miscellany

this post copy-pasted from a piece by Caitlin Johnstone* – with the tweet below embedded

They’re hunting civilians with armed quadcopters in Gaza.

The drones play recordings of crying babies and women screaming in distress in order to lure people out into the open, and then shoot them. 

This is reportedly happening at the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza, where people live in total darkness at night and have no connection to the outside world.

Other times the drones play the sounds of explosions and gunshots and rolling tanks, and sometimes songs in Hebrew or Arabic, all to terrorize these refugees hiding in the darkness afraid for their lives.

This is the sort of report that a critical thinker would normally dismiss as absurd atrocity propaganda if it was being made about any other military power, but this is the IDF we’re talking about, and this specific allegation is pretty well-supported now. 

Also @Hind_Gaza confirmed this is happening: the IDF has quadcopters luring people to them with recordings of the sound of women and children screaming, then firing on them https://t.co/1ANe4myWLx

— Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) April 18, 2024

When the destruction of Gaza first began I used to read the jarring claims about the horrific things the IDF were doing and often think, “No, no way. That can’t be the whole story. It’s too cartoonishly evil. There must be some information missing.” Then a few days or weeks later confirmation would come out, showing it’s even worse than I thought before.

I don’t experience that kind of dubiousness when reading such stories anymore. There are only so many atrocities you can see documented, so many videos of IDF troops recording themselves gleefully behaving like monsters, so many hospitals you can see attacked, so many journalists you can see assassinated, before you read a new report about new unfathomable acts of depravity and find yourself saying “Yeah, that sounds about right.”

This baby-crying-sniper-drone story is something else, though. It’s like something out of a weird post-apocalyptic horror movie or something. It’s the kind of information that makes you sort of re-evaluate your previous assumptions about humanity, the world, and the kind of reality we’re experiencing here.

It is really astonishing, how cruel people can be. How cruel a whole nation of people can be made to be, if they’re indoctrinated just right. You spend your whole childhood being indoctrinated into the belief that one group of people are inferior to your own and don’t deserve the same rights and treatment your group receives, and before you know it you’re blockading aid trucks from bringing that group food, and playing recordings of crying babies on an assassination drone in order to murder civilians at a refugee camp.

That’s how Nazi Germany happened, it’s how the genocidal apartheid state of Israel has happened, and it’s how the murderous US-centralized empire has happened. It turns out it’s not all that hard to manipulate a population into supporting shocking abuses at mass scale with modern propaganda and indoctrination from early childhood. It turns out the human mind is a lot more hackable than we’d like to believe it is, and that this can be used to unleash living nightmares upon our world a lot more easily than we’re comfortable acknowledging.

This is how the entire western world has been manipulated into accepting nonstop war, militarism, nuclear brinkmanship, imperialism and exploitation as fine and normal, and into assuming that a better world isn’t possible. As long as the powerful are able to manipulate the way a sufficiently large percentage of the population thinks, speaks, acts and votes, we’re going to be stuck in this horrifying dystopia where the sky rains fire upon the innocent, where war profiteers reap vast fortunes from machines which rip apart human bodies, and where sniper drones cry like babies.

We can help weaken the empire’s propaganda machine by spreading awareness of what it’s doing and how it operates, because propaganda only works if you don’t know it’s happening to you. Help people to see the ways in which the mass media are deceiving them, point out all the signs that we live under an empire of lies, and help spread awareness of what’s really true and what’s really possible.

All positive changes in human behavior of any scale are always preceded by an expansion of consciousness. Spreading awareness is the first step toward a healthy world, and we can each do that in our own small way every single day.

… a secular dharma which promotes human flourishing and a culture of awakening needs to be democratic, compassionate and grounded in our everyday life. A secular dharma is both radical in its reconstruction of Buddhism while respectful and appreciative of traditional perspectives and practices.

The ten theses:

#1 - A secular Buddhist is one who is committed to the practice of the dharma for the sake of this world alone.

#2 - The practice of the dharma consists of four tasks: to embrace suffering, let go of reactivity, behold the ceasing of reactivity, and cultivate an integrated way of life.

#3 - All human beings, irrespective of gender, race, sexual orientation, disability, nationality and religion can practice these four tasks. Each person, in each moment, has the potential to be more awake, responsive and free.

#4 - The practice of the dharma is as much concerned with how one speaks, acts and works in the public realm as with how one performs spiritual exercises in private.

#5 - The dharma serves the needs of people at specific times and places. Each form the dharma assumes is a transient human creation, contingent upon the historical, cultural, social and economic conditions that generated it.

#6 - The practitioner honors the dharma teachings that have been passed down through different traditions while seeking to enact them creatively in ways appropriate to the world as it is now.

#7 - The community of practitioners is formed of autonomous persons, who mutually support each other in the cultivation of their paths. In this network of like-minded individuals, members respects the equality of all members while honoring the specific knowledge and expertise each person brings.

#8 - A practitioner is committed to an ethics of care, founded on empathy, compassion and love for all creatures who have evolved on this earth.

#9 - Practitioners seek to understand and diminish the structural violence of societies and institutions as well as the roots of violence that are present in themselves.

#10 - A practitioner of the dharma aspires to nurture a culture of awakening that finds its inspiration in Buddhist and non-Buddhist, religious and secular sources alike.

☛ block quote copied as is from this post on the Secular Buddhist Network (SBN)*

Chartbook 251: In the beginning was Napoleon
Infruriated by the terrible Ridley Scott film, @CameronAbadi and I did a podcast https://t.co/V0IiDWoBGv
And I followed it up with this Chartbook 251 pulling together some recent econ history https://t.co/t8mFESrsny

— Adam Tooze (@adam_tooze) December 3, 2023

Adam Tooze:

If the period between 1790s and the early 1800s was, according to Reinhart Koselleck, the period in which the modern Western conception of secular history took shape (Sattelzeit), then Napoleon was perhaps its first hero (or antihero). If there was such a thing as history, then Napoleon showed how war and military command could make and remake it.

Not for nothing, Hegel described the emperor cantering through Jena as the “world soul” on horseback. It was the historical efficacy of Napoleonic war-fighting that Prussian theorist of war, Clausewitz, tried to grasp with his radically historical and romantic view of war as an antidote to the rationalist and geometric conceptions of war beloved of the 18th century.

One hundred and eighty years later, the historian Thomas Nipperdey began his history of 19th-century Germany with the simple statement: In the beginning was Napoleon.*