Minutes of a Monday #63
#minutesofamonday
Brain Food > The Opinion Conundrum
“The Cold War and its ideology persist and, over time, where a person stands on Israel-Palestine has become shorthand for where they stand on a variety of issues. It is the trump card in a suite of beliefs that line up neatly. As a result, the left tends to be pro-Palestinian and equivocal on Russia, the right is pro-Israel and wholehearted in their support of America.
The problem with this rubric is that many people feel forced, by their own sense of who and what they belong to and their preferred ideology, to take the whole suite of beliefs, rather than the more sensible a la carte option. You can actually be pro-Palestinian, pro-Israel (within pre-1967 borders) and pro-American, but that nuanced position is getting trickier. Despite being a conflict that directly involves such a tiny percentage of the world’s population, it has come to represent something greater. Far more people were killed in Syria than have (so far) been killed in Gaza, but the streets of the West remained strangely calm 10 years ago. Do Syrian lives matter less than Palestinian lives? Or could it be about the side that is killing as much as who is being killed?”
@davidmcwilliams on how the the Irish street is pro-Palestinian but paved with American money.
Soul Food
“A hard truth for many of us to accept – including me since I laboured so hard to avoid it – is that it’s what we actually do and not what we say we’d like to do, which reveals what we really value.”
on why she left a high-status job
LOL
Comedy gold from George Mesaros:
Appendix
“I realised that I was facing a jungle. And to get through that jungle, there was one path and it was my path. There wasn’t a path that someone had cleared before me, by writing a book about grief, it wasn’t a path that someone could lead me to because they had experienced the loss of a child. I had to pick my way with a machete, through this jungle, by myself, and find the best path.”
Moneyball author Michael Lee on how he got through the death of his daughter Dixie Lee (speaking on the Free State Podcast, 2 Nov, minute 38 onward.)
AOB
My next article will be hitting your inbox this Friday. It’s about a day in my life where I re-connected with my offline community.
Mind how you go out there - Niall