Taking a side requires information and opportunity.
Without a reliable understanding of the conflict, you end up a QAnon mark, siding with the oppressors because you’ve been propagandized into believing they’re the oppressed.
Without meaningful opportunity, you’re just posting memes into the void to relieve your own anxiety.
Who can you trust? Who can you aid? Who can you collaborate with effectively? If you can’t answer these questions, what do you think you’re accomplishing?
This out of context quote will help Ill-informed people justify their strong opinions.
All quotes are out of context. Else they’d be books.
And they all help Ill-informed people justify their strong opinions. So it checks…
A lot of people oppose information and deny opportunities because they’re “political”
A lot of “political” information is deceptive and loaded with bias.
Everything is political. Which is the point of this post. People who want to avoid politics are hypocrites.
Which is the point of this post.
You can’t bemoan someone’s disinterest in partisan slop if it isn’t their favorite flavor of slop.
People who want to avoid politics are hypocrites.
People who want to turn off the ads filling up their newspapers and televisions are perfectly rational.
What we lack isn’t human interest in world events. It is a news media that’s serving up valuable and actionable information.
The business-support model for news has dissolved away its educational value. All you have left is Page Six and a bunch of jerk off Op-Ed lightly sprinkled with State Department PR and guerrilla marketing.
This conversation is not as specific as you’re acting like it is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elie_Wiesel
Wiesel had gone on record as supporting the idea of expanding Jewish settlements into the Palestinian territories conquered by Israel during the 6 Day War
Wiesel often emphasized the Jewish connection to Jerusalem, and criticized the Obama administration for pressuring Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to halt East Jerusalem Israeli settlement construction. He stated that “Jerusalem is above politics. It is mentioned more than six hundred times in Scripture—and not a single time in the Koran … It belongs to the Jewish people and is much more than a city”.
What a prick.
But circumcised, at least.
I will always share this:
The former Berlin businessman I referred to earlier told me that he blamed his own group, people with the time and the money and the opportunity to know better, for what happened to Germany. “We ignored Hitler,” he said. “We considered him an unimportant fellow, not quite a gentleman, not of our own class. We considered it just a little bit vulgar to bother with him, to bother with politics at all.”
They thought of the government as “They.” The only possible route to a clear conscience in politics is to accept political responsibility, either as an active member of the party in power or as an equally active member of the loyal opposition.
—Robert A. Heinlein, Take Back Your Government
Missing from this equation is the risk to yourself. If speaking up has a low chance of stopping the aggressor but a high chance of injury or death to yourself then it’s not such an obvious choice.
The Nazis succeeded in building a regime of terror. Nazi thugs openly murdered opposition politicians and even oppositional voices within their own party (see Night of the Long Knives). Speaking up against them had an extremely high cost which meant that few were around to do so.
This quote needs a context. The same issue was mentioned in “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons From the 20th Century” by Prof. Snyder. It is a very appropriate read for today’s times, and I think everyone should read it. It also is a relatively short book.
The tyrannts were able to change government and consolidate power, because people were apathetic and just accepted it (for example “this doesn’t affect me”).
Remember that Germany was a democracy when it turned into Nazism. Same thing can happen in US if we let it.
Unintended consequences, what are those?
