Yeah I was listening to Ben Shapiro's podcast... he had video and clips up where they're pretty much spelling out what their goals are, but because only the right are covering it, people assume it's all down to political motives I guess.
That's why it's become so easy for this "war of values" narrative to even exist... if we aren't supportive of folk we rightly should be suspicious of, we are somehow part of the problem. It doesn't wash. When the media is very picky about what facts, footage and information they choose to share... then we're dependent on those "facts" to determine the "moral authority". My opinion, it's war, and in the case of foreign wars, it's very difficult at a distance to draw up black versus white... people are often emotionally swayed by certain narratives, and both extremes of the political spectrum rely on this gullibility to continuously shift the blame to the other side. In the end, nobody is held accountable, but interest groups, the media and many corporations will gladly profit of this, including terrorists that depend on this type of "good versus evil" propaganda in order to keep the public distracted and misinformed...
I have my own reasons to be suspicious of Israel. They bombed the hell out of the ship that my husband's grandfather was stationed on during the 6-day war. He lost his grandfather that day. However, the worst part was the US not sending help and being complicit in the cover up... there's a memorial in the NSA since it was a spook ship, but still, no public coverage... but then the media often overlooks these types of cover-ups and they only cover what fits into their own general narrative... they're in no rush to get all of the facts out there. Left and right media are often complicit in cover-ups, of all types, and yet many many people in the population
still depend on them to act as the front-lines of our moral authority... that doesn't make any sense.
I'm taking a course right now in storytelling (with graphics) and in it goes into how storytelling is basic to our way of life... we make stories out of everything and it's key in how we think, function and build references. The media to some degree has to insert some kind of narrative in order to contextualize the facts, so that's a given... but we highly attracted to storylines as context, it's pretty much irresistible... that's why we can have consistent cultural sentiments/values... it's how we relate to the world.
I think culture today takes it much further than we used to... we're not just reading the stories to pick up information, we're reading them in a way that makes ourselves the narrative... I mean, bombs are not going off on our borders... but like here in the US, both sides of the media want to inject American issues onto the situation and make it about
us... how about it's about two regions that have been
at war for a very long time and it's a stalemate that hasn't self-resolved... just like most people don't have a clue why anything else goes on in the world, why slavery still exists, why people would choose to live on the street addicted on pills to getting their life in order... we look for a boogeyman or scapegoat and things we will be the solution to all those problems, but at the end of the day, human nature will prevail and there's only so much that we individually (or as a nation) can control. I think people like to think they have the solution, can see it all in black and white, because then it means we aren't really at war with each other... many think, in a really narcissistic way I should mention, that eventually the opposition will come to reflect upon themselves and that their own values will prevail. That's what's so attractive about playing value/virtue sports... it's about the Self, aka individualism on steroids.
TLDR: Anyway, I suspect there isn't an easy solution to the Israel/Palestinian problem. I think it would've been reached by now... of course, people from afar will be like "Israel should just bow down and give in"... except they're not the ones who are being bombed and who have to worry about a group of people who just want to "kill a bunch of Jews". It's narcissistic to believe that a foreigner could
easily resolve the situation despite not being in their shoes... is my view.
Anyway, a good article on that goes into how subjective truth has taken over in culture...
How America Lost Its Mind
The nation’s current post-truth moment is the ultimate expression of mind-sets that have made America exceptional throughout its history.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine...s-mind/534231/
Quote:
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Each of us is on a spectrum somewhere between the poles of rational and irrational. We all have hunches we can’t prove and superstitions that make no sense. Some of my best friends are very religious, and others believe in dubious conspiracy theories. What’s problematic is going overboard—letting the subjective entirely override the objective; thinking and acting as if opinions and feelings are just as true as facts. The American experiment, the original embodiment of the great Enlightenment idea of intellectual freedom, whereby every individual is welcome to believe anything she wishes, has metastasized out of control. From the start, our ultra-individualism was attached to epic dreams, sometimes epic fantasies—every American one of God’s chosen people building a custom-made utopia, all of us free to reinvent ourselves by imagination and will. In America nowadays, those more exciting parts of the Enlightenment idea have swamped the sober, rational, empirical parts. Little by little for centuries, then more and more and faster and faster during the past half century, we Americans have given ourselves over to all kinds of magical thinking, anything-goes relativism, and belief in fanciful explanation—small and large fantasies that console or thrill or terrify us. And most of us haven’t realized how far-reaching our strange new normal has become.
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