The nice part of looking at non-US news sources like BBC or Japan News is that they sometimes cover stuff that US news sources ignore. For example, there was very little in any US news sites about the recent major flooding in Spain, which should have been a big story around the world.
The Daily Mail in the UK is kind of a rag (in the UK they call it the “Daily Fail”), it is definitely a tabloid with a slant/sensationalized. Yet they often have coverage of the US that other sources are slow to get, and they often have breaking coverage before anyone does and they are a global look (also great to find out the latest thing in Australia that can kill you lol)
My husband is into watching CNBC every morning, and most of the ads are for companies like Hims (with young looking actors) with a sprinkle of pharmaceutical ads. He hates these ads with a passion and always mutes the Otezla ones! ![]()
We’re not young…ahem…but we watch DW News from Berlin. International news. Very…sobering. The whole world is in an uproar of some kind it seems.
In many rich countries, economic inequality is increasing while economic opportunity and mobility are decreasing. Left leaning parties tend to be unable to stop this trend (their policies may slow it a little at most), while right leaning parties tend to accelerate it. So no surprise that discontent increases as more people feel that they or their kids are more likely to be downward mobile than upward mobile.
I think there is a lot to it and with the internet and social media it all has been amped up. Old orders have kind of fallen, old assumptions about things have died, even in basic things like where you work and how you even get hired, things once assumed like home ownership have become a lot more difficult. Change is accelerating as well, what the internet has wrought might pale in terms of what things like AI are going to do. People feel like no one cares about them, and it is easy to understand why, so much seems to be cold forces beyond their control.
Obviously the world has always been in turmoil, at any given time there were always threats and conflicts and horrors, but today they seem always in front of you, hitting you full on. A lot of people are saying that elections these days literally feel like life or death, that they never felt that not all that long ago, that the stakes feel higher (and I will note, this is across the board, people on various sides of things). One of the problems is that media, online vlogger/bloggers, and people supposed to lead manipulate these fears to their benefit. That always went on of course, but in this day and age of social media and the net, it has become even more effective a tool.
Me, I have decided to seperate myself from it as much as possible and create what little bubble of calm I can create and I am very careful about how much I expose myself to.
Another factor is that when the economy is seen as a zero or negative sum game for most people, the societal environment becomes more competitive and cutthroat, since people feel that they have to push someone else down to avoid downward mobility themselves, rather than look for win-win solutions. Such an environment makes it easier for influencers to brew up resentment and hostility against the outgroup of the day, since those not in the outgroup of the day may feel that keeping the outgroup out of economic competition helps themselves.
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