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Oct 21, 2023Liked by David Rovics

I particularly liked your anecdote about the Oud player and the powerful trans-human cross-cultural quality of music in communication. I passed it on to my musical housemate who played the oud in another life.

Regarding your earlier post about Hamas originally being groomed by Israel - Democracy Now has a piece detailing that early history of the movement. They missed your observation that the Taliban was similarly set up by the CIA, however. Keep the struggle, friend!

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Oct 20, 2023Liked by David Rovics

This same lady was harassing me through comments on my Youtube channel for supporting you and possibly for both following you on Youtube and listening to nearly all your material on repeat it finally makes sense since I have 2 Youtube channels and I only have 47 subscribers I'm not even a small fish Youtuber and my 1st channel is Small fish Channel thank you for explaining this David!

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Oct 20, 2023·edited Oct 21, 2023Author

well i'm especially glad i included her picture then, and i should have included her twitter name, which i now also know -- @marxandmagneto. i'm sorry you've had to deal with this wacko. and i'm sorry she's not the only wacko this city has produced in recent years. she calls herself phoenix singer.

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Oct 22, 2023·edited Oct 22, 2023Liked by David Rovics

First of all I am thankful for how articulate your writing is on challenging topics.

EDIT: Secondly: Following your struggles with online harassment has opened my eyes to how much we have become 'atomized' as a culture. It has become a topic I feel strongly about, but it is from a place where I realise when I hadn't been taking my pills I had become an online troll. I was reacting to what I saw as all of the right wing as trolling, where anything that causes drama and any reactions to that are treated as "public opinion", or "look how terrible the left are!!!" ( a bit like gaslighting ). Instead of acting with humility in the face of this overwhelming onslaught of noise mixed with horror that was twitter then. I started with some stories that weee supposed to be jokes, things so obviously innaccurate that it would show up like sarcasm. Later of course as my mental health progressed for the worse I didn't realise that my jokes were not nearly as universally understood outside my head as I thought had to be the case. I'm still not good at assessing how simultaneous and shocking the world outside my own mind is. Perhaps I still haven't reached an honest level of humility either.

On a similar note: I recall AnotherAngryVoice ( a left wing UK writer ) call twitter / X "a deteriorating mental health condition in an app" implying that a lot of people seem to be losing their minds. I worry that there is a threshold of minds lost that this planet cannot escape the event horizon of and we've already passed it.

_On the topic of Gaza_

It's difficult to process what Israel is doing and has been doing to Gaza. It's even more difficult to process through the haze of all the dehumanizing rhetoric on internet forums such as reddit.

Whatever is going on seems to set a bad precedent for levels of human suffering we can expect in the world of the future

I feel I'd get accused to anti-semitism if I didn't also state that the loss of Israelli lives in a brutal way is difficult to process.

I am trying to highlight that the processing of horror takes effort and having to use logic to estimate the horrors of what the children there must be going through is more difficult than having a video showing something brutal has occurred. That the horror is being withheld, is perhaps more chilling. The power of media blackout makes me wonder how much more I don't know about the state of the world, or perhaps more: how much I don't want to know.

EDITED

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Why do you write as if Israel were the only one capable of violence? Why do you write as if Israel were the only one capable of peace?

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I don't think I do. But the country with the power in this situation is the one that control everything for the other, and that's Israel. I actually think the only possibility of things improving is if the US takes action, rather than Israel. The US gives Israel diplomatic cover and so many missiles and fighter jets. The Palestinians don't have any of such things. They don't even have an airport, or control over their borders.

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Oct 21, 2023Liked by David Rovics

I don't think that is the way David writes at all, although there are those who seem to be writing from the point of view that Hamas is the only one capable of violence.

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