The camera is a weapon

"He is dead and he is going to die ..."

Gardner's photographs of Lewis Payne are portraits, documents not photojournalism as such. Payne may not have had a choice but he had the opportunity to confront the camera. The same applies to the portraits from Cambodian genocide. Photojournalism is voyeurism. There are going to be a lot more photographs of the last moments of life: the view of the weapon. It's something new.   

Today, one of the most tragic pieces of art is a novel called Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stow. The novel narrates the story of slavery in the United States; this work is still alive, after two hundred years, since first written.

The Americans introduce certain principles as “American principles” and claim that these apply to the entire world. The principles they introduce are human freedom, freedom of thought, human rights and the like. Are these “American” principles? Are these the qualities of the American society today? Was it not your government that massacred the natives of America and destroyed the Indians? Was it not the same government and its influential agents who enslaved millions of Africans - abducting young girls and boys from their homes- treating them atrociously for years?

Today, one of the most tragic pieces of art is a novel called Uncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stow. The novel narrates the story of slavery in the United States; this work is still alive, after two hundred years, since first written. These are the realities of the United States; this is the government of the United States; this is what distinguishes and characterizes the American establishment and showcases it to the world; not freedom, nor equality of humans! What equality? You do not consider white and black equal yet. To this day, a person having Native blood is considered “inferior “when it comes to recruiting individuals for various occupations. And you talk about equality of human beings and freedom of thought?

Statements at a meeting with government officials; March 18, 2002

His favorite novelist is Victor Hugo.

etc...

It is interesting to realize that America overthrew his government even though Mosaddeq had shown no animosity toward them. 

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“The Bicentennial Man,” by Isaac Asimov (1920--1992) has recently been published in Farsi. I came across it. In this book, a robot suddenly develops intellect, conscience and comprehension capability!  

He'll be remembered as a tragic figure, or more. Few Israelis now alive will.

The close relationship between the United States and Europe transcends geographic proximity and transactional politics. It represents a unique bond forged in common culture, faith, familial ties, mutual assistance in times of strife, and above all, a shared Western civilizational heritage.

Our transatlantic partnership is underpinned by a rich Western tradition of natural law, virtue ethics, and national sovereignty. This tradition flows from Athens and Rome, through medieval Christianity, to English common law, and ultimately into America's founding documents. The Declaration's revolutionary assertion that men “are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights” echoes the thought of Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and other European heavyweights who recognized that all men possess natural rights that no government can arbitrate or deny. America remains indebted to Europe for this intellectual and cultural legacy. 

samuel.samson · Pathways (Piano Covers)

Watching the "left" watching "liberals" and "conservatives" defend the rule of law against Musk/Trump. 

I think this is the last time I used the graphic.

A resonant encounter occurs at the point in Freedom, Merkel’s memoir, where the story passes from her first life into her second. At the beginning of November 1990, she had just been preselected as the Christian Democratic Union candidate for Stralsund-Rügen-Grimmen on the coast of the Baltic Sea. The GDR had ceased to exist a month before; the first elections of the newly unified Germany were a month away. As she toured her prospective constituency, she met with fishermen in a little town called Lobbe on the island of Rügen. She sat with them in their hut amid bottles, rubbish and equipment, making hesitant conversation but also enjoying their ‘sociable silence’. It was a complicated moment: the fishermen, hardy men of the Baltic coast, knew it was unlikely that their industry would survive the restructuring ahead. Most of them eventually went out of business. To them, Merkel writes, European fisheries policy seemed ‘a monstrous bureaucratic machine impervious to their concerns’. But at the heart of her recollection of this scene, we find the sentence: ‘It was the first time I had ever held a turbot in my hands and felt its distinctive stone-like bumps.’...

Putin struck her as a flawed individual, hypersensitive to slights yet always ready to dish them out to others. One could find all of this ‘childish and reprehensible’, she writes, ‘but there Russia was, still on the map.’

As these last words make clear, the problem of Putin and the question of Russia always remained separate in Merkel’s thinking. Merkel excelled in Russian at school and acquired a respect for Russian culture that has never left her. She represented her school in East Germany’s annual Russian language Olympiad, and by the age of fifteen she was the national champion in the language of the occupying power. Her youthful trips to Russia were moments of high excitement and expanding horizons. In 1969, she found that unlike in the GDR, you could get the Beatles on vinyl in Moscow (she promptly bought Yellow Submarine). She met young Russians with outspoken, dissenting opinions. She was astonished to be told by some members of the Komsomol (the Communist Youth League) in Moscow that the division of Germany was unnatural and that it was only a matter of time before the country would be unified again. She was ‘like a sponge’ on these journeys, she writes, ‘absorbing anything that could broaden my horizons beyond East Germany’. 

A Bulgarian I know went to Cuba on vacation. He ended up hanging out with one of Che Guevara's sons. But he also met a man who was happy to speak Bulgarian again; he'd studied there in the 60s. Merkel's conservatism isn't cold war Western. Her openness to immigrants is something from the conservatism of the communist east. Milanovic gets the joke. 

We are the hollow men

We are the stuffed men 

Leaning together

Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!

Our dried voices, when 

We whisper together 

Are quiet and meaningless

As wind in dry grass 

Or rats’ feet over broken glass

In our dry cellar

Someone grabbed some text from Yarvin's interview, so I did the obvious. I told Sam Moyn today that and he his peers are more responsible than anyone for the failure of the republic. Musk is a symptom. If I want to be the determinist I sometimes claim to be—If *I* want to be the determinist *I* sometimes claim to be—I shouldn't credit anyone as a cause, but I really hate liberals so fucking much. And I hate the pretensions of Oxbridge philosophy, the academic "left", and cosplay communists.  

Yarvin doesn't know what aristocracy is  any more than liberals do. I'm not going to repeat myself for the thousandth time.

In other countries most of the intellectual left admit if only tacitly, that they defend the ideals of the high bourgeois. Americans have no sense of irony. The country has been destroyed by sincerity.

Trump 

By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, including the Immigration and Nationality Act (8 U.S.C. 1101 et seq.) (INA), it is hereby ordered as follows:

Section 1.  Purpose.  This order sets in motion a process by which Ansar Allah, also known as the Houthis, shall be considered for designation as a Foreign Terrorist Organization, consistent with section 219 of the...

Houthis

removed immediately by Youtube

Donald Trump has redesignated Yemen's Ansarallah as a Foreign Terrorist Organization.

Here's Yemen's response 🇾🇪 pic.twitter.com/GABDbBWRbE

— روني الدنماركي (@Aldanmarki) January 24, 2025

I’ve spent the past few weeks in Iran.

It’s been some time since I’ve been back home, with my previous visits being in the summer of 2023 and winter of 2022/2023.

The ten points below are a summary of my observations about the current state of affairs.

I do not pretend to…

— Alireza Talakoubnejad (@websterkaroon) January 6, 2025

I’ve spent the past few weeks in Iran. 

It’s been some time since I’ve been back home, with my previous visits being in the summer of 2023 and winter of 2022/2023. 

The ten points below are a summary of my observations about the current state of affairs.

I do not pretend to represent every Iranian – other people may have radically different experiences. 

Nonetheless, these points provide a useful frame of reference that go beyond superficial news headlines.

 

# 1 – Social Tensions

In previous years, particularly after the Zan, Zendegi, Azadi movement, there was a trend of sharply rising social tension between groups of people, particularly the “religious” and “secular” (the names here are oversimplifications and there’s more than two groups, but this is enough to convey my point).

One group saw the other as direct representatives of the government, or at least, privileged and unfairly benefiting from government, regardless of whether they were connected with them or not. On the other hand, many of the religious, even those against the government, feared reprisals against them in the future.

I was surprised to see these tensions had cooled quite a bit (this was the opposite of what I witnessed in the diaspora). In fact, I didn’t believe this was the case until I had talked with a great deal of people from different sides and spent some time myself observing different situations.

It is far less unusual today to see two friends walking together – one wearing a chador and one without a hejab entirely, than it was in previous years. This extends to social circles, public spaces (things like gym classes), and beyond. These different groups, with different lifestyle choices, are more tolerant of each other and mingle far more, even beyond family groups.

I don’t want to pretend this didn’t happen in the past or that there aren’t still very real tensions. We’re talking about large scale trends, not individual people. But there is a real, noticeable shift compared to the past – particularly among the young.

I find this to be a source of hope. No matter what happens politically, it’s not healthy for different groups among the people to want to increasingly tear each other into pieces.  Though the real test will be if this will persist if some new spark lights the country into a crisis again.

# 2 – Hejab

As has been the case for the past two years, in almost any street in the country, ~30% of woman, old or young, go outside with their hair bare and without any kind of head covering.

There are some variations seen – the rate of no hejab is highest in Tehran and large cities, higher in the north of the country than the south, and fluctuates based on neighborhoods. In trendy cafes or shopping centers it is sometimes closer to 90%.

This was not always the case. Despite all the changes in dress trends over the past few decades, when Vida Movahed intentionally didn’t wear any scarf in an act of civil disobedience 7 years ago, it was unusual and stood out. Today you can see someone dressed exactly like her basically anywhere in Tehran and wouldn’t blink an eye.

Zooming out even more shows how much change there has been. When I was young, it was considered edgy for woman to wear hejab in a way that would reveal the front of their hair when looking at them directly from the front but would not be visible when looking from the side. Today, it’s not usual to see people wearing crop tops with a cardigan or loose jacket revealing their midriff when looking from the front.

The government has retreated on the issue, particularly under Pezeshkian. Women who break hejab laws still face serious potential consequences – consequences that are sometimes enforced & there are still sometimes Hejab Enforcers in public spaces. But it’s not the same as the draconian “Tarhe Noor” & more often than not people completely ignore the enforcers without consequence.

While the government is unlikely to formally revoke hejab laws anytime soon, it is also unlikely the situation on the streets reverses to what it was like just three or four years ago.

None of this is to say this represents all women. There are plenty of women, including young ones, who still wear all sorts of different head coverings, including chadors. I do not mean to imply that the amount of skin women show (or don’t) is a sign of progress. 

Furthermore, focusing just on hejab risks losing track of the vast amount of other societal changes happening beneath the surface.

# 3 – Societal Change

Without a doubt the most important story in Iran today is not regional politics, the nuclear conflict, or even the economy – rather it is the breathtaking speed of change happening in societal values and norms.

That’s not to say Iranian society has been stagnant in the past (it’s been one of the most dynamic in the world for generations), but this change has been rapidly accelerating in the past few years.

These are not things that are apparent from news articles or tidbits on X. Dozens of foreign reporters or tourists may be physically present in the country and still miss it. You can only fully appreciate them behind closed doors, in family settings (particularly traditional ones), among people that you’ve known for decades.

Attitudes towards everything from gender roles, spirituality, the relationship with Iran’s past, what we want from the future, who we are, LGBT issues (I’m not promoting anything, but there’s no arguing these are, for good or bad, becoming more prominent and attitudes are shifting), and much more are changing.

What is considered a ‘normal’ lifestyle and where social taboos lie are changing. I’m not just talking about the young – this is much more universal, across all age groups. I would say the change has been more prominent among women but is not exclusive to them.

These changes are independent of any political circumstances. For over a century, different Iranian governments have tried to impose top-down reforms on society based on their ideological frameworks. When those reforms clash with the values and norms of the masses, they’ve failed.

What is happening today can’t be explained by simplistic explanations like a reaction to cultural policies of the Islamic Republic. Nor can they be entirely explained by things like social media or globalization. They are a continuation of a multigenerational struggle to make sense of Iranian culture, values, and norms in the context of modernity and all it entails.

I don’t want to oversimplify things and claim the result of this will be the triumph of liberalism, or that Iranians will turn into clones of the West. It’s more complicated than that. There’s also been massive changes in the way religion is practiced or in how conservatives justify their view of society. What is consistent has been the change.

All future development in the country, from macrolevel changes like the relationship of Iran with the outside world to people’s individual choices in their lives will be affected by these changes. Much has been discussed about the relationship between the people and their rulers, but not enough about changes among the people themselves.

#4 – Inflation and Blackouts

Ever since Pezeshkian took office, there has been a roughly 40% decline in the value of the toman against this dollar – with the price being about 58,000 toman a dollar when he was inaugurated and reaching a record low of 82,000 toman a dollar last week (it has since slightly appreciated, but it’s unclear if that trend will last).

Most of that decline has happened after the election of Donald Trump as the US president. I believe it is largely due to the market pricing in a resumption of Trump’s maximum pressure policy to squeeze out addition concessions from Iran … though monetary policy by the central bank is also has an impact.

This decline has a major impact on inflation. It also means that the price of many key goods which are subsidized by the government are unsustainable. The most prominent among these is gasoline. The price of gasoline in Iran is significantly cheaper than Iran’s neighbors, meaning that there’s a huge amount of smuggling abroad with massive profits. There will almost certainly be an increase in the cost of gasoline in the next Iranian year – which carries the risk of social instability and will bring more inflation.

The minimum wage that was set in the government’s budget bill for 1404 is already out of synch with the reality of society.

However, no matter how painful this is, particularly for workers on fixed incomes, this level of currency devaluation and inflation is not unusual & has unfortunately been the norm for the past two decades. What is unusual have been nationwide blackouts during the winter.

I’ll write another post on blackouts later, but in short, natural gas supply (the source of most Iran’s electricity production) has not been able to keep up with demand. Peak demand is during winter months, when much of the north of the country plunges to freezing temperatures & needs gas for heating. Since there’s no short-term fix for supply, there’s been blackouts to make up for the shortage.

Blackouts usually last 2 hours, during peak demand hours, and happen around twice a week. Not every area gets them – some neighborhoods haven’t lost power at all. Typically (but not always) the power companies post a list of where will have blackouts and when from beforehand (and in some cases thieves look at those and take advantage of those times to steal wires).

These have led to a lot of problems. Note that a loss of power means that pumps also won’t work, so it usually means a loss of water too. People get stuck in elevators. Washing machines turn off mid cycle. Kids who had school canceled because high air pollution have to switch to mobile hotspots if they are attending remotely.

The problems are worse for businesses. I went to a local pastry shop and saw the owner cursing everything and everyone because a large batch of sweets went bad when the oven turned off mid cycle.

Industrial production is crushed because not only does production go down, but raw materials from suppliers is also decreased, so there is a compounding effect as one goes up the supply chain. There were also major blackouts for industry during the summer (those didn’t impact residential areas), so many factories were hoping to use these months to catch up with lost production. Altogether, this adds up to a massive loss to the economy.

#5 – Taxation

Since the government has experienced a massive loss of income from oil sales and other traditional sources due to sanctions, it is increasingly resorting to taxes for revenue. Existing taxes are constantly increased, things that get taxed are growing, and there is a steady march of new regulations to report transactions to the government to help enforce taxes more effectively.

This has led to tension with bazaris and producers. For example, earlier this year there were strikes by traditional gold sellers over tax related items. Taxation rates are still relatively low compared to global norms. However, many merchants retort that the quality of services received by the government is not the same as high tax countries either (such as the electricity issue mentioned) & the public sector is extremely bloated and inefficient.

# 6 – Bazaar Protests

I saw some social media posts about a protest in the Tehran Bazaar. In my opinion the significance of these was greatly exaggerated. There was not any sort of strike that was detectable across the country. Most the bazaris I talked to believed a conspiracy theory that this was all an inside job by elements in the government to put pressure to impeach Mohamad Reza Farzin, the head of the Central Bank (a carryover from the Raisi administration).

Protests in Iran are not unusual. There are frequent labor protests or strikes by groups like nurses and teachers, with varying degrees of success. And there are also nationwide protests like those that happened two years ago. Many of these are quite significant. But it’s difficult to separate out signal from noise from watching social media posts that imply every single one is a sign of the fall of the government.

In contrast, one act of protest that I did see almost everyone I know applaud was from Mohammad Khakpour, a former Iranian football player, who praised the former Shah as a patriot on TV during an event marking the opening of Azadi Stadium after a period of repairs. I thought that act was far more significant than the video from the bazaar.

#7 - Nostalgia for the Past

As long as I remember, there has been a feeling of nostalgia towards the past, particularly the two decades before the revolution in Iranian society. This nostalgia has grown more intense in the past few years.

Basically every trendy café in the country plays music from Iran’s pre-revolutionary pop singers. There are stickers of them in every bookstore you can buy. You don’t have to go very far to find portraits of the Shah sold openly on the streets. I had a funny experience where I was trying to buy a specific book by the current foreign minister and couldn’t find it despite looking in dozens of bookstores but was able to find a Persian copy of the Shah’s book “Answer to History” all over the place.

This nostalgia is not universal, but also not limited to just one group. I talked to a former political prisoner under the Shah who praised his long term thinking and kept repeating a quote of his about saving Iran’s oil wealth for future generations.

In the past, these signs of affection for the past may have been hidden, but right now it’s very much in the open and everywhere. Khakpour was not the first person to praise the Shah on state TV.

This feeling of nostalgia does not mean that everyone expressing it believes the Shah was completely faultless or agrees with all his policies. This isn’t the case. 

But popular views of him and his rule have shifted – most people would not say he was some evil puppet of the West, but rather someone that had good intentions and accomplished many good things (and perhaps some bad ones).

In contrast, I was not able to find a single person who seriously supported his son as the next ruler of the country. I have no doubt such people exist (they’re all over social media), but they’re certainly not in my social circles. Nonetheless the numbers are not really comparable to the vast group that have nostalgia for the past or are discontent with the current state of affairs.

# 8 – Pezeshkian

Masoud Pezeshkian has now been president for 5 months. This has been one of the most tumultuous periods in Iran’s recent history in terms of regional politics. However, most perceptions of him have to do with his performance at home, not on battlefields abroad.

There’s still a lot of uncertainty about him, but his popularity has certainly gone down significantly due to the recent rise in inflation and winter power cuts. Most people I talked to viewed him as weak, without plans, and not pushing hard enough. A very popular comment was that he didn’t have the aura of the president and still seemed to be adjusting to the role.

His most concrete accomplishment has been allowing many of the professors and students expelled from universities in the past 2 years to return. There also has been a marked decrease in hijab law enforcement since he came in power. He’s objected to implementing a new enforcement law that was passed by Majles.

He did manage to get WhatsApp and Google Play removed from the list of censored apps. This is a good start, but if he wants to get things to the point where people don’t need to constantly buy VPNs, as he promised when campaigning, then apps like Instagram, Telegram, and YouTube also need to be removed. He’s implied there’s more to come on this front, but progress has been slow.

The reaction to WhatsApp getting removed was generally positive. There were some conservatives who complained this would harm Iranian made messaging apps like Eitaa. I also encountered a few far right people who very seriously believed this was all part of a larger conspiracy by Pezeshkian to start riots against the Islamic Republic – something I doubt.

# 9 – Foreign Policy

I did encounter some people who nervously joked about an Israeli attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities, but by and large most the collective conscious had moved on from the back-and-forth attacks in October. Recent events in Syria were a much more popular subject of discussion.

Almost every discussion on politics I had eventually ended up on whether Iran was or wasn’t liable to a sudden collapse similar to Syria (I side with the second group). Opinions on the new Syrian government varied.

Most religious people I encountered were quite suspicious of them due to previous affiliations with anti-Shia sectarian jihadist groups. A lot of nonreligious people also disliked them because they don’t like Islamists, and the downfall of Assad reminded them of the downfall of the Shah.

On the other hand, there were some hardcore opponents of the government that welcomed these events because they were a setback to the Islamic Republic’s regional policies. I also encountered some people who were happy because the plight of Syrian refugees was over and they could return home and because the fall of a dictator.

There was also a widespread theory that there was some sort of deal between major world powers on removing Assad from power, which included guarantees not to harm the shrines in Damascus or massacre Syrian Shias, as well as security concessions to Iran. I don’t think it’s impossible, but Iranians also have the same conspiracy about basically every world event, so it’s difficult to discern.

# 10 – Trump

The elephant in the room for the coming months is Donald Trump returning as the US president and his relations with Iran. It’s impossible to fully know what’s happening behind closed doors, but there’s been multiple signs that the incoming US administration wants to engage in negotiations with Iran over the nuclear program and other areas of dispute.

What is unclear is what the Iranian government’s response to this is. There appears to be a growing divide between rhetoric from the Supreme Leader and statements coming out of the foreign ministry about negotiations (the same divide is seen over relations with the new government in Syria).

The administration appears quite willing, even eager, to engage in negotiations. This is not surprising given that Pezeshkian pretty openly campaigned on negotiating with Trump and even stated that there may have be concessions given.

This appears to contradict recent statements by the Supreme Leader. Furthermore, right wing groups are talking about the need to tighten belts and get ready for a difficult year with significant economic pressure. I even talked to a few people who said that they expected that “the enemy would instigate unrest” in the coming year and that they were fully ready to encounter this.

On the other hand, Pezeshkian does appear to have gotten the ok from the Supreme Leader to reintroduce discussions about implementing FATF reforms into the Expediency Discernment Council. Perhaps he does have a mandate to pursue a moderate realignment in foreign policy. What happens in the upcoming months will be telling.

Bonus Observation – Animals

I could swear that the number of street cats in Tehran has significantly increased, almost to an Istanbul level. They also seem much more plump and well fed than before. My theory is that this relates to evolving social attitudes towards animals and pets & the result of people feeding stray animals rather than viewing them as pests.

writing rewriting

Conclave and La Nona Ora

 

It's a standard trope of the modern novel that the central figure is more an observer than an actor: someone moved by forces beyond his control. In a novel, or written language, the first protagonist is the writer. In film because of the immediacy of connection to the image of the person on the screen, the performer leads. Fiennes is impressive because he shows all the confusion, but he's more impressive than the character he plays. A stronger director, cinematographer, editor, would pull the interest back to the observing eye. As it is Cardinal Tedesco is the greatest figure on the screen. Another option would have been to give him much more time, to give the devil his due.

In Barry Lyndon the central figure was a lousy actor, a blank playing a blank. I want to see it again.

Ali Bati, the ad that became a meme. 

The original drawing was about progress as it gradually became more skillful from left to right.

art vs illustration, intent vs reception, reading images, and time, left to right, in the West. I always liked the meme. I saw it today used to describe the Biden administration and decided to look for the source. That's when I learned that the one move was to flip the drawing. A simple transformation, and brilliant.

Jokes are popular art. Duchamp was a joker. There are a few cases where Bati could sue, but he seems to take in it stride.

Looking at  Jeff Wall

The arms, the hands, including the fingers, the formal arrangements, staged out of observation. Degas, including the green.

The Beautiful Game

The Kyrgyzstan Football Federation released this clip for their upcoming World Cup Qualifier against Team Melli pic.twitter.com/pnU6Za86BZ

— Alireza Talakoubnejad (@websterkaroon) November 14, 2024

Twitter may not last.

Updated at the top. 

There was always to risk that the Democrats would up the ante. And they did.

New Yorkers: Donald Trump may have Madison Square, but we have Carnegie Hall.

Join me this Wednesday night to get real about this election, our way forward as a country, and so much more. https://t.co/U2OLpCvQwj pic.twitter.com/Bm2y3LCcHh

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) October 29, 2024

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This idiot did more damage to the GOP than the Democrats have recently. America will become a failed state before it's ruled by fascists. The images, repeats: one and two 

reworking something from last year. oil on canvas, 11"x14".

Gary Indiana RIP

"One Brief, Scuzzy Moment"

 

 

Indiana, reviewing Blake Gopnik's book on Warhol in 2020, writes his own epitaph, and mocks his young fans. 

This book could appear only at a time when the bohemian mobility, sexual freedom, and cultural ferment of New York in the Sixties, Seventies, and early Eighties are not simply being forgotten, as people who were there die off, but becoming unimaginable. A time when New York has become so cluelessly middle class that someone can actually write, of the back room at Max’s Kansas City, that Warhol “behaved more like the cool-cat senior in high school who the freshmen do everything to impress and who looks on with amused condescension.” This is the point of view of someone who never, ever could have gotten into Max’s.

Lorentzen now has a tag. I was thinking it was odd Indiana doesn't have one, but Colin doesn't have one either. It's never necessarily been a compliment. I should have one for the new Brooklyn Intellectuals

---

a month later, remembering Menand.

"I am not the leader of a militia, I'm from Hamas. And that's it. I am the Gaza leader of Hamas, of something much more complex than a militia—a national liberation movement. And my main duty is to act in the interest of my people: to defend it and its right to freedom and independence. You are a war correspondent. Do you like war?"

 

Not at all.

 

"And so why should I? Whoever knows what war is, doesn't like war."

 

But you have been fighting for all your life.

 

"And I am not saying I won't fight anymore, indeed. I am saying that I don't want war anymore. I want the end of the siege. You walk to the beach at sunset, and you see all these teenagers on the shore chatting and wondering what the world looks like across the sea. What life looks like. It's breaking. And should break everybody. I want them free."

 

Borders have been basically sealed-off for 11 years. Gaza doesn't even have water anymore, only sea water. How is living here?

 

"What do you think? 55 percent of the population is under 15. We are not speaking of terrorists, we are speaking of kids. They have no political affiliation. They have just fear. I want them free."

 

80 percent of the population depends on aid. And 50 percent is food insecure—50 percent is hungry. According to the UN, Gaza will soon be unfit to live in. Yet still in recent years Hamas has found resources to dig its tunnels.

 

"And luckily. Otherwise we would all be dead. The way you see it, it's the way the Zionist propaganda tells it. The siege didn't come after the tunnels; it wasn't a reaction to tunnels. It's the other way round. There was a siege and a humanitarian crisis, and to survive we had no other option than digging tunnels. There were times when even milk was banned."

addendum at the top

Smartphones are a global phenomenon. But apparently the rise in youth anxiety is not. In some of the largest and most trusted surveys, it appears to be largely occurring in the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. “If you’re looking for something that’s special about the countries where youth unhappiness is rising, they’re mostly Western developed countries,” says John Helliwell, an economics professor at the University of British Columbia and a co-author of the World Happiness Report. “And for the most part, they are countries that speak English.”

Even the Happiness Report is an Americanism. 

repeats. Haidt is a promoter of "Positive Psychology". He teaches at a business school. 

repeats. Click on the quote from Cobb at the link.

Robert Osborn, 1960

repeats and repeats and repeats. Individualism, alienation, anomie. 

all explaining the first comment below. Ilaria Mazzocco's anxious forced expressions of happiness are like fingernails on a chalkboard.

How China’s EV Industry Got So Big Shift Key with Robinson Meyer and Jesse Jenkins

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as a side note, the voices of of people on the podcast are unbearable.

 

The CCG launched a brutal assault on the AFP personnel aboard an AFP Rigid Hull Inflatable Boat (RHIB), aggressively ramming it and brandishing bladed and pointed weapons, explicitly threatening to harm AFP troops. pic.twitter.com/LuFgLE3WJj

— Armed Forces of the Philippines (@TeamAFP) June 19, 2024

At the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. military launched a secret campaign to counter what it perceived as China’s growing influence in the Philippines, a nation hit especially hard by the deadly virus.

The clandestine operation has not been previously reported. It aimed to sow doubt about the safety and efficacy of vaccines and other life-saving aid that was being supplied by China, a Reuters investigation found. Through phony internet accounts meant to impersonate Filipinos, the military’s propaganda efforts morphed into an anti-vax campaign. Social media posts decried the quality of face masks, test kits and the first vaccine that would become available in the Philippines – China’s Sinovac inoculation.

Reuters identified at least 300 accounts on X, formerly Twitter, that matched descriptions shared by former U.S. military officials familiar with the Philippines operation. Almost all were created in the summer of 2020 and centered on the slogan #Chinaangvirus – Tagalog for China is the virus.

“COVID came from China and the VACCINE also came from China, don’t trust China!” one typical tweet from July 2020 read in Tagalog. The words were next to a photo of a syringe beside a Chinese flag and a soaring chart of infections. Another post read: “From China – PPE, Face Mask, Vaccine: FAKE. But the Coronavirus is real.”

After Reuters asked X about the accounts, the social media company removed the profiles, determining they were part of a coordinated bot campaign based on activity patterns and internal data.

The U.S. military’s anti-vax effort began in the spring of 2020 and expanded beyond Southeast Asia before it was terminated in mid-2021, Reuters determined. Tailoring the propaganda campaign to local audiences across Central Asia and the Middle East, the Pentagon used a combination of fake social media accounts on multiple platforms to spread fear of China’s vaccines among Muslims at a time when the virus was killing tens of thousands of people each day. A key part of the strategy: amplify the disputed contention that, because vaccines sometimes contain pork gelatin, China’s shots could be considered forbidden under Islamic law.

old and new "Behind the chiliasm..." etc.

It is from this ambivalent conception of humanitas that humanism was born. It is not so much a movement as an attitude which can be defined as the conviction of the dignity of man, based on both the insistence on human values (rationality and freedom) and the acceptance of human limitations (fallibility and frailty); from this two postulates result responsibility and tolerance.

Small wonder that this attitude has been attacked frorn two opposite camps whose common aversion to the ideas of responsibility and tolerance has recently aligned them in a united front. Entrenched in one of these camps are those who deny human values: the determinists, whether they believe in divine, physical or social predestination, the authoritarians, and those "insectolatrists" who profess the all-importance of the hive, whether the hive be called group, class, nation or race. In the other camp are those who deny human limitations in favor of some sort of intellectual or political libertinism, such as aestheticists, vitalists, intuitionists and hero-worshipers. From the point of view of determinism, the humanist is either a lost soul or an ideologist. From the point of view of authoritarianism, he is either a heretic or a revolutionary (or a counterrevolutionary). From the point of view of "insectolatry," he is a useless individualist. And from the point of view of libertinism he is a timid bourgeois.

Iran informed Turkey in advance of its planned operation against Israel, a Turkish diplomatic source told Reuters on Sunday, adding that the US conveyed to Iran via Ankara that its operation must be "within certain limits."https://t.co/iG8Qr8WIYk

— The Jerusalem Post (@Jerusalem_Post) April 14, 2024