There be dragons!
The joy of commenting
I very rarely get into comment threads, other than now and again on my nephew’s FB and sometimes they can end up roaring down rabbit holes, but they most often end well. In fact this post (and any sequels) may have sprung in part from the most recent bout — but that of course remains private.
But I did venture what I thought was a gentle observation on a vlog post by Professor Gerdes the other day.
Of the 85 responses so far most are acceptable — polite and respectful, the way it should be.
I added the crazy heads! Mostly I can’t be bothered with this sort of thing….
Been radicalised lately?
This morning on Thinking is Power on Facebook:
Powerful and serious words. Thinking is Power is a wonderful thing — I share all its daily posts on my FB feed.
TIP was created by science educator and communicator Melanie Trecek-King. Trecek-King is an Associate Professor of Biology at Massasoit Community College, where she teaches a general-education science course designed to equip students with empowering critical thinking, information literacy, and science literacy skills. An active speaker and consultant, Trecek-King loves to share her “teach skills, not facts” approach with other science educators and help organizations meet their goals through better thinking. Trecek-King is also the Education Director for the Mental Immunity Project and CIRCE (Cognitive Immunology Research Collaborative), which aim to advance and apply the science of mental immunity to inoculate minds against misinformation.Trecek-King has a Bachelor of Science in Biology and Chemistry and a Master of Arts in Ecology from the University of Nebraska at Omaha, where she studied prairie ecology, succession, the role of fire in ecosystems, and conservation biology. In addition to her love of science, Trecek-King is a mezzo soprano and a certified Choral Groupie, and has sung with some of the world’s greatest conductors and composers, including her amazing husband Dr. Anthony Trecek-King.
Thinking is Power
So needed!
On Facebook yesterday I said:
Looking back at a famous case of a radicalised teen becoming a suicide bomber, I can see a resemblance to what is happening now via social media both pro and con Palestine issues.
In 2015 I wrote:
“Bilardi’s blog reveals a teen not unlike some I have taught or met over the years, especially perhaps since the 1990s. A digital native. It strikes me that he was “radicalised” as much by, say, John Pilger or Noam Chomsky as the Quran or Islamist sources — or by any of a whole range of left to far left news, history and current affairs sites – some of them often very useful as a counterweight (or counterpunch?) to the mainstream. The speed with which he worked through all this stuff over five years from atheist 13-year-old to 17-18 year-old fanatic ready to kill or be killed is quite amazing.
“One really does wonder what realistically anyone can do about such radicalising influences. Shut them all down? Do a great firewall of Australia? Hardly likely, and hardly desirable as a lot of the stuff Bilardi must have consumed is in its own right legitimate….”
Here are three posts from 2015: Some reflections on the late teen suicide bomber; Bringing it home; Recycle and prelude: nine years ago. From that last one:
OK, the students involved, some of whom I know, are not threatening individuals, and are all very concerned and very intelligent; the appeal to people of their age is no doubt parallel to the appeal to others of fundamentalist Christianity, or extreme left politics. It is an expression of idealism, a reaction to a world that they in their fresh vision would like to put right. Such youth movements and motivation are not new.
But there is cause for concern, don’t you think, in the current state of the world, for the students’ own welfare as much as for anything else.
See also The Battle for Islam*, and, with what happened after Cronulla in mind, I refer you to this entry from December 2005:
Since I am at work today, I dropped in at lunchtime on the Islamic Students’ Society. They have had the occasional bit of controversy around them, as you may see above. I was interested to see what they, as intelligent teenage Muslim boys, felt about Cronulla and all that.
The gangs like the one(s) that have been causing trouble for years in Cronulla they utterly reject. “Leb arseholes.” (They mean of course those indulging in antisocial behaviour in groups in public. None of these young Muslims I spoke to today could be accused of bad manners, inconsideration, insensitivity, racism or sexism. But then they are confident, intelligent, and genuinely religious.) “Some of them are really bad people.” (That from a boy who knows the Lakemba/Campsie/Punchbowl area well.) As much to do with Islam as the Hells’ Angels are to do with Christianity. Definitely not practitioners of Islam. “They worry us as much as they worry you.”…
* Unfortunately this is not possible, as the relevant entries are casualties of the Diary-X Crash of 2006! However, I have been able to rescue one: Retreat from the Global: 11 March 2004 which tells you about “Ali”, who “was born in Pakistan — in fact he told me in Year Seven that he still spoke and read Urdu (and one or two other languages) and could still recall a three storey red house he lived in in Islamabad as a small child.” He belonged to “one of the largest ‘Islamic fundamentalist’ movements in the world, and much bigger than Al Qaeda.” I learned quite a bit that day.
Neil's Commonplace Book 