What Benefits Do You Get From Knowing About Far-Away Crimes?

(I'm not sure you have missed my point. I think there's a difference though between things - like wars and the concept of various crimes - which your government is likely to have a policy on and individual far-off crimes where you could say that "being informed" is always already voyeurism)

To answer your question however, I rarely watch television and don't often pursue online news sources. This does mean that I'm hopelessly ill-informed on some matters, but I think my day to day life is better for it. I can't personally do anything about most of the wars, droughts, bombings, etc. that are going on in the world so why submit myself to a daily dose of them? To be sure, empathy and compassion for our fellow human beings is desirable but there comes a saturation point when it all starts to blur out. I don't quite know why I was blessed with the good fortune to be born where I was and why someone else was born where they were but it hasn't escaped my attention that I have to deal with the realities of *my* existence and they have to deal with theirs. Does it do them any better to know that I'm sitting in Canada with a full belly tonight?

I don't feel that any terrorist angle's being played up. I think the reason why the killings are such big news is the sheer novelty of their method, the randomness and impersonal nature. And the concentration of occurences within a short period of time.

maybe this is simplistic but there's just a real basic desire within us to know what other people doing, probably ever since the time when it was important to know what people were getting up to in the next cave over. And not just to know whether they'd been stockpiling rocks to chuck at us, but also to know if they'd discovered the wheel. It makes sense to care what other people are doing.

I'll admit it's harder to see the point of following horrific crimes in far-off places but it has as much purpose as knowing about wars or earthquakes or other horrible things in faraway places - by knowing about others' horror we hope to know how to deal with horror ourselves. maybe it's worth knowing simply for the people of faraway places to know what happens to a society with no gun control. Not to say that there isn't an element of voyeurism in it all, but I hope it can't all be just gawking.

I guess the question I'd throw back is what is the benefit of not knowing about snipers and child murderers and so on? And is there really a benefit to being ignorant of anything?

"Beneath this fallacy lies the belief that the only real news is official news of state: news of politics and economics, news made by legislative bodies rather than human bodies, news made by people with credentials.

Cast into outer darkness and dismissed as "sensationalism" is news that involves the tragedies of ordinary non-credentialed people. I want to make clear a distinction between tabloid or "true crime" stories and celebrity journalism. Celebrity journalism is about famous people doing insignificant things. The best tabloid stories, by contrast, deal with ordinary people caught in extraordinary, often tragic circumstances. And isn't the most important story of all—the hardest of hard news—how we cope with the inevitable tragedies of life, with suffering, death and mortality? Are people to be condemned for caring about these stories?"

He continues here: http://www.nyu.edu/gsas/dept/journal/forum/forum.1.essay.rosenbaum.html

tonight at dinner there was a lot of discussion about this sniper crap, i really didn't want to hear anything about it. also, someone was talking about how 9/11 has affected many people's actions and decisions, etc. i don't dispute this, it's just that for me it hasn't. one night i got pretty freaked out because of some big explosions happening about 1/2 mile from my home, but i think that would have probably freaked me out anyway. it's not that i am not sympathetic to people who died, lost friends, family, etc. i am, but that doesn't matter.

in terms of politics, i basically don't support anyone who is working within the existing system. since that's pretty much what you're going to find in most media, there's no point in paying attention to any of that. do you really need some newspaper to tell you that these people are total fuckwads? i feel guilty about this also. but realistically i'm not going to change my behavior, so i don't see the point in listening.

i hate my opinions

i can't explain very well why i think that news is harmful, but i do. especially over great distances - i think that people should just let other countries alone and let them do as they please. i am a big believer in entropy. the more people get worked up about things and try to fix them, the worse they get. do we have some kind of duty to watch over the world and step in to rescue those in need? i find this arrogant, and i question if it is usually effective. a bunch of people are killing each other, and here we come to take over the killing for a while. how is this an improvement?

i apologize for my bad attitude

Fritz - the benefits of not knowing are a general reduction in angst and worry, I'd have thought. Knowing and thinking about specific unique crimes skews our risk-assessment ability in the same way that a potential lottery win seeks to.

It has the flaws one has come to expect from Monbiot (ie no real understanding of why people would prefer to watch Big Brother than John Pilger) but this is useful to know:

Next month the government will publish its new communications bill. 3WE has been lobbying for a legal requirement that broadcasters make factual programmes about international issues: a proposal which was included in the white paper, but dropped from the draft bill after the broadcasters complained. There's a good chance that the pressure group will win, but the rules will be meaningless unless they are applied enthusiastically by the regulator. The regulator, in turn, will act only if the public kicks up a fuss. So perhaps it is time we became more interactive viewers, and began demanding less "reality TV" and more plain reality. Otherwise we can expect the world to continue to deliver unpleasant surprises, as the needs and the responses of its people become ever more opaque to us.

I've found it useful to stop watching tv news and start listening to World Service radio.

Is a story (and hence anything) better if it is true?

This is an interesting thread. For me, it relates to what we care about and who we empathise with. I understand how it is easier to empathise with another Londoner than someone from Peking (though I find my empathy only kicks in with a personal connection - e.g. I knew someone killed in the Lockerbie plane crash), but I dislike the gradations in between, that do present American lives as the next most important or interesting after Brits, and works its way down to people from Laos or Gabon or Guyana at the 'bottom'. I think that does relate to this sniper story - it would get less prominence if it were happening in Bangkok or Caracas.

this is very true - but most rational people don't plan their lives around winning the lottery any more than they spend time worrying about snipers in foreign lands. I'm not sure the nightmare of snipers etc. affects us in any real sense much more than all of our other irrational hopes and dreams (get rich quick! love at first sight! world peace!).

And taking this a step further -- Is there a weird contract by which we as viewers are required to hear these stories? To where, while we can't do anything to help them, by sitting through the news piece and nodding thoughtfully or even shedding a tear where warranted we have somehow paid tribute, or done our part? Could this be true?

Nah - I've not even heard much speculation along these grounds. It's a global news story cause it's an unusual unresolved serial killer crime.

Unless something does have a global political angle, I can't think of any good moral justification at all for these stories going global. It's just satisfying 'human interest' or thirst for a good story. Assuming it is just some lone nutter, there have always been lone nutters killing people and this isn't indicative of some new trend society should specially be addressing.

Or consider the events of 9-11... I understand that it's huge news because it was an act of terrorism, yet people die brutal and horrific deaths every day, all over the world. I wonder, for those who lost a loved one on 9-11 due to any circumstance other than the terrorist attacks, how they balance their own personal and private pain with the global outpouring of grief, (not to mention huge insurance and benevolence payouts), that became the compassionate entitlement of the 9-11 victims. [By the same token, I've often considered that a "War on Cancer" or a "War on Automobile Accidents" might save more lives in the long term than a "War on Terrorism".] That's not to minimize the ongoing heartbreak and loss of the 9-11 families. The attacks were both tragic and traumatic, yet it can't be overlooked that the notariety of the event proved fortunate in a way. The family of the nineteen year old father who was gunned down in the crossfire of a gang-war, or a forty-seven year old mother with cancer who slipped away that day... there are no millions to help soften the blow of grief or ease the hardship of going on without them.

I live in NYC, and on Sept. 11 one of my roommates was at a funeral in Philadelphia for his uncle. Moments before the ceremony the planes hit, and the minister brought this up during the funeral. Most of the attendees did not know what had happened, so the focus of the memorial shifted from remembering their lost relative to wondering what was happening in NYC. A strange situation, for sure.

This is a really central question to my whole conception of 'a civilised person'. The more civilised we are, the more we care about things which do not seem to affect us directly (I say seems because you don't need to believe in the butterfly effect to know that everything in the world is increasingly interconnected). One of the statements which has annoyed me most in the whole history of ILX was someone saying that it was inevitable that he (an American) would care more about deaths in the US than deaths in other countries.

My personal interest in the sniper story is:

1. Even if there's no connection to terrorism, it shows how vulnerable the US is to the new dynamic of guerilla action against it. All Iraq or Bin Laden would have to do would be to find a few 'suicide snipers' and they could paralyse whichever part of the US they wanted. This seems to be one nightmare scenario for a US unwilling to rein in its imperialist impulses or care whether its policies are globally liked.

2. As in 9/11, the sniper episode shows how the rights of American citizens can be turned easily against the American system, in a kind of 'judo' effect. In the case of 9/11, it was 'liberty of movement / liberty of access' in terms of the laxity of the internal US passenger jet system which was turned against it. In the case of the sniper it's the famous constitutional 'right to bear arms'. I'm waiting to see whether the anti-gun lobby gets momentum from these events. My first impression it won't. For instance, a US minister interviewed on Newsnight said he 'wasn't qualified' to say the US should re-examine its gun policies as a result of the events, but that he thought people would turn more to God, and that it made Americans more sensitive to what people in other countries have to face daily. (Somehow I have the impression he meant specifically Israelis.)

But the main answer to Tom's question is that anything that happens in the US will continue to be of more than average global interest until the day the US ceases to be a more than average global power. The need for reporting of international stories (Pilger) gets more pressing the more people circle-jerk to synthetic national dramas (Big Brother).

(ps this prob deserves a thread of its own.)

Hmm. 'Species is, in itself, as irrelevant to moral status as race or sex'. I'm not sure I'm personally quite ready to go there. I'm unashamedly humanist. Humans have more power than crabs, therefore more rights and responsibilities.

Let me be certain I understand you. Are you saying then that an individual's willingness to watch the news and hence inform him/her self about the suffering of others has a direct correlation on one's ability to be empathic, compassionate and kind to others?

If so, I would have to disagree. For example, the sniper (or snipers) in this particular case are no doubt gobbling up every newstory they can get their hands on because they're not in the sniper business for the sake of civilising themselves or anyone else -- they're looking to get specific needs of a diseased psyche met through callous and cruel action.

On the other hand, there are many like myself who, as Yancey noted, have simply reached a saturation point. My willingness to distance myself from news reports has little to do with my lack of care, but rather my inclination to care too much. My imagination is such that I respond too strongly to the pain of others. Given that I can do diddley squat to relieve it, I've simply learned to not unduly expose myself. But that hardly makes me less (or more) civilized than those who watch the nightly news.

Meanwhile, it's a relief to know that "Momus" is a person and not a slang term of ixler's. Pleased to meet you.

i'm not really arguing with you, just teasing out this one point.

I would say it promotes 'disinterested compassion' rather than 'instinctual compassion'. Both are important. And you can make the argument that they are ultimately the same thing. My children (for whom I have instinctual compassion) are going to be safer in a world where everyone cares about everyone else, however far away or close they are. Such a world will contain fewer 'nasty surprises' (in Monbiot's phrase) than a world where I say 'Fuck everybody else, I only care about my nuclear family'.

There's a line in a song on my new album which goes 'The car protecting your child is killing mine'. It's on that level that we have to think about things.

Being 'civilised' in my sense would mean not just watching the nightly news but putting together a (global) picture of the world based (partly) on the understanding the news gives us, and acting (locally) as a result of it.

Given that I can do diddley squat to relieve it, I've simply learned to not unduly expose myself. Your sense of powerlessness is your most dangerous illusion.

Hmmm. I still don't quite see how you get "Fuck everybody else" out of choosing to not watch distressing things, but I understand that you're making a general, not necessarily specific, statement. Maybe I'm not phrasing myself very well, so what you hear is a lack of empathy that extends beyond my immediate circle to a greater humanity.

I suspect it's closer to the truth to say there are those who will choose to distance themselves from such things because they truly don't care, and in this instance, your statement is correct -- that is a concern. (Mind you, it's mostly a concern we can only be concerned about; our concern is not likely to inspire those who don't care, to care.) Others will choose the exact same course of action because they do care (including caring where they apply their care), and in that case, I don't believe it applies.

Otherwise, I think we mostly concur. What it all boils down to for me is be respectful and ideally, kind, to everyone. True power is recognizing the impact I possess via the choices I make of my own free will. Like not shooting people.

And of course this is a problem. The Big Brother response is 'Your suffering is my entertainment. Heap it on!' We then get TV as a sort of Circus Maximus, where one man's martyrdom is another man's matinee. So we can't always guarantee that information, no matter how it's presented, will make people draw ethical conclusions.

We also can't guarantee that when people do think globally and ethically, their view of the common good will match our own. For instance, I'm quite sure Bin Laden is, in his twisted way, an ethical individual pursuing global policies he thinks will improve the world.

I do like your ideas re: thinking globablly and then bringing it down smaller (i.e, locally and individually). Then of course, we have to blow it up big again. In another thread in another forum, we just had an interesting discussion related to schoolyard bullying and how very similar the dynamics are to worldwide terrorism. It never hurts to ponder where it all begins.

Now, it seems likely that the DC sniper has no global program and no long-range strategy beyond 'keep sniping, don't get caught'. But imagine if he had. Imagine if he declared, next week, that he would be travelling to many countries and sniping there. What if Interpol issues a statement saying there are many 'sleeper snipers' all over the world just waiting for instructions? Do we still question the need for news stories about him? Does the entertainment factor slip and get replaced by an anxiety factor?

Okay, so we all switch off TV and try and revive the village life they had in the middle ages... only to find that floggings and hangings in the public square come back into fashion. You mention bullying. This stuff seems perenially popular. I've even been stockaded myself a few times on this very board! Whatever forum you invent, as long as humans are on it, this is going to be an issue. Maybe Singer is right, maybe we should turn the world over to the crabs!

Then again, some might skip public floggings for the opportunity to read, or play cards, or garden, or go for a walk, or make love, or sit with a friend, etc. I don't really see it as an either or option. But presumably, neither do you and you were instead commenting on that particular quirk of humanity that gets a rise out of a bloody good show.

I've noticed that some do -- yes. I don't really know why that is either. I haven't figured that part out. However I do know that there's a certain worth in suffering. If you truly have suffered (or at least believe you have) it produces empathy if you're lucky, hatred if you're not. Perhaps in some twisted manner they're hoping to suffer vicariously and thus gain indirect life experience (or maybe what you'd call "disinterested compassion") that will lead to their own spiritual evolution wherein they won't need to do that anymore because now they know, and in knowing at that level, you can't inflict it upon others. Told you I'd drift.

And now, I am out of this thread and into bed.

This just happened at the @Walgreens on Gough & Fell Streets in San Francisco. #NoConsequences @chesaboudin pic.twitter.com/uSbnTQQk4J

— Lyanne Melendez (@LyanneMelendez) June 14, 2021

somebody attempted to prevent the liberation of some goods from a supermarket.
Redistribution of supermarket wealth should be mandatory surely.

Even Robin Hood needs shampoo.

The sign by the door adds a nice touch:

Thank You! For shopping at Walgreens.

I'm mostly impressed that he was able to just coast through a Walgreens door on a bike not once but twice.

I mean at least twice. I'm not discounting the possibility that he made a couple of test loops beforehand.