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Joined 2 months ago
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Cake day: November 7th, 2024

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  • I don’t quite get what caused your radicalization - was it the media corporations that own the vast majority of the journals/newspapers (like Murdoch press or Gannett that you have mentioned)? Is it being worked like a mule for 8 hours? Is it both?

    Nevertheless, it was a nice read, and I fully agree with your remark at the end that you can’t really change this kind of system from within, as the power is concentrated with people who benefit from it being worse and worse for everyone except the few.

    Much like yourself, I was raised under the impression that we live in a marketplace of ideas, that there is no objective truth and the greatest ideas will naturally come to the top and be adopted, it’s why things are the way they are now. I was drinking it in, I had hope that various institutions had our best interests in mind and whoever opposed them was just some misunderstanding conspiracy nut. But, as I got older I grew more disillusioned with this notion, seeing and experiencing inequalities built into the system, how it’s not good ideas that dictate how we live but capital/money and how this kind of system is constantly reinforcing itself through media/who money goes to/who gets to be elected and so on.

    That being said, is there a way out of this I wonder? What we need is nothing short of a leftist revolution, but the left is and has been in perpetual defeat since 1991, and the center and far-right cannot be relied upon as they dance to the whims of our feudal overlords. And even if there is some light at the tunnel, it might just turn out to be another incoming train.



  • Don’t fall into doomerism - news companies are companies, and negativity gets people on their platforms for much longer than positivity, it’s easy to get addicted to it. Set time limits or limit the amount of news you consume per day/per week.

    Recognize that caring about something requires mental energy - if you had 1 friend who asks you to care about their hobby or learn a bit more, then you might agree, but if you have 20 friends with different hobbies asking the same thing, then there’s no way you can care about all of them. Similar thing applies to the news, recognize that you can’t care about everything and try learning how to stay informed without giving up lots of mental energy stressing about things you can’t really influence.

    It’s admirable wanting to keep up with the news, but it also can be a bit of a trap and does require a degree of skill to not fall into what you describe in your post.




  • Corruption pretty much. The director of the school would constantly pocket a lot of the public funds sent to school and then offload the cost of whatever that money was supposed to go to onto students.

    One of my favorite examples of this is this tradition where last year students before graduating are supposed to leave something to the school, and our class was asked to buy new tables, with other classes having to do something stupid like that as well.

    I still see the school in the news from time to time being involved in some new corruption scandal lol