Issue Apathy

[SS-18 ICBM]

I have to say, I am really sick of hearing about ISIS and Ukraine. I mouse over headlines concerning them with eyes rolled upwards and lip curled in disgust.

My question is simple: am I shirking some important duty by neglecting to keep myself informed on the latest events on these issues?

 

[Borachio]

I'm really quite interested in ISIS. They seem to be genuinely radical.

Ukraine is just a part of the former Soviet Union falling apart. So, yeah, a bit boring. Apart from the people dying there. Which is of course deplorable.

 

[Timsup2nothin]

No, because there are no "latest events". There is just ongoing gnashing of teeth about the same old events. There may be an occasional replay of a previous event, but that doesn't constitute anything really new that you desperately need to be aware of.

 

[Oruc]

I have to say, I am really sick of hearing about ISIS and Ukraine. I mouse over headlines concerning them with eyes rolled upwards and lip curled in disgust.

My question is simple: am I shirking some important duty by neglecting to keep myself informed on the latest events on these issues?

No of course not, you have no way of influencing these events even if you were obsessed with them. Certainly not by watching the news then arguing about it, you would have to volunteer to fight.

 

[Gori the Grey]

I use the "think globally, act locally" slogan to combat "issue fatigue."

When I can't bear to hear any more about the many sufferings and horrors all over our globe, I look for someone in my immediate environment that I can do something nice for.

Because it does seem an ethical responsibility to be aware of these things, but it can easily lead to just being dispirited, and that is hardly going to do anybody any good.

 

[Terxpahseyton]

My question is simple: am I shirking some important duty by neglecting to keep myself informed on the latest events on these issues?

That sounds comically naive. The media surely did a number on you.
Look, the most simplest truth is that there is nothing but what you feel. And if you struggle with your feelings, explore them. Find out what they are about.
In this case - why do you feel bad for not caring about ISIS? I hardly think you are the second coming of Christ feeling bad about all misdeeds of human beings. So why feel bad about that?
My uneducated guess: Because the media / public culture told you to. Now as any human being, you are concerned with the opinion of your peers, but realize that public culture is an incredibly disingenuous variant of peer opinion. Would you care about disingenuous opinions of your immediate tangible peers in their own right? Probably not.
This is cynical, I know. But that is the world we live in - welcome to it. You still can fend off cynicism in your private tangible affairs. Or you can in global affairs. But that is exceedingly hard and exceedingly many do not make it. Because they got the whole world against them and not even in a movie villain way, but in an quit uninterested way, which is a lot worse in social terms.
Or I suppose you can just kid yourself about that stuff. But then don't ask for my opinion.

 

[Domen]

I have to say, I am really sick of hearing about ISIS and Ukraine.

Oh yeah - Muslims, Muscovites, and Cossacks. Nothing has changed since the 17th century!

Time to bring back Pax Polonica.

 

[Terxpahseyton]

Well, I am sure the maps have!

 

[Domen]

Well, maybe maps - granted.

And the Crimean Khanate. But now Putin is the new Khan (Tsar and Khan in one person).

 

[Commodore]

I have to say, I am really sick of hearing about ISIS and Ukraine. I mouse over headlines concerning them with eyes rolled upwards and lip curled in disgust.

My question is simple: am I shirking some important duty by neglecting to keep myself informed on the latest events on these issues?

I get what you're saying and I feel the same way. Sure I argue about a lot of the issues in the world today, but that doesn't mean I necessarily care about them. For me though, my apathy extends far beyond just ISIS and Ukraine to just about any issue that does not have a demonstrable direct effect on the well-being of either myself or my family ("my family" being defined as those I am personally responsible for, which is my wife and daughter). Some may say this is a very short-sighted and selfish way to look at the world, but so much stress has disappeared from my life ever since I stopped caring.

 

[Traitorfish]

I have to say, I am really sick of hearing about ISIS and Ukraine. I mouse over headlines concerning them with eyes rolled upwards and lip curled in disgust.

My question is simple: am I shirking some important duty by neglecting to keep myself informed on the latest events on these issues?

I don't think so. A hundred, fifty, even twenty years ago, people would mostly have been exposed to these things on a weekly basis, if that. Unless the war was happening on your doorstep, they only intruded into the daily news with any volume if something particularly important happened- if some prominent figure was killed, some major city taken, some crucial resolution passed. Now we're exposed to extensive coverage on a daily basis, made all the more exhausting by the media's attempts to combine warsploitation clickbait with allegedly-expert analysis. How is a person supposed to process all that?

Besides, I think we should be critical about what capital-I Issues we're exposed to. We hear so much about scary anti-Western insurgents in Ukraine and Syria, but relatively little about, for example, strikes in India and China. Is that simply because what's happening in Ukraine and Syria is more dramatic? Perhaps to some extent, but I think there is an agenda at play, not any sort of conspiracy, but a certain understand of what Western public "needs" to know about the rest of the world. It is "important" that we know that Russians and Muslims are angry and militant, but it is not so important that we know that workers in China and India are angry and militant, and I don't think it's a purely aesthetic decision.

 

[El_Machinae]

My question is simple: am I shirking some important duty by neglecting to keep myself informed on the latest events on these issues?

No, you're not shirking unless you're shirking. If you've got an important issue in your crosshairs, then you should be attacking that issue. Sure, sometimes it's important to pull your head up and look around and see if you're using your time, training, consumer choice, and intelligence efficiently. But that's not the same thing as what you're asking.

It's slacktivism and selfish hedonism that will cause the world to go to pot. People who're putting efforts where their productivity is high end up making a better world.

 

[Domen]

At least Tibetans are not angry and militant. So everyone forgot about them.

 

[Sommerswerd]

Im tired of ISIS too... The pundits and scholars and commentators just go round and round and round saying the same things over and over... just like we do here But at least here I get to participate in the discussion...

"ISIS is beheading people and commiting all kinds of atrocities! We need to stop them!"

"Let's escalate our military efforts against them!"

"Its not working! What else can we do?"

"Well they rose as a reponse to US/Western invasion so maybe if we pull out they will go away."

"We can't pull out! ISIS is beheading people and commiting all kinds of atrocities! We need to stop them!"

Round and round we go

 

[SS-18 ICBM]

Look, the most simplest truth is that there is nothing but what you feel. And if you struggle with your feelings, explore them. Find out what they are about.
In this case - why do you feel bad for not caring about ISIS? I hardly think you are the second coming of Christ feeling bad about all misdeeds of human beings. So why feel bad about that?

I guess it would be how I speak about wanting to know everything, but then I find that some things I don't want to know about (yet). I don't know if I added that last word because I mean it. It's really distressing to find a massive disconnect between what you think you want and what you want in practice.

Besides, I think we should be critical about what capital-I Issues we're exposed to. We hear so much about scary anti-Western insurgents in Ukraine and Syria, but relatively little about, for example, strikes in India and China.

I guess I'm happy when I see stories like that. Maybe I just thrive on novelty?

Im tired of ISIS too... The pundits and scholars and commentators just go round and round and round saying the same things over and over... just like we do here But at least here I get to participate in the discussion...

"ISIS is beheading people and commiting all kinds of atrocities! We need to stop them!"

"Let's escalate our military efforts against them!"

"Its not working! What else can we do?"

"Well they rose as a reponse to US/Western invasion so maybe if we pull out they will go away."

"We can't pull out! ISIS is beheading people and commiting all kinds of atrocities! We need to stop them!"

Round and round we go

Yeah, that sounds about right.

 

[Traitorfish]

I guess I'm happy when I see stories like that. Maybe I just thrive on novelty?

I think there is something genuinely a bit different about stories like that. Without meaning to romanticise them, they carry at least some sort of optimism, if only insofar as suggesting that people can exercise some control their own destiny. Even if a strike fails, it happened, ordinary people made a decision and acted upon it. But with the stories coming out of Ukraine and Syria, it just seems to be a lot of horrible things happening for no good reason because a few lunatics decided they should, and nobody seems able to do anything about it.

 

[LamaGT]

A good majority of people are like that. Obviously Ukraine or ISIS affects you very little if at all, so you don't really have a good reason to argue about it.

I think this culture of "being informed" is really counter-productive for society. Most people don't actually give a sh*t about all these international events, so they inform themselves sloppily and superficially, which leads to their opinions being manufactured by whoever presents them the events.
There's also this interesting effect where people who know something, but not much, are the most eager to talk about it, because they don't realize that they know nothing (Jon Snow).

So yeah, if you inform yourself with just a general read of "what's new", be aware that it might be quite far from the truth.

 

[Cutlass]

I don't think so. A hundred, fifty, even twenty years ago, people would mostly have been exposed to these things on a weekly basis, if that. Unless the war was happening on your doorstep, they only intruded into the daily news with any volume if something particularly important happened- if some prominent figure was killed, some major city taken, some crucial resolution passed. Now we're exposed to extensive coverage on a daily basis, made all the more exhausting by the media's attempts to combine warsploitation clickbait with allegedly-expert analysis. How is a person supposed to process all that?

Besides, I think we should be critical about what capital-I Issues we're exposed to. We hear so much about scary anti-Western insurgents in Ukraine and Syria, but relatively little about, for example, strikes in India and China. Is that simply because what's happening in Ukraine and Syria is more dramatic? Perhaps to some extent, but I think there is an agenda at play, not any sort of conspiracy, but a certain understand of what Western public "needs" to know about the rest of the world. It is "important" that we know that Russians and Muslims are angry and militant, but it is not so important that we know that workers in China and India are angry and militant, and I don't think it's a purely aesthetic decision.

I don't think that anyone is making a decision that the Western (or American) audience 'needs' to know more about Ukraine and ISIS than they do about labor issues in massive nations. But rather that the majority of Western news media is lazy, cheap, and sensationalist. And, btw, corporate owned. Wars are flashy. Anti-Western rhetoric is sensationalist. Labor unrest is pedestrian. I really don't think you need to read any more into it than that.

 

[Traitorfish]

American media, maybe. But the BBC et al. are not so very terrible that I don't think their selectiveness demands more explanation. I don't think that somebody is consciously weighing up one story or against the other, but I think there are certain narratives being developed, about the world and the place of the West within it, and that stories which sustain those narratives are emphasised and stories which do not fit neatly into those narratives or even disrupt those narratives are given much less emphasis. The significance of Russian or Islamic militants is easily grasped in light of these narratives; it's much more difficult to grasp, say, a strike in Shanghai. I don't subscribe to the sort of hard elite theory where the media works as a MiniTruth-by-consensus, but I think it is generally engaged in the representation of a basically elite perspective- often quite sincerely, which perhaps makes the whole thing more terrible- and that what is and is not reported reflects that.

 

[Narz]

I have to say, I am really sick of hearing about ISIS and Ukraine. I mouse over headlines concerning them with eyes rolled upwards and lip curled in disgust.

My question is simple: am I shirking some important duty by neglecting to keep myself informed on the latest events on these issues?

What duty? There's nothing you personally can do about these issues. It's a time sink, under the guise of 'educating onself', not much better than obsessively following sports scores. Don't worry about it.