It is little wonder that people are turning off the news in record numbers. The images are often unwatchable, the descriptions beyond imagining, the scale incomprehensible.
Everywhere you look the cruelty of the human spirit is on display.
Newsreaders have adjusted their scripts. They used to say, “Some viewers might find the next item distressing.” Now it is an unequivocal declaration. “The images are distressing.” They could use other words and still not capture the enormity of what is cascading day after day into the living rooms and on to the screens of those who have not yet opted to turn off. Confronting. Intolerable. Inhumane. Unforgivable.
The words offer no respite. The cries of those touched by the horror of 7 October and the weeks of reprisals are heartbreaking. Instead, in bulletin after bulletin, screen after screen, it shows the extent of our powerlessness. A third of the population globally actively avoids it, the number of people interested in the news continues to fall.
Information was supposed to make us powerful, but democracy’s essential feedback mechanism has broken. Traditional media lost trust first, but other forms are quickly catching up.
Candlelight vigils and mass rallies offer solidarity, but hate is in the air. Its poison has been on display all year, with unprecedented increases in reports of racism, Islamophobia and antisemitism.
In Australia as public utterances about the Indigenous voice to parliament became less conciliatory, angrier, more dogmatic, they became news…..
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Orwellian nightmares: What I learned about today’s rage culture from rewriting 1984
George Orwell Reviews Mein Kampf: “He Envisages a Horrible Brainless Empire” (1940)
ALBERT CAMUS: by Nicola Chiaromonte
Albert Camus: The Almond Trees (1940)
Invincible Summer – Albert Camus
Why Turgenev Remains One of the Most Important Russian Writers
Book review: The Hamlet Doctrine: Knowing Too Much, Doing Nothing
Ivan Turgenev on Hamlet and Don Quixote / The madness in Hamlet and Don Quixote
After the truth-shower 