"[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.
