"[Journalist Samuel] Mena, of Phoenix, ignited his left arm — becoming the second person this year to set fire to themselves in the nation’s capital to protest Israel’s military actions in Gaza..."
Yesterday, here in DC.
www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/202...
"Mena was a news photographer for Arizona’s Family, a Phoenix-based broadcast network...“Arizona’s Family expects its newsroom employees to conduct themselves with neutrality and objectivity,” the statement on its website reads. “Mena is no longer an employee.”"
"Norman R. Morrison, a 31-year-old Quaker from Baltimore, burned himself outside the Pentagon to protest the Vietnam War in 1965. Wynn Bruce, a 50-year-old from Boulder, Colo., who was described as a climate activist dedicated to Buddhism, self-immolated outside the Supreme Court on Earth Day 2022."
"And Aaron Bushnell, a 25-year-old senior airman in the U.S. Air Force, set himself on fire in front of the Israeli Embassy and shouted “Free Palestine” as he burned in February. A man also died in September after setting himself on fire near the Israeli consulate in downtown Boston."
"How many Palestinians were killed that I allowed to be branded as Hamas?” Mena wrote. “How many men, women, and children were struck with a missile cosigned by the American media?"
"The smell of gasoline wafted through the air as police and other protesters rushed toward Mena. Rallygoers screamed for a medic while bystanders tried to put out the blaze with kaffiyehs.
Mena was transported to a hospital for treatment of injuries not expected to be life-threatening..."
"Parallels between Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and early America’s treatment of indigenous peoples are stark. Once you know the twin histories, you cannot unsee it. ... Americans are discouraged to draw parallels between Native American and Palestinian history. ... If anyone should understand ethnic cleansing, it is Americans, because our country was founded upon the genocide of indigenous peoples, followed by centuries of cover-ups." &mdash Sarah Kendzior, "Trails of Tears," Substack newsletter, Jan 11, 2024
Genocide has a legal definition, yes, but I would say — as a descendant of survivors of the genocide that led to the term being coined — that what makes something a genocide is not numbers of deaths, but an attempt to fully eradicate an entire community through the destruction of family lines.
What is happening in Gaza is not a genocide simply because massive numbers of people are dying — though yes, genocide often leads to mass death. It is a genocide because a significant amount of Israeli government rhetoric has framed Gazans as a people who must be wiped out in entirety.
When I think about what the descendants of Gazan survivors will grow up with, I think of the shadows that haunt my own family legacy. The inability to talk about the past. The family trees that just stop. The generational trauma. That, for me, is genocide.
The most tragic thing about the way we wrestle with the concept of genocide was that the term was coined in the hopes of *preventing* future groups from experiencing what my family went through. But instead it only serves to acknowledge the lost and horror trauma in the aftermath.
Having your loss recognized as a genocide is a pretty abysmal consolation prize. And it sucks that 80 years after my own ancestors were being slaughtered en masse in an attempt to wipe out their people, this is the best we have to offer.
This is an important framing of the idea of genocide. It's not mass murder for cultural reasons, its the attempted murder of a culture (which often involves mass murder).
Case in point: The residential school system for Native Americans would have been a genocide even without the mass graves.
Important: Israel's public channel (Kann 11) reports that the military effort that commenced today in Jebalia refugee camp is part of a bigger operation to expel all Palestinians from North Gaza, according to the "Eiland Plan".
Estimated 300,000 Palestinians remain in North Gaza. The plan is to force as many of them to leave and then proceed as if no civilians remained
edition.cnn.com/2024/09/22/m...
"question things that they find written down. This is an important development: to think critically about something, you need to suspend yourself in the space between believing 'this is true' and 'this is untrue' — you must sort the good information from the bad by testing it and thinking about it and verifying it. Many of my students seem to come into the classroom thinking, 'Well, it wouldn’t be written down if it isn’t true/good/worthwhile, would it?'"
However, "being correct or incorrect doesn’t always matter."
"So much of our discourse in this (and increasingly, it feels, every election cycle) is about pointing out gaffs from the other side — about how the former President denied climate change but built sea walls to protect his golf courses, that sort of thing. As if the mere fact of this contradiction is somehow material.
This is partially what allowed them to succeed in the 2016 election. The emphasis was on the fact that the other side was a grotesque mockery, rather than a credible threat. As liberals often do, they reduced things to aesthetics.
Now, a lot of people are talking about how think tanks attached to the party of “small government” and “states’ rights” is putting forward a plan for national controls on abortion and other reproductive healthcare. The contradiction here doesn’t matter to them, and pointing out their hypocrisy is just going to allow them to retain their advantage, because no one actually cares about that."
Three modes of language: Factual, instrumental, social
"We’re all explicitly taught to use language" in a "factual" mode, Summers says, which means we first try to understand information and root out our contradictory beliefs, and then we try to commmunicate it truthfully and clearly so others can know what we know.
But there's an "instrumental" mode too. This mode tends to generate contradictions.
The Instrumental Mode is not concerned with the horizontal(ish) transfer of information, but with the hierarchic imposition of will. You say things not to inform, but to achieve a particular end goal. In this stance, language is a tool that you use to achieve a material end result.
As such, contradiction serves the same purpose as exhaust, noise, and waste heat do for a combustion engine: it makes it clear that the apparatus is working as desired, it makes it obvious that it’s doing its job. As such, pointing out the contradiction is sort of like telling someone revving a muscle car, “That’s very loud and you’re putting out a lot of smoke.”
It’s not going to have the desired effect. You think you mentioned a problem; they think you’re describing the cool thing that they’re doing: only one of you is any closer to your goal."
The instrumental mode can be authoritarian. It can be modeled after a parent–child hierarchy. This "creates a hierarchic relationship where the speaker claims they know better than the listener. What becomes upsetting about the whole thing is when the listener repeats what is heard, creating a sort of linguistic pyramid scheme where the one receiving the repeated message is two steps removed from the one who supposedly knows best."
But this effect isn't really avoidable by retreating to a supposedly "factual" mode, as there's no way to entirely avoid norms.
"Even in the most informative utterance, there is the implicit message you should care about this. In answering a stranger’s request for help, there is the message that we should help each other.
Every utterance is, at least implicitly, a statement of belief about how the world works.
Language also has a "social" mode in which we try to connect to each other.
"My belief is that every composition or utterance has all three of these uses in different proportions. There’s always going to be an effort to make the other person do something, there’s always going to be an effort to make a connection, and there’s always going to be an attempt to give the other party some information that they don’t currently have."
As I interpret it
Communication, including "storytelling" of various sorts, always has these dimensions:
Here are the facts I'm aware of. I'd like to connect with you. Let's get something done together.
We should care about how we find out the truth, create knowledge, and experience the consequences thereof
In pointing out that what we call Generative AI is just a tool for bullshitting, Damien P. Williams said:
“The idea here isn’t to say that there’s some perfect capital-O, capital-T Objective Truth that Google Bard must actually adhere to, that GPT must adhere to, must reflect in the world. It is rather to say that when we uncritically make use of these [generative AI] tools, what we are doing is we are muddying the process of generating knowledge together. We are embodying and empowering a system which does not, in any way, shape or form, care about what is true or what is factual. Does not care about the impacts of providing non-factual, non-true knowledge. Does not care about the impacts of not going through the process of trying to understand what knowledge values and beliefs mean to each other. ... They do not care about truth. They do not care about fact. They are, in fact, bullshit engines.” (38:40–39:32, 39:48–39:55)
ICYMI: our latest @leftanchor.bsky.social ep we are talking the philosophy of bullshit as applied to Trump, Elon Musk, and JD Vance www.leftanchor.com/e/the-bs-epi...
Today, Jimmy Carter turns 100. His book Talking Peace (1995) is free to read on Archive.org.
See how he explains this in the first few pages:
For 400 years, the Ottoman Turks ruled Palestine. After World War I, the League of Nations allowed Britain to take over. After World War II, the United Nations wanted to split the land into separate Jewish and Arab states. War broke out. Israel declared victory, though no surrounding Arab states would recognize it. Jordan took the West Bank. Egypt took the Gaza strip. In 1967, Israel seized territory from Egypt, Syria, and the Palestinians.
"the work of Rosa Luxemburg [1871–1919], which theorizes, among other things, the alchemical process which transforms local disruptions into a revolutionary crisis" — Aparna Gopalan, news editor for Jewish Currents, Sept 20, 2024
In Kate Evans's book, Red Rosa, Gopalan says,
"We see Rosa growing up as a Jewish, disabled girl in Tsarist Poland, reading Marx as a teenager, and quickly coming to situate her own experiences of discrimination inside a grander narrative of global racial-capitalist exploitation ('I am just as much concerned with the poor victims on the rubber plantations of Putumayo, the black people in Africa with whose corpses the Europeans play catch . . . I have no special place in my heart for the [Jewish] ghetto. I feel at home in the entire world wherever there are clouds and birds and human tears'). We see her break gender barriers to study in Zurich; fall in revolutionary love; speak at the Socialist International; publish both propaganda newspapers and a dissertation on Polish industrialization; and eventually, move to Berlin and join the rapidly growing Social Democratic Party, whose trajectory she quickly influenced with her writing and speeches."
The final paragraph of Chapter 3 of Corpses, Fools and Monsters: The History and Future of Transness in Cinema by Willow Maclay and Caden Gardner (Repeater, 2024):
“The end of the 1970s foreshadowed the incoming political and cultural backlash against the LGBTQ community. Gay men and women were the target of many discriminatory firings that made the news around this time. In 1976, physical education teacher Steve Dain made national news when he was fired from his position due to being a trans man. For years, Dain was the most visible trans man in the United States. He was blackballed from teaching for the rest of his life, despite having won his court case against the Northern California school district. The positive gains seen in the election of Harvey Milk for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors in 1978, and his role in leading the successful fight against the homophobic Briggs Initiative/California Proposition 6 soon turned to tragedy when Milk and pro-gay rights San Francisco Mayor George Moscone were assassinated by disgruntled Supervisor Member Dan White. The subsequent 1979 White Night Riots in San Francisco, in reaction to White’s light sentencing, showed widespread anger. These systems and institutions of authority had no interest in protecting queer and trans people. This would only get worse in the Reagan years of the 1980s.”
I didn't know Steve Dain, and I don't remember ever hearing of him before. I grew up on the opposite US Coast. Dain died in 2007.
What interests me about this is that, in addition to Renee Richards playing tennis, here was another 1970s U.S. sports "scandal" where the scandal was that the person in sports was trans. Indeed, one website says: "Steve lost his job and went to court. He was briefly a media topic, but the very next day the Renée Richards story pushed him off the front page."
Another thing that interests me is that Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone were assassinated in 1978, while Dain was fighting in court. The paragraph is telling a history that links transphobia and homophobia in California: the transphobia that ousted Dain, the homophobia that killed Milk and Moscone.
More about his trial at the website The Berkeley Revolution.
From Sarah Kendzior ("The King," Sarah Kendzior’s Newsletter, Substack, Sept 12, 2024), I learned about the German painter Max Beckmann (1884-1950), who in the 1930s was exiled to Amsterdam and then to the United States.
Amsterdam - Stedelijk Museum - Max Beckmann (1884-1950) - Double Portrait of the Artist and his Wife Quappi 1941 Wikimedia Commons
From a 7,000-word article, "Israel’s Descent," by Adam Shatz, London Review of Books, Vol. 46 No. 12 · 20 June 2024
"When Ariel Sharon withdrew more than eight thousand Jewish settlers from the Gaza Strip in 2005, his principal aim was to consolidate Israel’s colonisation of the West Bank, where the settler population immediately began to increase. But ‘disengagement’ had another purpose: to enable Israel’s air force to bomb Gaza at will, something they could not do when Israeli settlers lived there. The Palestinians of the West Bank have been, it seems, gruesomely lucky. They are encircled by settlers determined to steal their lands – and not at all hesitant about inflicting violence in the process – but the Jewish presence in their territory has spared them the mass bombardment and devastation to which Israel subjects the people of Gaza every few years.
The Israeli government refers to these episodes of collective punishment as ‘mowing the lawn’. In the last fifteen years, it has launched five offensives in the Strip. The first four were brutal and cruel, as colonial counterinsurgencies invariably are, killing thousands of civilians in retribution for Hamas rocket fire and hostage-taking. But the latest, Operation Iron Swords, launched on 7 October in response to Hamas’s murderous raid in southern Israel, is different in kind, not merely in degree."
If a nation begins with "other forms of persecution...including plunder, denial of the franchise, ghettoisation, ethnic cleansing and racist dehumanisation," then "a war defined as an existential battle for survival" may catalyze yet more intense violence.
What word best describes the violence?
"The scale of the destruction is reflected in the terminology: ‘domicide’ for the destruction of housing stock; ‘scholasticide’ for the destruction of the education system, including its teachers (95 university professors have been killed); ‘ecocide’ for the ruination of Gaza’s agriculture and natural landscape. Sara Roy, a leading expert on Gaza who is herself the daughter of Holocaust survivors, describes this as a process of ‘econocide’, ‘the wholesale destruction of an economy and its constituent parts’ – the ‘logical extension’, she writes, of Israel’s deliberate ‘de-development’ of Gaza’s economy since 1967.
But, to borrow the language of a 1948 UN convention, there is an older term for ‘acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group’. That term is genocide, and among international jurists and human rights experts there is a growing consensus that Israel has committed genocide – or at least acts of genocide – in Gaza. This is the opinion not only of international bodies, but also of experts who have a record of circumspection – indeed, of extreme caution – where Israel is involved, notably Aryeh Neier, a founder of Human Rights Watch."
"I want to name the false binary of "hostages vs. Palestinians" when the real binary has always been, "soaking the earth with more and more blood" or "find a political solution." We’ve been talking about this for months. Eg here, here.
May the memories of everyone killed over the last 11 months be a revolution towards collective liberation, safety, wholeness, and a true future for everyone in the region."
Arguments over the anthem
Israel’s national anthem, “Hatikva,” is written from a Jewish point of view and refers to Jews living freely in their land of Zion. This often causes distress for the one-quarter of Israelis who are not Jewish. In the February 2013 swearing-in ceremony for new parliament members, several Arab politicians left the room to protest the lyrics. Suggestions to make the language more inclusive, even when those suggestions are vague and put forth by Jewish politicians, have been controversial.
“Great unforeseen changes—the great forward strides of American civilization—have blurred the edges of reality. The pseudo-events which flood our consciousness are neither true nor false in the old familiar senses. The very same advances which have made them possible have also made the images—however planned, contrived, or distorted—more vivid, more attractive, and more persuasive than reality itself.
We cannot say that we are being fooled. It is not entirely inaccurate to say that we are being ‘informed.’ This world of ambiguity is created by those who believe they are instructing us, by our best public servants, and with our own collaboration. Our problem is the harder to solve because it is created by people working honestly and industriously at respectable jobs. It is not created by demagogues or crooks, by conspiracy or evil purpose. The efficient mass production of pseudo-events—in all kinds of packages, in black-and-white, in technicolor, in words, and in a thousand other forms—is the work of the whole machinery of our society. It is the daily product of men of good will. The media must be fed! The public must be informed! . . .“
