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I completely disagree with Aaron, who here seems to jump rather quickly to the (merely asserted) conclusion that the news (i.e. the world) doesn't affect him. (

I completely disagree with Aaron, who here seems to jump rather quickly to the (merely asserted) conclusion that the news (i.e. the world) doesn't affect him. (Without this same news we would not have heard of Snowden OR, in an ironic twist, of Aaron himself). Furthermore, how ironic is it that we're discussing this itself on a self-purported news site? The news, even global news, absolutely affects all of us even if we live local, cloistered lives. Let us take the United States - which is overly represented on this site. The US economy is fueled by its finance and investment sectors, which are in turn fueled by neocolonialist enterprises overseas. The success of the US domestic economy is fundamentally tied to its navigating geostrategy and multilateral diplomacy, its overthrowing of governments, stabilizing and destabilizing nations with propaganda and embargos, fixing international law in favor of the leaders of its private sectors, and in its opening resources abroad to US companies is the primary and nearly exclusive driver of the finance sector. And in fact, domestic and international law now blur due to a similarly increased globalization. I find it odd that Aaron, known for his stance on free access to information and to being informed, would fall only to the knowledge of the academic - and not information and facts about the world in which we immediately live. Yes there are some truly irrelevant news items (take celebrities). One must filter and prioritize. It is a small price to pay. I would love to defend whichever notions have offended downvoters.

vinhboy 12y ago
So I browsed the comment thread, and you are the first "disagree" I found. I am going to join you here. I think one of the most wrong thing in the article is this statement. > Indeed, reading a voter’s guide is much better: there’s no recency bias (where you only remember the crimes reported in the past couple months), you get to hear both sides of the story after the investigation has died down, you can actually think about the issues instead of worrying about the politics. Yea, no... A big fat screaming no. A voter guide is a propaganda piece that has ZERO substance. Maybe for the propositions they give a little bit of pros and cons, but for the candidates, they give you nothing. The only way you can discern who is a lying asshole is by following the news. Maybe the conclusion will be they are all lying assholes, but at least you'll be informed of that. I also think that saying I don't follow the news because it does not personally affect me is short-sighted and self-fish. For example, those Christians minorities getting slaughtered by ISIS has nothing to do with me. But hearing their stories and learning about them through the news will certainly teach me a bit of compassion that I will need in some random tangential decisions I make later.
- xnull6guest 12y ago
  I had originally meant to include an argument about voters' pamphlets - I am glad that I did not as you covered it well. The pamphlet summaries, which issues are used for the face of a campaign and how these issues are carefully written about is all carefully crafted PR and not representative of the interests of the candidate, their constituents and investors or of their track record of fulfilling campaign promises. The information you get from a voter pamphlet is what a candidate wants to appear like and which voters they are trying to appeal to. This can help to understand their publicity campaign but it is not enough (alone) to understand their platform agenda. Similarly, seeing the high coverage of Coptic Christians where coverage of attacks on Muslim minorities (which are much more frequent and equally horrifying) by ISIS and sometimes America, allies or contractors (or of similar atrocities by Mexican drug cartels in the Americas) is missing helps to understand how media and state moral narrative diverges from more universally applied and internally consistent humanitarian compassion - and how and when this and these narratives may align with broad geostrategic policy goals. Insofar as Coptic Christian moral narrative may be used, as an example, as justification for some activity or funding, one will know to look to see if that activity or funding has been a long-standing objective or has been proposed and denied before due to a lack of public support.

vinhboy 12y ago

So I browsed the comment thread, and you are the first "disagree" I found. I am going to join you here. I think one of the most wrong thing in the article is this statement. > Indeed, reading a voter’s guide is much better: there’s no recency bias (where you only remember the crimes reported in the past couple months), you get to hear both sides of the story after the investigation has died down, you can actually think about the issues instead of worrying about the politics. Yea, no... A big fat screaming no. A voter guide is a propaganda piece that has ZERO substance. Maybe for the propositions they give a little bit of pros and cons, but for the candidates, they give you nothing. The only way you can discern who is a lying asshole is by following the news. Maybe the conclusion will be they are all lying assholes, but at least you'll be informed of that. I also think that saying I don't follow the news because it does not personally affect me is short-sighted and self-fish. For example, those Christians minorities getting slaughtered by ISIS has nothing to do with me. But hearing their stories and learning about them through the news will certainly teach me a bit of compassion that I will need in some random tangential decisions I make later.

xnull6guest 12y ago
I had originally meant to include an argument about voters' pamphlets - I am glad that I did not as you covered it well. The pamphlet summaries, which issues are used for the face of a campaign and how these issues are carefully written about is all carefully crafted PR and not representative of the interests of the candidate, their constituents and investors or of their track record of fulfilling campaign promises. The information you get from a voter pamphlet is what a candidate wants to appear like and which voters they are trying to appeal to. This can help to understand their publicity campaign but it is not enough (alone) to understand their platform agenda. Similarly, seeing the high coverage of Coptic Christians where coverage of attacks on Muslim minorities (which are much more frequent and equally horrifying) by ISIS and sometimes America, allies or contractors (or of similar atrocities by Mexican drug cartels in the Americas) is missing helps to understand how media and state moral narrative diverges from more universally applied and internally consistent humanitarian compassion - and how and when this and these narratives may align with broad geostrategic policy goals. Insofar as Coptic Christian moral narrative may be used, as an example, as justification for some activity or funding, one will know to look to see if that activity or funding has been a long-standing objective or has been proposed and denied before due to a lack of public support.