recognizing that right in a way that can't be interpreted away. I'll just sit here and wait while you go and do that.

> The reason it's not guaranteed is precisely because the united states is not a democracy, but a democratic republic, giving significantly more political power to some voters based on where they live.

You omit an awful lot of history in order to sound snarky. In reality, we started with a loose confederation of independent states. Some skillful negotiators tried to convince them all to unite into one nation. Naturally, the more rural states with smaller populations were concerned that their opinions and needs would be steamrolled by the more populous states, so to bring them all aboard, those negotiators biased a few things towards them a little bit. Everyone, including those more urban states, signed onto it, and everyone lived happily ever after*.

Now, making those states' concerns appear rather prescient, quite a lot of modern urban progressives seem to want to renege on that promise, primarily because they think they can get away with it, and they hate those people anyways.

> That great, then you should have no trouble passing an actual Constitutional Amendment recognizing that right in a way that can't be interpreted away. I'll just sit here and wait while you go and do that.

Would be easy in a democracy

Ergo the solution is rural voters count for much more than urban voters.

> Naturally, the more rural states with smaller populations were concerned that their opinions and needs would be steamrolled by the more populous states

What happened to respecting the wishes of fellow citizens? Why are these specific citizens more important because they live in a different plot of land?

> Now, making those states' concerns appear rather prescient, quite a lot of modern urban progressives seem to want to renege on that promise, primarily because they think they can get away with it, and they hate those people anyways.

Maybe its because the concept of losing a national election with millions more votes than the other side is bullshit? There are many divides in beliefs between people in the country. Geographical ones seem like the least interesting.

> Progressive wing of the Democrats

Actually the Supreme Court that decided Roe vs Wade was mostly appointed by republicans.

Who were almost certainly appointed long before any of those issues were of a concern to anyone. Exactly what are you attempting to prove by that statement?

You blamed it on the progressive wing of the democrats. It was the state of Texas that appealed to the Supreme Court. Not sure who you think the “progressive wing of the democrats” exactly were.

As tossthere put it: "Who decided that this was important to you, and why did you let them decide that?"

Can't help but think of this when I start forming an opinion about what Dr. Seuss should do with his old books, etc. All kinds of trivial issue the news and social media prompts me to think about. Why do I care? Especially since I'm not going to do anything about it. There are more important causes to fight for, and I don't have the time to take action for trivial things. If I'm not going to act, and cannot influence the situation, why bother even forming an opinion?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23940090

Personally, I've subscribed to several RSS feeds for local/state news outlets in my area. That helps me stay more in touch with local stuff. Then I just do a quick scan of AP News for international stuff.

Your dad's broader point is a really good one, but the example of Andrew Cuomo doesn't seem like the best to me depending on when it was said.

For a while there Cuomo was being talked about very seriously as the heir apparent to the Democrat presidential nomination. I agree with OP that "civic duty" is a silly reason for watching the news, but when it comes to voting to give people massive amount of power, that really does matter.

Now that Cuomo is out, I agree, for those of us not in NY his actions are less consequential.

maybe but in the end it turned out Cuomo was not going to be a presidential candidate and what happened to him never really mattered at all. I think this can apply to most news. You think a topic is important because it could be important months down the road. I would bet that 95/100 times what we think is going to be important ends up having no real impact on us at all and we would have been better served paying attention to our hobbies or families or friends.

Great point. That seems to happen far more often that not.

This falls into a trap of preparing for every possible outcome when you have finite time and attention. If Cuomo runs for president, there will be plenty of time to make an informed opinion then.

The trap set by news is implying that something could possibly impact you when it probably wont.

Indeed, good point. There's no shortage of coverage on presidential candidates long before you enter the ballot box.

I think people are fixated on Cuomo but just replace with _____ that constitutes most national and international news. A person in Indonesia shouldn’t give a shit about Andrew Cuomo, but they do. That’s the central point - NYT and others have way too much influence.

I’m glad you acknowledge the larger picture.

Since all the local TV stations and newspapers were bought out by conglomerates, they have been ruined. Local TV news is just random crimes and feel-good stories, and the newspapers are stories about restaurant openings and closures and sports.

Feels like meaningless dreck to fill the gaps between ads.

The Economist remains a good rag, and Wired is surprisingly good, albeit full of ads. But for true, long-form, thoughtful discussions I look to YouTube and podcasts these days.

Since all the local TV stations and newspapers were bought out by conglomerates, they have been ruined. Local TV news is just random crimes and feel-good stories

I'm older enough to remember local news before all the stations were bought up, and it was exactly the same. Nonstop horrible garbage.

Classic "kid stuck in the well" stories, a local news staple, go back to at least the 1940s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathy_Fiscus

I think Cuomo is maybe a bad example of why you shouldn't care. The Cuomo affair should hold a lot of interest because it was a true test of the health of public institutions.

Here is a powerful public official who was lauded by the media for his response to COVID, while simultaneously implementing terrible public health policies in old age homes that led to thousands of deaths, who then fudged his COVID reports to the CDC, and passed legislation that shielded executives that managed old age homes from liability for following those terrible public health policies. Other representatives tried to draw attention to these problems but couldn't get traction because Cuomo was a media darling in how he stood up to Trump.

Cuomo's public image was further bolstered by his brother at CNN, and with all this free publicity Andrew signed a multimillion dollar deal to write a book about his career.

But his incompetence and fraud wasn't enough to trigger a fall from grace, it took several sexual harassment complaints.

So as a health check on your democratic republic, I'd be a little worried given the multiple failures up and down the line: failure of the executive to implement sensible policies and report data accurately, failure of the press to check their claims, provide coverage free of conflicts of interest and otherwise keep them executive branches in line, failure of the justice department to prosecute blatant misconduct.

> "Why do you care what Andrew Cuomo is doing in New York city?"

In and of itself, I don't. Unfortunately, the local politicians toe the party line and ape the Big City / Big State politicians, the Cuomos and the Garcettis of the world.

Suppose you could paint it at some level as "know thy enemy" (pardon the abrasiveness of the wording) because those states are something of a test bed for what to expect from the local folks, but a year or so down the line whether that's "You must wear a mask and cannot let your child use that swing set," or "policies that demoralize the police and undermine anything resembling a reasonable standard of rule-of-law, or "we must tear down statues of elder statesmen ("divisive", old, racist White men) while erecting statues of individuals that praised and sought to emulate the Haitian revolution and its genocidal outcomes."

With that said, I can't stand that all of my local options routinely shove rage-bait National stories in your face. There is no true "local only" coverage.

Self awareness and the phrase "rage-bait" could do you wonders.

Frankly, I don't follow.

Perhaps of these issues the only one that could be construed as a non-serious issue is the topic of statues. At the same time, I find it rather queer that when I take a stroll through the local park I am confronted with the statue of a man who wanted to kill everyone with my skin tone in a time where we are supposed to be seeking some sort of harmony.

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