________ ________ ________
2025-10-16 / \/ \/ / \
/ __/ /_ _/
Alex Schroeder and I don't see eye-to-eye / _/ / /
on a lot of stuff. hell, if you zoom out far \_______/_\___/____/\___/____/_
enough you probably even find us butting / \/ \/ / \
heads, but his recent post[1] on Israel's / _/ /_ _/
war on Gaza made me want to respond, /- / _/ /
not as an antagonist but in back-to-back \________/\________/\___/____/
solidarity.
making a post like that, even here in the Internet underground takes a lot
of courage. the genocide in Gaza is a difficult topic to understand and a
difficult topic to discus without people bringing their baggage with them and
running roughshod over you with opinions and assumptions. it's a minefield
that invites enemies and costs you friends.
I also really very rarely am political in my writing, all of that is far
too big and broad for me to parse and I keep my head out of it, again because
writing about political hot-button topics invites enemies, costs you friends,
and leads to a lot of unconfirmed assumptions about who thinks what about this
or that.
my response is to make the following point, not really to Alex but to
anyone who reads this. this is attempted genocide. you can frame it, slice it,
color it any way you want but there's no degree of genocide. you don't do some
genocide, there's no genocide lite or genocide with benefits. genocide is
pretty black and white, and to see an attempted genocide being championed by a
people who have first hand experience on the receiving end of an attempted
genocide makes my stomach turn.
but this is where people like us come in; we aren't combatants, we aren't
press or journalists, we're something far more dangerous. we're record
keepers. the Internet is forever, you can not close Pandora's box, we have a
long memory and a near infinite library. the Internet didn't exist in World
War 2, but it does now, and the records we keep will tell the truth of what
happened in Gaza, unflinchingly, unbiased, regardless of who did this or that,
who said what and when.
our duty, as record keepers (be it documentarians, librarians, archivists,
data hoarders, etc.) is to not let history be rewritten because rewritten
history is an open door to repeated animosity, violence and worse.
I like to wheel around the quote that WOPR, the supercomputer from the film
Wargames was right; "the only winning move is not to play" - but without
having a record of playing, a record of reaching stalemate ad-infinitum and
the time to reflect on those records, WOPR would have continued the game
against themself forever.
[1]
gopher://178.209.50.237/02025-10-14-israel
EOF
