News/current affairs

Wars and the greed after resources will always be part of the human experience. The news our history in the making, is the story of US. We can watch or not. I have a firm grasp of the history of both Ukraine, and the middle east and have watched developments and patterns through the decades. The current bloody engagements are familiar to previous flareups with one exception: now it is happening along side of many more natural disasters and a much larger percentage of people, therefore, being displaced and without the stability the world itself had provided, this adds a certain existential dread to the mix. I do feel the sadness of that dread in others. I wish I could do something for them.

Hello Nemesis2k7, I am Number.

May I just ask, do you still use social media (insta, FB or X type things) and/or email..... and if so, are you still not bombarded with "news" from those sources ?

I only ask this question because I am interested - not nosey, and certainly not judgemental about it, one way nor the other.

I stopped with media / tv / fake news, years ago. Its all designed to provoke reactions, troll people, and manipulate how we feel

Number said:

Thank you for reminding me of Edge of Darkness.....I remember it well.  It had quite a profound impact on me.

I re-watched the series on DVD and may do so again...

I've probably just DOUBLED the number of people who know about the Trawsfynnd AGR venting...

(It was a deliberate venting according to the file, NOT an accident).

What I didn't mention, is the amusing tale about the radioactive welsh sheep that for economic reasons involving the man from the ministry not paying enough to keep the farmers happy or solvent if their sheep failed the testing, so the farmers found it made business sense to take them to Aylesbury and trade them for other sheep that would test OK and not be culled... 

Chernobyl happened soon after trawsfynydd and I detected  NOTHING.

Post Fukushima on one memorable day my background count was indicated to be  45 TIMES higher than baseline... 

And we trust nuclear power is being operated safely. Anyone who's stirred to action and can afford such a thing can buy a networkable geiger counter and join the civilian network and both contribute to and benefit from accurate local to global information about radiation levels and help try and hold this industry a bit more accountable than they were in the eighties.

It's quite low at the moment..    https://gmcmap.com/

I like to think of the news as "The Story of Us". It's like reading and living in a book for me. When I was small I didn't know that superman (1958 tv serial) and the Vietnam war news were different worlds. I watch it like a story that will always be developing as lo g as there are humans and a world they live on.

Wow.  I've been following current affairs for most of my 41 years and had never heard of the Murrell case.

Thank you for reminding me of Edge of Darkness.....I remember it well.  It had quite a profound impact on me.

You have reminded me of 2 things from the 1980s when I was involved in CND:

The murder of Hilda Murrell:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilda_Murrell

and the brilliant TV series Edge of Darkness:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edge_of_Darkness

When back in 1986 I became by accident one of a handful of people who were knowledgeable that our Background count in Birmingham had doubled due to a venting of 30 tonnnes of core coolant from Trawsfynnydd NPP I became what is now known as a "conspiracy theorist". 

When as part of my Job a decade later I found myself READING THE FILE in the offices of the place that maintained that NPP, (of course I was not entitled to, but it was open on the desk I was working on!!) the "conspiracy theory" became documented FACT and I abruptly lost the last of my naivete as regards those who we regards as "authority" and started to take a REAL interest in CT.

The reason I'm telling you this, is because I learned REAL FAST that it is hard on ones peace of mind and sense of "balance".

With C.T. (which is after all a subset of current affairs, and in some cases historical journalism, but sourced from alternative sources or perspectives) unless you want to start believing that the world is flat and the royal family are shape shifting lizard people or some other tosh, YOU NEED TO TAKE BREAKS FROM IT.

Both the "news" and C.T. are full of manipulation and some deceit because (and we Autists more than most should know this) lying and manipulation is what humans DO to each other.

Even this site can make your head swim at times, and I notice that many of the posters do indeed "take a break" in order to recover.

I wrote a lot more, then cut it. I need to think long and hard before teaching a group of Autists how to get macro results from micro actions..  

i doubt a world war would happen over this.... all of the muslim world dog piled isreal in history at one point and isreal won it all alone... there was no world war in it, they already did it before and it didnt result in a world war....

these countries, they are not majour enough combined to result in world wars.... we may get world terror attacks, yes. but not world war... we wouldnt get world terror attacks though if we did a few things, like didnt allow mass global migration in huge demographic replacements globally to the point you have loyalists of these nations willing to attack the local place they moved to which doesnt have anything to do with their nations issues... and also if we all kept to local issues too both of that combined would make it so we dont even get global terror from any of this.

but a world war off this is massively unlikely.... even if iran, as they threatened to in the past, were to nuke jerusalem... that wont even result in a world war.... the entire west went in on the middle east before, that wasnt a world war... these nations, small, minor, insignificant.

When the Israel/Palestine conflict first hit, I was genuinely conflicted about this, knowing the history and issues on both sides, the murky politics on both sides in the Middle East and the history going back centuries to both the Crusades and the Roman Empire - knowing that Christians are caught up in the Palestine Region, as well as Jews and Muslims and knowing how Irish UN Peacekeeping Troops were sent to Tibin in Lebanon some years ago, after the Egypt War with Israel after the Suez Canal Dispute, I now stand with ordinary people in both Israel & Palestine, including Jews, Christians & Muslims - Lebanon is in a very precarious position again and other groups in the region like Hamas and Hezbollah have betrayed the Palestinian People where they want to link up with Iran, Syria, Egypt, Yemen and other Islamist groups like Isis, Al Quaidea, Taliban, etc and they are just as bad as the Israeli government and the IDF - the most shocking thing for me was that while Israel was telling Palestinians to evacuate for thier own safety (after Hamas attacked Israeli civilians first, backed by Iran) Hamas would not allow Palestinians to leave the area, as Hamas was using them as human shields to escape Israeli justice - I think this war is far more serious than the Russia/Ukraine conflict or the China/Taiwan conflict, as other Muslim nations could be drawn into this conflict in Palestine and the big concern is that a world war could happen if it escalates any further 

I find I go through phases with the news/current affairs. Sometimes I want to know what is going on in the world (good and bad), but then I reach a point where I need a break from it. As I tend to access the news via my TV, it's not too difficult to avoid it because I can just change the channel.

Occasionally, I will access the news via the likes of the BBC News website, but this tends to be when I want more information or have maybe forgotten some of the details of a news item I'm particularly interested in.

All I can say is that you have to do what feels right for you and your mental health.

No problem friend. 

Deb- if you like.  I will read double the amount so you don't have to read any.

Thank you

Deb- if you like.  I will read double the amount so you don't have to read any.

The news can be overwhelming, and taking a break for your mental health is a good idea. I've done the same. It's all about finding the right balance.

Autonomistic said:

The second aspect is a sense of powerlessness and an inability to resolve a problem. I suspect autists may struggle with this perhaps more than the general population. We often have a need to problem solve and can be deeply affected by what we see or read on the news. Just getting through life day to day can be tough enough without trying to devote energy and thoughts to solving the world problems on top.

Absolutely!

I had typed similar this morning to Number, but the site went down.

Cunningly, I'd save it as a Word document so have just posted my reply.

Autonomistic said:

You have in the past got involved in the things you care about and those actions will be an awful lot more than much of the population ever do.

Autonomistic said:

There is no need to feel guilty if, at this point in your life, you need to shield yourself from news to protect your own mental health.

That brought tears to my eyes, after a long hard day.

Thank you.

Number said:

but if everyone does that, then only the leaders and decision makers will ever set our direction?  And in democracies, how we will know who we want those leaders to be if we don't hear or watch what they are saying or doing AND have some clue about the challenges that they face?

In my 2nd comment, I explained how involved I'd always been.

You are working on my guilt complex N but I know it's with kindness.

I've given over 4 decades of my life to this sometimes active involvement, so I'm going to give myself some time away, maybe the rest of my life, nevertheless.

I suspect that not autistic people who are less sensitive are more happy to be involved (obviously the politicians too) so things will keep ticking over without those of us who step out of the ring.

I think there are two aspects to this.

The first is increased anxiety as a result of enhanced awareness of world events. The world seems a more dangerous place as a result and the more news we consume the more we hyper focus on the scary stuff. The Covid pandemic was a good example of that. My anxiety increased a lot and watching the daily news conferences became an intense focus for me.

The second aspect is a sense of powerlessness and an inability to resolve a problem. I suspect autists may struggle with this perhaps more than the general population. We often have a need to problem solve and can be deeply affected by what we see or read on the news. Just getting through life day to day can be tough enough without trying to devote energy and thoughts to solving the world problems on top.

I do really care how this country is run and by whom + also other countries.

So, because of all this, I feel guilty now not following the news.

Your sense of guilt illustrates the second aspect above. However I think it is misplaced. You have in the past got involved in the things you care about and those actions will be an awful lot more than much of the population ever do.

Just think how people seem to consider 'news' as what their favourite fake celebrity is wearing that day or what is happening on Love Island. All that effort that goes into completely pointless news could be redeployed for good but those people don't seem to experience the guilt.

There is no need to feel guilty if, at this point in your life, you need to shield yourself from news to protect your own mental health.