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Comment by metabagel | Hacker News Reader

This is close to correct. We should be aware of current events but not become too emotionally involved with them. They are mostly outside of our control, and we need to reserve most of our focus and emotional energy on what is front of us and our loved ones. However, we should still act on behalf of greater causes with the means at our disposal. Some examples...

world in crisis - I donate to World Central Kitchen

the war in Ukraine - I donate to Come Back Alive

fascism in America - I vote for and donate to the campaigns of candidates opposed to fascism

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"We should be aware of current events" - should we? Why? There is an avalanche of current events, I've stopped paying attention and I still find out - its impossible to avoid, I see absolutely no value in paying attention to things that I'm just not interested in. War in Iran - yep, battle of the stupids - it just doesn't matter, there is nothing I can do about it, best to ignore it all. I have friends obsessed with the news, wake up in the morning and watch the news during breakfast - they discuss it endlessly, get a lot of angst from it, its all just noise to my mind.

Large groups of people all contributing small amounts towards a goal none of them could accomplish on their own is the only way any of those things ever get done.

Sure, but that has nothing to do with watching the news though, I would put it paying attention to the news actually takes time from things you could do.

News is what people who do things use to maintain an accurate mental model of the world.

If everything that you know about the world fits in a 2km radius around your house, you aren't doing anything.

Doing what you feel necessary or useful at a local scale is still empowering. Understanding that the effects will be mostly local as well is a good thing, but choosing your battles is perfectly healthy.

Cause people unaware of those events vote to cause those events.

Thank you for your donations. World Central Kitchen is a really unique organization. In addition to feeding people in Ukraine, Gaza, and pretty much anywhere in the world where disaster strikes, they have a very unique model in which they employ locals and feed cash into in local businesses, generating economic impact to jumpstart the shattered economies in disaster zones. Your donations actually make a bigger difference than you might realize.

I was recently massively downvoted on Reddit because I mentioned I didn’t really care about candidates stances either way on Israel/Palestine as it regards to a city-level election. I certainly have opinions and understand why folks have principles either way, but we can’t make every issue the issue we spend our energy on, and this doesn’t meet the bar for me for a city official.

Sometimes online and election media discourse can feel like we’re supposed to be single issue voters on 1000 issues at once.

In my ideal world, explaining this stance would be a part of democracy.

It’s an uphill battle vs a tribal mentality, though.

Israel Palestine single-voterism is particularly frustrating to me because of the weird way it has to infect completely irrelevant topics. As a particularly crazy example, I remember people arguing about Israel Palestine in the context of the Australian Aboriginal Voice to Parliament debate, a debate about an internal representation mechanism for Australian Aboriginal people, incredibly few of which have any ties to either Israel or Palestine, and a group which I considerably doubt represent a single soldier on either side.

That’s a feature, not a bug.

Historically that tactic is used by ‘revolutionary’ and ‘liberation’ and reactionary groups to overwhelm and exclude honest debate. It’s a destabilization technique, aimed at gathering critical mass for revolt with no clear second phase. Occupy, overthrow, liberate, replace…

Taken at face value, honest protest, it’s a hate crime against the victims and participants in the actual situation: these chaos agitators steal the cause for noise and invest in perpetual purity and polemic campaigns, it only hurts the victims, but enables eternal grievance politics for the agitators.

Spray painting Nazi slogans on American universities isn’t helping diplomacy half the world away. Flotillas without aide aren’t aide.

The propagandists involved are not dumb, they are funding very tactically. The point is not convincing or helping anyone, it’s establishing political dominance and orthodoxy. Mob rule.

> Flotillas without aide aren't aide.

Is this referring to the flotilla full of food sailing towards Gaza that was invaded and kidnapped by Israeli pirates inside the national waters of Greece?

I think it's used as a stalking horse by outsiders who are really just trying to put across the idea 'candidate X sucks and you should shun them like they're poison'. I don't think that topic is treated like it's authentic at all. It's used just to make people mad by influencers who don't give a rat's ass about Palestine really.

Given the shift in attitudes among the public and especially the Democratic voter base, a candidate’s willingness to go against Israel is a superb proxy for whether they will prioritize voters over donor interests.

It’s also effectively a referendum on the current Iran mess, gas prices, assaults on free speech by the administration, and the Democratic establishment in general (AIPAC is the #1 single-issue lobby by far).

We have the same problem in the UK. Local councils went all in on the Palestine thing when their job is basically collecting trash, roadworks, planning and education.

I can’t realistically vote a candidate in who doesn’t talk about trash collection but does talk about Middle Eastern politics.

Sounds like all the noise in Texas right now about sharia law. Muslims are a tiny proportion of the people there, what are the politician all worked up about?

Yeah we have that too. The right wing are using it to leverage voters here.

If I lived in 1930 I would definitely care about a city candidate's stances on Germany/Judaism. Even though that candidate couldn't do anything to affect the Germany/Judaism situation, it would still tell me a lot about that candidate.

theres some reason to care - non-federal entities still make and enforce anti-bds laws, and put support for israel into contracts for working with them.

if you want to be able to have say, cheaper government, you need to be elect local officials on the palestine side, so that folks other than just the pro-israel ones can bid

That’s assuming that the antisemites are cheaper.

But a company boycotting others for political/religious agendas is not going to be able to provide the cheapest/best service, it’s therefore not optimal to go with companies that practice BDS.

>We should be aware of current events

I have come to the conclusion that there is no way a layman understand the truth about current events. So it is best to not at all be aware of any current events as reported by the media or popular opinion.

For example you say "fascism in America", and I wonder is this guy for real? Fascism? If this was true how are all the people who insult Trump on social media still alive or not locked up?

So imagine if you were running a new outlet. All of your readers will unquestioningly accept your flawed narrative! And imagine there are multiple of such flawed/biased news outlets.

There is no way to know the truth. This is painfully clear when you read stuff in the news that you have first hand knowledge about...There is some name to the fallacy of why people still believe in news despite that...

If there’s no way to know the truth, how do you know you’ve come to the right conclusion?

What conclusion? I am talking about not having any conclusions at all.

> *I have come to the conclusion* that there is no way a layman understand the truth about current events. So it is best to not at all be aware of any current events as reported by the media or popular opinion.

That is a conclusion that is arrived over course over long time and many experiences/thought. It is not a news or blog article I read once and made me conclude it.

Have you considered that maybe most of the posters on this website weren't born yesterday and have also spent a lifetime absorbing facts from many sources and experiences?

In fact most people have, in some way.

Most of the posters in this website are teenagers or in their early twenties. Let’s not be delusional here, this is still the internet.

There may have been a time when most people on the Internet were in their teens and early twenties, but I don't think that has been true for a long time.

I think it's still the case, especially during summer. People get busy and less interested in online bs once they graduate high school or college. I've noticed, someone mentions their age here and it skews younger pretty often.

I don't believe you've made a case here.

But what is your point? Can't one come to a world view that is vastly different from his contemporaries?

I think he means the conclusion you were talking about when you said "I have come to the conclusion..."

You concluded that America is not fascist.

I did not. I meant that even in the news, there is nothing to substantiate such a point of view.

Then you clearly think it is not.

ie null finding versus negative finding

Neither are a positive finding.

So you don't know whether America is fascist or not? Because you clearly presented it as if you believe America is not fascist.

You replied to the wrong person.

> how are all the people who insult Trump on social media still alive or not locked up

I think you'll find that some of them actually are locked up, and a few of them are dead.

So it can't be fascism or be close it it until we have fully operational death camps?

Fascism is a way overused term. Personally I tend to avoid it unless we're seeing paramilitary forces shooting civilians in the face. Other people may have lower thresholds.

What about shooting them in the chest while they drive their car? Or shooting them in the back after they’ve been detained?

No further explanations should be necessary.

Did you know Hitler was the president of Germany for about ten years before he started the holocaust?

Was he a fascist during that time?

Is not instant. But if trump stays in power he’d pack the courts(not that he listens to the courts anyway), put people in power that would just do what he says and he would start locking people up the instant he could. It certainly is a slow walk to fasicism

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