the economist:

many in Israel are seriously worried that the powerful phenomenon of masses marching in defiance of armed force may at last be spreading to Palestine after challenging so many regimes in the region.

democracy in america’s matt steinglass adds:

What will it take to make Americans recognise that the real Martin Luther King-style non-violent Palestinian protestors have arrived, and that Israeli soldiers are shooting them with real bullets?

hendrik hertzberg at the new yorker:

this week’s mass marches along the borders suggest that the Arab Spring has finally come knocking at Israel’s door. They were marred not only by deadly gunfire from Israeli troops but also by Palestinian rock-throwing and Molotov cocktails. Luckily for Bibi (and unluckily for Israel’s ultimate security), most Palestinians still don’t quite seem to grasp the potential power of nonviolence, which could have got them their state decades ago.

i was a scrawny little kid. used to get beaten up as a freshman at highschool all the time. dad never let my mum complain, said it would build character. one of the giant to me at the time gcse students took pity on me for some reason resulting in slightly fewer bruises from the bus rides home.

we developed a fond friendship over the following years. in his final year at school he had an accident working the lathe in the school workshop and died instantly.

this was my introduction to death. we were only peripheral friends but i felt a deep emptiness and it took me a little while to work my way through the emotions.

there were only a couple of hundred kids in my high school total but from then on there were usually a couple of deaths a year, often car-related, this was dubai after all. each one a progressively lesser impact. later my grandfather passed by which point i was left only feeling sorrow for those grieving; my mother and her family.

one of the first winters upon returning to dubai from university, my high school geography teacher, perhaps forty-ish at the time, seemingly healthy, collapsed, completely alone, in the middle of the desert where he was participating in a relay triathlon. there are few who will play larger roles in my life; he taught, inspired, loved and more. our friends who were racing with him came over to my house later that evening to break the news. he meant so much to us, they wanted to be there for me, all around me, as i found out.

i smiled, breathed deeply, hugged each one of my friends, and sat down still smiling. that moment, the first death of my young adult life, inspired so much: artistic explorations, entrepreneurial ventures, adventures in love. it continues to inspire much of my life and i know lives of our mutual friends.

he’s never really left us. and this understanding of what death isn’t remains with us.

one of those friends who shared the news with me saw his little brother pass this morning in yet another car accident. i write this for him.

What’s coded intelligence?

If you make something, it’s an artifact. It’s something that somebody or some corporate entity has caused to come into being. A great many human beings have thought about each of the artifacts that surround us. Different degrees of intelligence and attention have been brought to bear on anything … I’m looking at a tall Starbucks cup right now. The amount of thought that went into getting that Starbucks cup to look exactly the way it is, as it sits on the bedside table next to me, it’s an enormous amount of information. You could write a book, a thick book, about how that cup got to be there. I’ve always been, for whatever reason, very conscious of the world of things. In a way, the Internet of things, as the current expression goes.

Terrorism.

If you’re a terrorist (or a national hero, depending on who’s looking at you), there are relatively few of you and relatively a lot of the big guys you’re up against. Terrorism is about branding because a brand is most of what you have as a terrorist. Terrorists have virtually no resources. I don’t even like using the word terrorism. It’s not an accurate descriptor of what’s going on.

From the first atrocity on, the little guy is building his brand. And that’s why somebody phones in after every bomb and says, “It was us, the Situationist Liberation Army. We blew up that mall.” That’s branding. By the same token, you get these other, surreal moments where they call up and say, “We didn’t do that one.” That’s branding. That’s all it is. A terrorist without a brand is like a fish without a bicycle. It’s just not going anywhere.

No one in Zero History seems to be from anywhere, and indeed could be in London or Paris or New York and it didn’t really matter — just that they were in urban areas. Are we losing the concept of home and the notion of being from a specific place?

I’m happiest with people who’ve gotten furthest from traditional ideas of nationalism. I’m happiest in wildly multicultural post-national environments, which most large world cities now are. I’m writing about places I like.

So if someone is born now into this global world, do you think they even have a native culture?

If you’re born now, your native culture is global, to an increasing extent.

Technology trumps politics. Technology trumps religion.

You’ve taken to Twitter [GreatDismal].

The people I’m following work for me as a sort of conglomerate aggregator of novelty.
Really, the Twitter I’m always raving about is my Twitter.

buy zero history.

ishmael khaldi speaks to the economist.

we’re nomads; property of land wasn’t part of our culture. soul or sanctity of the person is way above the sanctity of land.

At the start of the 20th century half of all federal government revenue came from duties on alcohol, tobacco and playing cards. Two decades later, with newly-introduced income and business taxes, America could contemplate alcohol prohibition. Then in the 1930s, with the Great Depression weighing on tax revenues, booze was relegalised. Now, with alcohol and tobacco contributing just 1 per cent of federal receipts and 2 per cent of state incomes, the need for cash is helping to prod public policy along. Next month Californians will vote on Proposition 19 which, if passed, will allow the sale of marijuana to be regulated and taxed.

the ft’s lex runs some numbers and finds, in the cost saving potential in particular, attractive terms for a truce.

im not as unique as i thought it would seem.

i beg to differ. pops used to take me along to his squash league games growing up. like most boys, i assume, i grew up believing my parents were perfect flawless beings – especially my father who’s absence from my childhood lent him a distant air of mystery. i was devastated then to witness my father lose a league game for the first time. stunned, i dont think i uttered a word the rest of the night. my father didn’t notice my confusion, he had no reason to, he’d only lost a game of squash after all. what followed slowly but surely was the dissolution of all notions of perfection right up to a now that allows not even a semblance of perfection to be contemplated. my parents originally defined perfection. god, religion, science, mathematics everything that followed was a product of them or in more abstracted terms a product of humanity. and humanity was from then on forever fallible and incomplete.

a bit melodramatic for a squash game sure but the essence of that night was as my dear friend and mentor eloquently put to me a decade or two later the revelation of mortality.

peter singer wrote a great op-ed in the ny times a few days or weeks ago questioning the morality of having children. it has always bothered me that the general discourse on having children revolves around the parents’ wants and desires leaving the unborn child necessarily out of the decision- the only decision that counts, the decision to exist is not ours. some favorite bits from the op-ed that you should read in full:

The 19th-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer held that even the best life possible for humans is one in which we strive for ends that, once achieved, bring only fleeting satisfaction. New desires then lead us on to further futile struggle and the cycle repeats itself.

South African philosopher David Benatar, author of a fine book with an arresting title: “Better Never to Have Been: The Harm of Coming into Existence.” … To bring into existence someone who will suffer is, Benatar argues, to harm that person, but to bring into existence someone who will have a good life is not to benefit him or her.

almost all of my closest male friends have by now either had children or are about to embark on the frankly baffling to me adventure. i say all that without taking away from the undeniable joy that fatherhood has brought these friends, a joy far deeper than money, power, fame and other successes which these same friends have achieved in spades.

father to son to father.

my dad is a beautifully flawed man. deeply beautiful. deeply flawed. our relationship has evolved erratically and often maddeningly into an intense and honest love. i celebrated him today alongside my father (and soon to be father) friends around the world.

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