@punishmenthurts @samlitzinger

4. In my view, speed of technology and availability of technology is as important as anything in this.

In 2011, Russia knowingly triggered a war that they call "War of All against All". This wouldn't have been possible without electric media, or much slower if it relied on paper printing presses.

We are fighting with machines, be it weapons of messages or weapons of explosions. "going viral" mind to mind in our chase for notifications / news events.

@punishmenthurts @samlitzinger "fifteen years on since the media became a cartel"

Music industry cartels were often articulated by bands as being abusive to authentic art. Book industry, music industry, etc. Popularity is a force few people are willing to openly criticize. Mob mentality of "we all like the sound of this one speaker's voice" even when that speaker is preaching hate or teaching terrorism.

Again, this was written in 1985, long before the Apple iPhone and Twitter:

@samlitzinger "A decade into the Trump era, media hasn't figured him out”

Steve Bannon, Cambridge Analytica, Russia / Kremlin....

"Konstantin Rykov has been a key player in all of this, so when he says that he partnered with Trump beginning back on election night in 2012 and that together they came up with a plan to pay Cambridge Analytica"

November 2012, that's nearly 14 years ago...

washingtonmonthly.c...

I don't think of the "Tower of Babel" metaphor as magical, supernatural, that it comes from a book of special revelations. I personally have experienced it, I realize I use English or Github open source or books from the public library to learn - that the English I use to communicate is a product of other people, of human beings, just as much as purchasing a can of food to eat and realizing someone put these vegetables inside that can for me. The "Tower of Babel" metaphor I experience.

Malala calls for a "cease fire" between Israel and Palestine. Is that the best she can say in public, because of crowd reactions? I would hope that Malala is holding back, and really she wants to say: love one another, stop this hate, stop all wars, stop all hate. And I have said it for her, now and today. Because I already know how incredibly unpopular it is to ask people to stop death-wishing, hating, waging war against those they hate. Again, back to the Tower of Babel metaphor...

One of my guru teachers of religion and media is Joseph Campbell, and his stance on violence and hate is that it is part of life, just accept it. I also find Joseph Campbell contradicts this in his own faith, condemning wars and hate, here and there, and repeating Joyce's quote about "history is a nightmare I am trying to awake from".

Survival of the fittest, the killing by eating other creatures, is core of the Earth. Do we as thinking emotional creatures with compassion go beyond that?

Yet, Malala is saying educate girls, educate women, bring sexual equality of birth into the leadership of Afghanistan / Pakistan and all the world. She herself has expressed equality of love and putting love above violence, but how can we ignore the schools and educators of war? Be it terrorist groups, organized military, or school shooters who are inspired by previous shooters?

That's a big component of the Tower of Babel metaphor, that education can teach hate, teach war, teach killing.

Malala reached an audience mostly because of the reactive hate that her blog created, Malala was a curiosity to the world because of technical matter of surviving a gunshot to the head.

On October 7, 2023 when Palestine and Gaza became the words on everyone's mouth about Quran vs. Torah / Islam vs. Jewish faiths - I did not hear people say "reformation of terrorism like Malala was saying 10 years ago". I said it, but few cared.

It isn't just a pipe dream "high road", it's what is needed.

Malala communicates beyond the tower of Babel, she offers a positive reformation to Islam / Quran interpretation and teaching. But she seems to run into the same barrier we all have, that James Joyce exposes in Bible verse "1 John 4:20" metaphor patterns in Finnegans Wake. The whole of the systems of a whole city ( #DublinEverywhere ), of human activity, of the peer pressure and influence, of the language being taught to us, of our own common ground on the Tower of Babel. Language shifts.

www.bloomberg.com/n...

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”
― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, 1995