I know, I know, this site is beginning to sound like a Vox stalker site. But I have it as one of my news feeds and they post a lot to it, plus, despite my qualms with it the stuff they put out is orders of magnitude better than what the AP typically pipes into my feeds. Here’s another recent one:
Eight facts about violence against women that everyone should know.
In case you feel like you are “everyone” here is the piece. And this is why, in my view, Vox is quite the offputting place. Yes, indeed, EVERYONE MUST know those 8 facts about violence against women. Really? We must all know them. And don’t go claiming that violence against women is a uniquely awful problem. There are dozens and dozens of equally awful problems out there, and despite the very best intentions of millions of people it is rather impossible to know EIGHT facts about just about any of them, much less 1 or 2 facts. Why should EVERYONE know EIGHT facts about this issue? Do we all have an obligation to research 8 facts about all important topics? Or does the author mean that anyone who wants to seriously engage in a discussion about this issue should start by understanding that these facts are out there? One cannot know, but such is the general direction of much of the Vox site and its authors. It’s beyond a little offputting – so by trying to actually get educated about topics like this and others (hence my interest in the site) one finds themselves regularly scolded from on high that we don’t know jack. It’s sort of like the priest during the Sunday homily yelling at all of the audience members for not coming to church.
By the way, if this were a truly civil place and people of all stripes were reasonable, I’d chime in on this:
Orders of magnitude better than AP? OK, AP might spike a story, or miss a story, or the writer may not know the full story and even spin a story, but I would put more stock in them than VOX. Or the Daily Worker or Mother Jones, for that matter. There are only so many hours.
I liked the Quadrillions article, where he concludes that maybe the discount rate does not matter. I am still having difficulty with trillions of Federal Reserve Notes.
Then you will love this!
Just for the record I have never seen one individual like this. And, of course, when does one say he or she is happy? How do they measure that happiness? It seems like a narrow-minded list to get a lot of hits catered to my generation that seems to think we cannot have a singular passion and work to improve ourselves within that passion. But, hey, maybe I’m just morbid because that’s the way I am.
In general, these sorts of articles are tailored to be infectiously marketable (again, to get the hits). There are sites that dedicate themselves to creating these sorts of epic, black-and-white, and ironclad generalizations of life, the universe, and everything in between always titled in such a way to make you feel socially inferior (another variation of this title is, “The economics teacher was teaching a normal class on externalities. What happens next will change your life!”). They construct these articles and titles on the philosophy that they will run through social media like an epidemic using their bombastic title along with an article fit for social media’s attention spans (so it is usually a list to make it easier and faster to read). Thus, that feeling of inferiority formulates when we look on our newsfeed (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) and say to ourselves, “Hey, so-and-so has read this article and it has so many likes by my friends…I must read it, too! I don’t want to NOT know things everyone else knows!”
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