Posts tagged "news-actualia":

Back from America

Back from the US to the turmoil of this Jewish-Israeli intifada, which is only getting worse. With this people and government it's like the cliché about when an irresistable force meets an immovable object. So far neither are giving way though the government is showing more signs of stress than the people on the streets are showing signs of despair.

NATO and Russia

It's frustrating to see that people calling for peace in Ukraine can be dismissed so easily as Putin sympathizers. This is a classic move to silence critics and peaceniks, in almost every conflict. Accuse them of working for, or playing into the hands of the enemy. So that's how we should relate to these statements also today. There are some, like Donald Trump, who aren't afraid to speak bluntly. Quoting Jonathan Cook's article of today, Trump apparently said: “FIRST COME THE TANKS, THEN COME THE NUKES. Get this crazy war ended, NOW.” Easier said than done. A stitch in time would have saved nine. But for people with vision and courage, there could also be an opportunity here: to rethink and remake the security arrangements between NATO and Russia in such a way that neither side feels threatened, and ensure peace into the 22nd century. This was something that needed to be done quite some time ago. How much further do we have to go down the road towards annihilation before we realize that this is what was needed? I think the war was, all along, never really about Ukraine.

Trends I'm seeing

Israeli TV news reported that homophobic hate speech and attacks are up 75% since the last elections, which were a victory for religious rightwing extremists, who want to reinstate "Jewish values".

A film, thoughts about Epicyon and federation, links

Went with Y and D to see Cinema Sabaya, which is amazing. I didn't feel like making the effort to see it and D almost had to drag me along - it would have been insulting as Y had already bought us the tickets. But I was immediately caught up in the film, because it's simply so well done. A mixed group of Arab and Jewish women take part in a video-photography course. From class to class and exercise to exercise they learn about each other and themselves; where they can relate to one another as sisters and where they cannot agree; where they can support one another and where they shouldn't press too hard. There are layers on layers of complexity. The film is utterly engaging and unfailingly authentic.

Diary

I made a new fedi personal instance using epicyon. It took hours, and wasn't even my first choice. I rented the new server under the assumption I'd be using Streams. See the post I wrote on epicyon itself here. It's actually a temptation to continue using epicyon's blogging feature. But org-static-blog gives me better possibilities for presentation.

Journal

I am gradually picking up many of the connections I previously had, just because someone ends up boosting posts by one of them, here and there. As a result, my timeline is growing more interesting by the day.

War and occupation

Jonathan Cook and Noam Chomsky have good pieces comparing western attitudes on the war in Ukraine to wars and occupation in Palestine and Iraq. Predictably, it's fine to express righteous indignation towards what the Russians are doing in Ukraine but not against the US or Israel.

Freedom outside the press

Yesterday I listened to a 90 minute interview of Kim Stanley Robinson by journalist Ezra Klein in his podcast. It's the first time I'd listened to Klein - I had never even heard of this seasoned American journalist. But the interview was impressive from both sides. Klein, who says that Robinson's Ministry of the Future was the most important book that he'd read that year managed to ask questions about many of the central features of the novel, and, in response, Robinson spoke about topics like Eco-Marxism, which is an ism that I hadn't heard of.

Europe and its problem with Fascism

The world watches in trepidation while yet another European election threatens to bring in right-wing populists - this time in Italy. It's pretty exasperating to see this constant tussle between inept centerist parties and their far-right adversaries. Europe needs change, but its people keep looking in the wrong direction, choosing the worse over the simply bad.

2022-4-26 - olives, loquats | dealing with complexity | web fonts

The olives are in bloom, meaning many people will have allergies. It looks like there are many flowers this year: does that mean there will be many fruits? (Olives are famously biennial bearing).

2022-04-14 Collective fantasies

I've been thinking that, considering the unreality of the world, or worlds, that we inhabit, it may be more intelligent to spend as little as possible time with what seems to be “the hard reality”. Children, when they are given the freedom to be somewhat detached from a need to earn a living or take an active part in their parents' world, grow wings. They have the ability to dream, to engage in fantasies of their own making. We all think that this is wonderful. Yet, when children “grow up” they are gradually expected to conform to the hard realities of the adult world, where engaging in fantasy is excoriated and shunned. Collective fantasies especially are reviled, such as QAnon, by people who are not part of that, and vice-versa. Half of society is accusing the other half of engaging in fantasy, and there are sub-groups and cults: political and spiritual.

2022-04-10 Spread of Autocracy | Messaging | Degoogle resource | Libre-DNS | Sri Lanka

I am thinking to make the font size of this blog bigger. In my browser, I do that anyway, and I find that I like the look of blogs with a large font size.

2022-03-24 нет войне

I am home alone for a long weekend while D is away on a mindfulness retreat. Plenty of work to do though - both for the office and around the house - some gardening if the weather permits. Just woke up at around 5 AM and am sitting here listening to Cafe de Anatolia music [1], a little loud.

2022-03-07 - Media blindfolding

"The first casualty is truth" is drivel in a world where wars are completely unnecessary for the proliferation of fake facts, but I know from my Israel-Palestine experience that whenever a truth seems too unequivocal, reality is probably not what it seems. So when, thanks to someone on the Fediverse, I discovered Max Blumenthal's article on neo-Nazi infiltration in Ukraine, I breathed a sigh of relief and started fishing around for more. Noam Chomsky, of course has interesting things to say too (US Approach to Ukraine Has “Left the Domain of Rational Discourse”).

2022-02-23 - Russia and Ukraine | Sufi music | Garage Philosophy

Jonathan Steele in the Guardian has an interesting article about how we ended up with the current situation - as expected, it isn't all Russia's fault. Also, according to him, Russia has already won, in terms of denying Ukraine the possibility of joining NATO, because the alliance does not admit countries that do not control their borders.

2022-02-22 - Russia and Ukraine

Now that Russia is actually invading Ukraine, thoughts about what both sides could have been doing to de-escalate the situation and avoid war become irrelevant. It's a clear case of a large country bullying a smaller one, and the Russian leader deserves to be reviled. There was a lot of nonsense spoken about how such military intervention and aggression is no longer possible in the 21st century, and that the build up we were seeing was "actually the war". Subtlety of that sort doesn't exist in Putin's world; people were forgetting his long record. I also feel incredulous at wars and military campaigns. I feel like that every time Israel embarks on its periodical campaigns against Gaza. But it is dangerous to project one's personal value system and think that leaders and nations share it. They don't. It's the same group violence we have known for 10,000 years, using the technological means and systems of the current era. It isn't likely ever to stop, just to adopt new forms.

Diary and links

2022-02-02 22:22 - Wow that's quite a time and date! Not intentional, I swear. Today was also my brother's birthday, and the day my eldest son moved to his new house. Our own house suddenly got bigger since they were moving out from the part that we divided off to rent out. I think we're done with renting, so we'll have a couple of guest rooms.

World Wide Waste

There's a website called "World Wide Waste" that is dedicated to the subject of digital waste and its costs to the environment. It seems to me that it is less of a subject for the individual than for the corporations, although we are all guilty of over-streaming. I wonder whether the environmental costs of internet streaming is greater than reliance upon satelites? It may be that since both exist, it makes little difference. It must be better to use videoconferencing than traveling and commuting. Harari makes the point that we don't really have an energy problem - there is infinite energy that we could obtain. It's just a technological and an environmental problem. If we can only solve the 21st century technological problems of polluting industries, we will be able to enjoy the tech advantages, but, along the way, we are making terrible misjudgments. Humans are inherently wasteful. We need to cut down on packaging and processed foods, products that are wasteful.

Extraordinary times

We are living in an extraordinary time in which the viability of our institutions, the myths of society, and the true worth of leaders, is severely tested. Some leaders, like Donald Trump, are so completely confounded by the challenges that whatever they do or do not do places them in a situation of appearing ridiculous. Others, like Angela Merkle, do not need to be very vocal, since they sit atop functional systems that just work, or at least work better.

Foreign workers

“Foreign workers are particularly vulnerable, with a weaker support network and language barriers that prevent them from seeking government help…”

Thoughts on Brexit

The UK has not been my home since childhood. I will probably never go back to live there. Yet my only passport is British, and I might wish to live one day in a European country. Here’s what I think about Brexit.

Richard Stallman's site

I’ve been checking Stallman’s site to see what he will say about his resignation from the Free Software Foundation, as I think it is curious that on the site he mentions his resignation from CSAIL at MIT but nowhere mentions his resignation from FSF. That’s true till today, though a week has passed. I suppose he’ll get around to mentioning it eventually, but it does seem a little odd. For now, there is only the notice on the FSF website to rely upon.

Stallman's resignation from MIT and FSF

https://fsfe.org/news/2019/news-20190917-01.html

Regarding Stallman

I once went to a Buddhist meditation workshop where the teacher pointed out that if we were there in the room, it meant that we had not attained perfection, and that we still had something to learn. It’s also true that if we still believe ourselves to be here on the planet, living a separate existence, we have something to learn. And what we have to learn is basically that there is an underlying unity upon which everything depends. Our world is an illusion because our perception is false. It is false because it fails to include awareness of the unseen unity that gives life to all that we see. Including ourselves. There are many ways to express this truth, and none of them are going to do it very well, because we are attempting to express the inexpressible. When we do so, contradictions emerge – a Buddhist will say this in a certain way; an Adwaita Vedantin will say it in another way, a shaman in a third way, and to our minds they seem to be contradicting one another. When it comes down to words, there are always going to be contradictions. Words are a vehicle for our thoughts, and thought cannot capture the reality that underlies the thinker and her thoughts.