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News Fear Of Another 9/11

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Avoid the news completely. The BBC and the newspapers are just as bad as any other source. Avoid talk shows, current affairs, news bulletins etc for at least a couple of months. If you can avoid TV all together, for a couple of months, so much the better.

If you watch a seventy second clip from the 2006 fictional film, V for Vendetta, it will give you a good indication of what the news is doing and why (search youtube for "00V for Vendetta-why they need us.avi" ).

The news is intended to adrenalize and to gas light.

As HL Mencken, put it, about 95 years ago:

"The aim of practical politics is to keep the population in a constant state of alarm, and hence clamorous to be lead to safety. This is achieved by an endless string of hobgoblins. Most of them imagined."

Your practical politicians are just being particularly needy and attention seeking at the present time.
 
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As HL Mencken, put it, about 95 years ago:

"The aim of practical politics is to keep the population in a constant state of alarm, and hence clamorous to be lead to safety. This is achieved by an endless string of hobgoblins. Most of them imagined."

And there you have it. thats a great quote, Mencken has regained my humble appreciation of his ability to cut the crap.

I think todays politician has to also be a master of the ability to keep the polarized voters polarized, difficult at best when the strongest polarizing issues often overlap and juxtapose. For example, I personally would like to be lead to safety in a way that doesn't mean the government gets to look at my facebook account or read my e mails looking for Menckens hobgoblins.

I read the paper and listen to NPR and watch the local news and get scared to bejeezus but I guess I just do it all like I would go and watch a movie, the skill to acquire is knowing when to suspend disbelief and when to go get popcorn.
 
I avoid TV altogether. Any shows I watch are on Hulu.com. I watch them when I want to, when I'm ready. I do check CNN, BBC, NPR, NY Times websites daily, but I choose which links to follow up on. I avoid the middle east ones usually. I avoid a lot of links on the "news" sites actually. The whole business of "news", now days isn't really about presenting the news. It's about getting people addicted to coming to their websites generating cash. The articles are hyped up with key words and phrases that have been researched to bring people back, not to inform them of world events. I could go on and on, but will stop here.

I tend to go to science, environmental, tech gadget, tech, sustained living, web sites. Sites I can learn from.

Decide what is truly important to you, and chose to go to those websites. Invest your energy in finding peace within yourself.
 
Hi Enough,
Love the Zappa reference in your avatar.

In terms of the "lead to safety" part. I use a dog to frighten sheep. They run away from the dog in the hope of finding safety, and instead find themselves in a raceway that they can't back out of, and looking at a bunch of Kiwi sheep shearers.

I don't think that the principal is any different with politics. The divide and rule issues are as banal as Coke vs Pepsi or Chevy vs Ford:

"Pepsi drinkers, vote for me. I'll stop those vicious Coke drinkers from stealing your stuff, and I'll give you free Pepsi (out of the small change when I've finished fleecing you all)".

There's a quote from Saint Augustine's "Kingdom of G-d" (book 4: chapter 4) written in the early fifth century:

"Justice being taken away, then, what are kingdoms but great robberies? For what are robberies themselves, but little kingdoms? The band itself is made up of men; it is ruled by the authority of a prince, it is knit together by the pact of the confederacy; the booty is divided by the law agreed on. If, by the admittance of abandoned men, this evil increases to such a degree that it holds places, fixes abodes, takes possession of cities, and subdues peoples, it assumes the more plainly the name of a kingdom, because the reality is now manifestly conferred on it, not by the removal of covetousness, but by the addition of impunity. Indeed, that was an apt and true reply which was given to Alexander the Great by a pirate who had been seized. For when that king had asked the man what he meant by keeping hostile possession of the sea, he answered with bold pride, “What thou meanest by seizing the whole earth; but because I do it with a petty ship, I am called a robber, whilst thou who dost it with a great fleet art styled emperor.”
 
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Personally, all this worry of another 9/11 (in general, not just this post) annoys the heck out of me. Why? Because in most countries those of us here are from, things like 9/11 are a drop in the bucket compared to what has happened in other countries.

Yes, bad things happen. Yes, bad people exist. But on the whole, just like the number of good things on Earth outweighs the bad, the number of good people outnumbers the bad.

And, if you let terrorism take over your sense of safety, the terrorists have already won.

So if the news is scaring you, stay away from it. There's a reason why the phrase "if it bleeds it leads" exists; bad news sells more papers than good.
 
I don't watch the news either. So what if people think I'm an uninformed idiot? I really don't care! The world could be crashing down around me, and I would be oblivious to it all unless someone actually told me face to face or over the phone. Yes, I've had my moments when I look like a complete idiot for not knowing about something that has been plastered on the news for weeks, but again, I don't care....and oftentimes end up saying "well you know I don't watch the news!". Anyone I say this to knows I can't handle it and they understand.

And the rest of my non-PTSD family? Well they don't like the news either as its so depressing. They even stopped watching Jon Stewart as all of his mocking clips of other news stations were maddening in that they still saw the ridiculous things that news stations were reporting (although we all still love Jon, lol).

I figure if its important, I'll find out about it one way or another. Otherwise, I rather live in uninformed bliss (...bliss being relative, of course!) 99.9% of the time there is nothing I can do to affect these events, and since knowing about all these events brings me down, its an unnecessary part of my life. And if I ever get caught at a cocktail party with nothing to say on a certain newsworthy subject, I will quickly dismiss myself from the conversation with a witty remark!
 
All of this violence has been going on in these countries for centuries... the only difference today as to why suddenly people have fear about this, is because of the Internet and this 24/7 connectivity we have gotten in the last decade. A lot of this stuff doesn't make your local paper, yet it makes news through the www, twitter, Facebook, it trends, and thus your nightly news and current affairs shows spotlight, because people want to see all the hate going on in the world. Nothing has actually changed, and all this hate was there before the web.

Like people said above... if it affects you negatively, then switch off and stop watching / reading such things. Terrorists use this 24/7 connectivity that is available to them to reach millions beyond what they ever could before without the web. They're still doing the same things as centuries past, they're just now doing them on YouTube or such and people watch, then spread the content. Why? Because humans seem to have this innate passion to view all the bad shit that goes on in the world, and the media give the people what appeals to them. This is why we don't see a nightly news of warm and fluffy things happening in our communities, because people don't care about the good as much as they do the bad.

Go figure... humanity is its own worst enemy.
 
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