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Do they really believe their own hype?
Hozan
Veteran
This is NOT a who is right, who is wrong thread, but rather a "do people really believe their own hype". This is not an Israel vs Palestine thread.
Today over 50 Palestinians were killed by gunfire from the Israeli army. Many unarmed. Some children. The PM tweets - its a great day for peace.
Do these people really believe these things? Sometimes human behaviour still has the capacity to shock and surprise.
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Without going into rights and wrongs and historical conflict, my question is a simple one.
How on earth has it been a great day for peace????
Either passion, aggression or ignorance result when dualism arises.
That is one side of the story.
The Israeli's will tell a different one.
Who do we believe?
He said, she said.......
I don't believe any of them really @Bunks
As my old man likes to say:
"Don't believe anything you read and only half of what you see"
Wise words from Bunks Senior
No, I don't think they do. They simply spin the narrative they want repeated while doing whatever the hell they want regardless of how people are harmed by their words and actions. The Palestinian people were displaced from their homes through settler colonialism and are now living under apartheid conditions. The world often views them as terrorists because they sometimes react with violence and rarely takes a second look at how they're being treated; but they're fighting for their very survival against a nuclear settler state backed by the US. And even when they gather to have their voices heard, engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience and protest, they're answered with violence. Their lives are dominated by nothing but constant political, economic, and militaristic violence. It has to stop. We have to stop turning a blind eye to their suffering, and the suffering of other groups like the Rohingya. It's not even defensible anymore thanks to the availability of phones and the ability of regular people to document what's going end. As much as I want the Jewish people to have a safe place to call home, this isn't the way to do it. And we're complicit.
If the whole region didn't believe "their own hype" you'd have peace.
Takes two to tango.....
I guess too, it also depends on what "truth" is being released to the world.......
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/srael-gaza-us-embassy-protests-opening-jerusalem-border-fence-leaflets-a8350511.html
We're all just canaries twittering in our cages. In the relative world, it's mostly money that gets to talk.
My speller put in Canadians instead of canaries. I'm afraid i had to smile at that, with all due respect to my cousins in the north.
@Kundo said:
It certainly will take both sides to compromise in some way if peace is to be achieved.
They said there would never be peace in Northern Ireland but the last 20 years have been unrecognisable. Not perfect but pretty damn great considering all the violence that went before.
Watching the political divide grow in the world in the past couple decades I wanted to understand what the cause was( why now?) I think it has mostly to do with the partitioning of the media. Rather than everyone getting their information from a few sources we can all get a wide array of news from sources that only tell us what we already believe. So everyone gets in their own bubble and the only ideas or hype different from their own they get are strawman views or otherwise negatively biased perceptions of other opinions. That ends up creating a world where I would say that yes, most people do really believe their own hype.
When you get to the news makers and information peddlers then there are also plenty of people out there who aren't so fully indoctrinated in their own bubbles but rather intentionally spin things and promote misleading propaganda to further their own agenda.
Trying to determine what is actually true these days takes so much work.
Hear hear.....
They say that there are two sides to a story, and then the truth.
I guess Israel and Palestine do not seem to agree what that truth is or which of their stories comes closer to THAT one and only mythical truth.
Truth is, just one truth does not exist.
Except that neither side is altogether to blame and neither is altogether innocent.
I Think our revered Buddha said it first, and said it best....
The result of everybody being in these bubbles is that they are strengthened in the beliefs they hold, and rather than being open to compromise and collaboration they take up adversarial positions where they choose to fight based on ideological stances.
In some ways Trump is a product of this process.
I just saw a newspaper article from the current Palestinian leader, likening the people of the Gaza Strip to a caged tiger and saying that hundreds of thousands of Gazans may attack the border fences. He had spent 25 years of his life in Israeli jails.
If that were to happen I think there would likely be an enormous bloodbath. I don’t think that the way that the media operates these days is conducive to increased compassion.
It says a lot about the human race that the most empathic being I’ve seen on the internet in the last few days has been a gorilla...
"If we could talk to the animals, learn their languages...."
The saddest thing about all conflicts the world over is that all children are born innocent. They have to be taught to hate. I see my eldest son in school. His class is very multicultural. At least half of his class have different ethnic backgrounds and different religious beliefs or no religious beliefs. They are 6 and 7 years of age. They are all the best of friends.
Tee Hee. Maybe belief is not what it used to be . . . or maybe it is . . .
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/jun/11/naomi-klein-donald-trump-no-is-not-enough-interview
The Shock Doctrine (2009)
That is so. It puts me in mind of what Osho said about allowing children to grow up, that they should be left as much as possible to their own devices in order to prevent the parents from messing them up. Which is not entirely flawless as a doctrine, but it has some good points.
But the natural empathic tendencies of the gorilla’s are something special. It makes me wonder what humans were really like in pre-history, when we used to live in a way not very different from our great ape cousins in the wilderness.
I think a lot of this has to do with in group-out group dynamics. Apes are tremendously violent against other groups.
For people with strong in group preferences compassion and empathy can be easily and readily expressed towards people in their groups but they have a hard time or are outright hostile to (if seen to be in conflict with) expressing it towards an out group.
"Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not; for such is the Kingdom of Heaven."
Go to a good, hot summer beach anywhere, and while the parents jealously guard their taken space on the beach, and resent the intrusion of near neighbours, privately thinking them a nuisance, all their children - French, German, Italian, Dutch, British - are playing building castles together at the water's edge... none speaks the language of another, but all understand each other very well. They play together, as if they have been doing so for ever....
In my opinion, it's not just a case of he said, she said. It's a case of settler colonialism and apartheid. It's the case of real displacement and suffering in what's basically the world's biggest, open-air prison. It's a case of people being killed, including journalists trying to tell the story, because of one nation's inhumane treatment of those whose land they covet, because things are spun a certain way to villainize one side, and because everyone else is throwing their hands up and saying 'who knows who's to blame, what's really going on?' But I think it's pretty clear, and even Stephen Hawking, who wasn't known for being overly political and partisan, seemed to know that what's happening to the Palestinian people is wrong and will lead to disaster. And to be honest, while they certainly share some of the blame, I don't blame the media for this so much as people's apathy. The people in Gaza just aren't important enough for most people's attention, empathy, and action.
And to make things worse, Trump is throwing fuel on the fire, even after being warned it'd cause an even bigger conflagration because we want a strong ally in the region to confront nations like Iran.
What a fantastic video @lobster
It is a sad fact that when you look at the basic concepts of the presentation can be boiled down to the following:
We are IGNORANT: AVIDYA
We are IGNORANT of what we experience: DUKKHA
We are IGNORANT of our true nature: ANATMAN/ANNATA
In being born we are destined to be IGNORANT/SUFFER/be SELFLESS, but we have something devastatingingly innate: INSIGHT into our actions: Its called CONSCIOUSNESS.
Go with it!
I watched a show on the ongoing slaughter of the Rohingya in Myanmar last night with my mother and we were weeping. THIS deserves the same, if not more, attention. For seven years these people have been ruthlessly exterminated because they’re Muslim in a Buddhist country. The claim these people are terrorists is laughable. They are dirt poor and struggling to eke out an existence. Soldiers raping women and children, mutilating them whilst alive (with a particular fetish for slicing off breasts) then burning them alive. Where’s the outrage over this? Is it because there are no natural resources for the West to exploit? Those who survive flee to Bangladesh and live in the world’s largest refugee camp.
Why do we not hear about this? Where is the world’s indignation? Sorry, but after watching this last night, it is indeed largely the media deciding who’s “turn” it is to be highlighted as “the baddie” I am completely gutted by the depravity of humanity today ???
ETA the show was called “The Killing Fields of Myanmar “ and was in a program called Dateline on SBS channel in Australia. All footage was filmed by people being attacked and fleeing. It was graphic and brutal. But necessary for all of us to see and be made aware.
Some do.
However
pain of others is also painful
burst bubble buddhism anyone?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buddhism_and_violence
It doesn't matter how painful it is, it needs to be addressed and action taken.
Everyone has to believe SOMETHING, I guess.
Read the psychology of attitudes, of cognitive dissociation, etc. One of the most uncomfortable things we can do is question what we believe.
(that's why I like Buddhism .. it tells you to NOT belief, and points out that belief is not the same thing as first-hand knowledge).
I remember picking up my then six year old daughter at an after school program one day and she tried to point out her new friend playing in the middle of a gaggle of kids.
"The one wearing jeans."
I think one of the kids wasn't wearing jeans, so not very helpful. I guessed wrong.
"No, the one with the curly hair."
Okay, better but only narrowed it down to about half the kids. I guess wrong again and she laughed, thinking I was teasing her. In mock exasperation
"No, the tall one!"
I took a shot in the dark, "You mean the black boy?"
I've thought of that one often over the years. He was the only black child in the room but neither gender nor race entered her description in three attempts.
This reminds me of a quote from The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. I'm going from memory so this probably won't be a quote, but it'll be pretty darn close:
"Most of the people living on it (Earth) were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy."
You pretty much nailed it. @yagr.....