GM nostr. 🦡

I want to start this day by saying. It doesn’t bring me any pleasure to share any notes related to the 🇮🇱 - 🇵🇸 conflict.

I have a lot of Palestinian brothers, friends, and colleagues, and even way before this all started, my stance was clear on this matter when I talked to them.

I don’t support death, I personally agree with any solution that achieves that, my friends hated that. But also, I am not a Palestinian nor Israeli so I don’t get an opinion on what is the right solution.

#nostr is suppose to be a place where there is no content moderation. I try my best to self moderate and not to say anything even remotely racist. My criticism is mostly against Zionism, the Israeli Government, and Hamas. If I say anything that is racist, point it out. And just know it’s not my intention, and I will do better.

Also, this being a free platform, there is no way to guarantee that my notes won’t be shared, replied to, or quoted by racist users. 🤷🏻‍♂️

If my notes on the conflict are of annoyance to you. Don’t be a snowflake ❄️ and think about what the people who are getting bombed and can’t just mute rockets. 🚀

بعيدة عن شواربهم

In English: So far from your mustache

You have ‘fuck Jews’ right in your name. Why the fuck would anyone listen to your opinion? Muted.

Although it was predictable ahead of time that so many Palestinian civilians including children would die as a result of Israel’s response to the attack on Israel by Hamas, as the numbers continue to add up it is increasingly hard to watch.

Half of Gaza’s population is under the age of 18. There is not much more sad in this world than children, cut off from electricity and communication, violently dying from air strikes in darkness.

And sadly this happens in other places of the world too.

For much of human history, people were only aware of their own local area. Now we have awareness of large swaths of the world, and so we can keep track of tragedies in real time. We then desensitize ourselves out of necessity. Like, the sheer amount of negative information and unsolvable problems hit us through media, and in order to productively do something to add value to someone else, there is little choice other than compartmentalization it. An electrician can’t be caught up in the troubles of the world as he goes out each day and fixes things and building things, for example. In order to add order to his small part of the world, he can’t be fully caught up with its global chaos.

And then, I see these crazy protestors tearing down flyers about kidnapped Israelis, as though that activity could possibly be the best use of their time. People have a strong tendency to want to be part of something bigger and longer lasting than themselves, whether it is their religion, their community, their ideology, or their work. But some people chose such fruitless ways of doing it. Yes, you can and should advocate for not bombing children. No, you shouldn’t try to erase what happened to murdered or captured Israelis either. It is not rocket science.

The world is an increasingly polarized place, and my biggest concern is for those polarizations to be used to take rights away in a more broader context, or to wage war between larger opponents. Politicians will propagandize any small share of “crypto funding” to bad groups to justify more restrictions on those technologies and privacy in general. As countries go through sovereign debt crises, having some sort of enemy to point to helps their narrative for capital controls and keeping their citizens in currency and bonds as they are inflated away. I’ve studied the 1940s financial environment too much to be unaware of this.

Always look through to the bigger story, and ideally with a perspective of empathy toward many sides of any complex issue. Strive to be able to articulate your opponent’s view as well as they can, so that your counter argument can be most effective and surgical in its nature. And then, when there is nothing you can do about something globally, try instead to bring order and reason and improvement and kindness to whatever small portion of the world that you can.