bsking sends along that a number of TikTok videos are showing up of people having read bin Laden's "Letter to America" for the first time and been shaken by it. Not shaken in the sense of "I never realised how dangerous these people are," but more along the lines of "I now see that what we call terrorism might be legitimate political acts by the oppressed." Well, that's discouraging.
But she also sends along a tweet from Senior PowerPoint Engineer on X: [explaining why Bin Laden's Letter to America is bad to a zoomer] "He's gaslighting you. Don't let him trauma dump on you like that. Remember there were also BIPOC in the twin towers."
That is way better phrasing, more likely to persuade, than anything I would have said. To me it sounds almost facetious. But I doubt any words I had chosen would be remotely as good.
Wesley Yang at X: "When we made the succession from a text based culture to a streaming one, all prior knowledge instantly evanesced, reformatting all prior culture and leaving a blank slate
ReplyDeleteIn the resulting brave new world children can know they are the opposite sex, mass murderers of civilians are heroes of resistance -- and Osama Bin Laden is a profound and wrongly maligned truth teller. Anything can happen now."
Response from @Hippokleides: "Overthinking. This isn't technology; if you have an education system and media that relentlessly tells people their society is fundamentally immoral because colonial, they're going to start believing its external critics too."
I think it's both...the nature of the media, in a McLuhanesque sense, and the content of the education and media worlds in which they have been swimming.
https://twitter.com/wesyang/status/1725080698514452813
I linked an excerpt to an interesting passage from the Comanche David Yeagley (Bad Eagle) about his interaction w/a white female student.
Note especially the Cheyenne saying he quoted: "A people is not defeated until the hearts of its women are on the ground"
Several people have observed that those tearing down the 'Kidnapped' posters seem much more than 50% female.
Somewhat tangential, nobody under 35 remembers any of the Cold War, and nobody under 60 remembers even the dying embers of the post-WW2 Pax Americana. The past is another country to them. I count myself lucky that my son knew his WW2 vet grandfather well enough to realize the significance of those events.
ReplyDeleteI'm 80. I remember well my WW I grandfather and my WW II father. (They fought over the same ground in France a quarter century apart.) And I remember the 50's and 60's. We were better then, even race relations were better. (I lived in Dorchester.)
ReplyDelete1965 was the absolute peak for working American, and it might be the peak for the middle class, too. Real working class wages have declined steadily since then, and middle class salaries have stagnated. The upper 10% have captured ALL the economic growth since 1970, and they have even clawed income away from the workers.
And that silent coup extends to other areas as well as economics. The US Ruling Caste has started 80% of the 250 odd wars that have occurred since 1945. Almost all these wars were waged against countries that were at peace with us and our allies. We are the Evil Empire. Except Granada and Panama, we lost those wars.
Somalia is entering its fourth decade. Iraq is entering its third.
Of course, our Indian wars lasted more than 300 years from the start in 1607 to 1924:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_Indian_Wars