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Showing posts from October, 2023

We must better consider all the people caught up in modern-day warfare

In some ways, this blog comes full circle to the very second post I wrote on  here circa six years ago .  That time, in the aftermath of the 2017 Las Vegas shooting, the blog focused on how names and stories appeal to our emotion more than facts and figures. Boy can I see the difference in writing style - 17 year old Kabir bizarrely quoted Stalin in making the point.  What I grappled with, and have done for a while since, is the unnatural and paradoxically natural emotional response to scales of tragedy. Hundreds of thousands dying is harder to comprehend than ten that are accompanied by names and faces. Yet more people dying is obviously worse globally. Ironically, I forgot the shooting’s details, which in itself encapsulates the point.  These limits of human empathy are (at least to me) fascinating, but they pose some problems in the globalised, interconnected world we now live in. In a world where our media consumption plays such a key role in how we ...