Teach Your Children Well

In an interview Ezra Klein did with some creep in the Israeli government, the creep said the key to peace in the region was re-education camps for Palestinian children. If only they would learn the correct facts and history (that of the victors), they would then abandon the ideology which prevents everyone from getting along. Ezra might have said something about Israeli education but didn't. Today there is an article about the 50th anniversary of the death of Generalismo Franco. In the piece, the author says "we must outline an educational curriculum to teach young people about both Franco and the terror of Francoism. It is the only way to challenge the power of deceitful social media." On a recent trip to Mexico City, our guide informed us that in his opinion, Profirio Diaz was the greatest president Mexico has ever had. He ruled as a murderous dictator for 35 years but hey, he got shit done. I was taught all kinds of bullshit in my own schooling and lots of important imformation was simply skipped over. Remember the Alamo! The Open Door policy in China. Invading the Philippines: "The American use of torture, then called the “water cure,” in the Philippines during the war of 1899–1902 shocked some Americans of the day." Naomi Klein asks: " What were all those museums and lesson plans and documentaries about the Holocaust for, if not to prevent a moment such as this? And what about all those books with checklists on how to spot your country sliding into fascism? Why did so many of the people who read them – and even some of the people who wrote them – falter when a genocide was unfolding on their screens, a genocide that has blown a hole in the moral universe and decimated the shaky edifice of international humanitarian law, making any further depravity now feel entirely possible?" My point (and hers) is that education and curriculum must be approached critically. Super critically."Teaching" is a powerful entry into young, susceptible minds and this doesn't only apply to "decieitful social media". Although the internet has exponentially increased the threat. There are no easy answers about establishing boundaries between propoganda and information, but self-reflection is a start.

The Times They Are A Changin

We now live in the era of distressed jeans. People save their money to buy clothes that come with the holes already in them. They buy "organic" food that costs three times as much, "craft beer" the same. In an article about how the Israeli military used AI to generate targets which were then considered "legitimate", such disavowal is explained thus: "There is also the active suppression of their own thinking." The trust in technology allowed them to avoid their own conscience and "pull the wool over their own eyes". Now we simply have to extrapolate and imagine this process happening on a meta scale. Speaking of Israeli military, soldiers in the West Bank were caught on video murdering two Palestinians who were attempting to surrender. As they have been doing for years. Israel promises to look into it. At a protest at a NY city synagogue, a group promoting settlement in the West Bank was met with chants of "death to the IDF". Everyone was outraged! Such language! Jews were afraid and Mamdani was forced to condemn the chants. Zionism is where fearful Jews take precedence over dead Palestinians. Who really wants to know what they are thinking? Hillary Clinton was asked in an interview why young people were turning against Israel and she said the Chinese control the algorithms on the social media they watch. What she sees is real, what you see is fake. The dead babies are manufactured. She is intelligent enough to recognize the absurdity of such a statement but prefers not to examine it, prefers to suppress her own thinking. This is the ludicrous, Kafkaesque, bureaucratic horror of Catch 22 taken to the next level. Thanks in part to the new technology mediating our direct experience, or as the poet Anne Winters put it so long ago: "a sift in the structure of experience." Young people prefer chatting with their AI companion to real humans.Some fall in love with their machines. But don't worry, soon we will have nuclear fission and free energy, genetic engineering and immortality and sentient AI to fuse with us. What me worry?