I’m not doing particularly well, especially mentally, despite having tons of opportunity and successes. Worried about the younger cohorts, but I guess that is a tale as old as time.
I’m not doing particularly well, especially mentally, despite having tons of opportunity and successes. Worried about the younger cohorts, but I guess that is a tale as old as time.
I met the son of a family friend today, he's 13, already has an opinion about the Israel/Palestine war and spent $500 in roblox so far, they're not wealthy at all. Back in my days I was stuck in the free to play parts of mmorpgs (or had to beg for months for a $5 monthly membership), playing tf2 (free) and had 0 political ideas or even knew people who cared about politics
Young people emulating the adults in their life is how it always has been.
Then I got several years in the workforce and realized I wanted nothing to do with the Republican party.
It should give you some pause that a 10 yo has the same level of understanding of global politics.
Some politics are more complicated. Other politics are treated as more complicated because people get uncomfortable when you point out that they're casually endorsing-via-silence the mass murder of one group of people by another.
There's nothing complicated there. If you as a nation state or standing army are obliterating an opponent that can't fight back in a meaningful way, with lethal force, along an ethnic or racial line, that's a genocide. That's just what that is. The past year of desperate attempts by the West to re-frame it as something else have not been successful for exactly that reason.
And before you say it, no Palestine is not innocent. But unless I missed some pretty radical court proceedings in the UN, the punishment for their crimes as a state was not ruled to be "Israel gets to ethnically cleanse you" which is what is now happening.
> It should give you some pause that a 10 yo has the same level of understanding of global politics.
Kids aren't inherently stupid either. Kids have a lot of good questions to ask about our modern world and the fact that you don't have answers beyond "that's the way it always has been" both a) does not make that complete horseshit far more often than not, and b) does not make the question somehow lesser compared to you, irrespective of how many journey's around the sun they've taken.
Israel is itself a project of the latter end of colonialism, and like many projects and side-effects and consequences of colonialism, we will be feeling it for hundreds if not thousands of years into the future. I don't know how you fix it, apart from letting Israel demolish Palestine, and all the human horror that comes with that.
That's a lot of words to say you have no resolution.
> I don't know how you fix it, apart from letting Israel demolish Palestine, and all the human horror that comes with that.
I see. Maybe you do have a resolution.
Should Europe have used Palestine for this purpose, that is debatable. But to lump it into the same colonial endeavors such as England's occupation of India or Belgium's occupation of the Congo just doesn't add up.
https://www.yadvashem.org/articles/academic/holocaust-factor...
The Holocaust created hundreds of thousands of European Jewish refugees and international sympathy which had an effect on the UN vote for statehood.
However localizing it in an area none of them had any stake in was better politically, and yeah it meant pissing off basically every neighboring country to Israel, but that was also in line with the other priorities the West was holding: a strategic, permanent emplacement in the middle eastern region that would not ever oppose Western interests in any way, because it owed it's existence to the West.
It's a brilliant strategy overall as long as you ignore how it treated entire swaths of humanity as beneath consideration for what their own futures looked like, as long as those swaths of humanity were darker in complexion than yourself.
Who was the land taken from? It was owned by the British from WWI to '48. Before that, it was owned by the Ottoman empire, before that it was an Egyptian kingdom and going further back it was the Roman empire. And at some point before that, it was Judea which was the land of the Jews. The Romans renamed Judea to "Palestine" to remove the connection of Jews to that land.
"Like, there's no reason at all (apart from latent, extremely quiet antisemitism on the part of the Allied powers post WWII that they didn't want to discuss) that all those refugees couldn't have been subsumed into any of these countries, especially America, who at the time was boasting not only the only economy not obliterated by WWII, but also shit tons of open land."
Israel was pretty empty too in 1948. There was enough room for the European refugees and the Palestinians. The 1948 partition was not the best for everyone, but it did give both Jews and Palestinians a new homeland, something neither had post Judea or anytime for the Palestinians.
A big reason for wanting their own land, was to provide a safe haven. Jews were doing very well in pre-Nazi Germany, and that changed quickly. The same could happen in the US too. There's historically been very few safe havens for Jews in Europe (And America is pretty much an extension of Europe).
I don't agree with your premise about colonialism or that Israel was created to be a bridgehead for western powers. But I do appreciate your writing and dialog on the matter.
The people living there.
I think this was pretty clear from the context of what the commenter said when they referred to the "nations" from which the land was taken.
In terms of, you know, the people who had been living on that land peacefully for more than a thousand years.
Not from the various dying empires that temporarily occupied that land, and pretended to "own" it.
Israel unilaterally declared independence following what was in essence a civil war in Mandatory Palestine. The UN had partitioned the territory but Israel took much more than had been allotted to them. Israel also illegally expelled many Palestinians and refuses them the right of return to this day, which they do counter to international law. In 1967 Israel expanded even further and took the remaining Palestinian territories which they occupy to this day in the world’s longest occupation. To this day, Israel keeps taking more land from Palestinians e.g. by setting up illegal “security corridors” or opening new illegal settlements.
So to answer the question. The land was taken from the Palestinians. And it keeps being taken from the Palestinians, in defiance of a number of UN resolutions, to whom the British had given the mandate to.
In an alternative universe where Israel wouldn’t be colonial, there would not have been a civil war, Israel would not have unilaterally declared independence, but done so in agreement with Palestinians, the UK and the UN. They wouldn’t have expelled any Palestinians, and they wouldn’t have maintained a policy of maintaining an ethnic majority. Jews would live now as a minority in Palestine, hopefully with some minority protections mandated by the UN (and probably demanded by the UK as part of the independence agreement).
In a slightly less alternative universe where the Zionist national project still happens and Israel unilaterally declares independence, at any time after 1948, in an effort to right previous colonial wrongs, Israel would offer the expelled Palestinians the right to return and reparations for their years or decades in exile. They would dismantle their ethnodemographic policies, and either integrate the occupied territories into a single democratic (non-apartheid) Israel-Palestine or recognize an Independent Palestine at the 1967 borders with some freedom of movement between the two states (similar to Ireland and Northern Ireland). For as long as non of this happens. Israel’s current policies are an unbroken link to their colonial past.
Israel should get out of the West Bank, just like the way Israel exited Gaza. And I would like to see Palestinians flourish in both those areas. I'd even be happy to see Israel go back to pre-67 boundaries. But this will only happen when both sides desire to have peace and acknowledge their rights to exist. Sadly neither do.
It's patently ridiculous. Do both sides aggress? Yes. But one side enjoys the strategic and financial backing of the West for their aggression, and one does not, and ergo, the conflict will never, EVER be on a level playing field. To go back to my own metaphor, the invader in your first floor has the backing of the police department. What are you going to do in this situation?
Also what Israel ought to do, is not what Israel is doing, and what Israel is doing, is pure colonialism, taken straight from the 19th century, genocides and everything.
Only one side has the state md objective of “ethnic cleansing” and it’s not the Israelis
You can, for example, look to the Journal of Genocide Research at articles that draw parallels between Holocaust scholar Eugene's Finkel's declaration of Ukraine as a genocidal event and his point by point justification and similar parallels with Israel and Gaza.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14623528.2024.2...
There's no shortage of evidence of extremists in power on both sides calling for the destruction of the other.
No they're pursuing a strategy of using intelligence and AI to strategically target "Hamas hideouts" which both conveniently for the state of Israel and in fact are often civilian structures, which result in tremendous "accidental" civilian casualties, which Israel is clearly incredibly broken up about as they continue causing them week after week.
In reply to both this and the other person who's asking for my solution: I don't know, because fighting insurgent forces in any area of the globe at virtually any time in human history has only rarely succeeded for the non-insurgent side, and universally that success came at the cost of numerous atrocities perpetrated against the insurgent forces and the civilians they hide amongst. The most powerful military on the planet tried this exact same thing in Iraq, and 2 decades and trillions of dollars later, we left the Taliban and ISIS billions of dollars in U.S. war materiel, and the state of Iraq such as it was was quickly overrun by those same forces which enjoyed at least some level of support among the civilians they were hiding with, probably because it's extremely easy, even if they don't think you give a shit about them, to explain to people that the other side shelling their cities to rubble every day are bad people that are trying to kill them. Shock of shocks, even civilians largely against the ideological positions of organizations like Hamas, end up more or less on their side, because again, the other side is Israel, who is actively killing them, accidentally or not making precious little difference to the people at the wrong end of their missile strikes.
I would say, with a grain of salt as I am not even remotely in this line of work, but I would say: when your enemy combatants are sheltered by a civilian population, do not possess a standing traditional army that would otherwise meet you on a field of battle, and are prepared to carry this out as long as your state is: then there is no solution, apart from killing everyone. The problem is the more civilians you kill in your quest to kill the combatants simply makes your combatants job of recruiting people to their cause even easier, because you killed their family in the previous bombing run. Ergo, the logical endpoint of this cycle is either returning to the stalemate that has persisted for decades now, where Hamas takes pot shots at Israel from neighborhoods, or the Israeli's just finishing the job and turning Palestine and what remains of her people into dust and corpses. Simply openly declaring that one state, Israel, and her people, have a greater right to exist than Palestine and her people do, and let that play out.
However, that is an ethnic cleansing, and IMO, still a heinous crime against humanity unless we're just going to plunk down some UN courts and say, once and for all, that a resistance movement fighting inside a besieged state is such an impossible strategic puzzle to solve, that it's okay to just obliterate the entire fucking thing. Which is an option, though I think it's a pretty horrific one.
But how are you so sure that doesn't apply to you?
As you noted, the first[1] batch of mass-media "influencers" were AM Radio hosts, then came cable infotainment , and now vloggers.
1. Perhaps preceded by syndicated newspaper columnists, but there was an editorial filter for those.
I would be more worried about those who by this age didn't develop any interest in geopolitics - it affects them all the same but they typically don't understand why and pick whatever source tells a more compelling story.
And the war or whatever we call the situation in Gaza would be something I'd want to shield my 13-year-old child from having any knowledge of if I were a parent -- for basically the same reason I'd want to shield them from learning about sadomasochistic sex as long as possible.
Anyway I need to ask the same question I always do in such conversations: what's the plan when this hypothetical child hits legal age and immediately receives the legal right to learn about all of this at once?
> I don't recall any opinions about Vietnam
It was constantly on the nightly news. The Vietnam War was one of the first widely filmed conflicts. Plus, there were regular violent protests against the draft. I find it hard to believe that the adults around you didn't have strong opinions about it. Did that not interest you or affect you?I am bit younger, but I was exposed to the outfall of Vietnam through Hollywood films and documentaries.
> the situation in Gaza
Your (hypothetical) 13-year old child is probably learning about it in their social studies class. Also: What age do you think German children begin to learn about the National Socialist/WW-2 era? I guess around 12-13 years old, and they turn out pretty well-adjusted to the world (in my humble opinion).Sure maybe there's a minority of kids with social media/smartphone bans nowadays, but they're probably as plentiful as 13 year olds interested in geopolitics in the 1970s.
I browse Instagram's TikTok clone ("Reels") when idle, it's rather dull, when that hurricane hit a few weeks ago, the stories were all about that, a few days later it was forgotten. Obviously, lately it's been about Luigi Mangione...
At 13 (early 2000ish) I was reading the newspapers my parents brought home and debated a friend of mine who in turn read his parents' newspapers - mutually exclusive sets from opposite ends of the political spectrum.
I need ask: when is the best moment to, as a parent, introduce a young person to the news cycle? You'll inevitably have to since they're on their way to become voters and taxpayers.
My first independent political opinion (if we can expand politics to include techno/digital politics and not just national/state/local government politics) was formed at the age of 4/5. Just from reading discussions and arguments around me.
And, as a girl and a lesbian, I was starting to read ideological theory in part to cope with my life situation pretty early: I followed news about gay issues because I knew I was gay at 6/7 and it was clear that some people were okay with that and some were very much not and I needed to know the difference. Likewise with being female - the switch up in how I was treated by men when I crossed the pubescent threshold led me to seeking out books/works/discussions on feminism (as well as arguments against it). Suddenly, people cared a lot more about my body than they ever had before, and as an intellectual child, I wanted to understand what was going on.
I'd expect that's even more common now and extends to new groups of people. I know I've seen young men/teenage boys talk about how a lot of anti-male sentiment filters down and makes them feel terrible and also having to deal with their own switch in puberty where people go from feeling protective of them to scared of them.
A lot of politics and the news cycle has to do with domestic cultural issues, and many children are very aware of those by the time they reach 9 or 10.
International politics is something that a lot of adults don't engage with on any meaningful level, and conflating the news/political awareness solely with international military conflict would be an error, I think.
I think the best time to introduce children to politics and the news cycle is when they start asking questions about why the world is the way it is, or why different families/places do things differently than their own family or culture. Or when something political touches their life in a very personal way: e.g. the Japanese-American children being interned during WWII would have to be introduced to politics. This is going to vary by child; I don't think there is a hard and fast rule.
As a parent now, we ‘know’ more than ours did. Helping with guidance is our role!
Anonymity is new and probably not something the human brain, which isn't meant to handle more than a few hundred familiar faces, can manage reasonably.
If you want anonymity 200 years ago, you had to print your own pamphlets and hand them out on the corner in a costume and hope nobody recognized you. Then you would go to church on sunday where the entire community would gossip about everyone's "sins" after the service.
Human history was radically more transparent about who was doing what, and who was saying what.
Nobody standing on a sop-box ever wore a mask, and while most used pseudonyms or pen names, there were only so many printing presses in the colonies, but that didn't stop the American rebels from spreading their claims.
So, yes, it's relatively new. But it's not the only thing that's new.
Which has the better culture? 4chan, or professional settings and churches? Non-anonymous settings almost universally have better culture because people's behavior has an impact on their social standing in their community.
I wouldn’t say you can compare churches and 4chan - one is an online activity with millions of people around the world joining; the other is a highly intimate affair conducted in a small community.
Have you seen Facebook? Anonymity does not, in any way, preclude horrible behavior and harassment.
Also, reducing the problem to “bullying and harassment” is frankly laughable, and gives rise to the suspicion that you at most only skimmed the page.
Anonymity and pseudonymity are big enablers of bad behavior, since it shields reputational harm that would normally be incurred by engaging in that behavior.
Possibly. One could argue that the problem is not nearly as closely linked to anonymity as you argue it is, but even if it was, we would still need to have anonymity, including all its drawbacks, in order to make participating in the public sphere possible to all, instead of being restricted to a privileged few.
> There's no way to get the same level of social responsibility in an anonymous space.
You do know that this very forum qualifies an an anonymous space, right?
You realize non-privileged people have participated in non-anonymous forums for ages. What on earth justifies the statement that without anonymity public discourse is impossible for non-privileged people? You realize that just because an article on geekfeminism.com claims something is true... doesn't actually make it true?
It's just a demonstrably false statement. Take, say, labor organizing. People who weren't privileged participated in the public sphere in a non-anonymous fashion. The Civil Rights movement was spearheaded by people who were de jure second class citizens. I could go on with example after example of people who weren't privileged participating in public discourse with their real identities. I'm truly at a loss as to how one can assert that anonymity is necessary to "make participating in the public sphere possible to all, instead of being restricted to a privileged few" in spite of the all the non-privileged people throughout history who participated in public discourse under their real identifies. It's objectively not necessary.
> You do know that this very forum qualifies an an anonymous space, right?
Correct. Which is why commenters are emboldened to say demonstrably false things, like claiming only privileged people are capable of participating in non-anonymous public discourse. I'm willing to bet that without the shield of anonymity people would actually think through such a statement and consider the number of non-privileged people that have participated in public discourse. They'd think twice before making patently false statements under their real identities.
But with anonymitiy, one's reputation isn't tarnished by making false statements. So here we are.
Today’s youth are more proactive with their identities these days than we were. We were and remain reactive with our identities. That preference influences what triggers the dopamine hits needed for life.
The drugs of a reactive identity culture are sugar, alcohol, narcotics, work, anything that’s a trope in movies made by boomers. These drugs have consequences that shape the user’s identity. For example: weight gain or burnout.
But the drugs of a proactive identity culture are those that drive the person’s perception of their identity. The live ahead of the consequences. Things like digital social networks, status symbols like shoes, colleges, or jobs, and anything that drives success in those status symbols. Example: Adderall helps the user study, which helps the user get better grades, which opens the door to a better college, which allows the user to flaunt that college association as part of their identity. That doesn’t mean there aren’t consequences to those drugs but those consequences aren’t tropes of modern life just yet because we’re still normalizing their outcomes.
All of this to say: sodas aren’t their thing because soda is “unhealthy” and that drags on their identity.
I wanted to echo this and say that I believe younger people create a "symphony" with their identity; picking and choosing from various sub-cultures to create a unique combination. Flexible, morphing.
But also I think you're falling for sample bias. The ones who don't have a billion followers are overweight and generally less healthy than previous generations.
This breeds greed for status & perceived success and 0 patience to get there. You see it here on HN all the time when talking economy and real estate - young people complaining how they they cant own some well located nice house right now, how everything is shit and their future stolen, despite stats saying exactly the opposite. Where the fuck is at least a bit of decency to wait a decade of hard effort for such a success? Thats shit for losers, nobody got time for that.
How I feel sorry for them, all the added value of technology is nothing compared to what they 'lost' or more like never experienced. At least many of them, the vocal majority, the rest goes on just like we did
Has anything else been written online about proactive vs. reactive identities, and particularly - how this has changed historically. Could it have been the case that prior to television, generations (for example "The Greatest Generation") grew up with a proactive identity culture, due to having a more proactively social culture?
— Socrates