I feel there’s way more that’s interesting in the discussion than there is divisive.
@raybennett — UFOs and possible answers to the Fermi Paradox — I like the Star Trek “non interference” Prime Directive (why ETs aren’t colonialists), as one explanation,
and as for FTL, I think AC Clarke did take light speed as perhaps unbreakable, but the universe is very old, and as humans we’re in this weird 200 year period where we’ve only just realised that maybe we could travel to other stars — but have no idea what might be possible in the next thousand or even billion years — maybe reincarnation is the interstellar travel. But meanwhile, yeah, any sighting story is too easy to have been made up. Footage from the U.S. Navy on the other hand… hm.
@thebeatificvision — I do like the coalescing around stories. I was once complaining to a counsellor that I’d arrived at the rational understanding that life had no meaning. Nothing, zilch, nada. I’d done the sums and suffering outweighed everything. It was my unbearable lightness of being moment. She suggested I buy a book called Up From Eden and take it on a beach. I never got the beach holiday but it worked nevertheless.
@Charles_Marxer — I have been struggling to understand the Palestinian perspective. There’s so many angles on it as well. The “history” analysis, for example, says the people who were there first were… the dinos 300 million years ago! And I wish one could make light of it, the horrific tragedy that it is.
Also, I’m conscious that whilst Spiral Dynamic offers a massive explanatory power, I am now its prisoner, in that I can’t not see things in terms of that model. It’s now become a structure dictating how I see things. However, just within those broad brushstrokes, it does at least get away from the “good” vs “bad” picture, as if the Western backed Israel was “good/bad” versus the other side “bad/good”.
I don’t think the good vs bad model helps. I guess there’s this thing about the fall of the Ottoman Empire leaving a power vacuum, and then various factions fighting it out.
At its “birth” Israel was attacked, they say. So who defended them? I guess all the pre-existing paramilitary groups. And where did they come from? Much of the Middle East seems to be the land of warlords and paramilitary groups. Plus a lot of people live in these lands, and as @thebeatificvision says, most ordinary people just want a good life — but we are also all under the spell of our political system. I used to think that the UK was a democracy, for example. With the pandemic, I’m not so sure.
Red wants to fight, paramilitaries want to fight — that’s their story, their meaning making — and being red and winning is only better than being red and losing — the victims — so in one sense, perhaps there are no victims in those lands, there are only losers…
but one thing which I’ve heard and which seems to ring true but is brutal — this notion that the powerful deliberately keep destabilising those lands, in order to keep everyone at red, and keep people fighting each other. And that probably applies to Israel also — they get a lot of “power” from the USA, but they also are the victims in the geopolitical game of being used to “help” keep everything destabilised. And that just seems evil.
But these power games are also played in a very subtle way. I’ve heard that Egypt could just turn off its oil supply to Israel tomorrow, but wouldn’t — there’s all manner of interconnected power and economic and political forces. Everyone wants to fight a bit but not too much. It’s ghastly.