10/21/23

 Saturday, October 21, 2023

In bed by 9:15, up at 7:04, with some CIS/CPP and feeling kinda crummy, 46°, high of 54°, cloudy day and perhaps some rain ahead, wind SSE at 4 mph, 2-25/22.  Sunrise at 7:13, sunset aat 5:59, 10+46.

My dear friend Ed told me twice while we were at Lyn's wake  on Thursday that his children had Lyn's hospital bed and equipment moved out of the house almost immediately after her death and returned the family room  to its prior condition.  He didn't put it that way exactly but that was the gist of it.  Twice he told me.  The more I remember those comments, the more poignant - and sad - they become.

Nasty CPP/PBS day.  All day.  Keeping me off the treadmill.

Finished watching the social dilemma on Neflix. "This documentary-drama hybrid explores the dangerous human impact of social networking, with tech experts sounding the alarm on their own creations."  Scary, especially for kids growing up with it, 'users' all their lives.  More scary as AI technology expands.  Orwell, 1984  (1949) and Huxley, Brave New World (1931).  Wikipedia: "Largely set in a futuristic World State, whose citizens are environmentally engineered into an intelligence-based social hierarchy, the novel anticipates huge scientific advancements in reproductive technology, sleep-learning, psychological manipulation and classical conditioning that are combined to make a dystopian society which is challenged by the story's protagonist."  "It's not the technology that is the existential threat.  It's technology's ability to bring out the worst in society and the worst in society being the existential threat.  If technology creates mass chaos, outrage, incivility, lack of trust in each other, loneliness, alienatin, more polarization, more election hacking, more populism, more distraction and inability to focus on the real issues, that's just society and now society is incapable of healing itself and just devolving into a kind of chaos."  Tristan Harris

    I am reminded of my dear brother-in-law who used to send me insane right-wing social media crap until he sent me one evincing outrage that Nancy Pelosi was pushing a bill through the House that would preclude all military veterans, like him and me, for ever owning a firearm.  Patently unbelievable crap.  I look it up and what prompted this disinformation was Pelosi's opposition to a Republican bill that would have automatically entitled every military veteran to a concealed carry license, regardless of their background, criminal record, domestic violences history, etc.  Jim, and probably millions of other users, bought into it and was duly outraged at Pelosi (and Democrats.)  I emailed back to him the accurate information and never heard back from him.  My sister learned that he was sending that crazy NRA Republican crap and laid into him.  But he was inextricably a member of that NRA gon rights Republican tribe, wedded to it, deriving identity and meaning from it.  So it goesand so it is.  We and much of the world are increasingly in the grips of insuperable tribalism.  We are doomed.

    In 1941, Erich Fromm published Escape From Freedom about Fascism and Nazism and the psychology underlying authoritarianism.  I underlined one sentence on page 240: "The right to express our thoughts, however, eans something only if we are able to have thoughts of our own."  He anticipated our silos and the role of social media.

From Friedman interview in NYT:  "To think about Israel, I think, today, you have to hold three thoughts in your head at the same time. One is that Israel is an amazing place. What Israel has built in 100 years, in a deeply hostile environment, from science to medicine, to literature, to the ingathering of exiles, and medicine, it’s just amazing, number one.

Number two, Israel does bad stuff. Israel does bad stuff sometimes. It steals Palestinian land. It lets settlers occupy land illegally and then legalizes them. Israel does bad stuff. And third, Israel lives in a crazy dangerous neighborhood. Their neighbors are not Canada and Mexico.

Now, I have no problem holding all three of those thoughts in my head at the same time. Unfortunately, most people can’t. And so I’m always just looking in my own mind not for a knockout blow — there just aren’t any. I’m looking for the least bad that buys the most time. That’s my whole philosophy of life. Israel, do the least bad that buys the most time because there is no once and for all.  

From "Ukraine, a Sniper Mission and the Myth of the ‘Good Kill’

in this morning's NYT, by Thomas Gibbons-Neff, a story that made me think of Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan:

 "Violence in any conflict is processed differently by those involved and those not. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has been characterized by its sheer brutality — including cities leveled by bombardment and mass graves — and by how accepting much of the world has become of wholesale death and destruction. . . . Raptor  [a Ukrainian sniper] was working his way through the subject that sniper cultures often avoid. Few times during my deployment did I pause to consider the Taliban. At least in conversation. We conditioned ourselves that Talibs were targets and little else. Our time revolved around killing them as they killed us, and before they killed us more.

It would take years for me to realize how indoctrinated we all were. Raptor already understood — at least enough to articulate his findings to a stranger in a stairwell amid the thud of distant artillery strikes — that he was killing a human being, and trying to explain why.  For me and my comrades, all these years later, the reason we chose to kill can continue to elude us.  We found ourselves in the middle of some poorly thought-out counterinsurgency strategy, propping up a corrupt government that collapsed almost as soon as the United States left. We were protecting each other. That became a binding ideology, all the clarity we could summon in the puzzle our politicians in Washington handed us. We stumbled through exhausted, mouthing our lines, until our tours ended and we were discharged.  Now we’re discomforted by our own killings, aware of the details and the violence we committed under the bright banners of “nation-building” or “winning hearts and minds,” or whatever our officers told us as the seasons changed. In the shadow of our failures, our silence hangs over it all. [Italics mine]

Russians in Ukraine, Hamas in Israel,  U.S. Cavalry in America.  From an exhibit at the Colorado History Museum in Denver about the Sand Creek Massacre of Cheyenne and Arapahoes on November 29, 1964.

The US troops opened fire on our camp before many of us knew what was happening. They started shooting into ou tipis with revolvers, repeating rifles, and exploding artillery shells. Many died in their beds. Many more were shot and mutilated while running away. Cheyenne Chief Black Kettle made sure the soldiers saw the white flag of surrender and the US flag fiving above our camo. Another important Cheyenne chief, White Antelope pleaded with the soldiers to stop attacking the peaceful camp by singing a journey song. But he too was shot. He died underneath the flags Colorados Governor Evans said would show that we were peaceful

Soldiers bashed in children's skulls with rifle butts. Letters from witnesses tell stories of worse. They record many atrocities, including US soldiers cutting unborn babies out of their dying mothers' wombs. Cheyenne and Arapahc survivors fled or dug pits in the cresk bed where thou could hide. Some survived and told their stories to their children.