George Floyd and Revisionist History

The Fate of Israel and Palestine

When I was doing research on the history of Jews for my final paper, I did not expect for another conflict to spiral all out of control just a few months later. Jews as a group of people are extremely interesting in the fact that they come together not from shared cultural history. They are not like the Indus river valley civilizations that popped up around a major river or Mesopotamia. The civilizations I mentioned bonded over their culture and unique pantheon of gods. The Jewish people come from all over the world because they never had a land they could call their own. Jerusalem was constantly occupied by larger continental powers. Romans and Persians kept the Jewish people as second class citizens because of their faith. The Jewish faith propagated from the Middle East to all over Europe, and that resulted in Jews all over the world being second class citizens. Most Jews were loyal to their country and thought that if they played their part they would be viewed as citizens. This though would continue throughout the ages as they fulfilled their awkward place in society as loaners of coin. Ignoring the pograms wiping out a third of the Jewish population and the forced migration towards slums, the Jewish people were still valued where they lived. That was until the Dreyfus affair. A Jewish officer was accused of giving French information to the Germans. Accused of treason, his family gave up and accepted that he failed his duty as a French citizen until information proved that he was innocent. The information was covered up and the blamed placed upon Dreyfus and he was only pardoned after huge societal pressure. In the beginning, it was only a case of a military coverup until it spiraled into antisemitism and antichurch. To really explain how this came to be, I must mention that the Catholic church has heavy influence in the army. The church wanted Catholic officers which they can control and Dreyfus was a Jew. So the army had a real religious bias preventing Jews from reaching higher heights in the army. In essence, the affair was about the church and the Jews were caught in the crossfire. The Dreyfus affair lit the fire in the growing Zionist movement. After World War Two, the world was convinced that the Jews needed a home and Palestine which was owned by Great Britain was given to the Jews. Logically and empathetically, I expected the Jews to recognize the horrors of history that were placed on them and not perpetrate them on the Palestinians living there. Instead, there was forced colonization and a massive divide that saw renewed religious tensions. The instant people are able to be the one perpetrating crimes against humanity they always seem to just want to commit it. So when the phrase Palestinian Lives Matter is mentioned, I can only look toward the Jews in Israel in disappointment and disgust.

Reflections on GME and Doge Coin

When I discovered that a twenty dollar stock could become 350 in a month it was insane to me. Game Stop isn’t worth the price it currently is. The huge buyout of it’s stock just to screw with big hedge funds was a movement for the people. It was to say fuck you to Robinhood for screwing with people who wanted to buy GME. Doge coin followed after as a follow up to Bitcoin and both these coins had their values dropped tremendously over the week. I see a general trend of people wanting to invest their futures in new tech and trends. This worries me because it feels like a cult considering that’s all I see on Reddit. People hang onto unprofitable stocks in hope that their value would peak again only to lose out. Digital currencies have no real value other than what people determine them to be. Elon Musk was sort of the first big business to state that he would accept Bitcoin until he retracted his statement. The following dips only showed how volatile digital currencies are. Buying for profit makes sense, however, the trend of buying for a trend does not.

League of Legends – MSI

The MSI finals just finished with RNG (Royal Never give up) winning 3-2 in a best of 5 over Damwon Kia. It was a disappointing game 5 as RNG rolled Damwon to win the mid season invitationals. I was impressed with the fake leash RNG did on the botside which resulted in a double kill 2 minutes later. Ghost and Beryl were not expecting to see the enemy Udyr and the game seemed to snowball out of control after the firstblood. What this means is that the LPL can take an extra team to the world finals which is in a few months time over the summer.

Going back outside!!!

For the past month of May, I have been outside about 5 times. The weather was horrible with the intense sun and humidity. On Saturday, I got the chance to play tennis with my friend which I haven’t seen for an entire year due to Covid. I had experience playing badminton and I thought tennis would sort of be similar. I was extremely wrong, and it took me a while to even try hitting the ball properly. My initial impression was that you were suppose to hit the ball hard because it was heavy. Instead, a gentle tap can cause the tennis ball to accelerate and travel a large distance. In badminton, you had to hit the shuttlecock hard if you wanted to see the opponent potentially failing to hit it back. However, the extreme heat seemed to hit my friend hard and we opted to instead hunt for food instead. We spent the next hour and half roaming 8th avenue to find that most places had no sit in or even shutdown. A shock was that A+ was no longer in the area and was replaced by a market. I been in A+ for over 3 years and Covid seemed to convince the tutoring company to move on from the location.

Reviewing books

I spent most of my time reading books and I could say that most of the good books tend to unique. Harry Potter is a good one along with the Rick Riordans series. Books that copied their tropes needed to have their own spin to be good. Or do they? Perhaps it’s my bias in the fact they were they first type of books that I fell in love with. I recently learned to take these books with a grain of salt because they were made for young teens. As I grew older I found some books unbearably hard to read because they seemed to lack common sense. I have read Twilight around 14 and the book was ok. My mom loved the series and we watched all the movies together. Around that time, I also started reading the Game of Throne books; I couldn’t even get past the first one. I found it so boring with endless transferring of characters. Rereading it again didn’t change my opinion much although the show was fantastic. Twilight, however, just made me cringe especially when I remembered scenes in the movies. The characters were extremely angsty and the werewolf guy just seemed to become hot for no reason…. Yeah, some stories were tailored made for a certain age and judging them for another age makes no sense.

Online Conversation

Some time ago, awake at 2 a.m. I had a four conversation with a friend. It all started with us discussing the effect of the Amazon union vote. I was shocked at the outcome, but at the same time Amazon really ramped up their propaganda. The conversation spiraled into the topic of music. I used to play the violin for a couple of years and he had just learning to play the lute. He decided to take a break year and in his spare time he took up learning lute because he read a lot of fantasy. All the bards in the stories had lutes so it made sense. I memed him for wasting three thousand dollars in a dead instrument. We joked about how he was the 8th best lutenist in New York City. Spending two hours listening to him playing the lute and judging him was fun and what I needed. We spent the entire call on facetime and seeing someone that I the same age as really tells the difference between texting and calling someone. We discussed our futures in our respective careers. I wanted to be a civil engineer and he wanted to designs AIs. He asked me if I would choose to ignore my morals to design a city (my dream). NEOM was the example in this case, and I said no. I would not want to associate myself with a nation that was homophobic and sexist. He said he would take the one in a life time chance. I wonder if I would change my mind in the future, but I want to think that I was set in my morals.

The Trolley Problem

I recently saw a meme about the trolley problem on reddit, and that got me thinking about what I would have done. I have taken philosophy for a year back in my junior year and read multiple books from a range of philosophers. None of them really talks about this problem. As a matter of fact, they discuss living life and the ideal government. Before I even answer the question, the trolley problem is the typical utilitarian question. Would you save a group of people by sacrificing one person? In my honest opinion, I wouldn’t unless they were someone extremely close to me. Why? It would bloody my hands if I changed the direction of the trolley. If the initial group was bound to die why would I make another man suffer their fate. How am I to fairly judge the value of the people? Yet, everyone forgets to ask how the trolley feels….

Food

I enjoy food as much as everyone else, but I just can’t stand avocado and soybean. It was most likely allergies that was causing the itchiness in my throat when I ate them. It’s also the fact that avocado taste like nothing and it’s just straight up overrated. I really wonder where all the hype for this fruit came from. The millennial with the avocado toast or something. Soybeans are a bit of a weird case. I can drink soy sauce and I will be fine, but soymilk is not a happy tenant in my stomach. People who are allergic to good fruits are truly suffering. Also being lactose intolerant sucks. Imagine not being able to eat ice cream!

Good shows

I recently just finished watching Breaking Bad among a variety of other shows. I can safely say that Breaking Bad is my second favorite show. It has the drugs, crime, and violence that I would expect from a good crime show. What really puts this show apart though is the deep character building of Walter White and Jesse Pinkman. Walter is a science teach with cancer. Jesse is a deadbeat who needs money. It was a miracle these two came to work together if it wasn’t because of the fact that Jesse was a student of Walter. Together they produced high grade meth and navigated the criminal underworld to become filthy rich in the process. Yet, Walters path is quite tragic and his pride is partly to blame. Walter was a brilliant chemist that sold his share of a company that is now worth millions to pay for a month of rent. When his old acquaintances offered him money for chemotherapy, Walter rejected them. Jesse fights his inner demons when dealing with the fallout of being a drug dealer. Jesse loses a girlfriend to overdose and brings harm to another lover. He is then captured and forced to work as a slave producing the high quality meth. Everything seems to bite back at them. Walter ends up dead and loses the love of his family and Jesse is all alone again with nothing. And while this does happen, Walter ends up fulfilling his wish of providing for his family by leaving millions behind for his children. I wish I can say I know what the deeper meaning behind this story was, but in the end it was a tragedy.