Yes, the Turkish election result is pretty heartbreaking as someone who works on the region. I don't really understand Turkish politics well enough to know how central Erdogan is to the AKP's success, but it's very hard to see how the opposition win this election (and there seems to be an AKP parliamentary majority anyway).Even in democracies, parties tend to crash at the next election when a leader resigns after more then ten years in power. So I would expect that when Erdogan dies, loses an election so badly he can't cheat, or retires, the AKP in Turkey will have a crisis. Five or ten more years of Erdogan would be bad.
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It gets quite amusing reading about the same issue through the lens of both the Guardian and the Daily Mail (or even more extreme, Morning Star and Daily Express).
I wouldn't recommend this approach for the faint of heart, however. Maybe take up meditation before attempting :D
I mainly rely on Google News and make sure I'm reading articles on any issue from a cross-section of the political spectrum.I think that could have been a good strategy for local news in the 20th century where the main issue was not agreeing about facts but how to interpret them and which to mention. But it can't deal with a lack of facts in the first place. If none of the news organizations in a country have resources to keep one monolingual person in a national capital talking to rich English / French speakers in the lobby of their hotel (the bad old system), but just reprint press releases and social media posts, what can you get?
It gets quite amusing reading about the same issue through the lens of both the Guardian and the Daily Mail (or even more extreme, Morning Star and Daily Express).
I wouldn't recommend this approach for the faint of heart, however. Maybe take up meditation before attempting :D
On the contrary, I think we have access to more facts than ever before.We have access to an unlimited flood of unverifiable words and images from social media, that nobody puts their reputation behind. Those are not the same as facts, which are the output of a process and a social system, and especially not agreed-upon facts.
The difficulty is the signal-to-noise ratio. We also have access to more gibberish and nonsense than ever before.
Hence my point about 'signal-to-noise' ratio.To clarify, psyanojim, are you saying that "if news organizations in my country don't pass on facts about happenings in other countries (or build consensus about what those facts are) it does not matter because I can do my own research?"
'Unverifiable' is not the same as 'incorrect'. There will be plenty of true, factual statements buried in the deluge of gibberish. The difficulty is in identifying them.
To clarify, psyanojim, are you saying that "if news organizations in my country don't pass on facts about happenings in other countries (or build consensus about what those facts are) it does not matter because I can do my own research?"Something like that, but with fewer binaries/absolutes.
In my experience, "do your own research!" does not work. Some of us can do it for one or two topics that we are interested in and relate to our expertise, contacts, and experience, but nobody with responsibilities can do it for every topic that might be relevant. And even then, nobody can both attend the Tuesday night city council meeting and see if the hospital emergency room was really overflowing that same night. So a long time ago, we started to hire teams of professionals to do the investigating and the summarizing, grouped them into a few news sources, and interacted with that for most of the topics relevant to us. Humans are pretty good at understanding the strengths and weakneses of a handful of sources we have known for a long time. We are not good at sorting through thousands of disconnected claims from people and sources we don't know well, and we obviously can't process things in languages we don't know or from cultures we are not familiar with. Especially since its so easy to just plain make things up across a keyboard or in selected and edited photos and video. It is easier emotionally, and its easier because if you control the camera angle you can control what people see. And most importantly, I do not know of any Canadian media organization whose reporters pass on facts about events in other countries which would let anyone understand them in a sophisticated way.To clarify, psyanojim, are you saying that "if news organizations in my country don't pass on facts about happenings in other countries (or build consensus about what those facts are) it does not matter because I can do my own research?"Something like that, but with fewer binaries/absolutes.
Does it 'matter'? Sure. But less so than in the past, given that we live in an era where we have more access to vast quantities of global information than at any time in human history.
How we process and filter that information overload and awful signal-to-noise ratio is the critical question.
Writing this reply cost 2 or 3 hours of concentration.
At no point anywhere did I suggest that everyone must do their own research on all topics and discard all other sources of verification. I really don't understand such a binary and extreme way of looking at things.For my own part I have trouble associating "binary" or "extreme" with any of my opinions. But the collapse of trusted networks of synthesis and verification is something I have been thinking hard about for ten years or so. I still don't understand what your preferred solution is.
Milei's Argentina has announced that in contrast to the previous government's policy it won't be joining the BRICS group of major developing economies.It fascinates me that the "Brazil Russia India and China"-s became BRICS and added South Africa, then became a formal group as opposed to an investor's shorthand for "large low-income countries with high economic growth." People are strange. Of course Russia never kept up the "growth" part and Brazil has difficulties too. Per capita, Argentina was one of the richest countries in the world in 1910 but it fell behind.