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Avoiding outrage fatigue while staying informed

(www.scientificamerican.com)
757 points headalgorithm | 4 comments | 05 Feb 25 14:55 UTC | HN request time: 0.039s | source
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majgr ◴[06 Feb 25 07:03 UTC] No.42959854[source]▶
Living in Poland ruled by trumpists for 8 years I have these experiences:

- Get subscription of high value newspaper or magazine. Professionals work there, so you will get real facts, worthy opinions and less emotions.

- It is better to not use social media. You never know if you are discussing with normal person, a political party troll, or Russian troll.

- It is not worth discussing with „switched-on” people. They are getting high doses of emotional content, they are made to feel like victims, facts does not matter at all. Political beliefs are intermingled with religious beliefs.

- emotional content is being treated with higher priority by brain, so it is better to stay away from it, or it will ruin your evening.

- people are getting addicted to emotions and victimization, so after public broadcaster has been freed from it, around 5% people switched to private tv station to get their daily doses.

- social media feels like a new kind of virus, we all need to get sick and develop some immunity to it.

- in the end, there are more reasonable people, but democracies needs to develop better constitutional/law systems, with very short feedback loop. It is very important to have fast reaction on breaking the law by ruling regime.

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koolba ◴[06 Feb 25 13:36 UTC] No.42962143[source]▶
> in the end, there are more reasonable people, but democracies needs to develop better constitutional/law systems, with very short feedback loop. It is very important to have fast reaction on breaking the law by ruling regime.

What’s wrong with the separation of powers in the USA? There’s plenty of situations where judges issue injunctions that are in effect until the case is resolved.

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1. pjc50 ◴[06 Feb 25 13:54 UTC] No.42962303[source]▶
> What’s wrong with the separation of powers in the USA?

Once the same party controls the Senate, House, Presidency and Supreme Court, the powers are no longer meaningfully separate. Which is now the case.

(state powers are still separate; I'm guessing we'll see action from state AGs against sudden Federal actions which have disadvantaged their state)

Also, as Musk has figured out, the simple power of fait accompli. If you don't comply with a court order, someone has to make you. All of whom are Federal employees. Who are on the OPM payroll. Which he controls.

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2. koolba ◴[06 Feb 25 15:49 UTC] No.42963515[source]▶
> Once the same party controls the Senate, House, Presidency and Supreme Court, the powers are no longer meaningfully separate. Which is now the case.

Three out of four of those are the direct will of the voters. And the fourth is the indirect will of the voters as expressed by their President.

I think insisting that they always be at odds with each other is unrealistic and goes against the fundamental idea that people have a right to form a government that represents them.

It's like insisting that someone who is appointed to run a given department (e.g., Education, Interior, or EPA), is required to promote more spending or expansion of that department. There's no requirement like that and the decision to pare things back and limit the scope of a department again falls in line with the will of the voters. There's no rule that government is only allowed to grow bigger.

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3. pjc50 ◴[06 Feb 25 16:10 UTC] No.42963755[source]▶
> I think insisting that they always be at odds with each other is unrealistic and goes against the fundamental idea that people have a right to form a government that represents them.

Sure, but then there's no longer meaningful separation of powers and you've converged on a UK-like system where a majority, no matter how narrow, conveys all the power - but with a politicised court (UK SC is still generally agreed to be nonpolitical).

It's a really serious problem for the US that lots of very important rights like, say, interracial marriage in Loving v Virginia, came about as court cases despite and often against the will of the voters.

4. mostin ◴[06 Feb 25 17:27 UTC] No.42964493[source]▶
Will of the voters doesn't mean it's not a dictatorship. Plenty of dictators were popular and democratically elected.