(Location/time: early days of Soviet Russia, old and young doctor talking at dinner)
"If you care about your digestion, my advice - do not discuss bolshevism and medicine at dinner. And, god be with you, never read soviet newspapers before dinner."
"But... there are no any other."
"So, don't read any. You know, I performed 30 experiments at my clinic. And you know? Patients, that don't read newspapers, feel great. I forced others to read "Pravda" on purpose, they lost weight."
The official Lenfilm YouTube account has it also, but for some reason only with French subtitles. It looks like less of their catalogue there is English subbed, compared to Mosfilm, which has English subs for basically everything.
https://sovietmoviesonline.com/comedy/87-sobache-serdce.html or https://www.reelhouse.org/vintagefilmclub/the-heart-of-a-dog...
To each according to their need etc.
E.g. they used half of a plane hull with construction foam on top of it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriarch_Ponds
Now years later, I do data analysis to show how media can give us a skewed view of the world — and can be used to manipulate our beliefs:
How Media Fuels our Fear of Western Terrorism https://www.nemil.com/s/part2-terrorism.html
Today’s biggest threat to democracy isn’t fake news—it’s selective facts https://qz.com/1130094/todays-biggest-threat-to-democracy-is...
And write a media literacy guide on Github:
Hack the Media https://github.com/nemild/hack-the-media/blob/master/README....
Definitely true for tribal politics though.
But more importantly, we don't want to be living in a country in a downward, inward decline. Brexit isn't going to solve the problems that disaffected leavers voted for, and I think it's going to get worse - Britain may get even more virulent demagogues. If we have children, we don't want them to grow up in an illiberal society, or be educated in this kind of a system.
Things aren't great elsewhere either, for sure. That's why it's so fascinating.
Great you say, more jobs for the English. But now the businesses have to pay a higher wager and/or increase their costs which are passed down to us. Now we have to pay more, but we aren't getting any extra money and due to austerity it's even worse.
Sure, there have been quite a few unfortunate and well-publicised outlier cases of people situationally caught between bureaucratic cracks, but as someone who lives in London, I assure you that thousands of long-since immigrated grandparents aren't getting booted out to satisfy some arbitrary ‘anti-immigration’ whim.
It's a mess for sure, but I'm not sure it's as you appear to be trying to paint.
Even worse, hackernews gives these organizations favorable treatment and privileges where they can get away with it. Can you imagine what would happen if foxnews spammed HN everyday?
The only saving grace for HN is that HN is so small that it is an afterthought for these spammers. The real problem is in reddit, facebook, twitter or larger social media. That's why those platforms are so toxic. It's overrun with news media employees and spammed content.
4Chan isn't exactly overrun with spammers and it's the same toxic cespool that Reddit is (granted Reddit has better manners and at least pretends to emulate civil conversation). I don't think the news sites spamming their articles is more than a minor contributing factor.
Apparently we're not allowed to say 'that one chick from the alien films' or 'miss/ms' enternamehere without deeply offending some of the population to the point of being yelled at. There are many other examples of this I'm sure, but I don't get out much.
Isn't it also ironic that there's a group of people on a site called hackernews saying not to read the news? This is my only source, and it depresses me to no end. But how else do you keep up in a very quickly evolving world like ours?
I've never heard of "Ms." being an issue, though, since it explicitly doesn't make assumptions about marital status like Miss and Mrs. do. I'd guess that someone didn't actually know what it meant.
In the past I've cut out the news and felt much better fairly quickly. However, it gets to a point where there's something that happens that I should be aware of - like the annual budget speech, or something related to my industry that's hit a headline.
I guess I need a means of separating the 99% outrage-inducing, unactionable mainstay from the 1% of things that I genuinely need to know about.
First, I started by stopping reading daily news; stopping refreshing the headlines every time I had a few minutes; stopping getting alerts; avoiding 'news 24/7' channels like the plague.
Then I stopped reading weekly news - what was the point? Whilst it's less of a burden that daily/hourly/minutely news, it's still unactionable for me - it has no utility, as you say.
But then it's been months and things have happened that I should know about, and the only option I have is to go back to getting alerts and 'triaging' my interest in them - except that this means that I have to process each headline again, and I'm basically back where I started.
Newspapers with a certain quality, a long-term perspective and in printed form is fine though if limited to weekends.
I remember when I first consciously decided to stop reading mainstream news. I was in high school then; I had my Firefox configured to put RSS feed from national newspapers as a drawer of bookmarks under the address bar (oh, the days you could do that in a browser...). Took me a while to realize the reason why I feel so sick in my stomach on mornings and evenings was that just looking at the headlines disturbed and depressed me. I unsubscribed from the feeds, killed the bookmark drawers, and after a short period of FOMO, I started to feel better.
The "Newspapers with a certain quality, a long-term perspective and in printed form" are few and far between. If you can find those, by all means, stick to them.
For long term money planning, where to put your money, which areas of the world have problems, the news are important. You can skip your local gossip, but knowing what happens in the world is important for long term planning.
Not daily news.
I largely agree with the statement, but as naive it might sound I still consider being aware and forming an opinion of what is happening in the world and my country as a civic duty, as unpleasant as it is.
Most people can safely give up reading and watching the news and still be aware and informed through their normal daily interactions and lives of the world around them.
we don't have to go very far back in our history until we find that all the information that reached us was relevant to us and therefore anything that happened, any news, whether it was about something that's actually happened to us, in the next house, or in the next village, within the boundary or within our horizon, it happened in our world and if we reacted to it the world reacted back. It was all relevant to us, so for example, if somebody had a terrible accident we could crowd round and really help. Nowadays, because of the plethora of one-to-many communication we have, if a plane crashes in India we may get terribly anxious about it but our anxiety doesn't have any impact. We're not very well able to distinguish between a terrible emergency that's happened to somebody a world away and something that's happened to someone round the corner. We can't really distinguish between them any more, which is why we get terribly upset by something that has happened to somebody in a soap opera that comes out of Hollywood and maybe less concerned when it's happened to our sister. We've all become twisted and disconnected and it's not surprising that we feel very stressed and alienated in the world because the world impacts on us but we don't impact the world.
From the most brilliant stream of consciousness I have ever read: http://www.biota.org/people/douglasadams
Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at; as railroads lead to Boston or New York. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate. Either is in such a predicament as the man who was earnest to be introduced to a distinguished deaf woman, but when he was presented, and one end of her ear trumpet was put into his hand, had nothing to say. As if the main object were to talk fast and not to talk sensibly. We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the Old World some weeks nearer to the New; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough. After all, the man whose horse trots a mile in a minute does not carry the most important messages; he is not an evangelist, nor does he come round eating locusts and wild honey. I doubt if Flying Childers ever carried a peck of corn to mill.
If only...
Although even if you accept that claim, you could argue that being aware of the world made you a better person even if it makes you unhappy - a sort of Socratic argument that "escaping the cave" is inherently good. In that case you'd have to justify (only to yourself, of course) that "news" is the right kind of knowledge to accomplish Goodness.
With that said, I highly recommend reading Master and Margarita as it is my favorite novel. It is a work however that is deeply rooted in its time and place, so looking at annotations[1] that explain the subtlety is very useful.
This comment was based on my previous two comments here[2][3].
[1] http://www.masterandmargarita.eu/en/
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14282358
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14870327