On January 11, 2016, I began a daily practice of writing a joke meditation of the day, called Cracked Pot Meditations. I was still recovering from the treatment of cancer, and I was having very challenging cognitive issues, so I chose just to put something simple and easy to write every day. Posting it to the blog allowed me to hold myself accountable. Some of those meditations were poorly written and unedited. I have gone back and begun editing these and adding an illustration, starting with the April 27th meditation. I hope you enjoy.
Meditation for July 28th
Some Things Have to be Believed to be Seen
We have this great tool at our fingertips called the World Wide Web. It is like a super information library right at our fingertips. We can access it from our mobile phone. If we want to know something, we can use Google to find what we are looking for. The internet was supposed to create a more intelligent society where people are informed and educated, and if they didn’t know something, they could quickly look it up on their phone and learn.
The Internet is also a source of news. Many people obtain their news primarily on the Internet, with most relying on Facebook as their primary source. Facebook is the biggest news agency in the world. You’re reading it, your mom is reading it, and now your grandma is reading it. Nowadays, TikTok is a significant source of news and current events for younger people, while Baby Boomers tend to stay on Facebook for their information. Both sources are riddled with misinformation and propaganda.
The problem is that a lot of the news on the Internet is complete utter bullshit. Over two-thirds of the news posts on social media are generated by bots. A third of Americans have unwittingly shared misinformation because they believed it to be true. While mainstream media have their problems, during the last election cycle from August to November, fake news engagement outperformed mainstream media by almost two million clicks. The internet doesn’t have any oversight or “truth” regulation like mainstream media and its editorial process. I can write whatever I want and get away with it. Just look at this blog for Pete’s sake. Could I get away with this on TV or the radio? Unless my name is Rush Limbaugh, I can’t. I obviously don’t have an editor and fact-checkers like those at a newspaper or magazine. The New York Times isn’t knocking down my door to hire me (more on them soon).
Most of the time, you will find a news headline that ignites your feelings on the matter, maybe speed-read it, and if it still seems to capture your beliefs, you’ll post it to prove you are right to feel the way you do. You have no idea that the news story is an opinion or utter malarky. People are reacting to news with emotional responses rather than reason. Sometimes the truth is hard to swallow and shakes our foundation, so it’s easier to ignore that and reach for what makes us feel vindicated.
How can you be a more skeptical and more reasoned Internet news reader? Follow some of these easy steps:
What are the sources?
If there are no sources, then don’t believe it. Many blogs will claim that information is from an anonymous source, a person with knowledge of the situation, or some other vague indication that the writer made it up. A TV or newspaper article must have two sources, and one of those sources cannot be anonymous. Look for links to primary sources. If you obtain your information from videos or podcasts, they don’t have to cite their sources, so you may need to conduct some research. Just because someone says it loudly doesn’t make it accurate.
The author is not a news source because that is considered opinion, which is what most news blogs aim to do: emotionally engage readers and encourage them to click on their links, read the content, and reblog it, thereby attracting more readers to support the blog’s financial needs. Maybe getting news paid for by advertising isn’t the most ethical way to share news.
The chief barrier between people and the news is paywalls. Almost all the legitimate news sources require a paid subscription, and while I fully believe that these hard-working writers need to be paid for their work, most people will go to what is free, and you get what you get when you don’t pay for something. That leaves government-funded organizations like NPR, but as you know, it is threatened to be cut off, and will probably go to a subscription-based paywall system, gatekeeping real news from those who need it most.
Mainstream media isn’t exempt from the need to cite their sources and is also guilty of spreading misinformation. The New York Times spread misinformation about sexual violence during the October 7th Hamas-led attack from sources that were bad-faith actors. They also had a memo leaked about not saying certain words like genocide when covering the Gaza genocide. We can’t blame people looking for other sources of news because our prominent newspapers are US imperialist propaganda machines.
Can you distinguish between opinion and fact?
Judging by what most of you post as news stories backing up your ideal point of view, you don’t. Facts are unbiased truths, and opinions are bending those truths to fit a belief. You think with your belief system and not your reason, so you are going to be easily susceptible to opinion pieces.
Even sharing an opposing opinion opens the door to truly take the objectivity away from the reporting that is needed to tell the news. Just because some yahoo says that weather machines run by the government made the flooding happen doesn’t mean you need to add that in your story.
Starting with the 24-hour news channels, opposing opinions have become what is played as news. It isn’t enough to say something is happening; we need two to six people yelling at each other, and we take sides based on our feelings. The social media algorithms are designed to bring you down rabbit holes that become increasingly extreme, encouraging you to click and scroll. You might be watching a video on how to macrame, and then you suddenly are watching a video about how fluoride is making us all gay and susceptible to mind control by the deep state run by Obama.
It doesn’t matter what people say
Many blogs rely on what the masses are saying, and unfortunately, the masses tend to favor products like McDonald’s cheeseburgers and Taco Bell. Not the most significant source for bolstering a belief system. Currently, the number one book on Amazon is “Armageddon: How Trump Can Beat Hillary.” This means everyone wants to be scared. It’s as if that old fear of success is plaguing all of America. The number one song on Amazon is “I Want to Live” by Skillet. This doesn’t give me any hope of trusting the masses to be smart, informed voters.
This is why the reporting of unbiased news is now more critical than ever, as we need to let consumers make their own decisions without a push in either direction. When you report on a political issue and Kid Rock shows up to share his views, you are automatically pushing some people one way and others the other way without Kid Rock even opening his mouth. The sides have been taken, and the truth of the story is lost in emotional responses.
Ask some fucking questions
Ask some questions out loud about the news story you are reading. If it seems to hold up to scrutiny, then it might have some merit, but unless you are a fucking idiot, then the article shouldn’t hold up to any line of questioning. Is there a lot of unanswered questions in the article itself, then it was either written poorly or is a lying sack of shit.
Sometimes it helps to ask the questions that someone who doesn’t share your opinion might ask about an article or podcast. Clarity comes with seeing the whole picture. Things are usually more complex than what a meme might be able to showcase.
Critical thinking is a necessary skill for understanding the news, which requires reading comprehension and historical context. Nothing happens for no reason at all. A conflict doesn’t emerge from a vacuum; there is a story that led to that conflict. Most media outlets are counting on you to accept the information they provide without questioning or seeking to understand anything beyond what they are saying.
Yes, your beliefs might be (are) wrong
You may need to question your cherished belief system from time to time. Let articles that are written about other belief systems challenge your belief system. You won’t learn if you ignore other belief systems because it might offend yours. This makes you easily controlled if you fit nicely and neatly in a belief box where we can feed you some emotional shit for you to react to. Be ok with being wrong and changing your mind.
The whole reason you even saw this great news article that proves your political belief is better than other people’s is that you have to believe something to see it.
If you are getting most of your news from the internet and social media, then you have been pigeon-holed and are being shown only the news that fits your curated belief systems, which you have displayed through your clicks before. It would be challenging to break free from your ability to be open-minded if you have been confined to a small, closed opinion cage created by the internet, ensuring you are being accurately advertised.
History really did happen
History is a great place to see if your belief system has worked or not, and if it hasn’t, why? We keep repeating history because we ignore it, or we think we’re so fucking special that the things that happened in history won’t happen to us. Perhaps it’s not the conflict that is repeating itself, but the solution that has already been tried over and over again, which we think will work this time. Humans are insane; they keep trying the same thing over and over again, expecting different results.
As I mentioned earlier, something doesn’t just come out of nowhere. Nothing is really unexpected. Let’s take 9/11 for example, this isn’t something that just happened because some people disagree with our “freedom”, this is decades of terrible imperialistic colonialism influenced foreign policy. We have been fortunate that it hasn’t happened more often, and some of that is due to our geological isolation from most of the world, but I think technology is reaching a concerning point where that might not protect us anymore.
Sometimes we think that just because our government is doing shady shit that we don’t like, so it doesn’t concern us, but it does. Whether you believe that our way of life is excellent or not, it is as good as it is because of our international influence, which enables us to keep prices low and our companies to access resources, allowing us to have them. The most popular degrees that a CIA agent has are in economics, and they use this to tip other economies in our benefit, and sometimes that causes famine and civil wars. Not to bum you out, but this is about realistic meditating the Cracked Pot way, and your American lifestyle is only possible with the death of people in other places.
So go ahead and read the news that aligns with your belief system. Be enraged with Huffington Post and be vindicated by a think piece on Medium. Go ahead and read opinions believing they are facts because you’re too stupid or so self-centered to tell the difference. Go ahead and make the Internet less of a tool for democracy and more of a hammer of authoritarianism. They got your number, asshole. Now go like the new fad or keep posting cool links.