No, I didn't reat the Post story yet.
Just curious, when did you join this list? No reason, just wondering.
Evan
-----Original Message-----
From: Miriam Vieni
Sent: Saturday, November 10, 2018 8:25 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: waging war with words
I didn't see the Washington Post link. Did you read it?
Yes, Sylvie has disappeared. She's the person who, after I joined the list,
was posting articles from alternative media and international sources that
I'd not heard of previously. I learned a great deal from her posts and she
was also the person who helped me join the Israeli peace email list. We
became sort of long distance friends and talked on the phone occasionally.
But she disappeared, and I was unable to reach her by email or phone. Sylvie
came originally from New York City, and she moved to Seattle in the 1980's.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
<blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> On Behalf Of Evan Reese
Sent: Saturday, November 10, 2018 6:00 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: waging war with words
I don't see a message below yours, so I don't know what Sylvie is in
reference to. She must have been before my time.
As to an American media blackout about Fukushima, I did a search for
Fukushima accident, no quotes, and on the second page of ten results, I got
three from the mainstream media:
6 years after the Fukushima disaster, its victims are still suffering - The
...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/.../six-years-after-the-fukushima-disaster-it
s-victims-...
Six Years After Fukushima, Robots Finally Find Reactors' Melted ...
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/19/.../japan-fukushima-nuclear-meltdown-fuel
.html
Fukushima disaster 5 years on: How it changed Japan - CNN - CNN.com
https://www.cnn.com/2016/03/08/asia/fukushima-five-year-anniversary/index.ht
ml
Now these are not all from last week or last month or anything, and I'm sure
I would find more if I kept reading down the list, but three is enough to
show that there is no media blackout.
Evan
-----Original Message-----
From: Miriam Vieni
Sent: Saturday, November 10, 2018 5:18 PM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] waging war with words
I think that probably Sylvie is one of the smartest people I've known. She
handled participation on this list by posting articles and almost never
getting involved in discussions. I suspect that, that's because discussions
on the list don't feel like discussions. They feel like battles. Perhaps
that's just the nature of communicating by email or of any online
communicating. I listen to what the young people on podcasts say about their
twitter communication and it sounds as if they're all in constant daily
battle with opponents, even people who, supposedly, have views similar to
their's. At any rate, it does seem to me that attempting to win arguments by
trying to find statements that are absolutely unquestionable, is futile.
That's partially because there are varying levels of depth and meaning and
often additional facts that we don't know about or have forgotten about,
that can change the entire meaning of a discussion. All of this rambling
from me was caused by Evan's statement about how that one case of cancer,
caused by the Fukushima meltdown, is uncontrovertible. That's undeniable. Of
course, it's the only one that, the individual who wrote about it on
Wikipedia, knew about. So that's what was documented in Wikipedia and that's
what Evan quoted and then what? Does that mean that we had a debate and he
won? Does it mean that no other deaths were caused or that future deaths
related to that nuclear disaster won't take place? And when Roger and Evan
debate something and one of them bests the other with a logical argument,
what does that prove, except that in that instance, that particular
individual did better in the argument? We do all this debating and arguing,
as if what we say has some kind of impact or relationship to the truth. But
we don't have impact. Each of us continues to have our own take on things,
and we certainly don't know what relation to reality, our statements have.
I have one interesting little footnote. When I looked for articles on
Fukushima, the only article I found from the corporate media, was from The
Guardian, which is a British publication. And there was one from a Japanese
paper, I think the Tokyo Times, that I didn't read. Interestingly, there
were no articles from US corporate outlets. To me that says, "news
blackout".
Miriam
