About the effectiveness of convincing friends & relatives: I know what you mean about skepticism about changing people's minds. It's hard, and I certainly don't

About the effectiveness of convincing friends & relatives: I know what you mean about skepticism about changing people's minds. It's hard, and I certainly don't think you'll realistically ever flip someone's deeply held belief on its head with a clever argument. The most effective thing I feel like I can do personally is push people who are already mostly on board with something out of complacency and toward action. For people who disagree with me more strongly, I just try to continually nudge them in my direction since that seems to be more effective than shutting them off. About how frequently you actually need to read the news: if you're asking "do things move fast enough that hearing about an event when it happens vs a few days later matters?", then no, I don't think it does, and for some things you really need to wait before there's any useful information. But, at least personally, I don't think I could dedicate a block of time on the weekend to reading up on the events of the week. I follow some journalists on Twitter as well as some folks focused on local matters, and ask my brother questions about things I hear since he has more experience and I'm still relatively new to all this. Also, newspapers are great! Lastly, about all parties being equally corrupt: I think they're all corrupt, but I don't think they're equal in either the degree of corruption or in the magnitude of harm their policies & discourse cause. On just one current issue: it's hard not to look at consistently Republican-lead policies that disproportionately disenfranchise black people and think that one side is very much worse here. Even if both sides are trying to stop their opponents from getting more votes, one side is clearly being more ruthless & cruel. Again, this is just one issue, but it's a big one and I believe there's plenty of evidence that this isn't an isolated case.