December 26, 2016


News and Views


I’m gonna take my ball and go home!!


http://thehill.com/policy/defense/311842-israel-reduces-relations-with-12-security-council-countries-reports

Israel reduces relations with 12 Security Council countries: reports
BY REBECCA KHEEL - 12/26/16 04:04 PM EST


Israel is reducing diplomatic working relationships with 12 countries on the United Nations Security Council, after the body voted to condemn Israeli settlements in Palestinian territory last week, according to reports.

CNN reported Monday that Israel suspended working ties with Britain, France, Russia, China, Japan, Ukraine, Angola, Egypt, Uruguay, Spain, Senegal and New Zealand. The report follows a similar story Sunday night in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz.

On Friday, the Security Council voted 14-0 on a resolution that condemns Israeli settlements in Palestinian territory as a “flagrant violation” of international law and demands a halt to “all Israeli settlement activities” as “essential for salvaging the two-state solution."

The United States, which has veto power in the Security Council, abstained from the vote, breaking with longstanding U.S. policy to shield Israel from U.N. condemnation and allowing the resolution to pass.

The two other countries that make up the council, Venezuela and Malaysia, previously had no diplomatic relations with Israel.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was infuriated by the vote, handed down the order, according to the reports.

The curtailing of working relations means Israeli ministers are to keep travel to those 12 countries to a minimum, while foreign ministers from those countries won’t be received by Israel, according to the reports. Business between Israel and those countries’ embassies will also be suspended, the reports say.

But the order does not apply Israeli ambassadors in those 12 countries, meaning they will be able to continue to their work unabated.

The decision to reduce ties comes after from ambassadors from China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, Angola, Egypt, Japan, Spain, Ukraine and Uruguay were summoned to meetings with the Israeli Foreign Ministry on Sunday.

The U.S. ambassador to Israel, Dan Shapiro, was also summoned to a meeting Sunday with Netanyahu.

The order is likely to have little practical effect, as it does not touch trade, security cooperation and other aspects of relations, but it acts as a statement of Netanyahu’s anger at the situation. It also notably excludes the United States, which has been on the receiving end of most of Netanyahu’s public lashings.

But Netanyahu has expressed hope of being able to work with President-elect Donald Trump. Members of Congress, too, have pledged legislation to reaffirm the U.S. commitment to Israel, including targeting U.S. funding to the U.N.

TAGS DONALD TRUMP




http://www.forbes.com/sites/jordanshapiro/2016/12/26/the-fake-news-scare-is-itself-fake-news/#149b899d96cc

DEC 26, 2016 @ 10:48 AM 7,742 VIEWS The Little Black Book of Billionaire Secrets
The Fake News Scare Is, Itself, Fake News
Jordan Shapiro , CONTRIBUTOR

(AP Photo/Matt Rourke, File)


Don't worry about fake news. The whole scare is, itself, fake news. Don’t believe a word of it.

Could it be that the news media is still trying to distract us from their own poor performance? After all, if inaccuracy makes a thing “fake,” then all the pundits’ and pollsters’ pre-election day predictions were pretty bad offenders.

Or perhaps we should define fake news as the process of intentionally producing false stories for rhetorical reasons, in order to persuade people to shift perspectives. Which would make most of the advertising industry guilty. After all, you don’t NEED that new iPhone. Beats headphones don’t actually sound better. And most of those gifts you got for Christmas—the stuff you’ve been coveting all year—in the long run, won’t make you feel more beautiful, satisfied, or content. Every product placement, talk show interview, and biopic is a culprit. In some ways, the media has always been an amalgamation of useful little white lies strung together to impact your perception of reality.

Of course, there are certainly false stories—what Mark Zuckerberg calls, “misinformation.” Hoaxes. Misdirection. Intentional lies. Some are even more nefarious than The National Enquirer and The Onion. But fake news is not worthy of the attention it has gotten following the outcome of 2016 Presidential election. The whole thing is what Alfred Hitchcock called a “MacGuffin.”

While well-meaning people run around trying to protect children (and gullible adults) from so-called “fake news,” anyone in the United States who actually leans totalitarian must be ecstatic. They know that a “fake news” MacGuffin is an ideal first step toward squashing the First Amendment. Once the citizenry accepts the conceit that some news is “real” (and therefore, good) while other news is “fake” (and therefore, bad) they’ll voluntarily submit to censorship. Freedom of the press can easily be replaced by sanctioned propaganda.

Of course, on the wide-open internet, propaganda is not about controlling the content, but rather about controlling the protocols and processes for delivery. That’s why, in a November 19th post, Mark Zuckerberg already explained that Facebook is working on building “better technical systems” to detect “misinformation.” He and Sheryl Sandberg plan to solve this problem by creating algorithms which can control what we see with increasing precision. Am I the only one who finds that line of thinking problematic? We need to improve ordinary people’s capacity to judge the quality of news, to understand where it came from, not to continue further down the path we’re on: hiding the genesis of ideas behind ever more seductive user-interface decisions.

To be fair, Zuckerberg’s intentions are good. But I’m not sure he really understands that the robot curators, with their fervent commitment to data analytics, are actually the problem. He wrote, “we are exploring labeling stories that have been flagged as false by third parties or our community.” And he promised new feedback mechanisms that would allow everyday users to “report stories as fake.”

I’m particularly looking forward to this last one (allowing everyday users to "report stories as fake"); there’s a lot I’d like to report. For example, I have friends and relatives who are not really happy in their romantic relationships but keep posting photos of “date night” in order to convince us (and, presumably, themselves) that everything is peachy. There are certified narcissistic materialists in my network who keep posting semi-spiritual memes about gratitude and positivity which seem completely out of resonance with the sense of dark emptiness I feel when I’m in their presence. And parents keep posting anecdotes and photos of their children which suggest that their families have significantly fewer temper tantrums and meltdowns than I experience on a daily basis.

See, the real problem is not falsehoods or inaccuracies, but rather that everything about the popular landscape of digital media currently encourages us to see the world the way we want it to be. Combine that with an education system which pays little more than lip service to critical thinking—a system that’s barely cognizant of the fact that a skills-based approach to training inherently promotes specialization and, therefore, narrow-mindedness—and you end up with a population that’s been encouraged to live with poor vision. You know the platitude: when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

Democracy's biggest threat is not tyrants, but rather citizens who are satisfied with their own limited view of reality. That’s why, when Plato wrote Republic, he put education at the center of the politeia—πολιτεία (citizenship, government). He recognized the need for critical thinking. Plato called it Philosophy—Philei Sophia— which literally means “love of wisdom.” He knew that for a society to function, it needs to cultivate the children into adults who are passionately in love with the quest for truth, the quest to discover that each current reality is nothing more than a fallacy, a shadow, a reflection, a pale imitation of the real deal.

This sort of conviction for critical thinking—in the 21st century, maybe we need to call it critical media literacy—feels especially difficult in a world where all of our media is social. It’s easier to point fingers at others. After all, our daily timelines define us and our news streams are intricately tangled up with personal identity narratives. Challenging the information in front of our eyes becomes tantamount to questioning our own sense-of-self. And any serious engagement can cause a nervous breakdown.

Critical thinking is painful. Plato equated it with walking out of a dark cave and staring directly into a bright light. That’s what it feels like when you’re willing to question your most sacred beliefs no matter how much it hurts. It’s a kind of masochistic intellectual flagellation. Sounds horrible, but Plato promised it was worth it. Afterward, the contentment we get from constant spectacle will be replaced with true pleasure—essential pleasure.

Today, we mistakenly point to “fake news” when the real problem lies within us. Algorithmic curation is just the newest technology in a long historical line of shadow-stimulants that excel at numbing us into complacency. The issue is not the reality that’s presented to us, but rather our incapacity to challenge it.

Jordan Shapiro, PhD. is a Senior Fellow for the Joan Ganz Cooney Center at Sesame Workshop. Visit his website or subscribe to his newsletter: www.jordanshapiro.org. Twitter: @Jordosh



I agree with most of what Professor Shapiro said except that I don’t think purely logical thinking is as good as a mixture of feeling along with our thought for sharpening our own sense of what “fake news” might be, a task which takes intuition, and for adding our own wisdom to the situation. I personally think Facebook is a great thing, but just like any interactions in life we have to “take the good with the bad” and deal with each as we find it. One of the most important things for a human who wants to be happy and contribute to the world is to be open minded. That turns us into people who won’t be quite as likely to add to the danger content that is inevitably a part of the mix, and I think that single factor is the real reason for a flourishing community of Alt-right thinking, such as we have today. So, Facebook needs to do its’ technological thing, and we ourselves have to add something human to it all. The reason I’m so fond of the Internet, especially Facebook, is that people are able to make a kind of contact through that magic portal that I wasn’t experiencing very often until the Net came into existence. I had friends, of course, but the amount of Internet chatter is very enlivening for me. Making even a light level of contact with old friends, family, church friends, political people with whom I agree has made me happier.

In my opinion, though, the lurid pornography that pops up on the Internet and predatory political sites like ISIS and the KKK, should indeed be taken down by Zuckerberg and the other bigwigs of the Internet who created and are able to modify the Net. My father used to say, “your rights begin where my nose ends,” which is just a pithy way of saying that rights must be tempered by the needs of others as well. Beyond that, however, we ourselves are -- and must be -- the arbiters of what makes good logical sense and leads us to a decent life and civilization. Technical methods will only be able to do so much. Further, for a basic change to our society to happen it takes a warm emotional life as well as the ability for critical thought, and good companions of that same generous nature. Two sociopaths won’t likely be able to make a friendship and be good citizens together. The version of Christianity that I learned stressed more interaction rather than less, and we very much need that again to keep from growing continually further apart. That’s a great deal of the reason for our cities becoming so polarized and dangerous the last few decades. I personally am on a network of members of the UU church, to which I have belonged a number of years, and with whom I find a warm and positive interaction about social and political issues. I run across few subjects that don’t bring out some emotion within me, and which don’t change my personal views as time passes. I want to be in contact with people who will be on what I consider to be the side of Good. If that will happen, maybe the hateful old KKK and Militias and other semi-insane, semi-criminal people will go back into the woodwork.

It’s a process of growth that we as a society need, along with reading and studying, to provide a positive but nonetheless active defense against the NeoNazi trend which is taking over here and in Europe. In my opinion the Internet and Facebook allow the kind of communication and organization on critical issues that we need even if it also gives shelter to dangerous folk. Both literally form the isolated people into a community of mind. Those whose goal is to destroy all the positive achievements of this last 50 years – publicly funded schools, people of all races working and studying together, gays and lesbians treated decently, all working on justice issues together – must be confronted repeatedly and stubbornly. I’m really glad for Black Lives Matter, because they are proving to be active and courageous. We need foot soldiers in this fight that is clearly brewing between the deadly negativity of the Alt-Right and those who want to see good things come to pass.

People who don’t turn their beliefs and feelings over regularly with a light spade in the way that we must do if we want to prepare soil for planting, sometime in their life will find themselves becoming closed off emotionally and mentally, and bored. That’s when they start picking battles with anyone who is different and possibly becoming highly destructive. We have to cultivate the kind of mentality which creates rather than destroys, and cooperates with others toward good goals.

I also think the careful and slower analytical way of thinking is needed in addition to quick and clever deductions, and that we should be willing to experiment as we walk along our path of evolution as people. We absolutely should continue to read (including something beyond spy novels or pornography, of course.) If we do continue to read things that are at least somewhat challenging, we should be able to work our way through this “briarpatch” of useless and even dangerous Internet material just like Bre’r Rabbit did. The “scientific method” of thinking has always impressed me for its’ methodical analysis. It’s not too hard to do if you go to a source like Wikipedia to see the steps that are recommended for figuring out scientific or any other practical problems, detecting what as best we can ascertain to be true rather than merely exciting; and I do think the urge for excitement is at least half of what causes some people to join a hate group or a street gang. Thrill seeking is fun, but can be truly dangerous. That’s what makes these young girls drive down the road at 80 mph taking a “selfie” of their face at the time. That is not only profoundly silly, it is horribly dangerous to everyone on the roadway. Three young girls were caught doing that in the last few months. They do it, though, because it’s “popular.”

The reason that I mention the need for emotion as a mixing agent in our cogitations is that I believe the really dangerous people have very little warm emotion of any kind in their souls, assuming they have souls, which in my opinion is the part of our nature that makes us capable of being caring at all. We tend to try to stifle emotionality in our children, but being warm may be the thing that gives them their real usefulness to the world. I think we tend to use our “logic” in combative or predatory situations, to build buildings or make weapons, or other competitive things. We need a little love in our natures or we would be more or less like chimpanzees, which can be quite dangerous. It also helps to keep us from becoming crass, greedy and cold. I believe that data is not wisdom, and neither are the hysterical and magical types of thinking that too often substitute for the warm, healthy and considerate turn of mind that is, to me, what Jesus and other ancient philosophers were trying to teach. Unfortunately, we still haven’t mastered that lesson today after 2,000 years of Christianity of various sorts. In any group of religious people, however, there will be individuals who are all that Jesus would want of us.

We tend to speak of education as the be all end all, but the achievement of a high level of skills alone, doesn’t produce the ability to love or even respect our fellow man. My worries about our society are that, without a change in direction, we may too soon end up at a dangerous place in which we will have no gentleness left, valuing only our closest kin and our saleable goods. Quite a few people are already at that point. Without that inner frigidity, the young white man in Charleston SC wouldn’t have gone into a Black church, sat down with them for something in the range of an hour, and then gotten up so he could shoot and kill close to a dozen of them. We shouldn’t blame that only on insanity, because not all people who are insane are twisted and perverse like that. It is learned from our peers and our parents, and is I believe induced by rough or cruel treatment when they are children. I think that kind of insanity starts very young. That’s why I don’t believe in the pacifist, perhaps overly gentle people’s following their rules of life by saying or doing nothing to defend themselves or others, as I think a lot of conservative thinkers believe in. This is a time when we need to mobilize to do philosophical, social and psychological battle with the forces of “evil.” I know that word sounds ungentle in itself, but warmth and personal strength are necessary in human society, rather than simply being quiet and passive.

To get through life, I personally, and I believe most people, need some quiet time in which to THINK. People need to cultivate slow walks in the woods looking for squirrels and other natural glories, ripe wild muscadine grapes for instance, which almost always happen to be free of any financial cost. If you do have to pay $10 or so to get into the zoo or the butterfly garden, do it. You’ll feel what I grew up with when I was a child in my small southern town and I walked my dog every day in the shade of the wooded lands behind our house. Every day there was something different to see – salamanders, toads, birds eggs, colorful mushrooms and flowers, once a magnificent Luna moth on the underside of a green leaf, meanwhile breathing the good fresh air. If we find and make peace with our inner self, we will most probably be able to share emotionally with others, whatever their cultural group, on levels that are emotionally fulfilling and honest. If we would do that, we wouldn’t be on the verge of a societal fracture as we are today. Not only am I not looking forward to the Donald Trump years, but I am afraid of what we well may see happen in this country. Whatever happens, I will plod on forward and try to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem. If that means joining in group actions, that will be acceptable to me as it was in 1970.