On Saturday morning I fixed a few broken items with epoxy glue, but not a pair of shoes, whose sole has become partly detached. From watching a couple of YouTube videos, it looks like it will be better to buy a specialized glue for that – one that’s waterproof and flexible.
In the afternoon I met with a German group, who have been touring NGOs and civil rights groups in the country. They were very interested and asked lots of questions about the village.
In the evening I continued to watch some more video interviews with Gregory David Roberts. Some of them were filmed a few years ago – like the CNN story – he toured around Mumbai with the reporter, visiting some of the places featured in the novel – including the Colaba Slum, where his character – and Roberts – had lived. He says in the interview that this particular slum, near the “World Trade Center” would soon be cleared and the residents relocated. That didn’t happen, however the slum shown in the TV series based Shantaram was not filmed there on location. It was instead filmed near Bangkok, where “Shantaram’s crew rebuilt a shantytown, complete with a river running through the middle.” I guess it’s a lot easier to find money to create a fake slum than to re-house the residents of a real one.
Simple proposal to foreign governments: offer to move your embassy from Tel Aviv to West Jerusalem but condition that upon building a parallel embassy for Palestine in East Jerusalem.
I started to watch Shantaram, which I found surprisingly good – it captures the atmosphere and feel of the novel and the casting is brilliant. I read the novel in 2009 and loved it, of course, like everyone I know. But I didn’t read The Mountain Shadow, Roberts‘s second novel, because I read a couple of negative reviews when it came out. I sort of passed him off as a “one book” writer. Someone introduced me to that term when describing Pilgrim at Tinker Creek writer Annie Dillard; though I actually enjoyed a couple of her other books.
Anyway, after watching the first episode of “Shantaram” I had a look to see what Roberts has been doing since. I was delighted to see that he didn’t stop with those two books, but has both continued writing and has been re-inventing himself as a musician. He’s also studied under an Indian guru and become a devotee of Kali. He has an amazing look, with a red tikka down his forehead, goes shirtless, and is adorned with beads, necklaces and rings. He lives in Jamaica, which he says is a great place to produce music. He’s also been writing new novellas and a graphic novel and recording YouTube films and podcasts about philosophy, spirituality, his books and his writing techniques. At age 70 he’s wonderfully lively and creative. An inspiration.
There are a couple at climate sites where one can take a quiz to calculate the quantity of CO2 each of us produce. According to the parameters of the test, it turns that I’m pretty much a climate criminal. My wife and I share a free standing house of about 150 square meters and travel everywhere by car or by plane. That’s enough, apparently, to tilt the scale towards 11 – 13 tons of CO2 per person, regardless of diet or other factors.
I can add that all my electricity is produced by fossil fuels and a third of the water is desalinated by means of electricity.
If these crimes were not enough, I live in an apartheid state where the majority of the land was stolen from an indigenous people whose descendents continue to be oppressed today; a state that makes a living by exporting weapons and cyber-weapons and whose principal friends are corrupt dictators and war-criminals.
Being human, according to many parameters, is already to belong to a species that acts like a cancer on the earth; invading the territories of other species, de-foresting habitats, polluting the rivers, poisoning the oceans, wrecking the atmosphere and bringing about the extinction of many other life forms.
Our presence is as harmful to our environment as that of the rabbits introduced to Australia, which quickly overran the entire continent and ate up most of the vegetation. Or the European settlers in the Americas, who supplanted the indigenous population.
If we were to be put on trial for our crimes, we could claim innocence. We could claim that we ourselves are victims. We could claim extenuating circumstances and express contrition. But if we pardon ourselves and then repeat the crimes, what should be our punishment?
In the case of those rabbits, the favored solution was control or eradication:
Various methods in the 20th century have been attempted to control the Australian rabbit population. Conventional methods include shooting rabbits and destroying their warrens, but these had only limited success. From 1901 to 1907, a rabbit-proof fence was built in Western Australia in an unsuccessful attempt to contain the rabbits.[2][3] The myxoma virus, which causes myxomatosis, was introduced into the rabbit population in the 1950s and had the effect of severely reducing the rabbit population. (Wikipedia)
In the case of settlers (White Americans? Israeli Jews?), they could be expelled, like the Indians of Idi Amin’s Uganda. But since humans are anyway problematic, maybe they should simply be exterminated, like the rabbits?
There has to be another solution. Extreme retribution is exacted only at the cost of losing our humanity. Murder, capital punishment, genocide, even suicide are all crimes against humanity.
Does humanity actually count for anything when humans themselves are the problem?
I would argue that what we actually mean when we talk about humanity is divinity. And divinity, rather than being a quirky religious term, means the essential existence-consciousness underlying everything manifest. We call it humanity, because to be human is to be what we are. For a rabbit, it would be his “rabbitness”. And the essential in us, as in the rabbit, is the consciousness that binds us all together. The what-we-are is the divine.
I am the gambling of the cheats and the splendor of the splendid. I am the victory of the victorious, the resolve of the resolute, and the virtue of the virtuous.
-Krishna, in the Bhagavad Gita 10.36
So essentially, even when we are effectively undermining nature by cause of our existence, we are remaining true to our nature. Because we are part of all nature. We are the thing that we are undermining. We “inter-are”, as Thich Nhat Hanh would say. We cannot remove ourselves from the equation.
This is not to say that we cannot mitigate the damage, offset the environmental costs, or possibly give back to the universe something in return for its generous gifts.
Even by being aware of our connectedness, our behaviour can begin to change. It may dawn on us that birdsong and snow on the mountain peaks are as essential to our existence as the shiny new phone that we lust for, or the new car. We can reevaluate our priorities and begin to make different decisions. The question is whether the changes we make – individual and collective – will be sufficient, and in time.
Those are a few recent articles. In short, both Twitter and Facebook, and Meta’s other services like WhatsApp and Instagram are in serious trouble right now. People are seeking alternatives such as Mastodon, which some of the mainstream press, like the Washington Post (see above), struggle to understand.
We love to hate these big tech corporations here on the Fediverse. I would describe myself as an avid despiser of Zuckerberg and Musk. On the other hand, if I look back a few years ago, I remember my awe when MySpace, Facebook and Twitter were finally turning people on to the web, in a big way. At the time when those services were beginning, the internet was still a place that many less technical users visited only reluctantly. They certainly didn’t participate or publish anything there themselves. Yet suddenly, when the early social networks gained prominence, people finally “got” it. They began to share personal stories and family pictures in earnest, and even discover old friends. When Facebook came along, it suddenly became possible to find former classmates, reconnect with distant family members and recover old relationships. Its contribution to the social fabric of society was huge. Twitter, at the same time, became a place that you could find journalists and writers, engage with them personally, and get the back story behind the news. Emotions that journalists would carefully hide behind a screen of objectivity in their polished stories, you could learn about from their tweets. And, of course, Twitter was the first place to visit on any developing news story.
These examples are just a fraction of the contribution made by the big social media companies. The amazing thing is that, all the while, their true agenda was figuring out how to make money from their services. In a way, we should be thankful that they did.
And yet, as we know, their solutions were inimical and destructive, first to the web, and then to people and societies. We are now at a place where we are beginning to ask how we could arrange things differently, reap the benefits while minimizing the drawbacks.
Everyone on the Fediverse thinks they have the obvious answer to that; though, if you look more closely, there are problems there too, of how and how much to engage in moderation, on whether to block networks like Gab, about how to relate to new laws and increasing governmental snooping and interference.
Regarding the biggies like Facebook and Twitter, the EFF and Cory Doctorow have the core answer: there needs to be interoperability. Those big tech companies don’t deserve to be abolished, but their monopolies need to be trimmed down through legislation and regulation. They can live on, for those who want them, as honorable but interoperable platforms. If they are creative and clever, with an amazing interface that people appreciate, they will always be popular enough to make money. But they should not be permitted to stifle competition. Ergo interoperability. No more walled gardens: if the user wants to friend people on other networks, or wants people from other networks to be able to friend him, that should be made possible. May the best platforms win, but it should not be a zero-sum winner-take-all situation. Those who prefer to live on a maybe less slick, less plush, but ad-free, non-algorythmic networks should not be penalized for their choice.
And I still look forward to seeing an offline client, like Thunderbird is for email, that can bring together all of our social media posts, from around the Fediverse, from Diaspora, from Twitter and Facebook, and everywhere else.
Twice a year, there are lots of comments in social media about the stupidity of daylight savings time. Israel has DST too, and keeps in step with Europe and North America with regard to the date of the change-over. But many nations, like India and China, don’t bother with DST. Those two huge nations also impose a single time zone from east to west, regardless of the inconvenience it must cause to areas distant from the capital.
In Israel, achieving D.S.T. on those dates was a hard-won battle fought by the secular parties against the religious parties in the Knesset, who made many of the arguments being made today by Europeans and Americans, whereas actually they were interested in making it more convenient for early morning prayer times.
My own opinion is that if DST saves energy and emissions, even by a little, then DST is worthwhile. But research seems to be inconclusive, with most studies pointing to a small saving in lighting in the evening hours, when DST begins in the Spring. Obviously more work needs to be done.
I sometimes think about trying to live my life more in tune with daylight, because really, what’s stopping me? One way to do it would be personally to instate universal time, and break the connection between local clock time and bedtime. If I know that sunrise comes locally at a certain hour, even if it’s non-intuitive like currently 04:00 U.S.T. (06:00 local time, after moving the clock back), then that’s the time to begin my day. In order to get 7 hours sleep, I need to get to bed by 08:00 U.S.T. (22:00 local time). That gives me eight hours, because I usually wake up for an hour in the middle to do some writing or reading. The only thing stopping me is that it’s inconvenient to be on a different time zone from everyone else, or even to go to bed earlier than they do. For example, my kids call me to do baby-sitting once or twice a week – which means staying up till about midnight locally.
The 24 hour clock
Americans are about the only people who still almost universally go according to the 12 hour clock and write “8 pm”. Everywhere else, the 24 hour clock is favored. I noticed that in France, and perhaps in some other countries, people have even got used to saying the time according to the 24 hour clock: They will often say that “dinner will be at 19,” or at “20 hours” for example. Israelis will still say “4 in the afternoon” or “8 in the evening”. It would sound funny to say “at 20” or “at 20 hours” in Hebrew. Perhaps that’s what they say in the army, I don’t know, just as British and American soldiers do?
Date notation
The ISO 8601extended format date, 2022-10-31 is the only format for me. It avoids the confusion between international and American formats; it’s readable, makes sense, and, as a file-naming convention, helps to keep files in order by name. Unfortunately, Israel is not among the countries that has accepted it.
My phone camera names photos according to the ISO 8601 standard format (without the human-friendly dashes), though it makes a (permitted) custom variation for adding the time “20221028[underscore]105411.jpg”. My other camera uses a sequential naming format (P1234567.JPG). As a result, it’s a struggle, in applications like Darktable, to put the image files in order. Camera file-naming conventions too should be standardized according to the ISO date and time too.
Went up to the Sea of Galilee with the family, staying in Kfar Hittim, in the large house of an Israeli-Indian couple who seem to spend most of their time in India. We were 12; 8 adults and four kids. Kfar Hittim is near the place where Salah ad-Din’s forces won a decisive battle against the crusadors towards the end of the 12th century. It’s said that they won by cutting the crusadors off from the lake and then starting a wildfire where they were encamped. The battle decimated the crusador forces. Afterwards, more than 200 knights were beheaded, and the ordinary soldiers were enslaved. The king and some of the barons were shown mercy.
In 1948 the Palestinians were forced out of the area; the village of Hittin and others were evacuated or destroyed.
An earlier battle was fought in the time of Herod against rebels that were holding out in difficult to access caves in the cliffs of Arbel. They were defeated when Herod’s forces sent down soldiers in chests, who set fires at the cave entrances and smoked out the rebel fighters and their families.
The same caves must have been an ideal domicile for the paleolithic people who earlier inhabited them, in an area then teeming with wildlife.
The whole area is geologically extreme, a landscape formed by extinct volcanos and earthquakes, the sheer cliffs plunging almost 400 meters – and the lake itself well below sea level. It’s a small part of the Syrian-African rift – a feature that goes all the way down to Africa’s great lake system. A great tear in the earth’s crust, which till today is disturbed by constant tremors, though most of them are too faint to feel. We looked down over the valley from the edge of one of the two “Horns” of Hittim, as these high cliffs at Arbel were known.
The Climate Book
I pre-ordered The Climate Book, by Greta Thunberg from Kobobooks, for my ereader and it arrived in time for the weekend. It looks promising: a kind of one-stop-shop climate primer with chapters by more than a hundred experts, thinkers and writers.
Villa Triste
I enjoyed this Patrick Modiano novel as much as another of his that I read last year. His novels are often short, which suits me, as I read very slowly in French and often need to consult my Kobo reader’s French dictionary. I like his particular style of “auto-fiction” and will probably read more of his books.
Lupin
A similar exercise is watching French TV series on Netflix. It’s quite laborious as I need to stop the video often to absorb the subtitles; an hour long show can last a couple of hours, that way. Eventually I will hopefully calm down and stop trying to catch every mumbled throw-away bit of idiom. I tend to approach languages as I did when learning Sanskrit – a mistake, no doubt.
“Lupin” itself is entertaining, though often quite ridiculous. I don’t know if it will continue to hold my interest.
India
During the weekend we were discussing our travels. M said that her impression of India was that, more than in other places, she felt that people were very close to the earth and to the basic realities of life. I know what she means, but I’m not sure that it’s true anymore. It seems to me that many Indians are caught up in illusions and frivolities that have little to do with basic needs.
They can apparently now afford to forget all about the “realities of life”, and instead promote a toxic blend of nationalism and religious fundamentalism. Here are people trying to trying to persuade the courts that mosques that have been standing for a millenium are actually Hindu temples; or that somewhere in the Taj Mahal is a secret cupboard crammed with the Hindu idols pillaged from an earlier temple. Inspired by the destruction of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya, They would like to see thousands more mosques either destroyed or converted into temples.
Fanatics there always are; the problem is that in modern India they are increasingly supported by the government, the police, and sometimes by the judiciary. Fanatics are no longer a small minority but the power in the land. They enjoy popular support. The situation has many parallels to Israel, whose government is also increasingly in the hands of rightwing pyromaniacs. But there are differences. The political agenda here is different and more focused. It’s less about religion, more about colonisation. Zionism and Hindutva may both be nationalistic ideologies that seem to hark back to an earlier era, but they are not quite comparable.
In his recent interviews, Kim Stanley Robinson has been saying that the 3 or 4 years that have passed since he wrote Ministry of the Future have given him more room for optimism that we will successfully address climate change. On the other hand, Amitav Ghosh another novelist who has been doing some non-fiction writing on climate change, looks at the same period and finds reason to be pessimistic. Probably both writers would qualify such categorical statements, but that’s the drift. Others like Yanis Varafoukis, Noam Chomsky, Miguel Fuentes and (ultimate pessimist) Guy McPherson have been weighing in on the subject.
None of these are climate change experts. They are, like all of us, following the accumulating studies and news reports, while trying to understand and figure out how to address the changes that are unfolding. What we individually bring to the picture is the life experience that contributes to our perspective and to our tendency towards positive or negative thinking.
My own life experience comes from observing the Israeli – Palestinian conflict while living in a small Jewish – Arab community. There have been moments of great optimism and of pessimism. The optimism at the moment of the Oslo accords and the pessimism at the breakdown and second intifada of 2001, and everything since. As a community we haven’t given up. In talks to groups of visitors, I have often said that a source of optimism is the knowledge that the two peoples are stuck together, clinging to the same bit of land. Since neither side can rid itself of the other, the only choice is to determine how to live together. They can either keep fighting or find a way to make peace, and my assumption is that common sense will eventually prevail.
But it’s only an assumption. They might conceivably go on fighting forever, or until one side grinds down the other and wins. The balance of power is not equal, but it never has been. History favors first one warring faction then the other.
A further insight is that peace is never a static position that, once achieved, can be taken for granted. It’s part of an ever-changing continuum. Even if and when peace is attained, there needs to be a constant struggle to maintain it.
Within the larger reality of peace or the lack of it, there is our individual life and our responsibility to do the best that we can: to live life in conformity with our vision, to give our children an education that is conducive to that vision, etc. It isn’t necessary, and is not advisable, to wait for geo-political peace in order to live according to our vision of peace.
So, when I look at climate change, it’s this experience that I bring to it. A knowledge that, like the Jewish – Palestinian conflict, it’s a process whose resolution I will not see in my lifetime. I may see an accumulation of changes; some that are negative, maybe devastating; adaptations that bring cause for optimism. But whatever I live to see, it won’t be the end. The only thing that’s irreversible for us, as a species, is human extinction.
If I want humanity to reduce its carbon emissions and to live in greater harmony with nature, I can start by doing so personally, to the extent that individual choices can be made. Much of what we do is governed by large systems that are beyond our control, such as the sources of the energy we use. However other areas, such as diet and the purchase of goods, are subject to personal choice. And usually, what is good and healthy for the individual turns out to be what’s good for humanity and the biosphere.
Much of the discussion on climate change revolves around the psychological conundrum of whether it is advisable to issue dire warnings of the coming apocalypse, or whether this will only lead to defeatism. That’s not for me to say. I’m not in the business of trying to influence anybody; why should anyone listen? So I don’t care; can afford to be honest.
Consideration of the future may invite optimism or pessimism. But whether humanity will eventually prevail does not need to influence our current decisions. We already know enough in order to make informed, healthy choices about how to live, individually and collectively. The closer we align with the objective of reducing our negative impact upon the planet, the greater will be the chances of our survival.
Monbiot gives a perspective on the current situation of protest in the UK:
In 2018, Theresa May’s government oversaw the erection of a statue of Millicent Fawcett in Parliament Square, which holds a banner saying “Courage calls to courage everywhere”, because a century is a safe distance from which to celebrate radical action. Since then, the Conservatives have introduced viciously repressive laws to stifle the voice of courage. Between the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act that the former home secretary Priti Patel rushed through parliament, and the public order bill over which Cruella Braverman presides, the government is carefully criminalising every effective means of protest in England and Wales, leaving us with nothing but authorised processions conducted in near silence and letters to our MPs, which are universally ignored by both media and legislators.
The public order bill is the kind of legislation you might expect to see in Russia, Iran or Egypt. Illegal protest is defined by the bill as acts causing “serious disruption to two or more individuals, or to an organisation”. Given that the Police Act redefined “serious disruption” to include noise, this means, in effect, all meaningful protest.
For locking or glueing yourself to another protester, or to the railings or any other object, you can be sentenced to 51 weeks in prison – in other words, twice the maximum sentence for common assault. Sitting in the road, or obstructing fracking machinery, pipelines and other oil and gas infrastructure, airports or printing presses (Rupert says thanks) can get you a year. For digging a tunnel as part of a protest, you can be sent down for three years.
Even more sinister are the “serious disruption prevention orders” in the bill. Anyone who has taken part in a protest in England or Wales in the previous five years, whether or not they have been convicted of an offence, can be served with a two-year order forbidding them from attending further protests. Like prisoners on probation, they may be required to report to “a particular person at a particular place at … particular times on particular days”, “to remain at a particular place for particular periods” and to submit to wearing an electronic tag. They may not associate “with particular persons”, enter “particular areas” or use the internet to encourage other people to protest. If you break these terms, you face up to 51 weeks in prison. So much for “civilised” and “democratic”.
I have picked up a slight cold, as often I do when cooler weather sets in. “Cool” may be a bit misleading for folks north of here. We haven’t need to turn on the heating so far, but also haven’t turned on the A/C for a month at least. Since we don’t need either for several months of the year, perhaps our carbon foot print is a bit lower than the results given by those websites that try to estimate one’s carbon emissions. On the other hand, most Europeans don’t use A/C in the summer as we do.
Having a cold has given me the excuse for spending even more time than usual at my desk. I’ve followed all those ActivityPub conversations from the last few days and gotten to thinking that I don’t so much feel at home there, even without actually participating in the chatter. It’s a real “kishkushiada” as they might say in Hebrew (a place of relentless chit-chat). In that sense, my former timeline on Hubzilla was a bit more relaxed. It’s all the threads that drive me crazy: the statuses that begin with “Replying to…” – each of which needs to be expanded in order to find the context. Perhaps I need to do some weeding and follow people who are less chatty. And also spend less time there.
It brings me to the question of whether it’s actually worthwhile to install a personal Fediverse instance again. My current thinking is that it isn’t. My personal website is a better place to invest my efforts. I still have the hope for it to become a “digital garden”, though I’m not confident that I’ve chosen the best medium for it. I dither back and forth on these things.
I am gradually picking up many of the connections I previously had, just because someone ends up boosting posts by one of them, here and there. As a result, my timeline is growing more interesting by the day.
My strategy of interacting very little, posting only sparingly, keeping my follows off-record and, in my bio, discouraging people from following, seems to be working quite well 🙂
I get that Mastohost (which is hosting my new instance) is a poor model for the Fediverse: too much concentration of instances on a single server. Personal instances, such as on Mastohost, is still much better than for everyone to join a few big instances, which then eventually go down, just as the mastodon.technology instance is about to do. The owner/developer of Mastohost has committed not to hosting more than 25% of all Mastodon instances. I think a better plan would be consider not the the total number of instances, but the total number of users. A quarter of all instances already sounds like a large amount, but if those instances are large, it could translate to the majority of users on the Fediverse. It’s also true that lowering the bar (of technical know-how and expense) is what will get more people to run their own instances, which is what the Fediverse needs. Whereas the administrators of large instances can be expected to have greater technical know-how.
The first preference should be to get individuals to run personal instances from home. But the second preference should be to encourage the creation of many small instances. A way to achieve that could be the model of small co-ops renting space on green VPSs. There would be sharing of ownership, administration, costs and maintenance, together with restriction to a handful of users. That way, there is not too great a concentration of instances on one server, and if an administrator quits, the instance can still continue.
Video
We download and stream a lot of video content, but personally I can never watch more than a couple of movies or TV shows per week. Beyond than that just feels like overload. Even if I’m bored I won’t watch more any more. I read, surf the web, listen to podcasts or listen to music. So I haven’t watched anything new in the last few days. I tried watching “The Worst Person in the World”, but it didn’t hold my interest. I watched the latest episode in “The House of Dragon”. But without great enthusiasm.
Music
I am still really enjoying SoundCloud. In Israel/Palestine it isn’t possible to pay for a SoundCloud subscription, which means that much of the mainstream content isn’t available, but, on the other hand, I noticed while in Portugal and Spain that it wasn’t possible to listen to my usual content without taking out a paid subsciption. So this works very well for me, because I practically never listen to mainstream western music, and I’m amazed by the almost infinite supply of free content. I would never be able to discover so much wonderful music without a service like SoundCloud. It’s like entering a secret world with musicians that few people have ever heard of.
Currently listening to the station of Kinan Azmeh, a Syrian musician. Beautiful tracks from musicians from the Middle East and around the world.
Books
I’m reading Ville Triste by Patrick Modiano. I’m reading in French on the Kobo. It’s helpful to be able to click on an unknown word and get the translation. Modiano’s books are fairly short, which also suits me, as I’m a slow reader (even in English). I love Modiano’s prose and the atmosphere that he is able to establish. This book departs a little from the kind of story that he usually tells, but the familiar elements are there. Did he deserve his Nobel? Sure, why not.
When you take an average modern nation-state, which is already embarassed and touchy about the exposure of its dirty laundry (see under Assange) and you add to that an autocratic leader who, either for political expediency or due to severe psychological issues, is wary of the least opposition, you get a mixture that guarantees that virtually every citizen lives in fear of criticizing the regime, or maybe even thinking bad thoughts about it.
Jonathan Cook and Noam Chomsky have good pieces comparing western attitudes on the war in Ukraine to wars and occupation in Palestine and Iraq. Predictably, it’s fine to express righteous indignation towards what the Russians are doing in Ukraine but not against the US or Israel.
On one level, it’s a great relief to be in the consensus regarding the Russian invasion, but this should make us feel profoundly uncomfortable if we are not similarly anti-war-&-occupation in other cases too, when we are not within the consensus. Iraq and Palestine are excellent examples.
The mainstream press and public opinion are full of bull. We are blinded by propaganda and unconsciously drawn into hypocritical positions. The only good thing about the Russian war machine is its lack of apology and pretence, its “this is who we are” stance, though the lack of pretence is itself a pretence.
We the people lack sufficient power to stop nations in their tracks when they go on a war footing. If we are lucky, we can vote; we can register our opposition through protest. Or maybe we can grab the kids and go somewhere else – somewhere safe.
We can’t remove ourselves from the equation, however. As much as we try to exclude ourselves, we are responsible. The racism is our racism. The violence is our violence. I am the arms merchant. I am the pirate.
I am also the victim. Empathy and compassion are more appropriate than detachment, cynicism and despair. Looking for ways to help counts for more than being right.
