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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

• landdate 3mo ago
  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 3mo ago
    Righteous judgment according to which set of beliefs? Only the delusional are certain about anything that happens in the afterlife.
    • landdate 3mo ago
      > Righteous judgment according to which set of beliefs? Right is right; Belief doesn't effect truth. Such as in physics, there are differing theories, but the underlying truth doesn't change. > Only the delusional are certain about anything that happens in the afterlife. Just because you are blind doesn't mean others can't see.
  • deleted 3mo ago
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  • cucumber3732842 3mo ago
    If you do that the system works around you. Pretty much all the power of state/local politics has been usurped by fed/state via "in order to get your own people's money back as grants you shall pass a law meeting requirements blah, blah, blah...." type rules. You can want to improve permitting rules or the local school district's priorities all you want but the system is built to prevent you from being able to do so except in the most limited "within the permitted amount of local deviation from the federal norm" way.
    • landdate 3mo ago
      Helping one's community encompasses much more than just the political realm.
• metabagel 3mo ago
  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
  • appplication 3mo ago
    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.
    • fn-mote 3mo ago
      In my ideal world, explaining this stance would be a part of democracy. It’s an uphill battle vs a tribal mentality, though.
    • ViscountPenguin 3mo ago
      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 3mo ago
• applfanboysbgon 3mo ago
  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"?
  • joshrw 3mo ago
    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 3mo ago
      It was evident to anyone aware and paying attention.
    • cryo32 3mo ago
      The real question is should you have trusted his manifesto after the last time?
    • simonask 3mo ago
      From outside the US, nothing about him has really been predictable, except that he consistently lies about everything. The only predictable thing about this American presidency is the total chaos that has been inflicted on the world by millions of intellectually degenerate Americans. This is what the world sees. Almost nobody is making excuses for him, everybody is trying to move on without the US. So yeah, in that sense another war is simultaneously an unpredictable outcome and an unsurprising outcome.
    • torben-friis 3mo ago
      During his first term, his continuous threats to north Korea were enough to force congress to restrict presidential powers (the whole fire and fury stuff), and that's not counting Venezuela, Syria and others.
• uberex 3mo ago
  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 3mo ago
    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 3mo ago
      The only thing you can do to hurt the powers that be is not buying.
      • pepperoni_pizza 3mo ago
        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.
        • Gibbon1 3mo ago
          The difference between solar+batteries and oil and gas is the former is a durable good and latter are consumables.
      • numpad0 3mo ago
        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.
      • seba_dos1 3mo ago
        Can be done too. I live in a rather big city, so I don't own a car, as I can perfectly go by using public transport.
• voxl 3mo ago
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  • userbinator 3mo ago
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    • unethical_ban 3mo ago
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• Npovview 3mo ago
  > 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.
• pjc50 3mo ago
  > 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?
• sho 3mo ago
  > 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.
  • momocowcow 3mo ago
    You can read what his son has written on the subject https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/feb/02/amusing-ourselves-to-death-neil-postman-trump-orwell-huxley https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/feb/02/amusing-oursel...
  • csallen 3mo ago
    > … 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 To be fair, most people who engage in "healthy" habits like reading, creating, meditating, socializing, or just sitting and staring at nature, could also said to be in a mesmerized almost-hypnotized state, and rarely remember much of what they're experiencing.
• paganel 3mo ago
  > ? Or the rates of inflation, crime and unemployme A proletarian revolution would be a good start, not sure what this ideologue writer was on about. History is far from having ended, change can still happen through the union of individual wills.
  • danaris 3mo ago
    But how do you start a proletarian revolution? It's all well and good to say "this collective action would change the bad status quo", but even if you're 100% correct, unless you can point to ways to work toward said collective action, it's still pretty useless. You're not actually helping to change the bad status quo.
    • inigyou 3mo ago
      History shows that a revolution can only be started by a group of potential elites who hope to displace the current elites.
• stratocumulus0 3mo ago
  Postman wrote this in context of television, which is a broadcast channel with no means to interact with it. But in times of social media, your reaction to the news is something you can broadcast yourself, at the very least to your online followers (if we are talking about story feeds). Now, a lot of groups enforce their members to take political stances and show action as a sign of belonging. These might be anything from a writing circle to a raver collective. Everyone already shares the group opinions (sincerely or not), but then they need to perform token activism to maintain their image as a "safe" person to have in the group. Examples of such actions I've seen recently would be: - A special edition of a writing workshop dedicated to writing poems which can be used by people protesting against the ICE in the US. We are thousands of kilometers away from the US, by the way. - A street protest against whatever the most recent armed conflict is. The protest has a DJ, a great sound system and everyone is just dancing while singing the slogans. - A charity party collecting donations for a very narrowly defined vulnerable population in a war-torn area, most often someone the participants can personally identify with. Case in point is that the vast majority of the population has no power to drive any meaningful change, as Postman rightly noticed. But then, the new source of mental load comes from the fact that you have to be performatively concerned if you don't want to lose your status in a group.
  • consp 3mo ago
    Your first paragraph sounds like a religion.
    • throwaway209329 3mo ago
      As an autistic person this has never made sense, the things people are willing to do in order to fit into a group, like at it's extreme murdering others. After becoming aware of my diagnosis I've started studying "normal" people and it's insane what you are willing to withstand just to belong to a group or in society. Now I think that some things "normal" people participate in they think is actually fun, like hanging around others doing nothing productive, which after reaching 40 years old, and having a burnout, I also now enjoy just hanging around and belonging to a group. Also social capital, or belonging to a group, has many positive advantages.
• kstenerud 3mo ago
  It's not that you plan to do nothing; rather, it's because you can do nothing about them. The only people who have any sway are the various foreign offices and the country leaders. But even their power is incredibly limited, because humanity moves like the tide. Sure, Trump can continue chastising Netanyahu for continuing Israel's attacks into Gaza and Lebanon (which will sabotage the already comical agreement between the USA and Iran), but Netanyahu is in a bind with an October election coming up (and a hardliner rival who's already calling him a 3-failed-war-leader), so he can't change course no matter how much Trump (who needs a Republican victory in November) gets pissed off and threatens him. And even those threats will largely be empty because losing the religious right would be catastrophic. And no one else at either helm could do any better. And because of that, Iran knows it can just continue like it always has, slowly working towards a bomb, with Saudia Arabia and Turkey soon following suit (they can't allow Iran to be the only nuclear power in the region - not with an isolationist USA). Then we have Russia, whose insecurity and "defensive expansionism" spans centuries, stemming from its geography, so there's simply no way to placate them, and no way for them to ever be happy about NATO (which everyone already knows is a paper tiger anyway - it's just a matter of sussing out where the real alliance lines lay). So yeah, you're not going to solve it. I'm not going to solve it. Nobody's gonna solve it. We're just gonna ride the tide.
  • inglor_cz 3mo ago
    Netanyahu could also simply retire, he has been in politics since the 1970s. But he would probably end up in jail on corruption charges, which is why he perseveres. At this moment I wonder if the entire region would be better off if the Knesset passed a law "Netanyahu is universally pardoned, but must GTFO of the country and leave politics entirely". Cynical, but maybe the result would be worth it. On a more positive note, I can see Iran dropping their nuclear program. It is expensive and the same money could be diverted to the drone and missile program, which is what led to them not losing the war. Meanwhile, Russia has a very extensive and expensive nuclear program, and it didn't help them against Ukrainian drones burning and exploding strategic factories a few kilometers from the Kremlin. The threshold for an actual use of nukes is very high and they are losing a lot of their deterrence value.
• rvba 3mo ago
  > Middle East, inflation, crime and unemployment, preserving the natural environment, NATO, OPEC, the CIA, Iran Not voting for republican part or candidates would fix a lot of those things, although I will probably be heavily downvoted for this since cryptobros like their low taxes at all costs.
  • mlrtime 3mo ago
    I won't downvote you , but voting D will not solve any of these problems.
    • inigyou 3mo ago
      It would be a start. D isn't much better than R, but it is slightly better. Although R really knows how to do politics - you see how they're all suddenly anti-Israel a few months before the midterms when most of the country is probably going to vote against Israel?
  • bigstrat2003 3mo ago
    If you get downvoted it'll be for starting a partisan fight for no reason. That shit is annoying and drags down the discussion.
• cineticdaffodil 3mo ago
  I plan to be informed about causality and effect - and im voting accordingly to put an end to causes that affect me negatively. So understanding something, not mythologizing or idealizing anything, is a absolutly necessary pre-requisit to voting.
  • cindyllm 3mo ago
    [dead]
  • elif 3mo ago
    There has never been a vote with any impact on the CIA whatsoever.
    • cineticdaffodil 3mo ago
      Ah, that mighty CIA- that couldnt even stop Trump from tanking the sales of the MIC. Its not real- never was. Its some drunken station-chiefs, rainmaking Langley from hotel bars abroad.
  • JKCalhoun 3mo ago
    I don't disagree. Mental health is important as well. I am informed well enough to vote (when there are two parties) with just a few minutes of the news every day. (And in fact the few minutes seems to have only served to bolster how I was already inclined to vote. One thing I have to say about these times: there is very little nuance.)
  • unparagoned 3mo ago
    For many it probably has a negative effect on their life and their single vote is unlikely to ever make a difference. Plus people watching the media don’t consume in some objective fashion. Almost everyone just gets stuck in an echo chamber which reinforces reinforces their view rather than making them more informed. They might actually be less informed.
• AlienRobot 3mo ago
  I have always thought of this as a "broken superman." Superman has super-hearing that allows him to hear anyone asking for help anywhere in the world. Super-speed to get there in an instant. And super-strength to solve all the problems. Media only gives you super-hearing.
• jancsika 3mo ago
  One man's spite against this type of self-satisfied, evidence-free opinion is what got the 27th Amendment passed.[1] 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-seventh_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution#Revival_of_interest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-seventh_Amendment_to_th...
• Yoric 3mo ago
  I actually am spending some of my money in an attempt to contribute to decrease some of these things, and investing bit parts of my retirement plans in others. So, not entirely nothing.