I’m enjoying PKD’s The Man in the High Castle. It’s one of his more coherent books – it would be a good introduction to his writing.
Links
Israeli forces raid offices of six Palestinian human rights groups | Palestinian territories | The Guardian I’m lost for words here. But Israel couldn’t get away with this sort of thing if, say, Europe actually cared. There no longer seems to be any leverage in use. It always seems to me that Israel is testing the waters in such cases. Everyone should bear in mind that it would like to do much worse. To the extent that it’s policies are ignored, it feels free to do more.
A Saudi student at Leeds University who had returned home to the kingdom for a holiday has been sentenced to 34 years in prison for having a Twitter account and for following and retweeting dissidents and activists.
This is another reminder that social media is not a safe space for free expression. Posts and retweets that express sympathy for violence, sedition, support for unpopular causes or anything in the opaque category of “extremist” thinking can lead to incarceration in your own country or the denial of entry into others, even the western so-called democracies. A cursory web search will reveal arrests in the UK, Germany and France. Israel arrested 390 Palestinians last year for incitement on social media.
If it isn’t a nation state that comes down on you, it can be individual vigilantes who would like to see you dead. Having your own website like this one is probably just as likely to invoke the interest of the authorities. It no doubt depends on how dangerous it looks and the circulation it gets – but you can never know about that.
It is far safer to remain anonymous. True anonymity is tricky, because it depends on never making mistakes. In any case, you have probably already expressed yourself more freely than was wise in posts that will remain for posterity on the internet, a place that never forgives or forgets. Still, the web is humongous, and older data are buried under more recent data, so it is never too late to start taking an interest in privacy.
In my case, I figure that I’m at a stage when I’m never going to be looking for a job again or running for public office. The opinions I express may diverge from the mainstream but, in my domicile, would be unlikely to serve as grounds for arrest. My profile and risk factor are low. I may be barred from travel to some countries, but that’s something I can live with too.
Laws and conditions change. What is acceptable now may later become a crime. What seems to be private today may be in the hands of investigators tomorrow. That’s a risk we all take as soon as we open our mouths to say anything, or click on any button to post or publish to the web.
Links of the day
I think I’m spending too much time again reading the news. Mostly I’m reading stories that have, strictly speaking, no actual bearing on my life, so I grow agitated about matters that needn’t concern me. This is a phenomenon of the news media, though the psychological effect is similar to that of fiction: we read or watch something that is contrived in the mind of a writer or filmmaker, and our emotional reaction is almost as deep as if it were real and affected us personally. So we return to the theme of the interconnectedness of reality and fiction. On the TV news, particularly in featured stories, and in documentaries, there is the conscious effort to emulate what we are used to in watching our favourite TV series. The addition of background music, close-ups portraying the expression of emotions and other tricks of the film-trade all duplicate the experience of watching a TV drama. It’s one reason that I prefer to read the news rather than watch it.
Uproar after Mahmoud Abbas in Berlin accuses Israel of ’50 Holocausts’ | Mahmoud Abbas | The Guardian Words are wind. It’s doubtful whether any Israeli decision-maker actually cares what he says as long as he continues to do Israel’s bidding – they are not going to find a more moderate or pliable Palestinian leader. For ordinary Israeli citizens Abu Mazen just reinforces their negative stereotype of Palestinians. What Germans may be thinking is hard to guess. However in modern diplomacy outrage is usually staged. Even genuinely sickening and egregious episodes like the Khashoggi murder can be swept under the rug, if not today, then tomorrow. Israel can continue its brutal occupation without fearing reprisals. Russia can look forward to being welcomed back into the community of nations and Ukraine forgotten, as soon as it becomes economically or politically expedient.
There is one positive aspect of the increasing darkness we see all around us – the climate emergency; the victory of anti-democratic forces; the increasing number of refugees; the continuation of proxy wars; the smouldering animosity between nations; the expansion of hate-speech; the erosion of civil rights; the development of technologies for mass surveillance; the spread of motiveless crime; the destruction of the biosphere; the resurgence of religions; the growing gaps between rich and poor; the prevalence of modern slavery, the subservience of the state to corporations; the loss of culture and of cultural diversity and all the rest – it is a fertile bed for the imagination. Ugliness and nastiness are a perfect palate for great art. Good books and films are incubated in dark places. The horrors of World War II and the fascist regimes of the time continue to be a source of great movies. Post-apocalyptic dystopias are a recurring feature of science fiction. The horrors of the feudal era and of warring kingdoms inspire fantasy like that of George R R Martin. As things get worse, the literature gets better. Regardless of the consequences, whether, say, novels and films about climate change, are actually effective in spurring us to action, or whether imaginative fiction about dark regimes can urge the populace to vote for change, such art has a value in its own right. It keeps us engaged, entertained and enthralled, immerses us in realities that are even worse than the one we are presently suffering. The present is dark and the future may be blacker, but we live not only in reality but in our dreams, and usually these stories of wretched hyper-realities are populated by sympathetic figures and heroes who need to find their way in the darkness; either through ingenuity, by discovering their superpowers, through the exercise of compassion and humanity, or by cleaving to other hapless human beings in a similar plight.
When things get really bad, and worse, will this kind of fiction still be popular, or will we prefer to imagine better worlds – fantastic realities like the Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland or Mary Poppins? Will we place a positive spin on the present? The Middle Ages, a period of poverty, rapaciousness and pillage, cultivated fantasies of chivalry and romance. The only constant is the power of the imagination to overcome the constraints of a crooked and flawed existence.
Then there’s another school of thought: we can simply own up to what is happening around us, and, without worming away from it by recourse to the imagination, acknowledge facts as facts, understand that they are part of a continuum in a reality that is full of different potential, and live in consciousness and awareness of the whole. Probably the only valuable kind of action is that in which consciousness is fully present, informed not by imagination but by the actual or potential consequences.
Just as it’s hard to think of Israel’s independence day without remembering the Nakba, it’s impossible to think of India’s independence day without remembering Partition. Although it took place 75 years ago, the news media have still been able to find survivors who remain traumatized. Soon, there will be no one left to remember.
The bloody founding events of India, Pakistan and Israel took place in the same years, after Britain beat a hasty retreat from its colonial failures and responsibilities. There is yet another reminder of the horrors of British colonialism in the news now, this time from Kenya: Police chief quit after abuse by British colonial troops in Kenya covered up. A new documentary titled A Very British Way of Torture, “pieces together many of the worst abuses committed by British colonial forces through survivor testimony and expert analysis from a team of British and Kenyan historians.”
The events took place in the 1950s, when the Mau Mau movement was fighting against colonial rule. Their revelation arrives in the midst of Kenya’s election, the results of which have just been announced. As in India and elsewhere, the British left behind a working functioning democracy but a harsh legacy from colonial rule, the effects of which linger on.
Al Jazeera today has a story on how India has “little to celebrate”. Just as everyone predicted, the country has been growing increasingly less democratic under Modi and the BJP’s rule.
There are some bad dreams from which one does not awaken. Arundhati Roy and now the French scholar Christophe Jaffrelot believe that these authoritarian trends are irreversible.
Roy:
The systematic indoctrination of people on the scale on which it has taken place over decades is hard to reverse. Every institution that is supposed to make up the system of checks and balances has been hollowed out, repurposed and deployed against people as a weapon of Hindu nationalism. In terms of political opposition, there are political parties that have successfully opposed the BJP at the state level in Tamil Nadu, Bengal, Kerala, Maharashtra, Punjab, but opposition is virtually non-existent at the national level.
The whole system of elections has been gamed. You can win a huge majority of seats even without anything close to a majority of actual votes. In India, we have a first-past-the-post, multi-party democracy. This means that even if you get say only 20% of the vote in a constituency, as long as its higher than your closest rival, you win. A rich party can put up spurious candidates to split the votes. But that’s just one trick in a whole bag of tricks.
And, anyway, how do you woo an indoctrinated population? By proving that you are a better, prouder Hindu? Nobody can beat the BJP at that game. And right now, that’s the only game in town. As far as mainstream politics goes.
So, no, I don’t believe the damage is reversible. I believe we will be broken and then reborn. Change will only come when and if at all an accepting, gullible, fatalistic people realize what’s being done to them. And then it will come suddenly, and from the street. Not from the system. Until then… God help us.
Jaffrelot:
Democracy, nowadays, is a notion you need to qualify when applied to India. You may say, like some scholars do, that it is an ‘illiberal democracy’.
I prefer to use the concept of ‘ethnic democracy’ that has been first used in the case of Israel. An ‘ethnic democracy’ is a regime where pillars of democracy are still practised, including elections — something populists across the globe need to retain to acquire legitimacy — but where minorities are second class citizens because of all kinds of discrimination.
You may (also) use the word ‘majoritarianism’, which designates the attempt for transforming a cultural majority into a permanent, political majority.
[The] changes under Modi may be permanent if the Hindutva forces have not only captured power, but also society — at least temporarily — and if this hegemonic position allows them to get deeply entrenched in the State apparatus, then a point of no return will be reached.
Just as countries formerly under British rule inherited that country’s flawed democratic system, they also inherited the ways it found to suspend all pretence of democracy. For example, Israel continues to renew and institute the emergency regulations put in place in the closing years of the British mandate. Administrative detention without trial was one of them and, till today, hundreds of Palestinians are incarcerated in this way.
I read about the attempt on the author’s life and his wounding in the attack. I’ve read only one of his books – Shalimar the Clown, and a couple of short stories, which I enjoyed. Satanic Verses I once tried to read, but it didn’t hold my interest. I find something irritatingly affected about the man that keeps me at a distance. Maybe more than other authors, his personality seems to infuse itself into the writing. But my judgment is only cursory – I can’t really claim to understand Rushdie from reading one novel and listening to a few interviews. And it’s just a personal bias. Still, I obviously know him better than his would-be assassin – I suppose religion was the motivating factor and Rushdie was just a symbolic target. What an idiot, what a presumption, by an ignorant 24-year old, to harm one of the great writers of our era.
I think the irony at the heart of all religions is that real religion is not something that one can “follow”. Every religious tradition has its geniuses, but the greatness of most of them stems from the fact that they themselves weren’t followers. They were people who put their lives on the line, searched for truth, tried to go to the heart of existence and made a direct connection with the divine. In their boldness, uniqueness, and willingness to escape convention, they had more in common with Rushdie than with those who revile him and want him dead.
A good guide to religion and ideology is that wherever there are attempts to trap us in prescribed practices and ritual, such as prayer or meditation at regular intervals, we need to reject them. Whenever they take away our power to think for ourselves, require us to differentiate ourselves from others, wear identifying clothing or symbols, we should reject them. True religion is about freedom of mind and vision: we can’t understand any of the secrets at the heart of existence as long as we subscribe to set rules of behaviour or thinking.
It’s a funny thing; the religious geniuses were themselves, by the standards of ordinary 21st century society, crazy fanatics – they had to be – it’s just that they weren’t followers.
George R. R. Martin
Having finished reading all five volumes of A Song of Ice and Fire now, I began to read a bit about the author. Apparently he composed all his books – at least up to 2011 and maybe till today – on a DOS computer and in WordStar. There’s something inspiring about that simple fact: One of the most successful and prolific writers of our time requires nothing more than what most people regard as antequated software. He evidently rejected all the bells and whistles of modern word processors in favor of an old and trusted tool. As to technique, he says that he writes in a sort of daydream, though obviously he needs to be extremely systematic in order to keep all the threads of his epic together. I wonder how he compiles and catalogues the enormous amount data that he is working with? Software also as simple as WordStar? OrgMode could naturally handle both the writing and the data collection, and would be a perfect tool. When I write my epic, that’s what I’ll use.
There are two or three cats that pass at every hour by the pateo screen door, on what look like regular patrols. Their pace is unhurried, as if they have all the time in the world. If the door is open behind the screen, they take a moment or two to peer in; no doubt if they could enter they would do so. I don’t want to discourage their patrols. One day on the path we found a dead snake; perhaps that was their doing.
Reflecting on their manner of living I compared my life to theirs. Animals seem never to question the purpose of their existence. As far as we know, they never wonder if they are making any kind of contribution, whether they are being lazy or over-zealous, kind or mean. They just exist.
When humans exhibit the same behaviour, I’m the first to grow judgmental, and I try to watch my own, worrying that I too am just a burden on the earth, despite my decidedly low-key way of living.
Yet the existence of human beings is much more expensive to the planet, in terms of resource use, than that of animals. Maybe there is a reason to look at the time spent as if we are here on an expensive scholarship?
But I’ve got it all wrong. A vagabond who sleep-walks through life does less damage to the earth than an accomplished technocrat. A person who achieves nothing beyond procreating and taking out the garbage is much less of a drain on resources than a wealthy stockbroker. In fact, the poorer and simpler our lives, the better for the planet and the future of humanity. If we could just live like those cats…
Links
In PaleMoon, a browser not noted for the range or quality of its extensions, I found one that can take a web page and convert the URL and title into OrgMode syntax, for import into my blog. Perfect!
Approximately 3.7 million Syrian refugees live in Turkey. The influx of Europe-bound migrants to Greece has dropped dramatically over the past year but this week’s crossing is a reminder of the lengths people fleeing war and poverty in the Middle East, Asia and Africa are willing to endure to find refuge in the west.”
“The EU has been urged to introduce a travel ban on Russian tourists with some member states saying visiting Europe was “a privilege, not a human right” for holidaymakers.
President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in an interview with the Washington Post that the “most important sanction” was to “close the borders, because the Russians are taking away someone else’s land”. Russians should “live in their own world until they change their philosophy”, he said.
Yeah well, if that’s true, the EU should close the border also to Israelis, on the same grounds. And Ukraine supported Israel in its latest military operation.
I’m actually not so sure that citizens should be punished for the crimes of their governments, especially when the cost of disagreeing is often to be put in jail. Even when it is true that the majority of a population supports the actions of the government, ordinary people should be presumed innocent of the crimes of their countries, or at least seen independently and treated with respect.
For several months, at all times of the day and night, there have been sounds of distant shots being fired. Seems to be hunters – probably of quail. On my walks, I’ve never seen or met a hunter, which leads me to imagine that these are deeply personal men, hiding somewhere in the undergrowth, unseen, vigilant, harboring a passion for killing things that keeps them up even through the summer night.
Gaza campaign
On our morning walk, distant sirens heralded a flurry of nearer-sounding bangs and booms, as the Iron Dome system intercepted incoming rockets. Another dumb and useless round in the violence has reached a tense ceasefire. More than 40 Palestinians have been killed, helping an Israeli leader’s election run. War is a triumph of a certain kind of imagination over the common sense peace that sane people desire. Peace does not require imagination. The opposite is true. Peace is boringly simple; it means that my life and your life are worth as much, that we are all ordinary people struggling to make a living, raise our children, live our lives. Imagination comes along to encourage us to make sacrifices and agree to a reduction in the quality of life on behalf of patriotism and national identity. Domestic and external threats are conjured up in order to cow us into obedience. Violent solutions are invented for issues that can only be solved by peaceful means.
Nations are parasitical entities that live off the backs of their citizens, finding uses for their tax money that no normal person would wish to support if they had time to think about it. We are encouraged not to think – as if spending the money that I have entrusted to the government, in the form of taxes, for the benefit of my fellow citizens, is beyond my concern. It can be used to build palaces, make bombs, bankroll oppression, surveil me, or whatever other schemes that politicians and bureaucrats can dream up.
Photography influences our propensity to experience reality visually. Professional photographers are more likely to identify subjects of interest because they are actively looking for them. Lately I have been pondering this in the context of awareness and consciousness. The cultivation of seeing can help us change the way that we view reality. But the heightened awareness can also be inimical to our mental state or spiritual purposes. For example, an instagrammer who loves to publish viral photos will always be on the look out for them. The eye and center of consciousness shifts in accordance with one’s intention. If I have a prior conception of the unity of all beings, I might look for expressions of that; if I have an ideology of compassion, I will be seeking a compassionate vision. In every case, this is about finding ways to support established opinions or conditioning: My prior opinion determines the way I see reality. I look at and photograph the world from a certain viewpoint.
A slightly different result emerges from observing reality, deciding what is essential to it, and then finding a way to express this understanding in a photograph. In Let us Now Praise Famous Men, the photography deliberately shows the humanity and stature of people who the world thought of as being simply poor and downtrodden. If the vision comes from a genuine perception, rather than simply illustrating an earlier held belief, then the photography becomes an authentic record. Or does it?
A person who inhabits a post-industrial society has an everyday experience of a plain, utilitarian and modern urban space. When such a person visits places that are quite different, such as small European towns that have scarcely changed since the Middle Ages, what is remarkable to him are the ways that this reality differs from what he’s used to. He is likely to look for charming ways that express the otherness of this reality. The result is a clichéd superabundance of images of stone arches, cobbled streets, colourful window boxes, etc. It becomes almost obligatory to take a certain kind of picture; one resembling the paintings and postcards sold in the tourists’ shops. But such photography reflects a selective vision that does not necessarily express the reality lived by the local inhabitants.
I wonder how many times I have tried in my travel photos to exclude cars and other modern elements because they look incongruous in the reality I would like to capture. This reminds me of the famous Starbucks coffee cup that was spotted in a Game of Thrones episode.
Then there are photographic attempts to juxtapose the ancient with the modern, such as photos from India of robed monks speaking on cell phones. These are contrived with a certain purpose in mind.
It is a truism of the modern world and of the ubiquity of cameras that our desire to record, post and share what we see frequently interferes with our ability to truly be present in our experiences.
Figure 2: Young photographers in Kochi, Kerala
When I first embarked on a trip outside of the European and North American reality I was used to, I decided not to take pictures at all. At the time I was thinking that photos are only poor shadows of the reality experienced, and one should rely upon memory instead. To photograph reality is to change it; there’s the quantum mechanics law, according to which it is impossible to observe reality without interfering in it. Lao Tzu, my inspiration of the time, had said, “one who excels in traveling leaves no wheel tracks”.
But maybe another approach is deliberately to make photography a participatory experience and, rather than attempt to capture reality or a version of it, to make images that are themselves objects of creation. Instead of taking a photo of a street, one may take a certain detail and then enhance it or superimpose it upon another image. This may be done to reflect an inspiration felt at the time, with no attempt to stay close to the perceived reality. This kind of photography well expresses the knowledge that every attempt to capture reality is doomed from the beginning; that viewing is always interpretation. As one could expect, there are many cringe-worthy web sites devoted to the subject of art photography.
It is almost inevitable that whatever we do has been done previously and probably better. This is, after all, an era in which several hundred people climb Everest every year, millions of people descend upon the world’s cultural capitals and every aspect of human endeavour becomes hackeneyed and trivialized.
In the end, I find that, social media and messaging services not withstanding, I take or make pictures mainly for myself: either as an aide-mémoire, or because in some other way it pleases me. Nobody – not even family members – is interested to scroll through a whole album of travel photos. Maybe our grown children will look back occasionally on the photos taken of them when they were young.
Photography is not just about the product; it can also be an exercise in seeing. Engaging in it gets us in the habit of opening our eyes and trains our visual acuity. There is no guarantee that what we capture digitally will express anything of value, but it is certain that if our eyes are half shut, we are less aware and less alive to our surroundings.
It took several hours today to decide on a flight to Porto, in Portugal, in order to walk again on the Camino trail. Perhaps we will make it to Santiago on this one. Flights are expensive in this season – and increasingly immoral. But the only way to reach the European continent from this country is to fly, so it’s either that or stay at home. At least when we reach our destination, our manner of vacation will be environmentally friendly. The trip is planned for September.
There was one film at the Jerusalem film festival that would not have been D or YS’s cup of tea, but which I found interesting, so I saw it now: “Crimes of the Future”, by David Cronenberg. The genre is somewhere between science fiction, horror and fantasy. Elegant and well acted, it is set in a future when the human body is adapting to the environmental crisis by gaining the ability to make evolutionary changes to itself. There is a political movement aiming to speed this process, while police and bureaucrats fear that humanity will mutate into a new species. At the intersection are two performance artists. One of these is growing in his scarred and mutilated belly new organs of unknown function. The couple exploit this capacity in performances of on-stage surgery where the organs are removed, while a wowed audience snaps away and films them. It’s a fascinating and visually impressive movie, though sometimes difficult to watch.
I spent the last few days messing with servers on Kamatera’s VPS hosting. After abandoning the attempt to set up an Epicyon fediverse instance, I tried to re-utilize the same server for the blog and photo galleries. I’d chosen a NGINX based server, and somehow I couldn’t succeed with it, so eventually I gave up.
Next, I tried a Caddy server image offered by Kamatera. I didn’t manage with that one either; though Caddy is supposed to be really easy, I couldn’t get through the set-up. It might have been easier simply to take a plain server and to install Caddy myself.
Eventually, I chose a server image based on Ubuntu with Apache and PHP pre-installed – a configuration that I understand best. But, as I was quickly to discover, these server-related components weren’t fully present on Kamatera’s image. At least, they weren’t working. First I found that A2ensite wasn’t there, then that PHP wasn’t functioning, so basically I needed to install or reinstall all of the server bits.
After a few hours, I got it all set up again, including the emacs org-mode based blog and galleries. Now, as before, publishing a blog post only requires me to compose it, press Alt-X and type “pub”: that rsyncs everything including the posts and any media I’ve placed in the local directories to the website. That’s about as easy and painless as you can get – and it automatically provides me with a full local backup. The only actual disadvantage is not being able to publish something directly from a phone. It’s no doubt possible, with an ssh app and a bit of configuration, to publish photos over Android to the server, but not blog posts, due to the dependence on emacs. What I can do, is draft posts on my phone, using Orgzly, and then transfer them to my computer.
I think I’ll leave it basically at that, rather than risk being over-ambitious and spoiling my configuration again. There’s only so many times that one can go through the process of reinstalling a server and setting everything up without being driven to a place of “what’s the point?”
For social media crossposting, I’ll depend on Disroot’s Pleroma server and Twitter. But for that to be significant I would have to build up a follower base again, and I lack the energy and self-confidence needed for that.
From my photo blog, the view from YS’s apartment in Jerusalem.
