Yeah but you’re a citizen, you exist in a society, in a wider world, and part of that is having a duty of being informed. Avoiding the news makes you vulnerable to disinformation and propaganda. It’s also extremely privileged to be able to treat “the news” as something optional; those are people’s lives, and yeah, maybe we can’t solve it, but we have duty to bear witness and remember.
I’m sorry, but being informed is part of being a grown up.
huh? Listen, being informed is good, I try to be, but there’s a difference between “I am aware of things around me” and “I am exposing myself to terrible things all time because I have to”. Suffering isn’t noble, and if we want to make a kind world, the first place we have to start with is ourselves. Feeling like shit is not activism, it is not your noble duty, and I can guarantee feeling terrible actively hinders any real work you’re trying to do.
This is a bad and dangerous take, imo.
Do you know what’s a really strong tool for authoritarian regimes enacting genocide? Apathy.
Apathy is one of the things that reinforces the legitimacy of the United States. That crushing feeling that there is simply no alternative to the colonialist and genocidal government of the United States. I struggle from this too. But actively trying to be aware of the atrocities and genocides the US has done/is doing and using that information to organize or help others is extremely important. If it weren’t for years of activists during the American invasion of Vietnam advocating against the invasion of Vietnam, then I feel like the US would have stayed much longer in Vietnam.
Unfortunately there are way too much atrocities to list all of them, but apathy benefits many genocidal regimes, not just the US. Such as Russia, which is currently genociding Syrians and Ukrainians. And Israel, which is currently genociding Palestinians. As well as the Myanmar junta burning towns to the ground. When people refuse to spread their stance against said regimes, it can have a large snowball effect and massively benefit said regimes.
All of those potential people who could be helping out to combat disinformation from said genocidal governments would instead be unaware or actively choosing to ignore, which as I said, benefits those regimes. Pro-Kremlin accounts will often post messages in order to try to push people away from being as supportive of Ukrainians resisting Russian imperialism as possible, like trying to distract Americans with “"their crumbling infrastructure”“” (which yes it is quite bad, but it has nothing to do with the Russian invasion of Ukraine). Though I am aware some atrocities get more coverage than others, and I think people should be talking about the ones that don’t get coverage way more as well.
Being informed about what is going on in the world and talking about it with others helps. You may just be one person, but when many people have this mindset, it really can help.
If you’ve had classes related to maps or have the internet (and you don’t have any learning disabilities), you should be able to point to most Middle Eastern countries on a map. You should be aware that the US has done multiple genocides, such as those in Vietnam and Iraq. And use that information to fight reactionaries.
And this feeling of “being terrible” doesn’t hinder your activism, if anything, it should make you more angry at the government and push you. If it becomes bad for your mental health, than taking a break is fine of course. But choosing to be ignorant of everything for the sake of “being comfortable” is an extremely dangerous tool that benefits authoritarian regimes.
uh
This isn’t about being apathetic. This is about “wow that’s a lot of information that makes me feel horrible it’s my honorable duty to continue exposing myself to it for some reason” being a dangerous way to live. I’m a trans woman in the US, I am well informed on how much trouble I am potentially in at all times, but I do not actively go out of my way to consume all news stories related to the situation because 1. I can only do so much and 2. If I spiral and try to hold onto the grief of hundreds of thousands of people with no clear idea what to do with it I’m just gonna feel like shit and that’s not good or noble, that’s just self harm. It’s good to be informed, but you should also acknowledge that humans are not meant to process this much global information and eventually knowing about every single terrible fucking thing in the world is going to do you WAY more harm than good. Not everyone is cut out to be an activist even, that shit is hard fucking work! You are not a bad person for knowing your own limits and stepping away from reading about horrible suffering and pain; that is self preservation, and something we all have to do if we want to continue making the world better in the first place. Deliberately harming yourself is not activism, we are not fucking Catholic here.
You want to know a quick shortcut to being apathetic about what’s going on in the world?
Overexposing yourself to shit that makes you feel miserable and hopeless.
Also, it’s not really useful to make yourself feel like shit about things you have no control over.
Take the above example is the war in Ukraine. Yep, there’s a war. It’s bad! Lot of people are getting hurt and killed.
And I, as an individual person, living well below the poverty line and on the other side of the world, can do fuck-all about it.
It’s scary and dangerous for trans people in a lot of places right now, and it doesn’t really help anyone for me to memorize the details of how each specific state is being awful, or read a bunch of articles on whatever new garbage law has come out of Florida NOW.
I can’t currently physically stand for long enough to cook a meal or take a shower unassisted! There’s not a whole lot I can do about Russia. Or colonialism. Or genocide. “Spreading my stance” on it isn’t going to do an awful lot, because if you’re a government orchestrating a genocide, you PROBABLY don’t care that a random disabled woman and her friends don’t like you.
I don’t actually need to know all of the specific details of the atrocities going on to know I think they’re bad and I would like them not to be happening.
I vote. I write to congresspeople when it’s relevant. If someone in my immediate vicinity says something shitty or spreads misinformation, I talk to them about it. But it’s doesn’t really help anybody, or do anything really useful for anyone if I just fill up my head and my heart with all of the pain in the world.
If you have more money or resources or physical ability or power, maybe you have more tangible, useful things you can do, but making yourself feel like shit is not activism, and no one person can do all of it.
I think you need to ask yourself if your “staying informed” is actually giving you anything actionable you can do, because if it doesn’t and it’s just making you despair, then it’s just self-harm.
Also if you’re wearing yourself down that way, you might miss it - or not have the energy - when there is something actually tangibly useful you could do.
Yeah. They did that. I bet the ‘clarification’ came as a result of some strong legal threats.
So be aware in the coming weeks that if your favorite actor reportedly says something shitty about the strike that makes your blood boil? Check the sources. There’s going to be a lot of uh, spin in the news.
CGI animators should unionize next. normally, their jobs would be too precarious to strike, since studios would replace them without a second thought, but if it’s part of this larger general film strike, they might finally have meaningful power to better their working conditions
if CGI animators unionized, it would kill the MCU. straight up. the the entire business model is built on exploiting CGI animators
THEY ARE TRYING!!!!! SIGN THE PETITION TO GET THE DISNEY ANIMATORS’ UNION RECOGNIZED
this petition is from IATSE (union), btw! it actually has credibility, unlike most change.org/etc petitions! please sign it!!
you finally confess your attraction to the hot priest and he’s like “oh darling, I thought you’d never ask” and proceeds to bite your neck and turn you into another catholic priest
I see posts go by periodically about how modern audiences are impatient or unwilling to trust the creator. And I agree that that’s true. What the posts almost never mention, though, is that this didn’t happen in a vacuum. Audiences have had their patience and trust beaten out of them by the popular media of the past few decades.
J J Abrams is famous for making stories that raise questions he never figures out how to answer. He’s also the guy with some weird story about a present he never opened and how that’s better than presents you open–failing to see that there’s a difference between choosing not to open a present and being forbidden from opening one.
You’ve got lengthy media franchises where installments undo character development or satisfying resolutions from previous installments. Worse, there are media franchises with “trilogies” that are weird slap fights between the makers of each installment.
You’ve got wildly popular TV shows that end so poorly and unsatisfyingly that no one speaks of them again.
On top of that, a lot of the media actively punishes people for engaging thoughtfully with it. Creators panic and change their stories if the audience properly reacts to foreshadowing. Emotional parts of storytelling are trampled by jokes. Shocking the audience has become the go to, rather than providing a solid story.
Of course audiences have gotten cynical and untrusting! Of course they’re unwilling to form their own expectations of what’s coming! Of course they make the worst assumptions based on what’s in front of them! The media they’ve been consuming has trained them well.
insane how many people just have these incredible artists in their families who get no recognition outside of crocheting circles because this art form is devalued for its association with women
in my country, the word for crocheting, is used metaphorically, to compliment a surgeon’s work.
every AFAB person my mother’s age and older, had practiced this craft at one point on another.
My mom has made literal paintings, that decorate our house for years (I’ll come back with pictures when I visit next) you can only see that they are crocheting when you go very close.
as promised here’s my mom’s crocheting “paintings”
There is another one but it had been stored many years ago, (i remember it from my childhood) and sadly it is probably damaged by mold, it depicted wild horsed running in nature
This doesn’t include the best bit of the whole thing - she found the Twitter thread!
This is like one of those romance novels where people bond over accidentally writing each other emails but better.
Like Pride and Prejudice but instead of the love interest getting dissed for his toxicity and then reforming, it’s just two people bonding over dissing a dead toxic asshole.
![Chewbacca: [translated from Wookie] my name is chewbacca i'm a 200 year old war hero from Kashyyk](https://64.media.tumblr.com/c5510289dde40c1e0ad5d33aa7728627/44c2e94f6770a172-48/s500x750/7412307dfcaf87d994bc8348038cbda5844eb819.png)
