I have a superpower. When I see a piece of news being circulated, I’ll more or less immediately be able to tell whether the claim is true or fake. And I’ll be mostly right. In fact, most fake news is designed to weed out people like me and only target the most gullible. That is what makes it easy to spot.
How do I do it? A lot of it has to do with the breadth of content I (and many like me) have been consuming since childhood, the range of knowledge, however superficial, in every area, a memory built to remember interesting tidbits and trivia, a love for going down the Wikipedia rabbit hole, a broad understanding of physical laws of time & space, a healthy scepticism for everything that seems a bit ‘off’, an eye for detail to spot that ‘off’, and basic, everyday common sense about what humans can and cannot do.
That last bit is failing me in recent days, though, when it comes to what Israeli humans are capable of doing to Palestinian humans, as American and European humans watch and Indian humans applaud and cheer.
For example, I swear to dog I thought this video was fake when I first saw it, with only one commonsensical reason coming instantly to mind: They won’t do the same thing to others what they claim was done to them, which is the very basis of the existence of their country, the same country they claim is under threat, and hence, all the fighting.
Apparently, I am wrong. I no longer know what the limits are for humans ill-treating other humans. And I am worse for it. I wish I had not known this.
Israel is my Kryptonite.
P.S.: Also, remember we were asked this question in Ethics class about the ‘Torture Problem’ in which we were told a story about a suspect in custody who may or may not know the location of bombs planted in a city and whether it would be right to subject this human to inhuman torture to extract the said information? Yep. Very similar to the ‘Trolley Problem’ where we are asked whether we would pull a lever or push someone off a bridge to save many by sacrificing one. Do you remember what the conclusions of the discussions around both these ethical dilemmas were? That these are intractable issues, and any answer would say more about the person answering than the ‘solution’ itself. Well, that.
