[spking]

Neil Postman called this the “Peekaboo World”.

“What steps do you plan to take to reduce the conflict in the Middle East? Or the rates of inflation, crime and unemployment? What are your plans for preserving the environment or reducing the risk of nuclear war? What do you plan to do about NATO, OPEC, the CIA, affirmative action, and the monstrous treatment of the Baha’is in Iran? I shall take the liberty of answering for you: You plan to do nothing about them.”

https://www.nateliason.com/notes/amusing-death-neil-postman

[sho]

> the “Peekaboo World”

What a great analogy. And IG/Tiktok reduce it into an even purer state - endless random videos, barely if at all connected, ephemeral stimulation you can't even remember 30 seconds after seeing it.

I know 50 year old adults who can spend entire hours just in this mesmerized state of flicking through these random feeds, seeing but not seeing, like some kind of drug induced hypnosis. I wonder what Postman would write today, were he still with us.

[uberex]

Er... I got an electric car does that count? Based on $ keeping the old car is cheaper. Also divestment, purchase choices, charity donations, solar install.

[Gibbon1]

Buying electric cars, installing solar, and switching to heat pumps are one of the few things you can materially do to screw the powers that be. The the other one is limiting your family size.

[gchamonlive]

The only thing you can do to hurt the powers that be is not buying.

[numpad0]

I think producing and consuming like crazy could also work, considering how quickly Twitter turned Elon Musk from most important to least interesting figure on Earth. Wealth and sensory capacity don't appear to be positively correlated at all.

[pepperoni_pizza]

Depends on which powers for each specific choice.

Electric cars don't run on Saudi-Trump-Putin juice, so they're pretty good step in screwing those, for example.

[weregiraffe]

No, it doesn't. Your contribution is statistically insignificant. It was purely a symbolic gesture.

[pjc50]

Everyone's contribution is insignificant, and yet it all adds up.

This is rather like saying the average player in a football match scores 0 goals, therefore 0 goals were scored.

[Gud]

Even so, an electric car is not particularly good for the environment.

Bicycles and public transportation.

[uberex]

Bicycles and public transportation are better yes. If I were healthy enough I would consider a cargo bike and bring 20kg of shopping home on that (for real). It would be cool. Then buses for unladen journeys.

[pjc50]

> inflation, crime and unemployment?

Here's a subject I want to explore; the statistical vs individual view of the world. Because those things do matter - to the individuals they happen to. People care about the price level every time they get paid or go grocery shopping. People care if a crime is committed against them - it can be a lifelong trauma. And so on.

They're also likely to care when things happen to their immediate social circle. What about their broader community? However that is defined?

On the other end of that, the ability to do something about things: isn't that ultimately why people value democracy, because it is actually possible to change things, even sometimes for the better?

[landdate]

Practically, focusing on the things you can change (mostly small scale evils in your community) will have the highest degree of positive effect, rather than focusing on stuff you are bombarded with online that is out of your control (mostly large scale evils).

However, don't think you get vindicated from duty just because the task is impossible. You are as just as much responsible for yourself, your family, your friends, your community, as you are responsible for the person living on the other side of the globe. Whatever you decide to do with that information is up to you, but you will suffer with any of those who suffer, whether that be in life or death. Only the delusional think they can escape righteous judgment.

[stouset]

Righteous judgment according to which set of beliefs? Only the delusional are certain about anything that happens in the afterlife.

[applfanboysbgon]

This is a weird quote. It reeks of pretentious pseudo-intellectualism. People vote for a government that does something very tangible about all of those things. The media influenced how Americans voted in the US election, and they voted for a guy that predictably started a major new war in the Middle East. That is a real thing that happened and has impacted billions of people globally with second-order economic effects. Is anything short of each individual American taking up arms and marching to Iran "doing nothing"?

[devsda]

> People vote for a government that does something very tangible about all of those things

People don't do that.

Politics in US(and democracies in general) have what I call the cable tv bundling problem.

Imagine you have only two bundle packages with your most preferred channels split evenly across two packages along with some unwanted channels. Regardless of which package you choose, you'll miss out on some of your favorite channel and still subscribe to unwanted ones.

You may enjoy watching a channel occassionally at your neighbors who subscribed to the other package but when it is time for renewal, you personally pick the package that gives you maximum bang for your money & preferences.

People will vote mainly based on one or two issues they strongly feel about.

[Paracompact]

My take on it is that he's not blaming people for the "doing nothing" part, but rather the fretting part. Of course most Americans can't reasonably do anything beyond vote or throw some dollars or social media sentiment at the thing. One should just take into mind that that is the limit of most people's ability to effect change.

[threatofrain]

Which is enough to make the rest of the world hold their breath, waiting to see what the sum of little choices will be.

[joshrw]

It wasn’t predictable that he would start a war.

He presented himself as the anti-war candidate and then betrayed his electorate.

[N_Lens]

It was evident to anyone aware and paying attention.

[SpicyLemonZest]

People vote for such a government very rarely - in the US, about once every two years. I don't think anyone would object to you spending a week or even a month before the election learning a large amount about what's wrong in the world. But when you go into the voting booth on November 3 this year, do you expect your choices will be at all influenced by the details of the bad news you read on June 21?

[applfanboysbgon]

Candidates don't pop up out of nowhere on election day, and building support for either candidates or policies takes time, public debate, raising awareness. All of that is a reason for more political engagement, not less. Given how much power we actually wield to significantly influence how issues are approached in a democracy, we should strive to make more constructive use of the news. There are real, deep-seated problems with both the current media and how people consume it, but we have a civic responsibility to do better rather than disengage, because quite literally the fate of millions of people are influenced by the sum of our actions.

[foxglacier]

You'd have trouble finding a candidate who wouldn't predictably start a major war in the middle East. Biden and Trump 1 were kind of exceptions. Kamala certainly seemed pro-war-in-the-middle-East with her support for Israel, so she's out. Who did you vote for instead?

[watwut]

Frankly, bullshit. Harris did not seemed more pro war or aggressive, unless you live in deep conservative bubble.

[pjc50]

The slight problem here is that the war was started by Netenyahu, whom US voters are unable to remove. But yes, I doubt Harris would have gone for the decapitation strike that destabilized everything.

[watwut]

War was started by Trump, Hegseth and Netenyahu. Hegseth specifically wants wars for emotional reasons - it makes him feel good.

America has a lot of Iran hawks, especially in goverment/military circles. They got their way.

[voxl]

I plan to vote for a Democrat for the rest of my life. You know, the bare minimum to being a good person.

[userbinator]

Congratulations, you are everything that's wrong with politics these days.

[unethical_ban]

The two party system is what's wrong with politics, along with social media, bad faith political advocacy, and the GOP.

[Npovview]

> You plan to do nothing about them.

Here's another example, let's say we got the news from Andromeda galaxy that Andromeda Hitler is killing lot of people? What do you expect me to do ? Since space and time are equal, similarly we don't lose sleep over bad events that happened in the past.

[metabagel]

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

[chadcmulligan]

"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.

[tlavoie]

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.

[watwut]

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

[forthefuture]

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.

[chadcmulligan]

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.

[shreddude]

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.

[appplication]

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.

[ViscountPenguin]

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.

[bonesss]

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 dominance and orthodoxy.

[fn-mote]

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

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

[Spooky23]

It has nothing to do with Israel or Palestine really. That’s because many Jewish people in the US have had it hammered into their heads, usually through political messaging delivered adjacent to religious practice, that this type of activity is essential to the survival of Israel and of themselves.

It’s the same playbook successfully used with evangelical Christian groups and now even some Catholics. Latinos literally vote for people whose stated aim is to round them up. The technique is fear endorsed by a trusted leader or in a sacred place.

If the political person says the thing they are supposed to say, they’re safe. Otherwise, they want to destroy your way of life.

[qsera]

>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...

[cocacola1]

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

[qsera]

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