St. Misbehaving is darn grateful he doesn't live in the so-callled Holy Land

    This being the day of rest in my childhood religious sects (Southern Baptist, then Episcopal), perhaps I should share what my tech buddy Bob at The Redneck Mystic Podcast (YouTube), The Redneck Mystic Lawyer Podcast (Torrent), told me on the phone the other day.

    He was having a revelation that the Vatican will make me a saint called "Saint Misbehaving". I asked if he was shown it will happen before, or after, the Vatican has me killed, which happened to some people in the past? Bob said he didn't know. 

    This morning, I saw something wonderful in my email, which I could not resist.

Poetic Outlaws | Substack

“Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”

—Kurt Vonnegut

Sloan’s Newsletter | Sloan Bashinsky 

One of my favorites, God only knows what marvelous planet Kurt came from, how he survived in a very strange land and kept his wit and his wits about him.,, 

 

In the main, humanity looks really fucked up to this 81-year-old mystic, poet and culture jammer, who wonders if there are any poets living today, whose verses might stand a chance of saving humanity from itself?

    Perhaps in answer, a dumpling from Hell arrived in my email account, and I waded through it and responded.

CAITLIN’S NEWSLETTER
Israel Doesn't Have A Gen-Z Problem, It Has A Morality Problem
CAITLIN JOHNSTONE
NOV 18, 2023

________________________________

Nobody starts out as the sort of person who would support a genocidal bombing campaign that murders children by the thousands. It’s something you come into gradually over the years, one moral compromise at a time.

Again and again over the course of their lifetime, a supporter of Israel is given the choice to either kill off a piece of their conscience or abandon their support for Israel. They are presented with this choice any time they see Palestinians being treated in a way they’d never want themselves or their loved ones to be treated — whether it’s bombs, protesters shot by snipers, people being driven out of their homes, human rights organizations ruling one after the other that Israel is an apartheid state, tales of the racism and abuse suffered by Palestinians in the West Bank, or testimony about how horrific life in Gaza had been made for the people who live there, long before this latest round of killing began.
This information is unavoidable in modern times. You can avert your gaze, you can try to insulate yourself from it in an ideological echo chamber, but it will inevitably find its way into your field of perception once in a while. And every time you are confronted with it, you have to make a choice whether to compromise your personal sense of morality a bit further than it was already compromised, or abandon your support for Israel.
You carve off pieces of your own morality one at a time, mostly in order to avoid the psychological discomfort known as cognitive dissonance which necessarily goes along with any drastic change in worldview. Then before you know it you find yourself opposing a ceasefire to a murderous onslaught that has killed thousands of children.

Deep down you know you’re on the wrong path. You know this isn’t how you started out, isn’t how you’re meant to be living your life. But you drown out that small voice inside with the much louder voices of life in a modern industrialized society, many of whom are paid millions of dollars a year to tell you your worldview is the correct one.

This is why there’s such a massive generation gap on the Israel-Palestine issue; young people haven’t spent a long time gradually eroding their moral compass into a worthless trinket, and they don’t consume enough mass media to have been convinced that doing so would be worthwhile. They have not been sufficiently indoctrinated into depraved indifference toward the suffering of others.
In a recent statement rejecting right wing claims that its algorithms are stacked to favor Palestine and promote anti-Israel sentiment, TikTok says the real reason pro-Palestine sentiments are so popular on the platform is because young people just statistically oppose Israel a lot more than older generations.
TikTok writes the following:

 “Support for Israel (as compared to sympathy for Palestine) has been lower among younger Americans for some time. This is evidenced by looking at Gallup polling data of millennials dating as far back as 2010, long before TikTok even existed. A March 2023 Gallup poll, before the war, shows young adults have rapidly shifting attitudes towards the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.”

In a leaked audio clip obtained by Tehran Times, Anti-Defamation League director Jonathan Greenblatt is heard bemoaning the loss of Gen-Z to pro-Palestinian sentiment.
“But I also wanna point out that we have a major, major, majorgenerational problem,” Greenblatt complains to his cohorts. “All the polling that I’ve seen — ADL’s polling, ICC’s polling, independent polling — suggests this is not a left or right gap, folks. The issue in the United States’ support for Israel is not left and right, it is young and old.”
“We really have a Tik-Tok problem, a Gen-Z problem,” Greenblatt adds.

In reality, what Greenblatt and his associates have is a morality problem. They have a large group of people who have not been indoctrinated into accepting madness and amputating parts of their own conscience over the years, and so are able to look at the mass murder of civilians in Gaza with clear eyes.

And really that’s all you need to see the ongoing Gaza massacre for what it is: a look with clear eyes. Just one swift glance, unmolested by propaganda distortion or cognitive biases. That’s all it takes. 
Israel’s problem is not that people are being propagandized into hating it, it’s that people are not being successfully propagandized into supporting it. Their problem is not malign influence but a lack thereof. Because the fact of the matter is there’s only so many ways you can spin the murder of thousands of children, and now all the media obfuscation in the world is not enough to pull the wool over fresh eyes that are ready to see.

Soan Bashinsky

Writes Sloan’s Newsletter

Perhaps young people do not resonate with, nor can they even imagine just how deeply rooted in three religions descended from Abraham the horrific mess in Palestine is. Perhaps it might help young people to look at Donald Trump and his MAGA evangelists to grasp just how impossible it is to change the minds and behavior of religious zealots, or, if you wish, religious fanatics. 

I don't know any Christians or Jews in my part of America, Alabama, who are willing to die for their religious beliefs. I have known very few Muslims, but the ones I did know did not seem willing to die for Allah.

In other parts of the world, where Islam is dominant, many of its adherents seem quite willing to die for Allah.They view it as a quick ticket to Paradise, and, if they are men, being with 70 virgins. 

HAMAS claims to be an Islamic resistance organization, but its behavior indicates it also is a terrorist organization. The October massacre in israel was a terrorist attack, just as a school massacre in America is a terrorist attack. 

Based on what I have read online and seen in the news, HAMAS has no concern for the people in Gaza being killed by IDF. Hamas views those dead Palestinians as martyrs, who now are in Paradise. 

I am not in any way defending Israel. It has done plenty to cause trouble with its neighbors. I think it was a catastrophic mistake for the state of Israel to come to exist. Maybe it would not have happened if WWI allied countries, including America, had welcomed WWII Jewish refugees into their countries. It looks to me that the only solution for what is going on in Palestine is for Israel to move to America. 

Meanwhile, It looks to me that HAMAS and its Islamic allies spent a long time figuring out and preparing how to cause Israel the greatest possible amount of trouble, and we are seeing it play out in Gaza, mostly, but it very well might spread to the West Bank, Lebanon, etc.

It looks to me that the October 7 attack was part of a much larger scheme to provoke Israel to invade Gaza and kill a whole lot of Palestinian civilians of all ages, attack and disrupt Gaza hospitals, level Gaza cities and infrastructure, and force Gaza people to stay and die or flee to Egypt or wherever, and make Israel look like Nazi Germany. 

It also looks to me that the Bible thumpers in America and elsewhere are so blinded by their Old Testament Scriptures, and by Jesus being crucified in the New Testament at the best of Jewish leaders in Palestine, that they are frenetic to have Israel defend what they view as THEIR Holy Land, and they are frenetic that America give Israel all the weapons and money it needs to do that, while they are just as frenetic that they do not risk their lives and souls to defend THEIR Holy Land.

It also looks to me that the Bible Thumpers in America and elsewhere, and their national governments, and HAMAS and its Islamic allies cannot imagine, if Israel feels sufficiently threatened, it will detonate its nuclear weapons where it deems best for Israel,

God, by any name, has nothing to do with any of this, and the Devil, by any name, has to be immensely pleased.

sloanbashinsky@yahoo.com