We’re all dreaming the same dream that someone or something will break the monotony, and maybe that’s why Trump, who is perceived as a renegade in a world of ‘politics as usual’, is so popular. He’s like the Right’s version of Obama, bearing ‘change’, although more competent than Obama.
You’re not missing out on anything if you ignore the news. Ask yourself, are you any better off for having read the news? Unless you make a living a news junkie, like this guy does, has following the news had any meaningful effect on your life? Does you caring about the news in any capacity change the outcome of it? I’m pretty sure for most people the answer to all these questions is ‘no’.
One reason why I’m a ‘news nihilist’ is because so much of it is crap.
Instead of sensationalist news, I prefer to subscribe to rationalism and realism.
Here are some examples of how the media misleads, or is just flat-out wrong:
‘China’s economy slowing down’ Been reading this headline since 2005, yet China’s market is near record highs, up 100% YOY. A 1% decline in China’s GDP from 8% to 7%, according to the doom and gloom media, is a full-blown crisis. In reality, it’s a blip, noise that can be ignored. Meanwhile, Brazil actually did fall into recession, but hardly a peep from the media.
‘Holiday shopping anticipated to be weak’ Every year, before Black Friday, the liberal media repeats this line, and every year they are wrong, but that doesn’t stop them from forever predicting the demise of the US consumer. They will be right eventually…we may not be alive to bear witness to it, but it’s coming…eventually.
‘Housing is a bubble’ Yet prices were up 25-40% in 2013 in many regions, 10-20% in 2014, and up again in 2015. Just another example of the media being wrong all the time.
‘Web 2.0 bubble, tech bubble, stocks are too high’ Same as above. Door dash, a food delivery start-up, is worth over a billion dollars. There are dozens of success like this, with stronger fundamentals compared to the first internet boom, as much as the left wishes it were 2000 and pets.com all over again. I read an article yesterday about how stocks could go lower and I just laughed it off. If you use Google’s search by date feature, you will find hundreds of failed predictions of web 2.0, housing, and stock bubbles.
‘Hyperinflation, dollar collapse, blah blah…’ Also wrong. I hate to be the bearer of good news, but the world is not coming to an end.
From Jame Altucher, How to be a Human, this is funny and true (bold added for empahsis):
I know this because they want the world to end. They keep blaming their problems on how bad the world is. How the world is falling apart. How we “borrowed too much” or how “the United States is going to fail” or how “Europe is going to take us down” or how “China is going to take over the world”. It’s an easy excuse so they don’t have to blame themselves on their own failures. They can blame me instead because I don’t think “China is going to take over the world”.
The left blames ‘greedy’ rich people, Wall St., the fed, the government, institutional racism, conspiracy theories, employers, college – everyone but themselves for failing. It’s easier to blame an external target than to do self reflection, ‘Maybe my IQ is not high enough to succeed…Maybe my work ethic sucks…Maybe I should have held my stocks in 2008 instead of selling…Maybe I majored in a useless subject in college…Maybe I should have read the fine print before taking out the student or home loan…etc.’
These people who either have bad genes or made bad life decisions seek crisis so that the ‘game’ of life is reshuffled and cards redealt in the hope of getting a better hand. Or they seek crisis to ‘punish’ their imagined oppressors.
In the article, James also writes:
– Their fathers or mothers didn’t love them.
– Other kids beat on them
– Girls (or guys) didn’t like them or called them names.
– Their friends backstabbed them.
That part I don’t agree with. People hold erroneous beliefs due to media influence, peer pressure, rationalization, and other factors. It don’t think it has necessarily to do with trauma or a bad childhood. A century ago, many thought the world was flat; they weren’t mentally ill or traumatized, just wrong.
‘US economic growth anticipated to be slow’ Isn’t it always? The stock market up some 200% percent since the recession ended. America is never going back to ‘fast growth’, nor does it need to.
According to the doom and gloom liberal media, wasn’t the fallout from Fukushima supposed to turn us all into mutant zombies?
Or what about Swine Flu and Ebola, both which were hyped as the next Black Death.
OWS…that failed miserably, much to the disappointment of the liberal media.
Remember the debt ceiling, S&P debt downgrade, and sequester (which the democrats caused), all overhyped by the liberal media, and all duds. There were headlines in 2013 – by Paul Krugman and others – that the budget cuts would cause a recession and bear market. Nope. The economy and stock market brushed it off, as I and others predicted it would.
This was in mid-2013. As of October 2015, payrolls have claimed to 142,654. A big goose egg for Krugman and the rest of the left.
Or the 2011 European debt crisis, the Greece crisis, and the 2014 Hong Kong protests? All hyped by the liberal media, and all duds. 99% of of the time, what the left calls a ‘crisis’ is a just a speed bump. The liberal media predicted a global economic contagion from the European debt crisis – also wrong. By 2012 the US market had recovered its 2011 losses and by 2013 was at new highs. Europe’s growth remains very sluggish, just as it was before 2011, so it’s not like Austerity can be blamed. Very few S&P 500 companies reported any evidence of weakness due to Europe.
Or what about that rape epidemic on colleges – that turned out to be a hoax, but the media ran with it anyway?
Or about the alleged ‘war on blacks’ by police? In reality, the percentage of justifiable homicides on blacks by law enforcement has been declining for decades, but you’ll never know by listening to the media:
How about man-made global warming? Debunked:
Global climate changes have been far more intense (12 to 20 times as intense in some cases) than the global warming of the past century, and they took place in as little as 20–100 years. Global warming of the past century (0.8° C) is virtually insignificant when compared to the magnitude of at least 10 global climate changes in the past 15,000 years. None of these sudden global climate changes could possibly have been caused by human CO2 input to the atmosphere because they all took place long before anthropogenic CO2 emissions began. The cause of the ten earlier ‘natural’ climate changes was most likely the same as the cause of global warming from 1977 to 1998.
Global cooling is a possibility:
Now a decade later, the global climate has not warmed 1° F as forecast by the IPCC but has cooled slightly until 2007-08 when global temperatures turned sharply downward. In 2008, NASA satellite imagery (Figure 6) confirmed that the Pacific Ocean had switched from the warm mode it had been in since 1977 to its cool mode, similar to that of the 1945-1977 global cooling period. The shift strongly suggests that the next several decades will be cooler, not warmer as predicted by the IPCC.
Or the liberal media spreading doom and gloom over wealth inequality, as consumer spending keeps surging anyway. The left insists that if wealth inequality is too high that the US economy will suffer, yet countries with less inequality, such as Germany, Japan, United Kingdom, and France, for example, have lower GDP growth and overall weaker economic fundamentals.
The liberal media owes everyone an apology for spreading panic and for being wrong all the time, but it will never happen.