Why do you follow the news/politics?

[taylor]

Originally Posted by ZephyrusX

Where did you get your current avatar from, taylor?

A Japanese anime version of Pollyanna.
The Story of Pollyanna, Girl of Love - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

It doesn't get more obscure than that hah.

[Michael Chui]

Originally Posted by taylor

Do you feel I'm trying to impose guilt? Thank you for pointing it out. That's not my intention at all. I guess I would rephrase the post to not make it personally about "you" like I did. Make it more about how I choose to see it.

No, that's not what I meant, but it's okay. I need to get back to writing my essay.

[Michael Chui]

relationship with the media

[Cochonette]

Originally Posted by ZephyrusX

I prefer to read blogs or books that analyze and explain why certain events are happening. The news media is only suppose to report facts, but when they do step over the lines and provide analysis, that analysis tends to be simplistic if not overtly biased. Having said that, reading the news can be sort of fun as I can pick out stories and say 'ah ha! This makes sense within this particular context!'. I mainly just enjoy understanding how the world works.

Lately though, I haven't been reading as many political books or paying attention to the news media. I suppose you can only read so much and it starts to get repetitive after awhile. That might only attest to my inability to scope out interesting material though.

Hehehe. Like the humility at the end.

I was intensely into political theory for two years. I read tons of books and blogs, took classes, tried to be an "activist," did a political internship, etc. It was my life. Every single day was spent thinking about the injustices of the world. Although I got bored of reading blogs which just got repetitive 'cause I read them like crazy, I was able to continue pursuing my interest via books.

Then it all started to crash and burn because my spiritual life was messed up, not to mention I don't seem to have much talent for changing the world in this way. I might cultivate the skill in time, but it would come with a lot of effort. I really wanted to make a difference, to do something big... and, to boot, my political interests themselves were changing dramatically to be more spiritually informed. That changed a whole lot for me, it just changed my entire approach to politics and what was worth fighting for and how.

So I shifted my focus to personal growth in the last year, and I am much happier. I am not ready to get back into politics. I still have much work to do on myself first. I call it spiritual justice. How can I work on social justice without spiritual justice? How can I make the world lovely for others if I hate myself? When it comes to spiritual justice, I find myself perfectly capable of making a huge difference in the world. The changes occur within me and are undeniable.

Now I recently started reading mainstream news, which I had long been bored by and avoided. Only because my public speaking professor made me, and now it's become a habit. She claims we need to know what's going on in the world to be credible public speakers.

[ZephyrusX]

Originally Posted by Cochonette

Then it all started to crash and burn because my spiritual life was messed up, not to mention I don't seem to have much talent for changing the world in this way.

So I shifted my focus to personal growth in the last year, and I am much happier. I am not ready to get back into politics. I still have much work to do on myself first. I call it spiritual justice. How can I work on social justice without spiritual justice? How can I make the world lovely for others if I hate myself? When it comes to spiritual justice, I find myself perfectly capable of making a huge difference in the world. The changes occur within me and are undeniable.

I've been spending more time on working on my own issues too. I think we talked about this before, but I don't think you can be politically active unless you have your own **** worked out and have the capacity to detach your self from events. You'll just burn your self out otherwise.

In the past, I went into sociology and was very vocal in speaking about political matters because I wanted validation for some of the issues I contended with in life. I wanted a voice and to be heard in a society that will more or less blow off class issues. But I learned that some people simply will not listen to you no matter what. I think that realization (I wanted validation and I'm not going to get it) has lifted a lot of my own political stress and has encouraged to me look at more effective ways of contending with social issues.

Originally Posted by Cochonette

That changed a whole lot for me, it just changed my entire approach to politics and what was worth fighting for and how.

Can you elaborate upon this? I get the part about changing your self, but if you were to get active in politics again, what would you do differently?

[Cochonette]

Originally Posted by ZephyrusX

Can you elaborate upon this? I get the part about changing your self, but if you were to get active in politics again, what would you do differently?

Well, my political focus was veganism / critical animal studies. At first I thought people needed to be vegan; now I just think it's nice/helpful if they are. I am not entirely sure where veganism stands for me now, but I do know that many people cannot do this, which would change the way I'd advocate it, and that is something without much formal precedent. Spending time convincing people to stop eating animals is a vastly different activity from other methods of improving human-nonhuman relationships. I don't feel the same passion for the latter because solutions on the personal level become pretty ambiguous. The work would be more just educating people on how ****ed up it is that we treat other animal species, and doing policy and law work and direct implementation. It's something I'd still be potentially interested in doing, but I am not sure it would stand above all the many other political issues I could be working on in terms of my passion for it.

Also, I suspect I'd want to focus less on political theory than the actual work of changing things. It's important for me to know that I'm not just acquiring knowledge, but directly participating in change. Of course, knowledge is important as well, and the masses need to be educated. But determining whether or not it's something I could devote my life to is based on more than that. I am interested in concrete things, where the answers are less ambiguous than they have often been in my past studies.

[javed]

Originally Posted by taylor

I'm trying to understand the point of following news/politics.

What does it offer you specifically?

.

Follwing political news has provided me the opportunity to scrutinise political personalities andd parties (local and international) and form a knowledge based opinion of them (of course it not so easy, considering the tricks that media plays).

[newmark]

I follow news stories because I'm interested in what's happening in the world around me. It gives me more understanding of the world.

Also, it's sometimes very useful. Knowing about revolutions, epidemics happening in the world has allowed me to alter my travel plans and avoid things I want to avoid. Knowing about likely swings in currencies has allowed me to save my money too.

I do have weeks when I've had enough of it, though, and I just switch off the noise.

[ZephyrusX]

I can relate to this. I think political activism is as much about changing the self as external environments, and in order to do that, we have to have some sort of indication that what we are doing is actually making a difference. I think this is very important for people who otherwise feel as if they lack the power to do anything.

I think my problem is that I have a very narrow idea of what it means to make a political difference. I have a lot of Marxist background, and although I don't believe in a communist state, his point on structural changes as opposed to local changes was really drilled into my head during school. Now i don't think anything is worth my time unless it actually changes how our society operates at a fundamental level. Ha! That is easier said than done. Educating people is out of the question as you usually end up preaching to the choir, so to speak.

I'd like to do something that makes me feel like I can make a difference, but I'm at a total loss. I think something like legalizing sex work has the potential to alleviate so many problems as it gets to the heart of the issue - sex workers do not have any rights entitled to other 'legitimate' industries. But yah, besides going to law school, which I can't afford, how could I possible help out in such an endeavour?

Did you have anything concrete in mind when you talked about doing something that will make an actual difference? How do you feel about educating people as a form of activism? Does it actually make a difference?

Originally Posted by Cochonette

Also, I suspect I'd want to focus less on political theory than the actual work of changing things. It's important for me to know that I'm not just acquiring knowledge, but directly participating in change. Of course, knowledge is important as well, and the masses need to be educated. But determining whether or not it's something I could devote my life to is based on more than that. I am interested in concrete things, where the answers are less ambiguous than they have often been in my past studies.

[Brutha]

Did you have anything concrete in mind when you talked about doing something that will make an actual difference?

Choose a policital party and join their meetings.
If you can convince people in the party from your idea that the seed for political chance.

Of course this only works when you live in a country with real political parties. In the US it might not work as a politician who has enough funding can run in primary without much support from other active party members.

[irfan]

A list of the most popular stories on CNN.com at the moment:

*Police: Arizona church is brothel
*9/11 threat called 'credible, unconfirmed'
*Some Republicans signal openness to Obama's jobs plan
*Washington man allegedly asked neighbors to dump a body in their trash
*9/11 through Bush's lens

Which buttons do you think we are pushing with these stories? I get this:

1) Prurience
2) Fear
3) Fear/hope
4) Horror/shock
5) Not quite sure how to label this one.

Do any of these stories affect you personally? Will you take some specific action in response to any of them? Do they give you hope for the future? (Those are real questions, not rhetorical: some people may say that Obama's job program will affect them personally, for example. If you live in New York, you may think about using the subway on the anniversary of 9/11, maybe. But maybe not.)

In the pre-internet era, I lived for five years in a small city in central Java, Indonesia. I didn't have access to English language magazines, there were no bookstores selling English language books, and my Indonesian language skills were quite limited, to the point where reading an Indonesian-language book or newspaper was hard work rather than mind-numbing relaxation. It was also the pre-TV period: there was one, appallingly bad government TV station that people didn't pay much attention to.

I wouldn't want to go back to that now, but it was interesting to see how the information diet affected me.

First of all, I more or less missed all the stories about the lifting of the Iron Curtain. Coming from a Czech-migrant background, I'm still a bit sorry that I missed the excitement of that. I remember finding two old Time Magazines somewhere: one talked about a demonstration in Prague of 1,000 people, and the next talked about a demonstration of 50,000 (making those numbers up, but you get the idea). So, in a single hour, I got the digest of what had happened over the past three months or so. That was quite different from watching the story unfold slowly over the period.

Of course, I did get the gist, from friends and so on. But I still slightly regret that I didn't get to read the stories and analysis as it was happening.

Still, the advantages might have outweighed the disadvantages. I found that instead of talking about international affairs and the big entertainment stars and the global sports events, people spent just as much time talking about local affairs, the affairs affecting their town or village.

There are some advantages to that, I think. At least people might possibly know a local football player personally, or even aspire to become a "local hero" themselves. It really was quite possible for most people to achieve that.

That's changed, now. These days, people talk about David Beckham and Madonna, and they even join in the discussions on distant murders or rape cases in some far off country! As if there aren't rapes and murders in Indonesia! But because the international cases are promoted in the major media outlets, they focus on those instead.

I think it's a bit disempowering.

[irfan]

hahahahahaha ....

The Arizona church/brothel story is actually quite entertaining.

Free sample:

The website says at one point: "Sex is a holy, sacred and divine healing force at the core (of) our beings. Once we embrace this force instead of deny it, we become successful, happy and powerful manifestors."

Sick bastards. Lock 'em away and throw away the key!

[irfan]

Amazing. I just googled to find the "Goddess Temple" website. It sounds like quite a credible organization providing quite valuable services.

If it was easy to do, I'd donate $10 to the defence fund of any of the people arrested.

American society is a funny thing for outsiders. I wonder if it makes sense if you actually live there?

[Sypyres]

Hi,
My job for approx 9 hrs of a 12 hr shift is to watch the NEWS and make reports to need to know people. I like my job but watching the BS News and reading reports that I know are obvious false (farse), all I can do is laugh it all and say,"if they only knew". It's more sad than anything else. If you rely on the news/media to decide your daily lives then I pray for you. I am not religious but I will do that for you. Here's an example:
News Flash: There is a terror threat of a terror.
10 minutes later: This report just came in, The terror threat is making people terrified.
20 minutes later: (News) Interviews of people being terrified.

And that's the news today..tune in tomorrow...when "the terror hits your pets".

[irfan]

Sypres, hehehe. Yeah, it's so much more about emotional manipulation than providing information.

I have very conflicted feelings about Julian Assange and Wikileaks, but I enormously admire his concept of "scientific journalism"

“I want to set up a new standard: ‘scientific journalism.’ If you publish a paper on DNA, you are required, by all the good biological journals, to submit the data that has informed your research—the idea being that people will replicate it, check it, verify it. So this is something that needs to be done for journalism as well. There is an immediate power imbalance, in that readers are unable to verify what they are being told, and that leads to abuse.”

I wish that newspapers used footnotes and hyperlinks to their original source, so that I could check them and assess them. It is sometimes interesting reading a commentators opinion if they are clever, but for actually gaining information, the best newspaper articles are (often mediocre) summaries of much better reports prepared by scientific organizations, private corporations, NGOs, and government organizations. The reader should always be encouraged to check the source themselves, rather than trusting the journalists ability to summarize these accurately.

The very worst newspaper articles start off with a bald assertion and then, a very standard journalistic tactic, offer as "evidence" the opinion of a single person, putatively a bystander or observer, who merely repeats or affirms the original assertion.

[Derelle]

I don't follow politics but I do pay attention to it and the news. It's a way to feel connected to the outside world. This is sometimes your only way of knowing what's going on. Eventhough, you have to use the media with a grain of salt, when it comes to information. After reviewing how the news covered 9/11 and didn't ask the tough questions or followed up on some the clues, let me know that the media is just as much a part of the problem, as the solution.

If there was no internet, many people would be at a lost to understand what is really going on today. I gather, had it not been for the internet and sites like You Tube, the government would have got away with this act of treason, without many people realizing it. It is too late and the cat is out the bag, so much so, that they had to go and get Popular Mechanics to try and debunk the information being brought forward by witnesses including civilians, firemen, police officers and other first responders, people on the scene, the experts in many different engineering, construction, physics, demolition and structuring expertise. There are many scholars, celebrities, and common lay people who realize that something just doesn't sit right with the evidence.

If we take our news face value from the media, then we sit looking at the evil doers on tv, with praise of how they handled 9/11, when they are the ones who help orchestrate it. So yeah, I watch news but I do so with my 3rd eye open... always.

[irfan]

Originally Posted by Derelle

I don't follow politics but I do pay attention to it and the news. It's a way to feel connected to the outside world. This is sometimes your only way of knowing what's going on.

Is it to "know what's going on" or to feel that you know what's going on?

If I'm not involved in a particular forum at a particular time, I often open up the Guardian on the Net with my morning coffee and carrot juice. It gives me that feeling of connection.

This morning, I haven't even bothered, I came straight to this forum to see if there were replies or interesting posts, etc. Maybe opening up the forum fulfils the same need - but without the Sex Goddess and body disposal stories that I saw in CNN yesterday.

So, which one is more positive? Which one creates the most value for me? Or for you?

[Double]

I dont, they follow me. Why? Because they want to make me a voter, a servant