Today (or Some Day Like It) is my title for posts about politics, etc.
If people are saying, “worst since Holocaust,” then the day must be unusual. But maybe every day is an October 7th for someone, or a chance to make a better kind of day for us all.
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At 44:35 of this podcast Yuval Noah Harari tells a “hopeful story” about how Poland and others let go of the past to make a success out of Vilnius and Lithuania and how that might be a model. He also says, “The curse of history is to correct the past.”
How do we get the world to let go of the past rather than use it as a club of correction?
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A few days ago I talked with a cab driver from Ethiopia about the Tigray war.
From Wikipedia:
As of May 2023, the combined impact of wartime violence, famine and a lack of medical access had killed an estimated 162,000-378,000 people, with other reported estimates reaching numbers as high as 600,000 killed
I can’t say people should be more concerned about this war than the ones in Ukraine and Gaza. Hamas and Israel often want their killing to send a message. Anyway, people see them that way. Being out of the spotlight is bad for Ethiopia, good for Putin, bad for Hamas and its wish to upend any agreement between Israel and Saudi Arabia, good for Israel. And so on.
In our attention economy, can anyone measure the link between attention and morality?
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Israel might have spent this last month flooding the web with as much of the raw footage of October 7th as possible. “Look how many I killed with my own hands! Your son killed Jews!” If every person on earth heard that tape and it was followed by “And still Israel holds its fire” it might—might—have been a way to make a kind of PR case. Ironically, though, this would have made many people even angrier at Israel. Why? Because nothing makes people angrier than shame. And while we live in a shameless era, we are ashamed of that.)
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We are all political. We are all activists. We are all keyboard warriors. But we pay almost no attention to the destabilizing effect of our actions, particularly how we spend our money. Amazon and Google and Apple are destabilizing and divisive and often made more profitable by ginning up anger and divisiveness.
It is hard not to want shiny things. We all like shiny things.
It would be cool if that want more often led to stable neighborhoods and a less zero-sum gain world.
This newsletter:
Monday: The Up and Down of It
Tuesday: Amsterdam-ia
Wednesday: At The Bottom of the Internet
Thursday—Notes on Education
Friday—Today, or Some Day Like It
Saturday—Muntrem, er
Sunday-Everything is Everything, Almost
(Sometimes I hit the day, often I am a day late . . . )